RE: Detecting design or intent in nature
February 4, 2015 at 8:28 pm
(This post was last modified: February 4, 2015 at 8:31 pm by bennyboy.)
(February 4, 2015 at 2:36 pm)Heywood Wrote:(February 4, 2015 at 9:13 am)bennyboy Wrote: Your stipulations about "observing the implementation" don't leave much room, do they, you naughty little sand-filterer? The reason nobody comes up with anything is because they only care about one kind of evolution-- actual evolution, the kind we observe in animals, for which there is no actual evidence of intellect.
Since you're playing loosy-goosy with definitions, I'd say that any persistent pattern that replicates and changes in response to external stimuli would meet a loose definition of evolution. How about crystals? Each new iteration of a crystal's structure does so in response to the existing crystal, i.e. it's "parent." And a snowflake's shape "evolves" in response to variations in climate.
I predict that whatever free-style definition I make, you will shoot it down, but whatever arbitrary human system you make up that are kind of like evolution, you will find it supporting the conclusion that non-human systems are designed by intellect. The special pleading begins in
3. . . 2. . . 1. . .
Your definition defines a set.
No it doesn't, any more than "we don't know what caused it" defines a set for you which is distinct from "we made it." My set is a subset of the Big Set of "all things people choose to call evolution." And since there are quadrillions of crystals in the world, I have excellent evidence that 99.999999% of the Big Set of things people call evolution are crystals. Therefore, by Heywoodian logic, there's a 99.999999% chance that biological evolution is a crystal.
Yay! I win! I'm really starting to enjoy Heywoodian logic.
