RE: Detecting design or intent in nature
January 2, 2015 at 5:46 pm
(This post was last modified: January 2, 2015 at 5:55 pm by watchamadoodle.)
(January 2, 2015 at 4:06 pm)Heywood Wrote:(January 2, 2015 at 2:32 pm)watchamadoodle Wrote: When people see design or the guiding hand of God in something, how would we define that?
We use experience to detect design. When the New Horizon probe flies by Pluto if it images machinery on the surface of the dwarf planet we will conclude that machinery was designed because in our experience machinery is always the product of design. Now suppose the probe images something completely novel to us. We'd have no way of knowing if that thing is designed or not.
I see the hand of God in nature. Every evolutionary system I have observed, whose origins are known to me, requires the existence of intelligence. Therefore I find it reasonable to conclude that the evolutionary system which produced me also required the existence of intelligence.
I follow what you are saying until the part I highlighted above.
(January 2, 2015 at 4:17 pm)JuliaL Wrote: I've never found the design argument evenly slightly convincing.
I think it hangs on a type 1 (fast) intuitive error.
In the Paley classic, the observer is supposed to contrast the watch to the surrounding rocks to deduce that the watch was designed. Some steps later this fact is supposed to prove that the rocks also were designed. The deduction from the initial comparison was therefore wrong as were the conclusions leading therefrom.
It also fails in that if humans were the product of eons of natural selection acting on wet chemistry, then their "designed" products; watches, cars and 747s are also the result of eons of natural selection acting on wet chemistry. You have to have a dualist presupposition of design already in place for the conclusion that actual design follows from apparent design.
That last sentence that I highlighted is very true IMO. The designer is assumed to be above the design somehow like God above the universe or the human above the spear point he is making. In some ways humans adapted to the spear point. Our shoulders changed to throw spears better. Probably our hands changed to make spear points better. We aren't really above the spear point necessarily?
