What IS evidence of design? (CLOSING STATEMENTS ONLY)

No more so than any ID argument. If a tornado blew through a wax factory would it make honeycomb?

This is one way to design. Is it the only way to design? If you can't say that this type of process is necessary to design, you can't rule out the possibility of non-conscious design, can you?

Sorry. Fixed. Because that's the topic, evidence of design. If we can't tell whether an artefact was designed or not, the whole concept of the "intelligent design" of life becomes irrelevant. If we can't tell the difference between an intentional result and an act of nature, we might as well shut down the Intelligent Design forum.

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You can have brevity and clarify, or you can have accuracy and detail, but you can't easily have both. --Percy

I've acknowledged that I cannot do that. Perhaps I'll take a stab at it if we ever do come up with a definition for design.

Good luck with that. That's sort of the crux, there is no definition for design that can be universally agreed upon, and even if there were, ascribing that to some supernatural designer is at best begging the question, and at worst, just plain fallacious.

Exactly why I havent posted anymore on this...although I find it fascinating. I think animal engineering could be an interesting topic on its own. Maybe I will try a new topic again based on this.

Perhaps there is a definition that we might agree on for the purposes of debate here. But there don't seem to be any ID proponents participating in this thread.

Par for the course. Most IDists tend to scatter once we star asking for specifics. Either that, or they ignore those requests and keep making bald assertions. I have to admit, I'd much rather they stop talking rather than ignore our questions, but I'd love it if one of them would have the courage of their convictions and stick around honestly.

What you said previously was this:

quote:

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Dembski at least has a (claimed) mathematical definition.

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I took that to mean that Dembski had a mathematical definition for design. Clearly, you did not mean that at all.

I think this has actually been productive.Sure we can argue whether the Beaver wanted to design a Damn or just create a pond where he could be safe, we can argue if the termite wanted to create a home of just built what worked, BUT, in every case so far we have been able to specify the entity involved and the method/model used to create the artifact.It's that step, identifying the entity and the method/model that the Creationists and ID supporters seem to lack. If they could present similar evidence of the entity that we can produce for beavers or termites or humans, and models similar to what we have for a beaver damn or termite mound or Stonehenge, then their might be something worth discussing.Until then, Creationism and Intelligent Design will simply remain jokes and fantasy.

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

Then it will remain so for the foreseeable future.But I do see some areas of contention. First of all, a supernatural creator, by definition, isn't natural. Everything you've shown with any creative agency is natural. That's a pretty large difference, so much so that any inferences we derive from one may not be applicable to the other.When you bring in something supernatural, which by definition is able to throw our normal, naturalistic ideas of causality and even existence out the window, we're really trying to compare rocks and unicorns.Everything that we know creates something, does so naturally. A supernatural entity is not restricted by that necessity, and therefore could create in such a way that we wouldn't see it.Of course, that also removes the ID argument, since if we can't see it, we can't claim to know it's there, but there's just something nagging the back of my mind when we try to apply our knowledge of natural agents to supernatural agents and expect to get homologies.

I Think you are going in the wrong direction in this discussion. The issue is not if there are designed things that can look just like undesigned things, but if there are specific attributes that you will only ever observe when looking at something that was designed. This is not saying, of course, that all designed things have these attributes, but rather that if you do observe one, then it was designed.One such criteria that was proposed by the ID movement was irreducible complexity, another was specified complexity.I have seen other criteria proposed such as emergent properties but it was a bit ill-defined. The basic idea was that if a certain numbers of pieces were arranged in a specific way in order to have a new property emerge (such as the arrangement of metal that makes a plane fly), then it was designed.So it not really what characteristic do all designed thing have in common, but rather what characteristic can identify something as designed if it is present.

Do you consider either of these as legitimate indicators of intelligent design, and if so, why?

I've never read any of Dembski's books, including ''the Design inference'' so I know nothing about it.I have read Behe's ''Darwin's black box'', but he has made advances in defending this idea that I have not read (partly from his blog, partly in other books)Still, I guess you could tell me the problem you see with irreducible complexity, since I do think that claims that it has been ''completely and utterly demolished'' are far from the actual reality of it.Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.

Personally, I think those flaws are best seen when the Socratic method is applied. If you don't mind, I will ask you questions and we will see where it goes. Interested?In case you are, why do you think that IC is evidence of design? (a short answer is all that is necessary)Edited by Taq, : No reason given.