The Watchmaker: my fav argument

[The Architect Of Fate]

Wouldn't that be answered in the very first sentence of the quoted material?

If we take an anthropomorphic argument as a valid hypothesis, then those are the criteria that we're going to use to judge what looks designed, designed for what... and.... just flat out assuming that it is...the quality of that design.  There could be any number of potential applications for a designed universe such as our own - but..expanding into...by the parameters of the alleged design itself, isn't one of them.  Space is either poorly designed for this purpose, or not designed for such a purpose at all.

It's always interesting how poorly designed in nature looks indistinguishable from not designed and how their doesn't seem to be any way to distinguish them that isn't fallacious or circular.

[Belacqua]

[...]

So it's worth noting that Christianity views emptiness as intentional. God doesn't just fill the Earth to the brim, he makes a garden and places two people in it. The rest of the planet, and perhaps the Solar System, is our canvass to paint, our ground to till, our problem to solve.

There used to be a quote going around among the anti-religion people, about how the earth couldn't be designed because so much of it is ocean. The argument, I guess, is that because people can't live on water then the ocean is wasted space. 

I think that idea is pretty much over now. We know that if the oceans die then people will, too. 

Our concepts of what constitutes "empty" have changed. 

These days the concept of "environmental aesthetics" is big among philosophers who work on aesthetic issues. It traces the history of how people have valued and judged natural spaces. People's opinions about the beauty, usefulness, and scariness of forests, mountains, and deserts have changed a lot over time. More importantly these philosophers work to de-couple our view of nature from our view of art. Since art is by definition made by people for people, it always has a particular human-centered viewpoint. Traditionally the criteria for judging art beautiful are then applied to nature -- a landscape is seen as beautiful if it looks like a painting, for example. So the new approach is to think of the aesthetics of these places in different ways -- not as something you stand back and view as if it were in a museum. I haven't heard the new approach applied to theology at all, but I think it would certainly change how people judged design in nature. 

Part of the problem may include how Star Trek and similar things have damaged our imaginations. In those things space is considered as populated by lots and lots of people only slightly different from us. There are lots of places to go and have fist fights in order to solve a problem at the end of the hour. It reduces the universe to something like different neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and removes all the real strangeness and beauty that comes from extreme non-human views.

[The Grand Nudger]

We decide between nature and poorly designed or constructed artifice every time we sift through stone age tools. It doesn't take any fallacious or circular reasoning.

It can be done, IDers are just bad at it.

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I think that idea is pretty much over now. We know that if the oceans die then people will, too. 

Is that not also gods design..or are those just the constraints he's working with?  

Did he have to make terrestrial hominids?  Did he have to make a water world?  Did he have to make it so that terrestrial hominids couldn't breathe underwater?  Did he have to make it so that terrestrial hominids who couldn't breathe underwater still needed water? Did he have to make it so that those same hominids use a shared breathing/eating/drinking apparatus, thereby ensuring that some portion of us will die attempting to accomplish any one of these primary requirements for remaining alive (which are...also..either part of gods design... or not).

This is a good point to stop and ask which parts are designed and which aren't - these would be good criteria. They would also be demonstrations of that designers specific incompetence.

OFC, like before, there are all sorts of applications for a hostile meat grinder like our planet. Maybe you like grinding meat?

[possibletarian]

presumably whatever the end result would be, a  god who made a world for its beloved creation could and would make a world that didn't kill them.

If we are going to throw our hands in the air and scream about how we should be humble, and the same gods plan or wish is beyond anything we could think of because our maggot brains cannot comprehend it, then why try at all? Such things add absolutely no information to the conversation.

I can only assume a god who created humans as companions to love and worship him would have also provide a way for them to understand him, and an undeniably designed world.

[The Grand Nudger]

This is the same god who argued for his own existence, in his own magic book, by posing the question of who other than god could make and control a dragon.

[Apollo]

Design argument is an anthropomorphic argument—if you take that as a valid hypothesis then you’d expect per more matter in the universe to give it semblance of a design, allowing designable, interesting things to happen more frequently in abundance. A cold, black, empty space doesn’t support such logical conclusion based on such hypothesis.

For a hypothesis to be taken seriously it has to be logically consistent and not some contortion that would bend the logic to fit the hypothesis.

Why doesn't a cold black empty space support such a conclusion? Why would I expect "per more matter"? 

When you say it doesn't have the semblance of design, what criteria are you using to judge what design looks like?

Already explained it — Anthropomorphic criteria.

[Belacqua]

Already explained it — Anthropomorphic criteria.

Right -- judging God according to what people want. 

I think your orderly Apollonian nature is using standard liberal bourgeois values. That which is exploitable for people's profit is good. 

A shot of the Dionysian here would indicate that the non-useful and non-profitable is also a part of the universe, and that it's narrow-minded to judge this as a failure.

[Apollo]

Already explained it — Anthropomorphic criteria.

Right -- judging God according to what people want. 

I think your orderly Apollonian nature is using standard liberal bourgeois values. That which is exploitable for people's profit is good. 

A shot of the Dionysian here would indicate that the non-useful and non-profitable is also a part of the universe, and that it's narrow-minded to judge this as a failure.

Totally clueless to what you said there but ok.

Ask yourself two questions: what does “design” include? It includes a designer, spacetime, which given the cold dark empty space and supposedly a creator we have so far for the sake of the argument. But is there something missing that is essential to design? I give you a hint—there are at least two other things missing.

Now ask yourself the second question: what are some of the characteristics of cosmos that would still exist in nature whether or not observers like humans exist? Particle spin? Gravity? Electromagnetic force? Atomic decay? Nuclear transmutation? So on and so forth.

Is ‘design’ such a property of nature or is it purely interpretive?

Things that exist regardless of us are objective reality of our universe. Design is not one of them. It’s an emergent pattern meaningful to us allowing us to use it to our advantage. Order vs disorder are human-centric concepts to weed out useful matter patterns from not useful (eg—fruit on tree or snake identification vs randomly scattered stones on sand).

[The Architect Of Fate]

Right -- judging God according to what people want. 

Have people ever done otherwise?

I think your orderly Apollonian nature is using standard liberal bourgeois values. That which is exploitable for people's profit is good. 

No

A shot of the Dionysian here would indicate that the non-useful and non-profitable is also a part of the universe, and that it's narrow-minded to judge this as a failure.

WTF?

[Ryantology]

Design argument is an anthropomorphic argument—if you take that as a valid hypothesis then you’d expect per more matter in the universe to give it semblance of a design, allowing designable, interesting things to happen more frequently in abundance. A cold, black, empty space doesn’t support such logical conclusion based on such hypothesis.

For a hypothesis to be taken seriously it has to be logically consistent and not some contortion that would bend the logic to fit the hypothesis.

I suppose we can assert that we live in a universe which is designed to perform a function we cannot comprehend, as the scale is too great for us to really make sense of it, designed by a designer operating on a level even our imaginations can't describe. 

The other side of that coin is, we then lose the justification for asserting a design at all, since it is necessarily incomparable both in scale and function to our own designs, and our own designs are all we have to which we can compare it. 

Hence, my stance of who cares either way.