RE: Detecting design or intent in nature
January 31, 2015 at 3:34 pm
(This post was last modified: January 31, 2015 at 3:36 pm by Heywood.)
(January 31, 2015 at 3:12 pm)bennyboy Wrote: But if you are trying to show that biological evolution itself (or anything else in the universe) was created by an intellect, then the updated chart should clearly show why you can't use evidence about human- (or now animal-) created evolutionary systems:
Your chart is wrong. Your conclusion is wrong. Let me explain it this way. Lets define evolutionary system as any system which contains the elements replication, heritable traits, change, and selection. There is some set which contains all the evolutionary systems. Lets call this the "Big Set". Now it is possible that the Big Set only contains evolutionary systems which required intellect. It is also possible that the Big Set contains a mixture of evolutionary systems....some which required intellect and some didn't. Which condition is more likely to be true?
Each time you examine an element of the Big Set you can say one of three things about that element.
A) the element required intellect.
B) the element did not require intellect.
C) whether or not the element required intellect cannot be determined.
What I am arguing is that each time you examine an element from the Big Set and it turns out it required intellect, while never coming across an element which did not require an intellect, the likelihood that all the elements in the Big Set required an intellect increases. The reason the likelihood increases is explained in this thread:
How we determine facts
What you and Chas are claiming is that we can't learn anything about the composition of the Big Set unless we examine every element of it.....and that is just false. We can draw conclusions about the Big Set by looking at all the elements available to us.