Intelligent Design: Did you design yourself?

[Esquilax]

I made the case several times already. So far everyone has buried their head in the sand about it. We have a way of telling if something is intelligently designed or not. Experience. If it becomes our experience that new lineages of life come into existence via intelligent design and never experience lineages of life coming into existence via some natural process, then we can categorize lineages of life as things which are intelligently designed. Quit ignoring this argument. Accept it or criticize it....but don't pretend it wasn't made.

There's an additional part of this that you're missing: the identity of the designer.

This is actually really easy: your argument about experience functions because we do have experience with the designers of both watches and myco bacteria. But we don't have any experience at all with the designer of life on earth, because after all, there was no life on earth before that designer got here, apparently.

If you came upon a planet in some deserted pocket dimension, and scanned it to find no life on it, but you found a watch lying in some corner of that world, would you be safe in calling it designed? No! Because there you'd have a complex object but no evidence at all of a designer.

See, the claim you're making comes with a corollary, and it's here that you've sort of palmed a card and hoped we wouldn't notice; I'm fine with saying "we have observed this intelligently designed life," but the extra part of that, the important part, is "human beings are the only known designers we have observed." Obviously humans weren't around before life began in order to design their own ancestors, so if you want to posit some other designer then you're doing so without evidence right now, and you have a burden of proof for that. Otherwise, claiming that life was intelligently designed based on the evidence you've presented right now is like trying to build the second floor of a building without ever constructing the first floor; there's a huge chunk of your position missing that needs to be established before your conclusion carries any weight.

You can't just pretend that one of the premises of your argument ("Designers other than humans exist") doesn't exist and still hope to have a coherent argument.

Heywood might just ignore this post, but it's here now. Feel free to quote it at him endlessly until he answers for it, I'd actually rather appreciate that.