Is the Designer Still Designing?

I'm brand new here and have only had time for a quick look around, so please forgive me if this topic has been proposed before. It's something I've wanted to ask for quite some time now.If an initial intelligent designer is posited as the reason for the biodiversity we see today, does that intelligent designer still exist? If not, what happened to it? If so, is it still designing? If the latter of these two possibilities is the case, then why do we not see radically new body plans appearing currently? Just taking animals as an example, we see a very limited number of basic body plans. If the designer still exists and is still designing, why don't we see much departure from these.As an example, all winged creatures have either six or two limbs in addition to their wings. There are no flying myriapods or quadrupeds. Why not? If one posits the existence of a designer, what constrains that designer from suddenly bringing such radically different forms into existence?I suppose this topic would go best on the Intellgent Design forum.Thanks.Edited by Mike O Risal, : No reason given.Edited by Mike O Risal, : Typos.

So what's the designer doing now that it's retired from designing? When exactly did it stop?

Whatever the damn hell it wants.

Like what? What does the designer do when it stops designing? You used yourself as an analogy. When you finished designing yuor software, did you stop doing anything at all, leaving your software as the only means to discern that you'd ever existed?Moreover, if it can do anything it wants, why did it stop designing things in the first place? Could it start again? And if it designed not only living things but the abiotic conditions of the universe, doesn't that also mean that everything exists entirely at its caprice? That sounds like a raher deterministic state of affairs, and still begs the original question of what the designer does when it stops designing.

You still don't understand the term "intelligent designer". You are trying to box in this intelligent designer as if it's some kind of automated process.

Not in the least. In fact, I'm assuming that an "intelligent designer" would be some individual or group of individuals capable of making decisions. So in the case that this designer is no longer dong what it did at one point in time, we must assume that it is doing something else at this point in time, even if that activity consists of taking a long nap.

Part of it being intelligent is its unpredictability.

This has nothing to do with making a prediction; it has exactly to do with what's happening right now, which by definition can't be a prediction. Unless it has ceased to exist altogether, it is doing something at this very moment.Intelligence makes an entity more unpredictable, of course, but it's not a necessary part of intelligence. For example, I can assume that you are intelligent and at some point in the next 24 hours will take water into your body in some way. I can't predict (without a lot more information) whether or not you'll drink it out of a paper, plastic, or glass container, but with the information I have right now, I can make certain predictions about you, regardless of your intelligence.Moreover, I'm sure that someone else who designs software and saw the software you've written (to continue your analogy) could make certain prediction about how you write software, and so how you would write software on your next project. Perhaps you do something particularly skillful with exception handling or create very useful object libraries. Someone who knew about software and needed someone with those skills who had never met you in person could look at the product of your work and make a decision whether or not you would be a good person to employ for a particular task; they could make a prediction about what you would do in the future based on your intelligence itself. Your intelligence would make you more predictable in that case, not less.

If we can predict what it's going to do next, then it's not intelligent anymore.

Only if you're assuming that it's actively trying to deceive us... in which case, we could compensate for that, too. Armies win wars based on "intelligence gathering" capabilities, making them able to make predictions about what their enemies is likely to do in a given situation. Con men judge their marks in just such a way, Making predictions based on the intelligence of another is, in fact, something that people do every day.So, again, when did the designer stop designing, and how do we know whether or not it has, in fact, stopped?Edited by Mike O Risal, : Forgot to close a tag.

if there is a designer , they must be still at work , just look at all the new varients of flu / colds / mrsa bugs we keep finding , they must also be working dirctly to control the actions of those working on gene sciences who are making new strains of plants , ie resistant wheat or rice . Im sure there are loads of other examples of current changes .

Interesting ideas. And yes, we do see new strains of flu all the time, and we also have a very clear of how they arise; a friend of mine works on exactly this problem and has been for years. It has to do with proteins (at least I think they're proteins) called hemaglutinins and neurominidases and how little bits of genetic code recombine over time. That's how the virus strains are named, in fact (i.e., bird flu is H5N1, which means it has a type 5 hemaglutinin and type 1 neurominidase). Look some stuff up on it sometime; it's pretty cool stuff!I must admit, though, that the idea of a designer pulling the strings of genetic engineers as they work in their labs is a little unnerving. So much for free will! Even so, if the designer is making that happen, we're still stuck with the question of why we don't see any radically new life forms suddenly coming into existence. Even if we assume that the designer created the rules by which living things come into being, what body forms are permitted, we would still need to find out why it doesn't just change those rules and whip us up some nice winged moose or amphibians with dry skin or the like. What constrains the designs, and what could we infer about this designer by such observations?

Primitive Neanderthals (as opposed to modern ones, I suppose) were still intelligent. Educated as we would think of it, no, but certainly not mindless and certainly capable of making decisions.In essence, though, you're entire argument boils down to us being unable to know anything about the designer, not being able to predict anything about the designer, and, since we can't tell what the designer is doing, because it can do anything (including not allowing us to perceive that it was designing anything in the first place, since it can do anything and we have no way of knowing what the thing its doing is), then there's no point to positing a designer in the first place.What is the point of positing something that we can't know anything about? If knowledge of it is impossible in the first place, then there's nothing we can say about it. If Intelligent Design is to be put forward as an explanatory model (e.g., a scientific theory, as it is claimed to be), then it has to be able to explain things. If it maintains the existence of a designer, it has to be able to explain the nature of that designer.Your statement about biologists not being able to create a worm in a laboratory is quite silly. Of course we can't; it took hundreds of millions of years for them to come about. Yours is in part an argument from incredulity and in part an argument from complexity. The fact that we can't create a worm in a laboratory isn't evidence of some non-human being able to do so, though.I find it interesting that you're claiming atheism here while defending this; Intelligent Design advocates generally claim theirs not to be a religious idea, and I haven't once brought up anything about any notion of deity or theology. In fact, I haven't even assigned the posited designer any identity, not even a gender.I do like the veiled threat about your experience with "kicking ass," though. It does wonders for your credibility in this discussion.And by the way, I've never been to the Amazon, but I have had the opportunity to discuss modern biological science with the "baba" who maintains a temple to the goddess Kali in the Trinidadian rain forest. Not a tribesman, but not exactly the beneficiary of a classical education, either. He never resorted to comments about kicking ass and had no problem at all reconciling his ideas about the universe with the new information, and I learned a few things from him, too. Given a little time and effort toward putting things into familiar terms, you'd be surprised what "native tribesmen" are capable of grasping.In any case, with such brilliant arguments as the ones you've made here, I'm sure that the Intelligent Design folks are overjoyed to have you sticking up for them.