Part I: Introduction:
William Paley made the most famous formulation of the Argument from Design, but contemporary Intelligent Design ultimately rests on a similar intuition.
There are generally two lines of argument in contemporary ID
1.
Known natural mechanisms can't achieve "X". "X" can be either a specific biological system (the eye was the favorite of classical design arguments, but today's IDers prefer biochemical systems), or it can be an abstract quality of certain systems (e.g., "irreducible complexity", "specified complexity", etc.).
For now, let's assume this is correct, because it's the second part I'm interested in.
2.
"X" was designed by something intelligent . Classically, this would be God, but these days it's often left unspecified.
Fundamentally this second argument always rests on an analogy with human artifacts, i.e., human artifacts
are to humans
as living things
are to "Intelligent Designer".
For example, William Dembski writes:
There's only one known source for producing actual specified complexity, and that's intelligence. In every case where we know the causal history responsible for an instance of specified complexity, an intelligent agent was involved.
(from
http://www.leaderu.com/...ces/dembski/docs/bd-specified.html)
So, ultimately the argument for the existence the "intelligent designer", despite the fancy rhetoric involved in argument 1, always rests on a variation of what Paley stated 200+ years ago.
However it's been noted that there are many differences between human artifacts and living things (for example, living things are self-reproducing) that render the inference as suspect. However, I think an important difference usually goes unnoticed:
Part II: Design for Who?
Why is Paley's famous watch example so compelling?
Because the "design" of the watch serves no purpose to the watch itself. Therefore, it must serve a purpose to
something else. The inference that another entity must be involved is compelling in the case of the watch.
But what about the design of organisms? Who benefits from the design?
Well, the organisms itself does. In this case, the existence of another entity doesn't seem called for.
Indeed, there does seem to be two classes of design in the world.
1. Design that benefits humans, and is known to be made by humans.
2. Design that benefits the organism displaying the design, and is known to NOT be made by humans.
This design-for-other vs. design-for-self seems to be a crucial difference, and this undercuts the strength of many ID arguments.
For example, on this forum there have recently been attempts to say that we can infer the existence of the Designer with the same justification that an archaeologist infers the existence of human makers of excavated tools, etc. But tools by their nature don't benefit themselves, but another, so the existence of another is called for. The design of an organism, however, serves to benefit the organism itself, so invoking another is an unnecessary additional assumption.
Still, the "design" of the organism is something to be explained, I understand. But the general line of argument that a designing entity is a compelling inference based on analogy with human artifacts seems fundamentally flawed to me. I'm wondering what others think about 2nd line of argument listed above, and how this distinction for "design-for-other" vs. "design-for-self" affects either the validity or the appeal of the analogy to human artifacts.
This message has been edited by Zhimbo, 09-28-2004 05:58 PM
Released to [forum=-10]. --Admin