What is an ID proponent's basis of comparison? (edited)

What is an ID proponent's basis of comparison?In general an ID supporter does not first prove the existence of a deity and then from that point progress to evidence of intelligent design of the universe. Instead they tend to point at a earthly phenomenon and proclaim that it could only have been created by an intelligent entity, and from that point conclude that their preconceived beliefs are supported. Bear with me as I spell out this logical argument:Premises:
1) There are things in the world which are natural, and things which are designed.
2) Humans are capable of distinguishing with a high degree of accuracy between natural things and designed things.Logic:
1) ID supporter declares an example thing which most consider to be naturally occurring to be designed.Conclusion:
1) Everything that exists was designed.Most discussions get hung up on disproving the "logic" portion of the debate, even ignoring the logical leap that the example cited is representative of the whole of reality (Inductive Fallacy). I would instead like to focus on the crucial fact that the proposed conclusion disproves the premise itself. *IF* the entirety of creation was designed then there are no natural occurring things with which to be distinguished from designed things. Therefore the declaration of an ID supporter that something was clearly designed inherently contradicts their proposed conclusion.Hence my question: If you believe that everything was intelligently designed, what is your basis of comparison?Edit: "Therefore the declaration of an ID supporter that something was clearly designed inherently contradicts their proposed conclusion."I suppose I got a bit wordy here, what I was trying to say is this: By making this argument an ID supporter is assuming something in their argument that they ultimately conclude to be false, making the entire argument invalid.The logic is sort of like this:
1) A and B exist, and can be distinguished.
2) B is distinguished in one case.
3) Therefore, B in all cases.My point is not that one instance of B cannot be extended to the whole of creation. My point is fundamental to logical argument itself; if you disprove a premise of a logical argument then the argument collapses. In the above arguments the first premise, if true, makes it impossible to reach the conclusion through valid logic.What I am interested in is how an ID supporter avoids this problem in their arguments.Edited by Phage0070, : Clarity

The last sentence of the next to last paragraph, either I don't understand you or it's not really an inherent contradiction. Wouldn't it be that the conclusion doesn't follow from premise or reasoning? What you earlier in the paragraph described as a logical leap?If it's just that I don't get it then there may be others that also don't get it, so please just edit your post so that the contradiction is explained more clearly. Or if you agree it's not a contradiciton then edit your post in that way. In either case, please post a note to this thread when you're done and I'll take another look.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

I hope the edit makes it more clear.

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

This is a variation of the question I have repeatedly asked that never gets answered:Is there anything that happens on its own or is god required for everything?

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

It WAS a little bit wordy, yes, but your point is dead on and it's one I've tried to bring up in many discussions before.My simplistic version of the argument is this.Can an ID proponent offer up anything that is NOT designed, in order to demonstrate how any given aspect of creation IS designed?Short answer: No. Their entire hypothesis precludes such a thing.

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What is an ID proponent's basis of comparison?

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The basis is the already know origin of specified complexity.

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quoteIn general an ID supporter does not first prove the existence of a deity and then from that point progress to evidence of intelligent design of the universe.

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That's because ID has nothing to do with deities.

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Instead they tend to point at a earthly phenomenon and proclaim that it could only have been created by an intelligent entity, and from that point conclude that their preconceived beliefs are supported.

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Unless you got some evidence that the pattern somebody claims is designed, can actually be produced by undirected natural process.

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Bear with me as I spell out this logical argument:

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Premises:
1) There are things in the world which are natural, and things which are designed.
2) Humans are capable of distinguishing with a high degree of accuracy between natural things and designed things.

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Logic:
1) ID supporter declares an example thing which most consider to be naturally occurring to be designed.

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Conclusion:
1) Everything that exists was designed.

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This is the most flawd description of ID though I have ever seen up untill now.ID starts with the know fact that only intelligence is able to create specified complexity. So when we do find specified complexity in nature, we conclude it was designed, because that is what in science is called an inference to the best explanation.

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Most discussions get hung up on disproving the "logic" portion of the debate, even ignoring the logical leap that the example cited is representative of the whole of reality (Inductive Fallacy).

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Actually what you proposed was a strawman which has nothing to do with ID logic.

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I would instead like to focus on the crucial fact that the proposed conclusion disproves the premise itself. *IF* the entirety of creation was designed then there are no natural occurring things with which to be distinguished from designed things.

