The Watchmaker: my fav argument

[Ravenshire]

*throws flag*
Shifting the burden of proof. This is a fifteen yard penalty and a loss of down.

Oh you're playing sports.

Seriously, you make the claim, the burden is on you to prove it, not on anyone else to disprove it.

So, prove your claim. I'll wait.

If your goal is to "win" something, then you can make declarations about the burden of proof and see what your "opponent" can do.

On the other hand if you're a grown-up interested in figuring things out in good faith, then you can make your best arguments for and against things without pretending it's sports. 

If you have some arguments against the design-ability of things in the world, we'd be interested in hearing what you have to say. Snarkiness and pointing to the rulebook don't really help.

He made a clear claim. Proving it is on him. It's not on anyone else to disprove it, but thanks for playing.

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Shifting the burden of proof. This is a fifteen yard penalty and a loss of down.

I'm a science student not a law student. We falsify things in science not prove them beyond a reasonable doubt.

You going to support your claim or just keep making squawking sounds? Your claim, your burden.

[The Grand Nudger]

Christer god didn't sit down with a protractor and come up with the earth.  He spoke it into existence.  That's not a plan, that's not a design, that's raw fucking power.

Is that not analogous to computer programming? You issue written commands in an executable language, and things happen?

Not in the least, no (and that's not actually what makes the program work, btw, lol - you can type all sorts of gibberish to no effect).  

But go ahead and try it for yourself.  Yell at your pc and see what happens. When you're done, remember that the god proposition, the id proposition, is not that god is a programmer, but that programmers need creator gods or designers, themselves. That the very universes which programmers exist in (as some thing in this sim), need gods or designers, themselves.

Full disclosure. My pre-adult job was working under the table at a rapid prototyping facility for defense circuit boards. Going the computer analogy route is unadvised. I can build them, and explain why you're completely and wholly wrong with any god comparison, from first principles. I wish that we could make a pc or a program the same way that a god can speak a thing into existence, and speak things into working™. I'd have alot nicer rig than this beater. We all would - but that's not how computers or programs, or the process to manufacture or write them, or even the process of design or planning for either....works™.

Sim theory provides your superstitions with absolutely no intellectual cover. You have misunderstood sim theory - and, for what it's worth, intelligent design as well - judging by your remarks. I think...and not without some study on the subject, that you've done this because you are searching for a way to support a declaration, not an observation. What do you think? Is that a possibility?

Let's try something out. Suppose that this world was a sim - just grant it. Suppose that, in some sense unrelated to id but very much related to sim theory - the sim is designed. That doesn't mean that we are, or that anything -in- the sim is designed. We (and any of these things) may be glitches or consequences of the universe in which the sim is instantiated. The designer of the sim..didn't design -that-. Can you see why, in light of this example, that a sim programmer is not equivalent to the intelligent designer proposed by your faith?

Or, to put it another way, are you ready to acknowledge that you worship a limited and un divine sprite addled coder who is himself a natural product of his natural world who works with what he has in an environment he doesn't control and didn't plan to achieve whatever limited range of those effects he can - all of which constrained to his pocket fantasy, and just suffers through whatever glitches and unintentional or un-useful behaviors that his design engenders - or whatever unresolvable issues those unintentional aspects of the assembly impose?

I ask, because that, my friend, is sim theory. Sim theory, is not ID. If your belief in an intelligent designer were true, that wouldn't make sim theory true...and if sim theory were true, that wouldn't make your belief in an intelligent designer true. Thus, they are not functionally or conceptually equivalent. They are in no way analogous or fungible with respect to each other.

You're not looking for a coder. You're looking for a coders creator. Feel free to tell me that I'm absolutely wrong, and your beliefs are too some fucking absurd other thing. I won't mind.

[John 6IX Breezy]

You going to support your claim or just keep making squawking sounds? Your claim, your burden.

Science is not a courtroom. We formulate hypotheses via Modus Tollens. We seek to deny the consequent, because affirming it is a logical fallacy.

