Intelligent Design or unthinking blasphemy?

I didn't say anything about "identifying" the Designer.I said that you can not know what the Designer's intentions were. Therefore, you can not know whether the designs acheived the Designer's goals. Therefore, you can not determine whether the Designer was Intelligent or Idiotic.So, even if your argument is about design, it isn't about Intelligent design. Maybe the Designer was trying for a toaster when he came up with you. That old canard is a bit dishonest. If I found a toaster in the woods (or a watch on the beach), I wouldn't be concerned about whether it was "designed" or not. I'd be wondering who left it there.That's not an argument for design - it's an argument for alien intervention. Maybe there's a planet somewhere where toasters evolved into watches without a designer. This is a science forum. Your beliefs are irrelevant. No, you didn't say that at all. In Message 72, I said:

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You might as well just admit that you can't know - that the "Designer" might very well be an incompetent bozo who did screw up many of His "designs" and can't figure out how to fix them.

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and in Message 74, you replied:

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... you are right that I could not possibly 'know' that anymore than I could know if He has screwed up many times.

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I take that as an admission that you don't know anything about the Designer's abilities. Not on this thread, as far as I can remember. Maybe you're thinking of another thread where I was demonizing faith.

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Suppose a Muslim turned water into wine. Would you call that "miracle" or "magic"?
Suppose a Hindu fed five thousand people with five loaves and two fishes. Miracle or magic?
Suppose a Satanist rose from the dead. Miracle or magic?

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I don't find that a very useful distinction.Many times, a "miracle" is the deity working through a human being. Jesus told His disciples:

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Mat 10:8 Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give.

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He said that He Himself was an instrument of the deity:

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Luk 4:18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,

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In magic, you claim:

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A mortal has tapped into supernatural forces and harnessed those forces to serve his or her will.

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But how can you tell whose "will" is being served, God's or man's?Since there doesn't seem to be a practical distinction between miracle and magic, I think the use of "magic" for "acts of God" is legitimate.

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Because the "design" is so poor.As per the topic, blaming the "design" on God makes Him look like an idiot. Claiming that He created a "perfect" design that somehow made itself imperfect also makes Him look like an incompetent fool.

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What definitions do we have but our own?

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By "our own", I meant the human race in general. That doesn't matter. You have no special knowledge of the "designer" either. Not at all. My assessment of the "design" is from the customer's viewpoint.Since none of us can know what the designer's intended outcome was, those intentions are utterly irrelevant.Who cares whether Henry Ford was trying to invent a car or a time machine? From our point of view, it's a car, and nothing else matters. We assess its design on our criteria, not his.

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My point is that we and we alone decide what is a good design and what is not. We have no way of knowing what the "designer's" intentions were, so the only criteria we have for judgement are our own.By our (human) standards, the "design" of many living things is crap. That implies that if living things were "designed", the "designer" is either incompetent or malevolent.Applying such a conclusion to God would be blasphemy, so those who do not wish to blaspheme ought to get off the "design" train.Pointy enough?

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The argument from design suggests that "we" - i.e. humans - can detect design. Do all humans share that view? I do not. It is your personal opinion. My point seems to coincide with what others are expressing. What's your point?

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Try reading the OP:

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... the definition of "Intelligent Design" and the definition of "God" are totally incompatible.

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God- Again difficulty in a concise definition, but there's some things all Creationists believe, He's omniscient,omnipotent and eternal, those are the important ones.

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Now design, essentially, is when we replace the actual trial and error process with an abstract version of same. Suggesting God did this means He can err.

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We are not removing the assumption of God in this topic. We are discussing specifically whether or not "intelligent design" is a blasphemous concept. Removing the assumption of God removes the possibility of blasphemy and the topic dies.This is not just another venue for pseudo-philosophical blatherings. Please discuss the topic.

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It's not an assumption. It's a conclusion. Do you know the difference? That's just silly. In whose opinion is bad vision or bad joints "perfection"? As I stated quite plainly, that quote is from the OP. It isn't my job to explain the OP to you.I quoted it to show that God is the topic. The "unthinking" part?
I was giving you an oppurtunity to do some thinking and perhaps redeem yourself.

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We've heard that broken record. If all you can say is "That's just your opinion" over and over and over again, you apparently don't know the difference between an assumption and a conclusion. The fact that we learn to cope with our imperfections doesn't in any way stop them from being imperfections. If you are suggesting that our imperfections were "designed in" for our edification, then you are the one who is making unwarranted assumptions about the designer's intentions. You have to learn to read more carefully. I haven't given any definitions.

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What you have pointed out is that you have no clue what the topic is.Unless your response contains some reference to blasphemy, I will waste no more time on you.

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Two obvious possibilities:

1. It came about by a series of "accidents", adapting to its changing environment.
2. It was designed by an idiot.

Nobody.There's a whole spectrum between "perfect" and "crappy", you know. If you were hiring somebody to design complex machinery, wouldn't you look for competence, at a bare minimum? But "The Designer" is supposedly capable of "designing" everything from quarks to galaxies, so wouldn't you expect better than the bare minimum from such an entity?

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