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Author | Topic: What IS evidence of design? (CLOSING STATEMENTS ONLY) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
slevesque Member (Idle past 4671 days) Posts: 1456 Joined: |
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.
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slevesque Member (Idle past 4671 days) Posts: 1456 Joined: |
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.
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slevesque Member (Idle past 4671 days) Posts: 1456 Joined: |
In case you are, why do you think that IC is evidence of design? (a short answer is all that is necessary) I guess you could say that it is an inductively proven premise, since every IC system of which we know the origin was designed.
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slevesque Member (Idle past 4671 days) Posts: 1456 Joined: |
I've never seen a convincing argument that the presence of IC or specified complexity indicate design. I'm curious as to why you think that they do. In particular I find it interesting that anyone who could not check Behe's work for themselves would believe anything he had to say. All I said was that any claim that it had been ''completely and utterly demolished'' seem pretty senseless to me, partly because I doubt a whole lot of people here have read Behe's original book, let alone all the updates and ''answers to the critics'' he has done through his blog and other books. there is more to the idea of IC then what you read on talkorigins.com ...
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slevesque Member (Idle past 4671 days) Posts: 1456 Joined: |
What about the IC systems that we do not know the origin of? How does IC evidence design in these instances? You can inductively conclude design in those instances.
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slevesque Member (Idle past 4671 days) Posts: 1456 Joined: |
If i remove the glass from my window it isno longer functioning as a barrier, tough it still functions as a look trough hole. So my window is not designed? IC systems are designedSystem A is not an IC system Therefore system A was not designed Classic example of denying the antecedent.
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slevesque Member (Idle past 4671 days) Posts: 1456 Joined: |
All IC systems are designed
System A is IC Therefore system A was designed The first premise comes from the induction: all IC systems of which we know the origin were designed,therefore, all IC systems are designed. To negate this you would need to find a counter-example. The second premise is an observation. The conclusion follows. AbE:
Edited to add: Consider the following argument. All known planets orbit the Sun. Therefore, any new planets we discover must also orbit the Sun. This would be inductively true up to the point where we find a counter-example, which we have.
I would think that inductive reasoning is a very poor way of finding the truth, wouldn't you? Inductive reasoning is central to the scientific process. Theories are proven until counter-examples are found. Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.
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slevesque Member (Idle past 4671 days) Posts: 1456 Joined: |
How did you determine that all IC systems are designed? You seem to be inserting the conclusion in the premise. quote: We don't know the origin of the flagellum, therefore this does not apply nor does the rest of the argument. You seem to be struggling to understand how induction works, that much I can tell. Let's take a less contentious example: 1. All swans are white2. This is a swan 3. Therefore it is white Now this first premise is proven inductively by the following: All the swans I have seen are whitetherefore, all swans are white Now suppose I hid a swan in a box, and asked you what color it was. Wouldn't you be justified to inductively conclude that it was white ? Would you be justified to say ''I have not seen this swan, so it does not apply nor does the rest of the reasoning'' ?
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slevesque Member (Idle past 4671 days) Posts: 1456 Joined: |
If I challenged your conclusion wouldn't you need to show that it was white? Or do you simply not have to demonstrate it? It's all probalistic. It depends on the strength of the induction. You are never obliged to accept an inductive conclusion, however, there comes a point where it is unreasonable to reject it, as you be right a very small percentage of the time. Just as no one is obliged to accept a scientific theory as true, but they will rarely be right in doing so depending on the strength of the theory.
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slevesque Member (Idle past 4671 days) Posts: 1456 Joined: |
The piece of driftwood on my coffee table would seem to be irreducibly complex because if you take one piece away - i.e. all of it - it ceases to perform its function. The same is true of the rock that I use as a doorstop. These are not irreducibly complex systems, since they only have one piece.
On the other hand, the dam that I designed would not seem to be irreducibly complex because taking away a piece or two won't effect its performance at all. So I'm not seeing the correlation between irreducible complexity and design. You are comitting the same fallacy as Frako, ie denying the antecedent. The reasoning is not that if a system is not IC, then it is not designed but rather that if it is IC, then it is designed.
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slevesque Member (Idle past 4671 days) Posts: 1456 Joined: |
Ok then name and IC designed system and il show you how removing a part never removes the functionality at best it changes its functionality ergo there are no ireducibly complex systems a mousetrap ?
