The evidence for design and a designer - AS OF 10/27, SUMMARY MESSAGES ONLY

Since you want to talk about origins, could you tell me what the clear purpose of life is?

From the perspective of someone trying to define and recognize purpose in order to attempt to logically conclude design. I could define the purpose for the origin of the hand-drill. People want to drill holes, so they needed a tool to do this. They invented the hand drill, whose purpose is to drill holes. I could in principle come upon a drill having never seen one and deduce its purpose and its fitness for it before potentially concluding that the implement was designed.So now to life...what is its clear purpose in the same way the drill's purpose was clear?

It does not assume a designer. Since you proposed it as a way for us to look for design, the latter seems more appropriate. That's is what life is, not a purpose for what it is. As Dennis points out - this would be the case even if it were not designed which means it is not a suitable method for discriminating designed from undesigned. The purpose of the wind is to blow. Anything that is essentially defined by its verb becomes designed. Since this does not lead us to design, surely we need something better?

This is because you implied that purpose is a result of the order, and that we must first define the purpose so as to imply order and design. Surely, if I wanted to argue the self-organisational properties of matter I'd just need to demonstrated its self-organisational properties. I fail to see what the temporality (or lack thereof) of matter has to do with this. I'm willing to run with you here, but I need to know what the clear purpose of life is before I'm happy concluding that it is something that has been designed with that purpose in mind (ie forethought). I'm perfectly happy to conclude that life is designed, and to say 'because it is incredibly good at what it does, as if it had been optimised for the task'. It's not exactly science, but I'm happy to run with it. But if that purpose is to do what it does, that implies a recursive nature - which is what we'd expect if it was designed by evolution.So unless there is some purpose behind life doing what it does, above and beyond it doing - then we need not posit an intelligence that designed it with said purpose in mind. Surely then, your design argument - striving to have a mindful designer, undermines itself.Until you can tell me what clear purpose the designer had in mind when it designed life - how can I judge how fit it is to that purpose? To see if life is optimised to achieve that purpose 'as if it were designed to do so'.

You should probably tell Dawn that, not me.

But I didn't disapprove, so you clearly didn't read my post. I'll take your evasion as concession that you cannot tell me the clear purpose of life without making the mistake of saying its purpose is to do what it does - which is clearly not an answer. My apologies I thought I was talking to a person that made the claim

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The result of the order is a CLEAR PURPOSE. Only an idiot would not acknowledge something so simple. Once the purpose is defind and recognized, design is a logical conclusion of that intricate design

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Since that person seemed to suggest that once we have defined the purpose, and recognized it we could logically infer design. I was wondering what the defined purpose of life was, you see. But since you don't think purpose is relevant I won't waste any more of your time Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Well obviously. But you seemed to suggest that purpose was CLEAR, and once recognized - could be used to logically infer design. If you are now saying that purpose does not serve as evidence then I consider my input in this thread a success. Maybe I'll look at some other claims of evidence to see if they really are evidence. If you want to shame someone, humility is the key, Dawn.Now - I'm sorry that I interpreted the words "Once the purpose is defind and recognized, design is a logical conclusion" was a statement that would imply you were making logical deductions from the evidence which is purpose. I'm sorry I thought it might be interesting to see how you defined the purpose of life to see if we could try logically inferring design from it.Maybe, given how I have not met your intellectual expectations - you could enlighten me as to what your words, "Once the purpose is defind and recognized, design is a logical conclusion", actually meant?

As I said, sorry. I thought when you said "design is a logical conclusion" once "purpose is recognized" you were saying you can derive design from purpose. I don't think I hold full blame for this communication error, though.When you are talking about design and a designer I rather presumed you were referring to an entity that designs things with forethought. The fact that things have a set/standard layout(ie., humans have two arms, two legs, two eyes etc etc), doesn't necessarily imply forethought so I can hardly bring myself to call it evidence for your position.It is suggestive of forethought, it certainly 'brings to mind' things which have been designed with forethought. The purpose line of thinking at least had as its merit the concept of forethought (seeing a need and designing life to fill that need).As you noted, law and order alone is insufficient to conclude design. And you seem to be suggesting that the evidence you have favours both hypothesis equally, which would essentially imply it is not evidence for your position at all.Unfortunately - the fact that no evidence says "Almost certainly designed with forethought" and a lot that suggests "Not designed with forethought" would mean that "Designed with forethought" is not on equal footing with "Not designed with forethought." In order to get them even we'd have to ignore the rest of the evidence, rather than merely considering some ambiguous subset.

