Have complex human-made things been designed?

Natural human traits, both of them. And as it's us who invents Gods, it's hardly surprising if they share our traits.

I said we invent gods. Do you disagree?

But do the two of you believe in the same God/god? You've brought us neatly back on topic there. I agree, the design does follow an evolutionary pattern. So much so that successful gods are like successful prototypes in biology, and they will diversify and branch out. The Abrahamic god (seen here with a small "g" Alpha ) is like the original cat ancestor of all cats. Judaism might be whichever modern cat is closest to the prototype, Christianity and Islam encompassing the rest, with Islam as a specific sub-group, like the big roarers, and so on.So these Abrahamic gods do fit both the pattern of human invention described in the O.P. and the branching tree of biological evolution. Unfortunately for this view, religion doesn't fit the pattern of science, which, when there are divisions of opinion, will always eventually unite in the direction of the evidence. Large successful religions result in continuous branching, and your Mormonism obviously illustrates this. A recent branch and an obviously viable species, it is already successful enough to be spawning sub-species within itself.One way in which religion and other human inventions differ from biology is perhaps that "abiogenesis" equivalents are more common, and "hopeful monster" leaps are much more common. Scientology is arguably the former, and the births of Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism, the latter. Analogies, of course, can be taken too far ! Belief in the soul and some sort of "afterlife" is the one basic religious belief that seems to exist in all known cultures, so it seems unlikely that the Israelites were an exception, don't you agree? I think that if we had a time machine and could go back to any point in the history of our species that we could find this kind of belief, but I don't know if I could present evidence for this.One line might be that Neanderthal have been found buried with possessions, and that current thinking puts our common ancestry with them at about 600,000 years! Such developments could be biological and/or cultural convergence, or even, fascinatingly, cross-species cultural influence, though. If not, religion, with or without gods, may have existed in our non Homo Sapiens ancestry. Interesting, but only on topic if religions are "complex human made things", which I think modern ones are. When complex, they are products of both "design" and "evolution of design". But their simple base, the tendency to invent and design them, is in non-designed biological evolution somewhere, IMO, whether as something that was directly selected for, or byproduct, or a bit of both (+ drift?).

Analogies tend to have varying degrees of quality, rather than being right or wrong, so your title description of my analogy being bad would be more appropriate than saying it doesn't make sense. If there were intelligent designers of biology who, as individuals, designed bits and parts life on earth in a scatty way, with none of them having an overall plan, then my analogy might be even more fitting.The thing is that, although we invent gods and they undergo numerous modifications due to individuals redesigning, no one designer has any overall picture of the ways that the gods will evolve, so the end effect is very similar to the apparently directionless view of biological evolution that you object to so strongly. The other similarity is the branching, so that if you start off with one original Christian god, his success as a prototype means that he speciates regularly, filling in numerous cultural niches, and 2000 years later there are the innumerable different Christian gods of innumerable sects and differing theological interpretations within sects.So although gods are the product of "intelligent designers", human beings, there is no overall comprehension or understanding in the process. St. Paul didn't know his god would transform into that of the Jehovah's Witnesses along one of its many future evolutionary twigs, or that an earlier branching would produce Allah and his many branches and twigs.In fact, to compromise, gods could be seen as examples of the evolution of unintelligent design. Science is not a conscious entity, and has no beliefs on that subject or any other. It has a method that requires evidence to work on, and I see no reason why it couldn't study intelligent designers of biology once presented with evidence for them. Indeed, we can study intelligent modifiers of life that we do have evidence for, and that's ourselves as animal and plant breeders, and recently as more direct genetic modifiers. No problem.So, if there are other intelligent designers involved in life on earth, they are not ignored on principle, but because of lack of evidence for them, direct or indirect. So it appears, but that depends how you use the word "design". After all, in the English language, nature has been known to abhor, love, hate, choose, and select, so there's no reason why she shouldn't design. So we could say nature produces designs at random and selects designs that work.And of course, it could all be happening with intent. The universe could have been created by a team of nine goddesses in the knowledge that its nature would lead to such processes as abiogenesis and evolution on certain planets, and that would give them pretty gardens to look at. Who knows? There are infinite such possibilities, and you're wrong if you think science in some way rules them out. Magic? The mechanisms of modern evolutionary theory can be observed in action, and they could certainly give an appearence of intentional design, because nature tends to select any chance mechanism that works, so it can appear to have been deliberately designed for its function, although close inspection can show rather odd or clumsy routes to problem solving. And aren't there a few "poofs" at the beginning of your magic book? You could describe what was known about the early earth 150 years ago in three words like "very little or nothing". I've explained to you before that Pasteur was only demonstrating that some of the claims used to back up the idea of extant life forms appearing spontaneously from non-living matter were false. Read up on his experiments, and you'll see that none relate to the first origin of life itself.Life started at some point in space time, so that means abiogenesis, whether supernatural beings like my nine goddesses were actively involved in the process or not.Can we describe you as an eternal life-young earth creationist?! It's a lovely oxymoron.You seem to find it bizarre that life, made from chemicals, should come from non-living chemicals via chemical reactions, a view involving nothing but common phenomena well known to exist (chemicals and chemical reactions). There's no evidence for my nine goddesses, which is why they're not included in any of the current hypotheses, along with the rest of the infinite supernatural possibilities we could unintelligently invent (and then evolve via further unintelligent design ). That's a great last sentence, and I agree entirely. All creation mythologies of all cultures should be treated as mythologies, just like non-creation mythologies. There may have been a King or Kings on whom Arthur was based, but we'd be superstitious fools to really believe that one of them had a magic sword, wouldn't we?

I didn't read beyond the post I'm replying to, but I'm counting gods as human made things and discussing their design, so half of the above post is on topic, at least!Edited by bluegenes, : trivia