Why only one Designer

Really? What else have you got? It remains a fair question. The title of the OP is actually "Why Only One Designer", not "If There Was a Designer There Must Have Been More Than One".It's a fair question. And you have in effect given the answer, which is that creationism is a branch of religious apologetics rather than a sincere attempt to discover the truth.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I don't see that specified complexity is well-defined.But leaving that aside, what reason other than analogy would we have to suppose that a message from space aliens was a message from space aliens? If one comes we should recognize it as such only because it'll resemble the sort of thing that we'd send to them.And what if, in a fit of egotism, they decided to broadcast a description of their genome? We should be right to identify the signal as having an intelligent origin, but for you to identify the information in the same way would be the usual creationist petitio principii. Well, quite. And yet it is possible to write a textbook on "Intelligent Design" by going through a textbook on "creation science" and replacing the word "creator" with "designer"; "creationists" with "design proponents"; "creation" with "Intelligent Design" and so forth. Au revoir.

* coughs gently *A square is in fact a rhombus. Now I will grant you that it's a subset of creationism --- the fewer claims that are made, the more unfalsifiable the hypothesis becomes, which is probably the best thing creationists can hope for.

Well, there is no evidence for unparsimonious explanations.Let me give you an example. Suppose I suggested that in the Andromada galaxy there's a race of superintelligent beings resembling beach umbrellas.Now, as I have no evidence for this, you would adopt the negative as the default position.But now I take this proposition about sentient beach umbrellas and combine it (let us say) with the theory of gravity. Now I have an eminently testable hypothesis which is rater well-evidenced.The problem is, of course, that the theory of gravity would explain the observations all by itself. We cannot, therefore, take them as giving any credence to the additional proposition about aliens in Andromeda.So while we can't necessarily expect the universe to be parsimonious, we often find ourselves in a position where we can say that there is no evidence that it isn't.Now we're in a different case if we have two hypotheses where one isn't a subset of the other.

Oh, well-argued. Would you not also suppose that I was wrong? If not, why the merriment?

That actually happens all the time. How do you think it's produced --- DNA fairies?There is abundant evidence of it being produced by natural processes (which are well understood) and zero evidence of it being produced by magical processes. Back in the real world, the extraordinary simplicity of DNA at first had most scientists doubting that it could be the genetic material they were looking for.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

What in the world gave you that impression? It's called DNA polymerase.Your turn. How does DNA appear in nature through supernatural processes, and are there any observations of this actually happening? Overlooking the anthropomorphism implicit in your question, organisms today inherited this facility from earlier organisms by purely natural processes which are well-understood (and which, by the way, include the action of DNA polymerase). In the sense that it's simple. I don't see how I can make the word "simple" clearer than it already is.This is why even after the discovery that DNA was in some way connected to inheritance many scientists were looking for the genetic material in the histones associated with DNA. They just couldn't believe that something as simple as DNA could be what they were looking for.

Specifically, you quoted me saying something completely different. You did not quote me as saying that I "have empirical evidence that shows how dna became the building blocks for life as we know it, through step by step procedures", a sentence which you wrote and I did not; and I am prepared to explain my own statements, but not yours. No? Then let me explain why it's a silly response: because it's something you wrote rather than something I wrote. You could have saved yourself a few paragraphs by just writing: "I don't know". This is like saying: "I never asked you about four, I asked you what two plus two is."DNA appears in nature through the natural process of DNA synthesis; and organisms today do not "learn" to utilize DNA, they inherit that faculty from their ancestors. This answers your question: if you wanted another answer you should probably have asked a different question. Well, yes. I'm not sure what you want. If you ask me why I say tigers are stripy, then it's hard to give any more elaborate answer than "because tigers are stripy".The reasoning behind my saying that DNA is simple is that it's simple. As I have illustrated by referring to the fact that many scientists thought that it was too simple to be the genetic material. It's really not a very complicated molecule: it's a double chain of purines and pyrimidines, which are themselves simple as organic molecules go.

Well, a couple of things to think about.First, this reasoning fails if you apply it to things that really were designed. Take away the wings or the engine from a plane and it quite literally "falls". Yet plane designers can and will buy in engines designed by someone else altogether.Second, ecosystems assemble themselves without a designer. We can see this with islands that have been either newly created or swept bare of life by volcanic action. Take Anak Krakatau, for example: You'd probably know this if you'd ever taken an interest in ecosystems in themselves rather than as props for a bad argument.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

This would be true only if design was the only alternative to chance; and we know that it isn't. In the first place, writing the same thing two different ways may be redundant, but it is not tautological. If I write "My kitten's name is Mittens, and Mittens is the name of my kitten", this does not magically make statements about my kitten's name tautological.In the second place, the statement that you have written twice in an attempt to magic it into a tautology is not accurate. Things evolve because of mutation and reproduction. Natural selection is the reason why this evolution has an adaptive tendency.And, on a more general note, if you don't understand natural selection what the heck are you doing trying to discuss evolution? It's a very simple, very basic concept. This paragraph is too vague and meaningless to critique except by pointing out that it is in fact vague and meaningless.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

My point is that the fact that ecosystems seem to fit together nicely does not necessarily imply a common designer of their components even if those components were designed. Not only is this not true, but also I don't see your point in saying it. It's still suggestive. Every time we see an ecosystem arise, it does so without the intervention of some mysterious "designer".

Because if you removed all the plants and animals there'd still be bacteria. I don't see the point because you haven't said what it is.If you removed all life from the planet, it is true that there'd be no life left. But I don't see why this fact should put us in mind of design in particular.

There are a number of alternatives, of which the most relevant to this thread would be evolution. Then I suggest that you construct a stupid strawman of evolutionary thought that actually is a tautology.Better still, you could discuss the actual theory of evolution, but I guess that would leave you short of worthless arguments. Again, writing the same thing twice does not make it into a tautology. Tautologies are not made by writing the same thing twice.A statement can be true and meaningful despite being written twice. In despite of being written twice, truth and meaning can inhere in a statement.These statements do not become less cogent because I wrote them twice. The fact that I wrote them twice does not lessen the cogency of these statements. Writing the same thing twice also does not make it more meaningful.That is still just vague gibberish. Could you try to make some more definite mistake?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

If you would stick to the topic of the thread, instead of using it as a platform to be wrong about the theory of evolution (a subject totally unrelated to the actual topic) you might find yourself with fewer posts to reply to.

But the analogy with humans renders these arguments doubtful. Different authors write in the same alphabet and the same language. The diversity of their productions, however, means that we wouldn't think that they were all the same. Would someone considering the corpus of English literature deduce that Shakespeare and Stephen King were the same person? In the same way we might well ask if the same person was responsible for the lamb and the tiger; the butterfly and the tapeworm; magnolias and gangrene. And yet we have a zillion manufacturers all making products that run off electricity. This common feature shouldn't lead us to deduce a single manufacturer.Rather, again, we might ask if it was even plausible that the same inventor was responsible for (for example) the cathode-ray TV and the flatscreen; or vinyl records and CDs. In the same way, we might wonder whether the same hand dsigned both the wolf and the marsupial wolf; or the hummingbird and the hummingbird moth. But again reference to human activity renders this point doubtful. If we have an intricate machine the parts of which work well together, it is almost certain that the various components --- the nuts and bolts; the electrical wires; the diodes; the cogwheels ... and so forth ... were produced by different firms and bought in by the design team that actually designed the machine --- and it is completely certain that the original germ of the idea for each of these components came to different people who never collaborated or even met.