Telephones Prove God's Existence

[Esquilax]

Well, my brother finally did get back to me, and Esquilax, you were right, it did shut him up.

Nice. I know you probably don't need the help, but I'mma stretch my rebutting legs anyway.

He still doesn't quite see how we can distinguish "between design (as opposed to apparent design [in nature]) in both watches and dogs for example," and insists that it "seems to follow necessarily that design is actual or illusory in artificial and organic objects."

It's really down to how we actually identify design in the first place. Guy's getting really close to the Watchmaker Argument here, so if you asked him how he thinks we identify design, I wouldn't be too surprised if he answers that it's an intuitive process. But that's not really an answer at all, that's just coming to a conclusion in his head without being able to verbalize the methodology behind it; at the very least he's begging the question, since he's seeing design in natural things without being able to justify it.

Perhaps he'll mention complexity, but that doesn't work as there's complex natural things, and putting them under that umbrella just because they're complex is begging the question too. Actually, we recognize design via contrast with natural things; watches have no natural means of replication and we've only ever seen them being designed and built, whereas dogs have natural replication built right in, and we've never seen one being constructed outside of that process.

A cool thought experiment is to imagine being dropped onto an alien planet that seems completely deserted, and finding a fully functioning watch on the ground. Without any means of contrast or any evidence of a designer around, how could you be justified in assuming that there was a designer for it? Would you do so just because it looks reminiscent of something designed you've seen on Earth? Say you pick it up, and over the course of a day you watch a sequence of natural weather patterns and environmental factors cause a duplicate watch to slowly form naturally in a freak conflux of conditions; now you have a completely natural watch to go along with your designed one. Can you be safe in any of your assumptions about design without evidence to justify them, now?

Beyond that his only response was: "It seems to me that if you can't, you have to hold that either the Taj Mahal is the result of natural processes alone (design is illusory)

In a sense, it was naturally constructed, but he's still holding to dual definitions of design to make his dilemma.

or that the Taj Mahal is designed (non-illusory) in which case, we need at least a Prime Designer or a rejection of determinism in human agency (which is inconsistent with naturalism. You could just bite the bullet though a hold that the One World Trade Center for example is just apparently designed. I am not seeing any other options here...

The other option is that determinism is near meaningless from an individual human perspective, since it doesn't alter the way we perceive our free will; we might only be doing things in accordance with deterministic, natural processes, but it doesn't feel that way to us. Our biochemistry informs our perceptions but that's not the way it feels to us; there's no meaningful distinction between our actual experiences, and free will.

Besides, the only way that it really matters is if your brother can establish what "real" free will would entail, and what distinguishes it from what we have here. He's not bothering to do that.

Finally, I'd bring up termite mounds and beaver dams. Termites and beavers are natural and only working in accordance with instincts, and yet your brother can probably see the design involved with the homes they- and any other animal, for that matter- construct for themselves. Plonk him down in front of a termite mound, with termites coming out of it, and evidence that constructing these things is what they do, and he'll recognize the design despite the fact that the termites are only obeying their deterministic instincts, far more than humans ever would.

There's a difference between "being natural," and "being purposeless and random."