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That would be true if that was actually what ID claims.

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Therefore the declaration of an ID supporter that something was clearly designed inherently contradicts their proposed conclusion.

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No, it doesn't becuse ID claims that only some features of the universe exhibit patterns which can be said to have been designed.

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Hence my question: If you believe that everything was intelligently designed, what is your basis of comparison?

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Well I don't believe that everything is designed obviously. So my basis for comparison is the distinction in patterns that natural processes can create, and what intelligence can create.

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Edit: "Therefore the declaration of an ID supporter that something was clearly designed inherently contradicts their proposed conclusion."

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Agaon, your strawman argument does that, not the actual ID framework.

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I suppose I got a bit wordy here, what I was trying to say is this: By making this argument an ID supporter is assuming something in their argument that they ultimately conclude to be false, making the entire argument invalid.

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You are constantly repeating yourself. Yes, we got it.

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The logic is sort of like this:
1) A and B exist, and can be distinguished.
2) B is distinguished in one case.
3) Therefore, B in all cases.

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My point is not that one instance of B cannot be extended to the whole of creation. My point is fundamental to logical argument itself; if you disprove a premise of a logical argument then the argument collapses. In the above arguments the first premise, if true, makes it impossible to reach the conclusion through valid logic.

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What I am interested in is how an ID supporter avoids this problem in their arguments.

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Simple, we just don't use your logic that you think we do use...

I'd like to challenge this on two fronts:When you say 'already known' I take it you mean 'we know that all specified complexity must be created by a designer'. But you can't take this as your start point - this is what ID has to demonstrate, based on evidence.Use of evolutionary techniques in generating Robot control algorithms, electronic circuits, animal gait models etc shows that information that specifies these things can be generated by exactly the same methods as evolution itself uses (mutation, selection, reproduction). This shows that the concept of specified complexity is in principle not a problem for the evolutionary approach.So there is good evidence against your position.

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When you say 'already known' I take it you mean 'we know that all specified complexity must be created by a designer'. But you can't take this as your start point - this is what ID has to demonstrate, based on evidence.

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Umm... but that is my starting boint because it has been demonstrated for the past few thousand years by every single living person alive.Specified complexity (CSI) is defined as more that 400 bits (the newest estimate) of information. Every person who has ever written a letter has created CSI, and therefore made it clear that intelligence can indeed create CSI. No natural process has yet been seen to do this. For an example, I present this:

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Scientists today announced that they have crafted a bacterial genome from scratch, moving one step closer to creating entirely synthetic life forms--living cells designed and built by humans to carry out a diverse set of tasks ranging from manufacturing biofuels to sequestering carbon dioxide.

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The scientists ahve, by using their intelligence, actually created a bacterial genome from scratch. They produced information from scratch. This is evidence that intelligence can actualy produce CSI.Longest Piece of Synthetic DNA Yet - Scientific American

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Use of evolutionary techniques in generating Robot control algorithms, electronic circuits, animal gait models etc shows that information that specifies these things can be generated by exactly the same methods as evolution itself uses (mutation, selection, reproduction).

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Actually it can't. This doesn't show an undirected natural process. This shows that intelligence has produced those robots, circuts etc. What you need is an evolutionary process without an intelligence guiding it. In the production of all those objects an intelligent agent was guiding the process all the way. It was supplying it with active information to get to the desired goal.It doesn't matter what mechanism was used, meaning, if the process was similar to what you would call an evolutionary process. The point is that an intelligence was guiding it. The process alone without any input from inteligence like in the natural world could not have preformed this task and generate CSI.

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This shows that the concept of specified complexity is in principle not a problem for the evolutionary approach.

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No, what this shows is that for evolutionary algorith to produce CSI, you need an intelligent input first. That is called intelligent design.

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So there is good evidence against your position.

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Not really. You should read Wolpert's work on NFL theorems. [quote]The inability of any evolutionary search procedure to perform better than average indicate[s] the importance of incorporating problem-specific knowledge into the behavior of the [search] algorithm.[/quote]He basicly explains how for any kind of algorith, including evolutionary algorithms, you need to input information first to get any information out. An algorith by itself is useless unless it uses an intelligent input.CiteSeerX — No free lunch theorems for optimization

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The concept of specified complexity is widely regarded as mathematically unsound and has not been the basis for further independent work in information theory, complexity theory, or biology.
-Wikipedia

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Your premise appears to be deeply flawed. This is common knowledge.