[R00tKiT]

  Bones are not designed, 

I didn't hear any atheist here define the word design. Can you provide one, please, before asserting that bones aren't designed? How can one assert something is not designed if they can't define design or distinguish designed from undesigned things in the first place.........?

Simply put, god who designs a universe with laws and processes of self improvement (like evolution) is superior to a god who intervenes at every instance, like intervene to create bones...

[The Grand Nudger]

-aaaand he's back!

It's not up to us to define the word designed, so that other people can even comprehend wtf we're talking about. That's your job. The IDers tried and failed. You tell me how the world is designed, and what that means, so that I can look at the world and even if i don;t believe in genies...say, "well, shit, I think you may be right."

I'll wait.

In the meantime, I consider these things plainly. Maybe some offsite mod looks designed, maybe some unknown and inscrutable intention does - but not the world we see. Not even to you, I suspect.......but it's worth asking. Is this world, that we see, in your estimation the genuine article? Is this a gods plan and a gods design - however you might define it - working as intended?

You must realize that you're about to smash your face into the wall of me declaring, and not without similarly plain and straightforward rationale... your god to be incompetent or evil.

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You going to support your claim or just keep making squawking sounds? Your claim, your burden.

Science is not a courtroom. We formulate hypotheses via Modus Tollens. We seek to deny the consequent, because affirming it is a logical fallacy.

The mp mt switch states that any valid form of one has an identical expression in the other.  No dice.

*fwiw, I'm actually willing to negotiate here - the ship in the night and the paper tomorrow.

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I'm trying to find you some pictures, John. Once upon a time I built a functional 8 bit ks computer inside a simulation (out of sheeps wool, in the sim, that I farmed and bred in the sim) that was hosted by the boards (it wasn't a solo effort, I had help from a friend who had no idea why anything went were - but that didn't effect the end product). If I can find them, I would be very amused to know that looking at a picture of my in-sim avatar and my in-sim accomplishment, you sit there thinking to yourself.......

-There's my god, there's something like my god. An intelligent designer like the intelligent designer I believe in. A design just like the sorts of designs I take to be indicative of gods.

I'm guessing no? I want to point out that, within the sim, a more useful or funtional or well designed computer literally could not have been concieved of or built. It was the limit. I could add bits, but only by duplicating the slice and every slice would take longer to finish a cycle. That I am very much and inarguably an intelligent designer - but even all of that, doesn't support the propositions of ID. It;s not impossible for terrain to be generated in this sim that can reproduce the range of function ...and, underneath the hood, literally every part of it -was- such a function. So here we have a designed world, and a known designer, and an inarguable design.......in a sim.....but, strangely, none of it..... not a single line of code, can hold the ID god up. It's just too heavy of a lift.

[Belacqua]

He made a clear claim. Proving it is on him. It's not on anyone else to disprove it, but thanks for playing.

John's argument has been that if we could falsify designability, then the whole idea of intelligent design would become untenable. This is NOT an attempt to avoid a burden, it is a description of how the issue could be resolved.

[The Grand Nudger]

ID -has- been falsified. So that's that, then?

[The Architect Of Fate]

John's argument has been that if we could falsify designability, then the whole idea of intelligent design would become untenable. This is NOT an attempt to avoid a burden, it is a description of how the issue could be resolved.

Too bad it would not resolve anything 

[Pat Mustard]

How fun...the Christian and the Muslim are going to argue whose holy book contains the worst stuff.

You seem to have forgotten that Pol Pot and Mao Zedong were atheists, and found good reasons for their crimes by their atheism.

So both christians and muslims stand in awe of atheism when it comes to the worst stuff.

Concrete consequences of atheism :

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I see things differently and I'll use two basic models to illustrate: Kohlberg's stages of moral reasoning and Baumrind's parenting styles.

