Detecting design or intent in nature

[Heywood]

You are shifting the goal posts here. In this thread I am not claiming that the universe is designed. I am claiming that the evolutionary system which resulted in you and I existing was designed or at least required a pre-existing intellect to exist. Why? Because every evolutionary system I have observed, which I also know the details of its origination, ALWAYS, either required an intellect to design it, or requires an intellect to be a component of it.

In another thread I did claim the universe appeared to be designed....but remember I said it wasn't designed for life but rather is was designed for emergent complexity.

Haha.. um. No.

1. Genetic mutations are random. By random I mean, as biologist Jerry Coyne writes, "mutations occur regardless of whether they would be useful to the individual."
2. "We can never argue back to any further conclusions about the ordinary world or our future experience which go beyond the data from which our inference began" (J.L. Mackie), for “our ideas reach no farther than our experience" (David Hume).
3. “Why go so far? Why not stop at the material world?” (Hume) After all, “an ideal system, arranged of itself, without a precedent design, is not a whit more explicable than a material one which attains its order in a like manner... To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like ‘God was always there,’ and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say, ‘DNA was always there,’ or ‘Life was always there,’ and be done with it.” (Dawkins).
4. “There is no reason why mental order as such should be any less in need of further explanation than material order, and the claim that mental order in a god is self-explanatory is just the thesis.” (Mackie).

C'mon Heywood, at least try to be imaginative.

1. randomness is used by intellect in designed systems all the time. A craps game for instance. The dice roll occurs regardless if the result is going to beneficial to house or not.
2.My argument is based solely on experience and observation and doesn't go beyond that.
3. It is one thing to say a supernatural being explains evolution and another thing to say evolutionary systems require intellects to come into existence. You can falsify one proposition but not the other.
4. Some material processes require intellect. Why can't evolution be one of them?

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How do you know the speed of light in a vacuum is constant if you haven't measured the speed of every photon travelling through a vacuum?

For AlexK and Surge: Maxwell's equations don't tell you because then the question becomes how do you know the permeability and permittivity of free space are constants if you haven't measured those values for every point in space?

Because science doesn't make truth claims, woody. It makes tentative statements based on our best current model.

We are confident that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant because every time we measure it.....it turns out to be constant. We could be wrong though....However the more times we measure the speed of light in a vacuum and find it to be constant while never observing it to be variable...the more confident we become in our conclusion.

I claim that evolutionary systems either require intellects to design them or intellects to be a component of them. Falsify my claim by giving me an example of an evolutionary system which we know came into being without intellect. Until you do, why should I not consider my claim to be tentatively true since it is consistent with every observation I have made?