INTELLIGENT DESIGN: An Engineer’s Approach

You say [the designer is] an incompetant moron? But obviously he's not. It's a great design. One of the things I was told in engineering school is that if you learn the general principles of engineering you can work in any field because nature is an orderly place. So you have springs in cars and ball-point pens and wings on both airplanes and submarines.

You are trying to resurrect the old vestigal organ thing, but you guys continue to miss the obvious macroscopic fact that life in general works extraordinarily well. Besides, how does natural selection explain the continuation of broken parts? Why have they not been weeded out? You illustrate to me why evolution is such a poor model from a purely practical point of view: It leads people to assume and look for errors in the living machine, and to get egg on their faces over and over again as reasons are found for the supposed mistakes. I wonder how far ahead medicine would be, for instance, if the modern scientist assumed the human machine to be a basically perfect design. Notice I didn't say a perfect specimen, but a perfect design.

Hmmm, guess I better figure out how to quote stuff. But anyway, can you see how the questions you've raised can only be answered within an intelligence framework? How can something be 'broken' unless there was some way it was supposed to be? It's the same for 'perfect design' and 'standards'. So you tell me what 'standards' are. As for 'how far ahead medicine would be if religion didn't get in the way' - that's just bigotry, I suspect. What do you have in mind - stem cell research or something? Ever hear of St Judes hospital or the like?

Well, to stick with our product analogy, why doesn't your cell phone plow snow? To make a human with all the features of every animal on the planet is a silly idea, really. In engineering we call them tradeoffs - weight vs. strength, etc. So the human is designed with the perfect mix of features for his intended purposes. You certainly can't argue this from an evolutionary viewpoint, because to claim the human is somehow defective is to claim there was something else he was supposed to be. Why do you think humans shouldn't get sick or die? Why do you think that is a defect? Where did all these preconceived notions come from? Very, very, very important questions for us to ponder.

"You're the one proclaiming a perfect design, it's up to you to provide the standards that you're measuring against."Ok, I'm the standard, and I'm perfect. QED.

ok, I think we're arguing in circles. Let me see if I can make my point without any subtlety: I see a number of arguments on this thread saying that life cannot be designed because the designer didn't do a good job. I'm pointing out that in an evolved world, or more generally, a world that arose by purely natural causes, there is no such thing as 'good' or 'perfect' or so on. There is no such thing as right or wrong. You may *feel* like something is right or wrong, but only because certain electro-chemical reactions take place in your brain. Those reactions have tended to be successfully passed on throught zillions of generations and that's why you are the way you are. That's the only reason you are the way you are according to Darwin. So it is logically inconsistent to make any sort of value judgements about a non-existent designer. Hmmm, design itself is only an illusion as well, because what humans produce is only a response to certain verbal, tactile and visual stimuli, filtered through our inherited behavior patterns. No, it is only the ID'er who can logically talk about whether life is, or even would be, a good design.

I don't want to be insulting, but may I gently suggest you don't understand what I'm saying? That's precisely my point. Remember how you proved things wrong in math class by following the premise to a contradictory conclusion?