The Constraints of Design

So you had a limitless budget for your houses and kitchens? Weren't you constrained to make both large enough for humans to fit in them, not to mention the furnishings? And weren't you constrained to make the kitchens small enough to fit in the houses, and the houses small enough to fit into the available land, or smaller, at least, than planet earth? Did you design many flying houses or kitchens made of inflammable straw, or were there practical constraints that prevented you from doing such things? Didn't you read the O.P.? Constraints explain why the designer doesn't do flying elephants. The great "I AM" presumably could.

You just beat me to it!

It's a very good O.P. dogrelata, but I don't think you'll get much joy, because I don't think we've really got any I.D. types around at the moment who are capable of attempting a reply. I particularly like this point, and your second question. It's an original angle, and I don't think you'll get a good answer. I've often asked why the designer has to design within the parameters of evolutionary possibility, which is maybe a similar question, and it gets avoided like the plague. Expect the same.

You need to learn what constraints are. The hypothetical Higgs has constraints. Physics, with or without the Higgs, has strict constraints. It cannot produce 500 mile high mountains on this planet, or flying elephants with wings the size of a seagull. The constraints are actually very tight. The O.P. suggests that intelligent design is only necessary if there are constraints, so that if there is intelligent design in nature around us, it is not supernatural but natural.You don't need to design a watch if there are no constraints, just poof it into existence, and it doesn't need any designed machinery to tell the time, because the machinery would only be necessitated by physical restraints. It can be a blob that miraculously speaks the time into your head when you want to know it.If your God has no constraints on what he can do, then he does not fit the "designs" of this planet, as they are tightly restricted in a way that wouldn't be necessary for an unconstrained designer.This indicates that your unconstrained God is a figment of your imagination, so you don't need to get up next Sunday morning to go to church, and you can enjoy a good lie in instead. Sleep well.

Art for art's sake?

Intelligent design, as understood here, really involves the type of interventionist designer proposed by the I.D. movement, rather than a designer who creates the universe, gets it right, and doesn't have to tinker.An interesting point is that, if the designer is both a creator of the universe and intervenes to design specific things within it, then he appears to have set his own constraints.What I.D. is looking for in the universe are signs of intervention, as the universe would appear the same without them, designer or no designer.So, we're looking for things that do not appear to be possible in the natural course of the universe.How helpful is Paley's watch analogy? With the watch, we can quickly identify the creature responsible from experience, and we can recognise not only function, but purpose.Does this help us when we look at biological "machines", in which we can identify function, but no specific designer or purpose? What can we tell about speculative designers from what's designed? And is it true that design itself is only required when there are constraints?A supernatural designer without constraints surely wouldn't need to design "machines", because he is not constrained by the laws of physics. If he wants a flying elephant that speaks Chinese, an unconstrained designer could just poof it into existence.So, do I.D. arguments point to a constrained and probably natural rather than supernatural designer?It would be nice to hear I.D. supporters' views on these questions.

Of course, a light touch designer could be undetectable, but that's not the claim of the I.D. movement which is, obviously, attempting to present evidence for design. The modern I.D. claim is founded on pointing to details that they claim actually do break the constraints of nature in their existence but not the way in which they function.So, if the claim is made for the human eye that it could not be produced without the intervention of an intelligent designer, this raises the question of why the designer broke constraints by designing it, but didn't bother to do so in its function, and enable us to magically see what's behind our heads.

You and Cavediver may be using the word "natural" in different ways. It's a notoriously difficult one, with so many uses that some dictionaries give 20 or more different definitions.Basically, in one common usage in which "man-made" = artificial and therefore non-natural, then it's correct to say that watches are not natural. In the broader sense, all physical things are a natural part and product of the universe, as in some of Dictionary.com's 31 (!!!) definitions, hereSo, the statement "watches aren't natural" and "watches are natural" can both be correct and incorrect, and require an explanation of the usage of the word.This post is just to try and stop people talking at cross purposes, so please continue on Dogrelata's on topic theme!