ID - How Many Designers and If ID, Macro or Micro Designer(s)?

William Paley's argument for the existence of God based on perceived
design has two basic weaknesses that defeat his purpose (and the purpose, i.e., to prove the existence of one supreme being, of all who advance the ID argument).The first weakness is that, when one looks at a watch, and perceives it to be made by design, one cannot conclude that it was the result of one, or of a multitude of designers. We do know, from empirical knowledge, that a watch is the result of many designers/inventors; the designer/inventor of the gear, the designer/inventor of the lever, the designer/inventor of the spring, the designer/inventor of the bearing, the designer/inventor of the means of producing the metals involved, the designer/inventor of the means of producing the parts of the watch, to name but a few. In short, the watch analogy does not prove that humans, even if the product of intelligent design, were designed by one supreme designer.The second weakness is that Paley implies that since the watch was designed by a macro (human) intelligence, to serve the needs or desires of that intelligence, humans must have been designed by a macro intelligence superior to that of humans to serve the needs/desires of that intelligence. The weakness of this analogy is that even if one perceives intelligent design in a human, or other multi-cellular organism, one can reach no conclusion as to whether the human or other multi-cellular organism was designed by an intelligence higher than that of humans to serve its purpose, or was designed by the micro intelligence of the individual cells, tissues and/or organs comprising humans to serve their purpose.There is no evidence, except verbal and written hearsay, of the existence of a macro intelligence superior to that of humans, while numerous arguments based on hard fact, as opposed to hearsay, can be made supporting the existence of micro intelligence, beginning with molecular intelligence and rising hierarchically to cellular, tissue and organ (the human brain is an organ) intelligence. Micro intelligence evolving to macro intelligence, just as micro life evolved to macro life.Original design always proceeds from bottom up, only duplicate design
proceeds from top down, as in reverse engineering. If ID proponents
desire intellectual integrity, they must abandon their top down (super macro intelligence) approach and embrace the bottom up (micro to macro intelligence) approach, in which case, obviously, they would transmogrify to evolutionists.

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

Nice thoughts. Two comments:1) The ID movement specifically argues that it does not specify who or what or how many designers are involved (because it compromises their purpose), and have stated that it could be a race of green aliens. This agrees with your argument.2) The default of your closing argument is that we designed ourselves ... through the process of evolution.Not many IDists are here to argue with however.Enjoy the fray.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

GS fan?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

GS?my source of the quote is Tommy Smothers, an song about love ... the next line is "... you can kiss you and i can kss me ...?"

GS = Gilbert and Sullivan. "Two little maids from school are we".

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

an inspiration for many. I used to do a lot of GS when I was younger.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

Yeah, and my AdminMode has a little list. And none of them will be missed. The perils of growing up in a house where GS, Kurt Weill and Bertol Brecht were mandatory. Unfortunately I was one of seven kids so dad was convinced he had his own repertoire company. Instead of tv we would put on Pirates or Three Penny Opera.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

you had to do pirates for pennance?

It was simply PUNishment.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Thanx for your response and your welcome, but you do make it tough on an old, tired and inherently lazy man, for now I must expend the effort to clarify. Oh, well, just punishment for the lazy, I guess.1)I was referring to their ultimate goal and should have clarified that fact. Their statements and/or arguments to the effect that they have no specific entity, or number or types of entities in mind should be dismissed as nothing more than a red herring.2)Not precisely that we designed ourselves, for we did not exist at the beginning of evolution. However, if natural selection is not confined strictly to mechanical action, but incorporates the intelligent actions of the evolving life-forms, than our predecessor evolutionary ancestors, perhaps including even single cells, as well as their precursive constituents, may have contributed to our design through intelligent interaction with their environment, just as our intelligent interaction with our environment will surely influence the design of the life forms into which we may evolve (should they be afforded the opportunity to evolve).Surely consciousness and intelligence evolved incrementally just as did our physical characteristics. Just where down the chain of evolutionary increments purely mechanical actions began to manifest intelligence, no one knows. One definition of intelligence is "the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment." I can perceive manifestations of knowledge of, and the ability to manipulate, the environment in the intracellular activities of DNA and Messenger RNA. I know not enough to argue that it is intelligent activity, nor that it is strictly mechanical activity. I will argue that the scientific community knows not for a certainty, either.To get back to the major point of my topic, the ID community cannot jump to the conclusion that evidence of intelligent design necessarily points to the existence of a supernatural intelligent designer (or designers) when evidence of intelligent design might have a perfectly natural (and more probable) explanation; the intelligent activity of the evolving life-forms coupling with mechanical activity in their environment as the driving forces of natural selection.I hope this clarifies my argument for you and wish you Happy Holidays.

thanks.Red herring it is, and also it is impossible for them to remove supernatural action if they say it is unnexplainable (what is the definition of supernatural eh?), and as supernatural action is de facto the actions of gods ...WE did not exist but each stage designed its next stage, and the chain of life is unbroken from first single cell to each living thing: we are it, by direct living lineage.are you aware that IC has been falsified as evidence? an IC system has been observed evolving naturally.enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

Yep, evolution is the original do-it-yourself, design-on-the-fly project.Could you give me a reference to the IC system you mention? I's like to check it out.

there is one reference here:
http://biocrs.biomed.brown.edu/Darwin/DI/Parts-is-Parts.htmland follow-up commentary here:
http://biocrs.biomed.brown.edu/Darwin/DI/AcidTest.htmlboth from Kenneth Miller, and he seems a little full of himself imho.what it is about is a bacteria where the gene for one part of a beta-galactosidase system was removed (required two parts working together, typical IC set-up) to see what would happen.what happened was that a new beta-galactosidase evolved with two new parts that also both needed to be present for the system to work.the original wasn't replace, the whole system was replaced with a new IC system.and the important thing here is that one IC system was observed to evolve.that means that any IC system can evolve, and IC cannot be used as an indication of design.enjoy.ps -- if anyone has a better reference to the actual experiment I would like to have it.This message has been edited by RAZD, 12-12-2004 09:17 PM

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

Thanks for the references.In reading about Hall's experiment it struck me that although it definately refutes Behe's argument that life is the result of an external, macro and supernatural intelligent designer, it could be used to support the concept of intelligent micro-designers at the genetic level.To my wonderment, in searching for more information regarding the experiment or similar experiments I came across an article entitled "Bacterial Wisdom, Gdel's Theorem and Creative Genomic Webs" by Eshel Ben-Jacob (School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel-Aviv University) which examines the possibility that evolution may be the result of micro-design, i.e., adaptive mutagenesis at the genome level, and cites Hall's experiment (among others) in support of this possibility.Here's the link:http://star.tau.ac.il/~inon/wisdom1/preprint.html