1. Christianity is a conversation; a dialogue between God and man. It is not authoritarian or permissive, it is authoritative (these are parenting styles). Evidence for open communication is sprinkled throughout Scripture. You have Abraham interceding for Lot and God agreeing; Moses interceding for Israel and God doing as Moses asked; you have Jonah running away because he wanted Nineveh to be destroyed and God explaining to him why mercy is warranted. Clearly, I'm allowed to disagree with God, challenge him, wrestle with him as Jacob did.

That's a good point. But the difference is, Abraham, Jacob and Lot are prophets, we aren't. So we can't really receive a message from God which directly addresses our disagreements with scripture.

2. As for what I think about certain aspects of the Old Testament: I see a lot of similarity between God's interactions with humanity, and Kohlberg's stages of moral reasoning. These are developmental stages; as if God is working with humanity, walking them through them. From pre-conventional moral reasoning in which reward and punishment are the primary justifications. Through post-conventional reasoning in which abstract things like justice and love are important. The shift is clear as you progress through the Bible, perhaps with the OT and NT marking the strongest shift. Clearly, I'm allowed to look back and feel that something is wrong or at the very least note how things have developed. Evidence for comes from stories like James and John wanting to rain fire on people like Elijah and Jesus rebuked them for it.

Well, some would argue that divine scripture should contain unchanging moral sentences. If you concede that some parts of scripture belong to developmental stages, then you somehow already acknowledged that this scripture is not divine. I am no expert of christian theology, however. And I am going to stop here because these atheist fools are trying to take the moral higher ground, when they have none.

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More effects of atheism on humanity :

To show how bad atheists are you show usp ictures of the evils a group of christians visited on another group of christians and on jews. You have a strange and terrifying view of the world, idiot. Luckily it is wholly disconnected from reality.

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Strange. I'm also an atheist, and for some reason, I've never wanted to go full on pol pot.  In fact, I never hear anyone but theists imagining that it must.... somehow..... be so?

Unlike you Pol Pot wasn't an atheist. He was a weird mix of buddhist and christian.

[Apollo]

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. 

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.

The design argument or hypothesis takes cues from the local environment (planet, solar system etc) and infers design and hence a designer. It's the same with big bang. None of us were present at the moment of big bang but after getting clues and building cosmological models we are quite sure of it.

For the sake of this conversation so far we can have the following picture:

Hypothesis #1: There is a design and there is a designer who designed the universe how it is.

If you take this hypothesis and extrapolate it to rest of the universe you would expect certain things. Why? To gauge the validity of the hypothesis we'd come up with some predictive behavior consistent to design.  Based on this predictive model we look at the universe and try to figure out how is it "designed".  We later find out that universe is isotropic when it comes to cosmological laws of nature. So if those laws are part of the design (and they must be because they are the ones that enforce everything in universe) then you should see the product of such design isotropically too based on such predictive model.

Since laws of nature are isotropic, the consequent design will be isotropic too. What that means is that we will have more or less similar ratio of matter/energy & their interactions, giving rise to more complex structures etc, making design isotropic characteristic of universe and you'll see more matter based designed objects (planets, galaxies, stars etc) than not. Universe would be a consistently "interesting" place rife with design elements than the cold lonely pitch black place that we see.

Hypothesis #2: Empty space with pitch black cold conditions itself is a design
Hypothesis #3: Universe is failure of design because

None of the design arguments we know of presented historically (Movers, watchmaker, guided evolution, irreducible biochemical complexity, fine tuning, so and so forth ) posit #2 & #3 above. They all posit #1. If there is someone who is making an argument based on #2 & #3 above then I'd be interested to know what predictive basis they used to formulate such hypothesis.

Remember, in case of #1 there is predictive basis and that is our observation of nature around us and conjectures based on that observation of patterns and designs.

(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.)

I disagree. A random anonymous name and avatar is better suited for an anonymous forum. I do not expect others to discuss greek mythology here with me. Don't judge a person by the avatar. I could have picked a rocket just the same.

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. 

Right. But since design arguments posit a position that's the focus of discussion so it's not agnostic position the above statement supposes.

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.

 
Yes.