Intelligent Design

[Simon Moon]

Yes, argument from analogy. Just as bad as argument from ignorance.

So, when have you eliminated all possible natural explanations? What peer reviewed journal is your paper published?

Why haven't the majority of biologists been swayed by your oh so convincing arguments?

Face it, you already had your conclusion, and you are constantly forcing the evidence to fit.

Do we have to eliminate every possibility except design before we can accept a designer to account for the design?

Yes. Every natural explanation should be explored. And if here isn't one, yet, the answer does not then become a "god is responsible",by default.

For several reasons.

Positing a creator god has no explanatory power. 

It creates more questions than it answers. 

It ends the search for a possible better answer.

just for a start...

[Esquilax]

I was going to leave this thread alone, but this was an interesting question. We can't tell much about the designer based solely on observations of the design, but there are several possibilities. We could assume that it was some natural intelligence like extra terrestrials. They would have to have a much simpler biological setup in order to make it more reasonable to assume that they could have potentially formed from abiotic materials. The reason I object to our life forms having arisen from abiotic materials and evolved is due to the fact that DNA replication involves dozens of proteins. Proteins are produced with the help of hundreds of different proteins (each of which needs previous proteins to be built). The molecules needed to build proteins and DNA also need to be synthesized with the help of other proteins. It's a lot of chicken or the egg problems. If some extra terrestrial life forms had a simpler setup, we may see a more reasonable way that they could have gotten there naturally. 

If you're already allowing the possibility that life can arise via unguided abiogenesis, then isn't it also true that life on Earth could have evolved from simpler abiotic setups, similar to what you're envisioning with the aliens? Who's to say that life on Earth evolved strictly from DNA as we currently understand it, or as it currently functions?

In fact, simply removing the middle man of abiotic beings designing life on Earth is far more parsimonious, since you've gotten rid of an unnecessary intervening step. Since we don't know how life formed on Earth, nor whether it passed through intermediate stages- as evolution would facilitate- before reaching our current genetic makeup, there's really no need to posit design for Earth life while simultaneously accepting the possibility of undesigned life elsewhere; just remove the irrelevant step and accept that, if your worldview allows for it to happen on other planets, it could happen on Earth too.

Of course I don't think this is the case. I think there is some form of intelligence outside of our universe that designed the universe and life. The big bang theory seems to point to the fact that there are other things outside of our universe.

Not necessarily. The big bang postulates that everything that comprises out current universe was once a singularity, and the general physics consensus is that measurements beyond or outside of that point, if they're even possible, would require an entirely new lexicon just to discuss it. It is equally possible that there is nothing outside of our universe, or that such terms don't even apply within what is, I don't think this is controversial to say, a model of reality totally unlike anything we've ever known or experienced.

A cause that led to our universe. Obviously it is impossible to try to explain these extra-universal ideas (unless they are capable of entering into our universe). Based on our current understanding of physics, nothing should be eternal, but the fact that things exist shows that something must always have existed.

I'm sorry, bridge the gap for me: what logical steps lie between "things exist," and "therefore, something must have always existed," because I'm not seeing that.

What I don't like about being told that I'm arguing from ignorance is that the person telling me that is making the assumption that their view is right. It seems to go something like this. The proponent of neo-darwinian evolution says something like:"just because we don't know now how abiogenesis occurred doesn't mean it didn't, we just don't know how it did and we will find out later. Saying it didn't happen is a premature conclusion when we will find the answer later." If this is not a good summary of the argument from ignorance, then please let me know.

The argument from ignorance is a logical fallacy wherein an area of ignorance is used as the justification for a separate, contrasting conclusion to the one being argued against. Thus, "abiogenesis cannot be true because we haven't solved X, Y, and Z problems," is an argument from ignorance because it is using our lack of knowledge in some areas to reach the conclusion that the concept cannot be true; the problem comes in the unspoken premise that X, Y, and Z areas will either never be solved, or will be solved with solutions that demonstrate design, before such solutions have come about.

Meanwhile, pointing out that, though we may not have the answers right now, there is nothing to suggest that those answers won't be revealed later is not an argument from ignorance because it doesn't take that extra step. Nobody is arguing that abiogenesis is true on the basis that the gaps in our knowledge may be filled in future, just that we allow the science to take its course and resolve those issues before coming to a conclusion, unlike what you are doing. This latter approach is a recognition that ignorance is not a justification for taking an opposing view: the point is to wait until there are answers to X, Y, and Z, not to come to the design conclusion merely based on the existence of the X, Y, and Z unknowns.

That kinda comes with the territory of science and probabilistic conclusions; abiogenesis is tentatively accepted by the scientific community because, A: it fits all of the available data without postulating anything as yet beyond the realm of our knowledge, and B: it has the highest probability of being true within the context of other theories that also work with A. But it is a tentative acceptance, contingent on the evidence as we discover it, not an unqualified embracing of the theory. Design, as a hypothesis, may rise and fall within that estimation, but it isn't going to rise merely due to the presence of mysteries, nor is abiogenesis going to fall for that reason; all areas of science have areas that aren't well understood, we haven't comprehensively solved any subject, but gravity is not false because we don't understand how it works, internal medicine isn't wrong because we haven't cured all diseases, and abiogenesis isn't false on the same basis.

Where did this being come from? I have no idea. What does it look like? I have no idea. The infinite regress leads to two possibilities. The original cause being intelligent, or the original cause being unintelligent. Neither makes sense, and it seems like there shouldn't be anything, but there is. Just because we aren't capable of studying this potentially higher dimensional being doesn't mean that it won't make sense if we had the chance to.

