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Intelligent Design

Thor 2

Philosopher
Thor 2
Joined
May 25, 2016
Messages
7,174
Location
Tiny town west of Brisbane.
Just wondering if any others here have heard any good ones about the proof of Intelligent Design. The topic can be tackled from a number of different angles as I read, but have yet to see anything that holds much credibility.

Have just been looking at the Golden Ratio Phi, and how it is seen to be evident in nature by many, who seem to get off on this stuff. Different measurements of the faces and bodies of humans and all sorts of other animals, are looked at and presented by these guys as proof of Phi in nature. The religious get worked into a frenzy as they see it as an obvious sign of design.
 
My brother in law insists that the eye proves intelligent design and cannot conceive how it might have evolved from "why we would need to see". Make of that what you will.
 
If by "good ones" you mean funny claims about things that are supposed to prove that Intelligent Design is true, I think it is almost impossible to beat Ray Comfort and his discussion about [url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4yBvvGi_2A]the Athiest's Nightmare.[/url]

/thread
 
bluesjnr said:
My brother in law insists that the eye proves intelligent design and cannot conceive how it might have evolved from "why we would need to see". Make of that what you will.
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Yes the irreducible complexity argument tackles this one as well . Richard Dawkins handles this one quite well.

It is all about a very primitive eye to start of with, and the ones that have the better ones survive, because they have an advantage over others.
 
sir drinks-a-lot said:
If by "good ones" you mean funny claims about things that are supposed to prove that Intelligent Design is true, I think it is almost impossible to beat Ray Comfort and his discussion about [url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4yBvvGi_2A]the Athiest's Nightmare.[/url]

/thread
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Ah yes "The Banana Man", it doesn't get much sillier than that.
 
bluesjnr said:
My brother in law insists that the eye proves intelligent design and cannot conceive how it might have evolved from "why we would need to see". Make of that what you will.
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Radio lab does a pretty good take down of this, demonstrating the prevailing theory for how the eye evolved slowly with each step contributing a little bit of improvement.
 
There is literally no such thing as "Intelligent Design."

It's an admitted PR ploy, an attempt to backdoor pure religious Creationism into public schools and to legitimize it as a "scientific" theory to the general public.
 
Thor 2 said:
Just wondering if any others here have heard any good ones about the proof of Intelligent Design.
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The Institute for Creation Research, so far, hasn't come up with any, indeed, zilcho, although it seems they are trying hard not to try.
Have just been looking at the Golden Ratio Phi, and how it is seen to be evident in nature by many, who seem to get off on this stuff. Different measurements of the faces and bodies of humans and all sorts of other animals, are looked at and presented by these guys as proof of Phi in nature. The religious get worked into a frenzy as they see it as an obvious sign of design.
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I see it as an obvious sign of mathematics, something invented by humans. If 2+2 = 4, what contribution does a god have?
 
bluesjnr said:
My brother in law insists that the eye proves intelligent design and cannot conceive how it might have evolved from "why we would need to see". Make of that what you will.
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Ignorance about the evolution of the eye (well known), and the existence of multiple precursors that exist in lifeforms today is what I make of it.
 
When Behe's irreducible flagellum hypothesis was disproved, The Discovery Institute (here in Seattle) shifted to claiming mitochondria are irreducible.

I don't believe Behe has ever accepted his hypothesis failed, confirmation bias in the extreme.
 
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My favorite little corner of ID is "fine tuning". With some living organisms or parts of them, it really is hard to picture a plausible path by natural selection to explain them, so I can understand the perspective, even though I don't share it. But apparently, we're also supposed to somehow be impressed by how finely tuned the universe is for us to live in it‽ How in the world could anyone ever look at this universe and think something so deeply odd‽
  • Most of it is empty space, which we can't survive.
  • Of the bit that isn't empty space, it's mostly stars and black holes, which we can't survive.
  • Of the bit that's rocky objects, most are either far too high or far too low in either gravity, temperature, amount of atmosphere, or concentration of any of a long list of chemicals, which we can't survive.
  • Of the one planet we know we can survive at least parts of, most of its volume is the interior, which we can't survive.
  • Of the surface of our own planet, most is open ocean, which we can't survive.
  • Of the land surface area, a significant fraction has one extreme or the other in temperature, dryness, or altitude, which we can't survive. (And even survivable levels can easily be pretty miserable.)
  • Even in the remainder that is survivable, it also contains elements that tend to randomly turn non-survivable temporarily, like other critters wanting to eat us, diseases, tornadoes, mudslides, volcanoes, poisonous gas pockets, diseases, and other critters wanting to eat us.
I would have thought that as soon as the abstract concept of a finely tuned universe came up, most ordinary people's first thought would have been to start by imagining one without some of those very obvious & basic problems in it.
 
JoeBentley said:
There is literally no such thing as "Intelligent Design."

It's an admitted PR ploy, an attempt to backdoor pure religious Creationism into public schools and to legitimize it as a "scientific" theory to the general public.
Click to expand...

The ID movement was an utterly dishonest attempt to backdoor religion into science class, yes, and undermine trust in science in general. Saying that there is no such thing as Intelligent Design, however, is likely going a bit too far. Intelligent Design is a common feature of quite a few religions, after all, which is something, and there are a number of Christians who believe that intelligent design happened, but are deeply offended if you try to lump their beliefs in with what they consider the dishonesty of the ID movement. Alien creators are postulated by some as intelligent designers, too, which is also something. And, of course, we are surrounded by things that were intelligently designed by humans.

With that said... there really aren't any good arguments for humans or life in general being intelligently designed, that I've seen. Arguments from incredulity regarding the complexity of life and how unimaginable it is that it could have come to be without a designer and appeals to how obvious it is that there must have been such a designer have seemed to be the most common arguments that I've seen for it. More rarely, there were the arguments that tried to abuse concepts like "language" and "code" to "prove" it. If my memory's not been dulled a bit by the many years since I was more actively investigating the topics, the most "solid" argument that I saw along those lines was a guy who was trying to make a case out of DNA (along with RNA and similar) being uniquely and dramatically more complex among chemical structures that were claimed to be natural, but par for the course for something that was designed, to make a case that it should be treated as intelligently designed. On the sillier front, of course, there were things like the banana argument, as was already pointed out, a person popping a cell in a water filled test tube and claiming that the fact that it wasn't going to spontaneously reform was proof of life being created by an intelligent designer rather than abiogenesis, the quote mining from Darwin's The Origin of Species (especially when the issue was addressed in the very next sentence), and so on.
 
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Aridas said:
......Saying that there is no such thing as Intelligent Design, however, is likely going a bit too far. Intelligent Design is a common feature of quite a few religions, after all.......
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I have no idea what argument it is you are trying to make here. Could you expand on the above?
 
I wonder if God used a nice modern CAD system, pencil and paper, or just did it all in her head?
 
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