Why only one Designer

Guilty. The OP presented a very deficient strawman view of ID, and I agreed with the OP that if this were the extent of ID arguments, they could't discern between one or many designers. I brought up the "first cause" to explain how some of them would argue for a single designer.

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"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." — Albert EinsteinI am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives us a lot of factual information, puts all of our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously. — Erwin Schroedinger

As Occam himself put it: "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem" (entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity). Surely you agree that zero unevidenced designers is the most parsimonious proposition. This really is incontrovertible isn't it? In this very thread you make the case that ID and creationism are the same thing. Yet here you want to pretend that designers and first cause creators have nothing to do with each other in the context of this thread.You know as well as I do that the term "designer" in this context is absolutely one and the same thing as the notion of a first cause creator of some kind.

I have read your posts in this thread. I can't find any arguments against the validity of applying parsimony to the issue at hand. You have asserted that parsimony has "nothing to do with reality" but beyond that assertion you haven't said anything at all to counter the following:1) The more parsimonious a proposal is the less likely it is to be wrong because the fewer assumptions it contains that are unsupported.2) The no designer proposition is the most parsimonious.Do you have any counter-arguments? Or just your already stated assertion?Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

I agree.Many in this thread are conflating the Intelligent Design movement with Intelligent Design as an explanatory proposition. They are conflating those who most commonly and publicly advocate the ID position with the ID proposition itself.The Intelligent Design movement is indisputably one and the same as the Christian fundamentalist creationist movement. They are the same people. And these creationists do themselves conflate ID and creationism for their own social purposes when it suits them. But that does not mean that ID and creationism are actually the same thing.ID as a position is not inherently Christian. Fundie Christians are currently very publicly advocating ID as a means to an end. But there are Moslem IDists. IDists of other godly beliefs. Even IDists of no specific godly belief at all. The illusion of design in nature is something that has fooled a lot of people over a vast amount of time. They have not all been Fundie Christians. Nor are they all now. There are some people who just think nature is all too "complex" to be "random" and that some sort of higher powered intelligence is therefore necessary. I would suggest that this view is far more prevalent in the world than Christian creationism. In fact I personally know people who would rather boil their feet than be labelled as Christian fundamentalists but whom could accurately be described as believing in Intelligent Design of some vague sort.Creationists advocating ID for social reasons just get most of the press. Hence the ongoing conflation.Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

As I said, my understanding is that that applies to different kinds of entities, not multiple instances of the same kind. That isn't the topic here. We're considering the hypothetical if there is at least one designer. Not at all. As I've already said, if we see design in the universe, that only points to the last cause, not the first. There could have been near-infinite generations of "causes".Some causes might have cooperated with each other. Some might have competed with each other. Some might be extinct. In the case of life on earth, we have evidence of common descent. In the case of phantom designers, we don't.

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If you have nothing to say, you could have done so much more concisely. -- Dr Adequate

I would argue that they are one in the same. The purpose of ID is to give a scientific veneer to dogmatically held religious beliefs. When you really push ID you always end up at the same place: It just looks designed because I think so. This is where the ID proponent started before looking at any of the evidence. Along the way you will stumble on arguments from ignorance and arguments from incredulity, but never arguments from positive evidence. The beginning of any ID investigation starts with a person's religious beliefs and never strays far from them. But it is inherently creationist, no matter what the religious flavor is.

A scam to sell the Brooklyn Bridge correlates more closely to other scams than it does to the Brooklyn Bridge.

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If you have nothing to say, you could have done so much more concisely. -- Dr Adequate

I think the point being made is that reality is not forced to follow rules of parsimony. In science, we are trying to model reality so we must be careful to recognize the fact that parsimony is only a rule of thumb, not a natural law.A good example of this is DNA phylogenies. The tools used to construct DNA phylogenies rely heavily on rules of parsimony. For example, a shared base at an orthologous position is assumed to be a direct result of inheritance from a common ancestor. The rules throw out the possibility that the base changed somewhere in the lineage and then changed back to the ancestral sequence. However, anyone doing these analyses will readily admit that reverse mutations can happen.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

