The Watchmaker: my fav argument

[John 6IX Breezy]

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.

Could you clarify this? Designs have an objective existence: fashion, buildings, watches. In what way do you see it as an emergent pattern, excluded from objective reality?

[Foxaèr]

Because seeing a pattern does not equate to it having been implemented by intelligent design. For example, the Fibonacci sequence in nature.

[John 6IX Breezy]

Agreed; but that is an issue of inference is it not? A body, a gun, and a murder are observable things, even if we cannot look at a body and determine it was murdered.

[Belacqua]

Totally clueless to what you said there but ok.

What I mean is that you are applying modern economic values to judge whether the universe is well or poorly designed. But you haven't yet established that these are what a designer would be aiming for. 

(Also if you're going to call yourself "Apollo" it would probably be a good idea for you to have some idea of the Apollo/Dionysus contrast. This is kind of fundamental.)

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.

I have no idea. 

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?

If those things are designed, then they came about by design. If they weren't then they didn't. 

How we interpret them doesn't change whether they were designed or not. We might well be interpreting wrongly. 

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. 

John has correctly pointed out that design exists objectively in our world. Whether there are non-human designers, or whether the universe as a whole is designed is a separate question. 

Design certainly isn't an emergent pattern. Design is design. I think you mean that we think we perceive design based on patterns we see in nature, but that these patterns may only look like design based on how our minds interpret things. If that's what you mean then I agree. 

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).

And "successful design" vs. "failed design" are also human-centric concepts which we apply based on our judgments. The idea that God would have the same standards of judgment that modern liberal bourgeois people have is something you haven't demonstrated yet.

[John 6IX Breezy]

@everyone

It seems to me that the entire Intelligent Design argument could be falsified if any aspect of the universe is shown to not be "designable" (able to be designed). That is a more effective approach than listing things we don't like (volcanos or the cold vastness of empty space) to suggest it wasn't designed.

Based on this, it seems perfectly reasonable to conclude that everything in the universe could be designed. Consider Simulation Theory (to distance ourselves from the supernatural—which I suspect is the reason many disagree). The entire theory hinges on the premise that everything in the universe can be desiged. (We already simulate many aspects of it virtually.)

The universe is designable—that's the claim that needs to be falsified.

[Angrboda]

[The Architect Of Fate]

[John 6IX Breezy]

Think of a computer simulation. Every aspect of the universe that can be simulated, can be designed. If any aspect of the universe cannot be designed, then ID has been falsified.

Does that make more sense?

[The Architect Of Fate]

[Belacqua]

The universe is designable—that's the claim that needs to be falsified.

I don't see how that could be falsified. 

We could certainly argue that certain concepts of a designer are unlikely. If we set up the usual literalist, anthropomorphic demiurge as our concept of what a designer is, then the lack of evidence for such a thing gives us no reason to take it seriously. This is what most people who oppose the concept of design are thinking of, probably. Even so, it isn't falsified. 

(We've seen before that some people on this forum are fuzzy on the concept of falsification. To be clear, what I mean is simply what Popper said. Falsification is showing that a thing is definitely absent or impossible. It is not a simple lack of evidence. So for example there is no evidence that the Loch Ness monster exists, and no reason to believe in it, but it has not been falsified. Because theoretically it could be hiding somewhere.)

The reason I think we can't definitively rule out a designer is that the human mind is limited. It may be that all the patterns we perceive in nature as design are not really design. I think that's likely. But that doesn't falsify design. It merely means we aren't seeing it correctly. An omnipotent and omniscient God would not be understandable in total to a human mind. Therefore its means and goals (if any) might well be unknowable. 

God as the Ground of Being, who "designs" by emanating, or simply being, the Logos, is not a falsifiable proposition. It's neither provable nor falsifiable by science.