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The concept of specified complexity is widely regarded as mathematically unsound and has not been the basis for further independent work in information theory, complexity theory, or biology.

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This is a statement, not backed up by anything. If you have no arguments than please leave.

No, ID starts with the assumption that only intelligence is able to create specified complexity. There is no reason to hold that assumption, all things with specified complexity that have been created by humans are created by humans. That's just a tautology. You have no logical basis to jump from "all human created specified complexity" to "all specified complexity" and no logical reason to jump from "created by humans" to "created by intelligence."All this is faulty reasoning stemming from a desire to prove a conclusion, rather than following the evidence to a conclusion regardless of preconceptions. As such, it is not science, it is religion.

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No, ID starts with the assumption that only intelligence is able to create specified complexity.

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Depends on how you define a "fact", and an "assumption". To me, a fact is an idea backed up by observations, an assumption is an idea backed up by nothing. Since intelligence has been observed to create CSI, I'd call that a fact.

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There is no reason to hold that assumption, all things with specified complexity that have been created by humans are created by humans. That's just a tautology.

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But that's not what I'm saying. What you said is clearly a tautology. But what I'm saying is that since only intelligence is known to create CSI, than it means that when we find CSI, it is apropriate to infer an intelligent cause. This is called an inference to the best explanation. This is actually what Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell used in their scientific discoveries.

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Studies in the methodology and philosophy of science have shown that many scientific theories, particularly in the historical sciences, are formulated and justified as inferences to the best explanation (Lipton 1991:32-88, Brush 1989:1124-1129, Sober 2000:44). Historical scientists, in particular, assess or test competing hypotheses by evaluating which hypothesis would, if true, provide the best explanation for some set of relevant data (Meyer 1991, 2002; Cleland 2001:987-989, 2002:474-496).10 Those with greater explanatory power are typically judged to be better, more probably true, theories. Darwin (1896:437) used this method of reasoning in defending his theory of universal common descent.

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The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories | Discovery Institute

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You have no logical basis to jump from "all human created specified complexity" to "all specified complexity" and no logical reason to jump from "created by humans" to "created by intelligence."

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Yes I do since only intelligence has been seen to create CSI. Let's test my idea, shall we?Imagine that you were walking in a desert, and you stumbled upon a car. What would you conclude? That somebody, a person designed it and left it here, even though there are no people around you. Or would you conclude that it was created by a natural process? Obviously you would conclude that it was designed by people, because your previous experiences tell you that people design cars. That's called an inference to the best explanation. It's the same thing with intelligence and CSI.

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All this is faulty reasoning stemming from a desire to prove a conclusion, rather than following the evidence to a conclusion regardless of preconceptions.

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And what's my conclusion? And what is the evidence I am not following?

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As such, it is not science, it is religion.

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Depends on how you define religion.

So, leaving out living things for a moment, how many bits is an igneous rock (let's say, the size of a baseball), or a star (let's say, the sun)? Are these things designed or not? I mean, they're pretty complex, depending on how you look at them.Also, where does this 400 bits estimate come from? No one ever denied that. We know humans can make things. Pretty darn complicated things. But just because we can replicate something we find in nature doesn't mean that thing in nature was intelligently designed. Houses are not proof that an "intelligent being" made caves. Algorithms obviously need input by definition, obviously. But why "intelligent input"? How can an algorithm recognize the difference between input from an intelligent source and input from an unintelligent (a-intelligent?) source?

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We have many intuitions in our life and the point is that many of these intuitions are wrong. The question is, are we going to test those intuitions?
-Dan Ariely

Hey SO, welcome to the fray. I think you'll find that this website is more or less dominated by the evolutionist side of the debate. Still, even though I'm an ID advocate, I find this forum intellectually stimulating and occasionally educational. Good luck. Thankfully truth isn’t decided by majority vote or Wikipedia. Otherwise, science could never progress. I think you are missing the point here. Intelligence is simply the ability to choose between options. As a result, intelligence can create things that (within reasonable probabilities) no natural process can create. Specified complexity and the explanatory filter that we use to detect it are simply an attempt to decisively identify some of the things that only choice can create. And, as best we can tell, it works. Whenever we have the opportunity to observe specified complexity being created, it invariably is the result of intelligence.