Why would you presume the existence of an additional complication not in evidence, solely on the basis that science hasn't provided an answer to your personal opinion that life is too complex to have arisen naturally that satisfies you?

[God of Mr. Hanky]

Only when your main arguments are argument from ignorance ("I can't figure out how these things could have come about via natural mechanisms, therefore it must have been my god") and argument from analogy ("this thing in the cell sure looks like a complex machine, therefore it must have been designed") does a magic being, that lives in a realm that can't be shown to exist, become the best explanation.

Complexity and function are not a sign of design.

It's not an argument from ignorance. I think you got to this thread late, but this has been covered a lot. It's not "We don't know, therefore God", it's "We do know how it works, and it functions like things that we only see paralleled (although not nearly rivaled) by things designed from humans" Therefore maybe it requires intelligence to exist.

Who the hell is "We"?

You don't know how something came to exist just by knowing how it works. You don't think another answer than your magic creator can be possible because you don't understand science at all. I may have been a biologist today if I hadn't been discouraged by the restrictions of a direct-ocular-only with glasses experience, while attending college in a lower-tech world, and compared to other sciences biology is of the best hiding places for those who would study without understanding. There is no need for understanding science in order to breeze through a biology classroom, when rote memorization of organs, organelles, and their functions is all that's required. This unfortunately gets people far enough that turning around is hard, and even if they do come to the realization how much their "science" involves no more science than auto mechanics, they will never admit it.

[The Grand Nudger]

What's the deal here...the minute I explain to you that you that no matter what you have to say regarding evolution I will not become a christian..you have nothing to say to me?  

What, exactly, are you here in this thread to accomplish?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Life doesn't have the kind of plasticity that you seem to think it does. If it could adapt to a given environment, then it would live on almost all planets

Actually, life is extremely, amazingly plastic. Sure, we may be used to finding it in damp, warm, oxygenated environs, but there are organisms - right here on good old Terra - that live and thrive in dessicated environments; frigid environments; anaerobic environments; environments so rich in sulfur compounds that they'd kill any mammal of our acquaintance; environments of low enough pressure to kill a bird; environments of high enough pressure to crush a human skull (or even a car); environs so loaded with toxins that humans couldn't survive in them without very special equipment; and so on.

Give the number of different conditions under which life thrives on Earth, it is utterly silly to think that live could not survive in the environments of other planets.

Boru

[Whateverist]

Yes, argument from analogy. Just as bad as argument from ignorance.

So, when have you eliminated all possible natural explanations? What peer reviewed journal is your paper published?

Why haven't the majority of biologists been swayed by your oh so convincing arguments?

Face it, you already had your conclusion, and you are constantly forcing the evidence to fit.

Do we have to eliminate every possibility except design before we can accept a designer to account for the design?

Try this:  
"Do we have to eliminate every possibility except design before we can accept a designer to account for the way things are constituted?"

The answer then is clearly yes, just as it is for the way you answered it .. but less confusing for having chosen a less prejudiced way to express "the way things are constituted".

[Whateverist]

Right, but what happens in instances where you eliminate every known hooved animal? You then have to start to think outside the box, and suppose it may be explained by something we have not yet seen. But yes, I agree we should turn known causes before we turn to things that we don't know can cause it.

Indeed, but since we haven't yet eliminated every mundane explanation in the case of god claims, nor even come anywhere close to it, there's no reason yet to explore beyond the box. Or put another way, the box of explanatory causes is, to date, sufficiently large.

Put another way, to explain a thing is to show how it fits functionally with everything else we think we under understand.  So to explain something by appealing to something altogether apart from everything we understand is inadequate.

[Whateverist]

What's the deal here...the minute I explain to you that you that no matter what you have to say regarding evolution I will not become a christian..you have nothing to say to me?  

What, exactly, are you here in this thread to accomplish?

AAA's thought process: "not a winnable soul.  Next victim."

[AAA]

Do we have to eliminate every possibility except design before we can accept a designer to account for the design?

Try this:  
"Do we have to eliminate every possibility except design before we can accept a designer to account for the way things are constituted?"

The answer then is clearly yes, just as it is for the way you answered it .. but less confusing for having chosen a less prejudiced way to express "the way things are constituted".

Yeah, but even the atheist/evolutionist agrees that things have a designed. They just disagree on if that design arose by undirected natural processes, or by an actual intelligence. The say the former.

[AAA]

Life doesn't have the kind of plasticity that you seem to think it does. If it could adapt to a given environment, then it would live on almost all planets

Actually, life is extremely, amazingly plastic.  Sure, we may be used to finding it in damp, warm, oxygenated environs, but there are organisms - right here on good old Terra - that live and thrive in dessicated environments; frigid environments; anaerobic environments; environments so rich in sulfur compounds that they'd kill any mammal of our acquaintance; environments of low enough pressure to kill a bird; environments of high enough pressure to crush a human skull (or even a car); environs so loaded with toxins that humans couldn't survive in them without very special equipment; and so on.

Give the number of different conditions under which life thrives on Earth, it is utterly silly to think that live could not survive in the environments of other planets.

Boru

Exactly, life is everywhere we look on Earth. Yet it is nowhere we have seen yet in the rest of the universe (i know we don't have a large sample size yet, but still). This could easily point to the fact that they were designed to live in all conditions. If we have archaea that live in Mars-like conditions here on earth, then why aren't there bacteria on mars. When you look at how complicated the mechanisms that allow extremophiles to survive in these areas, it begins to look more like design (at least to me),