Well If you take it from the view of similar design, it would probably make sense.Example: if were to start my own line of designer clothes, for each garment I make I would probably leave my signature on it to symbolize that the garment was fashioned by me. It would then be natural to think that there was probably one designer or one mind behind the design upon seeing my signature left on my product.Similarly every living thing contains some sort of signature (eg. dna). Why does every living thing require dna, why not some other mechanism for information? Probably evidence for common design.The biological system also exhibits an intricate system (ecosystem).plants depend on insects & animals
animals depend on insects & plants
insects depend on animals & plantsEvery-things intertwined, if you remove one of these, the entire ecosystem falls apart. This would then be evidence for a common designer since there was probably common thought used in designing the system.It may be possible that there were more than one designers, but that would be undermining the principle at hand, "life as we know it was possibly designed". The amount of designers won't really matter.

How is the existence of DNA evidence of design at all?Why is the signature different on every critter?Edited by jar, : add question 2

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

I'm not here to argue about dna being evidence of design, however if you can prove to me how something as complex & intricate as dna could appear in nature purely through natural processes, I'll be happy to have a conversation with you on this matter.as to why the signature is different on every critter, my point is not the dna molecule on a whole but the mechanism for which it is used.For example: every individual has a certain dna structure however no two person may have the same exact dna; But the dna sequence may be used to determine skin color, eye color hair length, etc etcIt is mainly the 'mechanism' for which it is used that represents the signature, not the mere presence of it in an organism.Why not use another way for determining phenotypes & genotypes? It would then be clear that there were more than one designers since no two people think the same.Edited by SavageD, : No reason given.

Again, that is not what you said. DNA is not the same, just as two peoples signature is not the same.The fact that their is a mechanism "DNA" does not offer any support that there is some designer, and in fact would support there being a different designer for each unique signature using your argument as presented above.Intelligent design is simply a really stupid idea and all the evidence shows that if there was some designer he is nothing but an on the job training apprentice who has not yet reached journeyman status.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Sure - so that your product could be distinguished from products made by other designers.But what if you were the only person who had ever learned, or ever would learn. how to make clothes? Is there really still a need for you to "brand" your products? I mean, just the fact that they're clothes would be proof that you made them, because you're the only tailor who has ever existed and will ever exist.So, unless you're asserting a universe of polytheism, where gods are competing amongst themselves to produce organisms, there's no reason to expect the singular creator of all life on Earth to have signed anything. Well, not every living thing requires DNA. There are RNA viruses, for instance, that have no DNA at all. Not always. Hardly ever, in fact - ecologies are much more resilient than you've been led to believe. I mean, over Earth's history, more than 99% of all the species that have ever lived have gone extinct; if the removal of an element of an ecology was enough to collapse the entire ecosystem, there wouldn't be a surviving ecosystem on Earth. Countless billions of species have gone extinct without a trace, but ecosystems survive. Some niches are just too good to go unfilled. Well, it does matter, because you've specified a common designer. That can only be consistent with one designer - if one designer designed this, and another designer designed that, then this and that can't be said to have a common designer.

Because of common descent. You have ears because your parents had ears.Whales, humans and bats have the same hand structure because of common descent, not because it makes any sense to "design" them that way. Human designers don't build submarines, cars and aircraft on the same frame.The fact that there are different eye structures in squid and humans, for example, suggests that if they were designed, it was probably by different departments with poor communication between them.

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If you have nothing to say, you could have done so much more concisely. -- Dr Adequate

amino acids are made by combining a few basic "chemichals2 and some electricity. You get whole oceans full of these amino acidsthe amino acids combine to build a very simple self replicating moleculewhen these molecules replicate sometimes they dont copy themselves 100% accuratelylets say the first molecule isactt it can survive long enough to copy itself but that is about it
acct worse combination it dies
acttc better combination makes more copies of itself before it dies continuation of this trend this molecule eventually makes a shell around itself to protect itself allowing the molecule to copy itself many times more before it dies then the basic actt molecule some might call this molecule alive cause it looks like a verry basic cell some call the molecule itself alive cause it looks like a verry basic virus the process contiues for 3.5 billion years and some of these one celled lifeforms become multicelluar life forms the plants went on to dry land first cause it was easier for them they got1 new space and no "predators" to eat them so they spread realy fast, after that the others came on land ........And all of this by mutation of the dna molecule that is observed measurable and testable and natural selection just turn on animal planet and you can see natural selectionWhats your "theory"? magic man dun it?