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slevesque Member (Idle past 4671 days) Posts: 1456 Joined: |
Try making complete, or at least sensible, sentences and not skip words, etc.
Because this is clearly incoherent, and even though I think I know what you are trying to say it does give the impression that you are retarded (no offense)
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slevesque Member (Idle past 4671 days) Posts: 1456 Joined: |
That's circular reasoning. It has to fit your definition of irreducible complexity to be designed and it has to fit your definition of design to be irreducibly complex. I have no idea where you got this idea. The definition of Irreducible complexity is given in Message 127. I honestly do not know where you got the impression of any circular reasoning, irreducible complexity is certainly defined appart from any reference to design. In fact, the very quote you take from me contradicts what you are saying here. I explicitly say IC ==) ID, not IC (==) ID. SO it goes only one way, irreducible complexity implies intelligent design. Furthermore, I have also explained that this does not come from the definitions, but from inductive reasoning linking the two.
What we're looking for in this thread, I think, is some way of detecting one without depending on the other. We need to ask ourselves what ability does an intelligent mind have that a natural process does not. My contention is that at least one ability is the capacity to project into the future. An intelligent mind can imagine possible future outcomes and strive toward desired. Natural processes cannot, it deals only with the present and cannot 'plan ahead'. Now, what type of systems demand such capacity ? Behe's claims that an irreducible complez system doesm because all the pieces must be in place all at once in order for the desired property to emerge. (Seen this way, irreducible complexity joins unto the ''emergent property'' criterion I spoke of earlier)
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slevesque Member (Idle past 4671 days) Posts: 1456 Joined: |
Fair enough. The problems I see with this inductive argument is that the IC systems of unknown origin dwarf the IC systems of known origins. If you had catalogued 5 million white swans and there was an estimated 5.1 million swans world wide your induction would hold weight. We have a boatload of IC systems that we know were designed in many different spheres of technology. The only IC systems that we do not know the origin are biological systems.
Even worse, your induction is incomplete. All known intelligences capable of producing IC systems are humans. Therefore, we would have to conclude that humans designed the flagellum and all other IC systems found in biology. This can't be true given human history. The induction is not incomplete, in fact you yourself give the answer. Suppose we replace the first premise. All IC systems are designed by humansSystem A is IC Therefore system A was designed by humans Someone could claim premise 1 is proven inductively, however it can be proven false by the following modus tollents (denying the consequent) If all IC systems are designed by humans, then biological IC systems were designed by humansbiological IC systems are not designed by humans, Therefore not all IC systems are designed by humans First premise is a conditional statement. Second premise is proven by observation (biological IC systems were there before humans), and the conclusion follows.
We also have examples of IC systems coming about through stepwise change, such as the mammalian middle ear. We know that the current mammalian middle ear does not work without two of the bones, and yet we can see a series of fossils where the middle ear started with just a single bone and then incorporated two other bones through time. Let's try to clear up all the logical steps leading to IC maybe being a candidate for identifying designed systems before going into counter-examples.
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slevesque Member (Idle past 4671 days) Posts: 1456 Joined: |
What is your evidence for asserting this? At the moment, there is exactly one known instance of life in the universe: Earth. The formation of said life was so far in the past, regardless of whether you believe in thousands or billions of years, that we can't say how it happened. So, we have a sample size of one, and the origin of that sample is unknown. Seems like a very weak bit of evidence to make such a certain, absolute claim. First of all, the burden of proof is on those who claim life can arise through natural processes. Not the other way around. Second, the fact that despite all our efforts we fail to find life elsewhere is actually evidence for the fact that life does not arise naturally, or else it would also have elsewhere.
What is the difference between living matter and non-living matter? Matter is made up of atoms, which form molecules, whether that form is living or not. When you get down to it, biology is just chemistry, which is just physics. Tell me what law forbids a chemical reaction from perpetuating itself if given the required components of said chemical reaction. Fallacy of composition. Life isn't just chemistry, it is an emergent property of the atoms when arranged in a very specific way.
Your evidence for saying so seems to rely on a house of cards supported by unfounded belief. Better hope it doesn't get breezy. Yet I'm the one racking up the fallacies in this thread.
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