What IS evidence of design? (CLOSING STATEMENTS ONLY)

Supportive evidence is not a different form of evidence. It is instead regular old evidence that supports a conclusion reached from other evidence.Similarly, direct evidence, circumstantial evidence, and corroborating evidence are all just evidence. They are not non empirical.Do you even know what empirical means?

I'm not quite sure what you are asking me. What does it mean for evidence to be attributed to abiogenesis?I'll take a stab at it though.I'm not aware of any evidence that there are multiple universes. At best the multi-verse is a hypothesis. Biology is not my forte, but I'm not aware of any substantial evidence for abiogenesis.But nobody is claiming that either of those things are established scientific theory in the same way that general relativity and the theory of evolution are. What's your point?

quote:

---

But the same empirical evidence is often interpreted differently

---

Buz, evidence is not simply some fact. Evidence is a fact that supports a particular conclusion. For the evidence to be meaningful or substantial, it should support the particular conclusion while not supporting an incompatible conclusion.If there in indeed a "large delta which is Nuweiba beach at Aqaba" something that I don't believe was even established during the discussion, that could be evidence of something. But it wouldn't seem to support the existence of an ancient land bridge any more than it would support the non-existence of an ancient land bridge. So despite the fact that an observation of a delta is empirical, it still is not evidence for your conclusion.We're probably way off topic here. If you want to present some of what you consider evidence of design, I could at least respond without going off topic.

I'm not sure I understand your criteria. What are the three parties are involved in the design of a pointy spear made by humans?

Your criteria seem ... problematic based on the roles you assign to the parties.In your critieria, the second party (stabbee) plays absolutely no role at all, and by your own admission the first and third parties can be identical.Revisiting your dung example, why do you introduce the dung beetle if we really don't need a distinct third party. Why not consider the dung maker and the dung dropper as two of the parties? Might not dung have a shape or a consistency convenient for the dung dropper?Who would the three parties be for a painting? Surely a painting is designed, yet there is only a single party involved. Arguably, a painting is not functional.Finally how useful would your criteria be for identifying designed living things which is where ID proponents really want to apply it? It does not seem intuitive to me how it would be applied.

Don't blame me. Using third party made your definition useless because by varying selection of the third party, we also varied the outcome determined by use of the criteria.By substituting designer as you suggest, then we have a useless tautology. Something made by a designer to fulfill a purpose or a function is designed? This is news? If I could show that a designer intentionally modified an animal to fulfill a purpose/function, then I could show that the animal is designed?Wow.

Well, I was just following your own example.

quote:

---

Whereas as elephant poo could be said to have a function to a dung beatle but the dung beatle is incapable of influencing the elephant poo in any way, so elephant poo is not designed (passes 1, fails 2).

---

So, your own example is wrong. Instead of concluding that elephant poo is not designed, we should instead note that your own conclusion regarding design was irrelevant. Or perhaps we can conclude that poo was not designed by dung beetles, but still might be designed. If we substitute bob for third party, we will conclude that essentially nothing is designed. bob is almost always irrelevant as he has not designed much of anything. I disagree. If your criteria are merely a definition, then conceivably there could be other methods of identifying designed objects.

My point is only that you failed to show that elephant poo was not designed despite your assertion that you had done so. Then you attributed your own failure to me when I attempted to follow your own methods. Perhaps now you can state your definition in a form that has no errors. I cannot describe a universal method for identifying design. But I do know that we don't go through the exercise you've described in order to reach to conclude that objects we encounter everyday have been designed by humans.For example, we understand that carbon rods are not naturally found inside of wooden cylinders and we conclude that a pencil is a designed object. We don't need to read Eberhard Faber on the pencil to reach our conclusion. We really don't even need to know the purpose of a pencil to reach that conclusion.I don't believe that our methods for identifying design can be extended to identifying features of living things. But I'm not trying to show that by merely asserting it to be true. That's really all you have done here.

We've seen very similar objects that we know are sculpted or manufactured. I'm not sure the materials used are all that important. If we could discern tool marks on the object, that might help confirm our conclusion.But accidents do happen. Sometimes our guesses are wrong.If instead the object depicted something I had never seen before, I'd likely find it more difficult to decide whether the object was designed. Well that's the question for this thread. I have experience recognizing human design. We all do. But I'm skeptical that anyone can recognize design in any other context.Edited by NoNukes, : add

Doesn't symbiosis benefit both organisms?. Does that not mean that the 'exclusive good' portion of Darwin's statement is not met?Or looked at another way, is it truly impossible to explain symbiosis using the theory of evolution? If not, then either Darwin is being misinterpreted or Darwin was simply wrong.Edited by NoNukes, : Fix tags

Could you provide a pointer to Dembski's definition of design? I was of the impression that Dembski had merely proposed a mathematical basis for identifying design.

quote:

---

Dembski states that specified complexity is a reliable marker of design by an intelligent agent, a central tenet to intelligent design and which Dembski argues for in opposition to modern evolutionary theory.

---

This article just says that specified complexity indicates intelligent design. But what is design?

I am aware of conscious design decisions I make in my own work. I cannot demonstrate that all decisions I make are conscious, but I don't need to do that to know that your suspicion is not correct.Creativity may involve the subconscious. But much of engineering design is done by consciously selecting/rejecting alternatives based on objective or subjective criteria in ways that can be explained to others. You'll need to exclude those types of activities from being design decisions in order to be correct.

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.

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.