I think you mean the Gulf of Aqaba (the area marked "A" on the top left map)

I fail to see how my incorrectly interpreting your meaning is grounds for concluding that I am rambling. One rather thinks the two are orthogonal.Given the communication difficulties we have already had, it's hardly surprising they would continue. And as I suggested earlier by that standard - all evolutionary biologists accept design and purpose are in nature. The theory of evolution was developed, in part, to explain how this design and purpose came to be. To reiterate I need not do any such thing. But I can accept purpose and design and cite evolution as the source of these things, as Darwin would accept:

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{The eye has} contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration...

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Here he "freely confesses" that the components of the eye have purpose, for instance.

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If we suppose that the ancient progenitor, the archetype as it may be called, of all mammals, had its limbs constructed on the existing general pattern, for whatever purpose they served, we can at once perceive the plain signification of the homologous construction of the limbs throughout the whole class.

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emphasis mine. Biologists have no qualms about purposes and they talk about them all the time. And design, in the 'body plan' kind of sense of the word, isn't a problem for evolution which can also explain it without recourse to a body planner beyond the mechanisms of evolution. Much like one might argue that a Mandelbrot set has a 'design' (an infinitely complex one at that), but it is produced using a simple and logical equation. As long as you accepta) Evolution is a theory that seeks to explain the designs and purposes we see in biological life
b) That the existence of design does not necessarily lead to the conclusion of an intelligent designer.
c) That design can, as proven experimentally, arise from an algorithmic process (particularly iterative "trial and error" ones ).Then we don't have any significant on-topic disagreements.

Not really, it can be used as a means to explain how the mammalian eye came to be, for instance. I'm not proposing the theory of evolution to explain how the eye works, I'm saying it can be used to explain (for example) how mammals eyes came into existence in a world with life without eyes.You didn't address the main point of my post regarding 'design', I thought that is what you wanted to talk about.

I agree that biological explanations are biological explanations, but when you cite examples of biology as being supportive of your position what else would be a rebuttal to 'biological explanations are not sufficient, an agent is required' but a biological explanation that is argued to be sufficient? Unless you are conceding that the eye isn't evidence of an intelligent designer?Why is this 'nothing more than when {I} started', and why would I want more? Indeed - are you suggesting that the philosophy of science is not philosophical or logical? Since I am not doing science in this thread, just talking about evidence and what it supports or does not support - I am necessarily engaged in a philosophical argument. My present argument is that the design we see is not necessarily the result of an intelligent agent, so any argument that implies otherwise (or even slightly weaker variations) is flawed.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Not in any meaningful way, no. Only crazy people expect there to be no doubt about some things. Yes, it's a quality called 'falsifiable', It is generally considered a meritorious thing. Seems to me, it allows evolution. Of course, it allows unfalsifiable theories too. Is your theory that life/everything was designed unfalsifiable?

Not particularly. But this topic is about design, if you want to persuade me design has more going for it than evolution you're going to need to do more than you've done. If you want to discuss the support for evolution we can do that in another thread. I had a thread, Confidence in evolutionary science two years ago that I put aside for this kind of thing, you entered it only to say you weren't interested in discussing it. If you now want to talk about it, feel free to return to that discussion. The last message I posted to you is Message 17 and you didn't reply. I've not met many evolutionary biologists that accept the existence of the Yeti. I'd have thought "The Yeti is a piece of folklore" would have been true. Nonsense. The theory that all life shares common ancestor for instance can be easily falsified within a handful of years.There exists significantly more genetic tests that could take place than have in fact taken place. Genetic tests are getting cheaper and quicker. It is feasible that between now and 5/10 years from now we will have performed more genetic tests than we've ever performed.If every single one of those contravened evolutionary expectations, I would regard that as a pretty rigorous falsification. So far, your theory
a) is unfalsifiable.
b) has no evidence that can set it apart from falsifialbe theories.
c) has an absence of logic.You keep talking about logic, but you've yet to demonstrate anything that might be considered a formal logical argument. Maybe you should work on rectifying these problems before claiming that it is on equal scientific footing with a falsifiable theory that has a narrow range of possible confirmatory evidence and a wide range of potential falsifiable evidence built on mathematics, iterative algorithms, game theory and other logic.

I disputed that this is so and have challenged Bertot to provide the kind of evidence in this thread that put it on equal footing with the kind of evidence I put forward in the thread that I linked to that Bertot has refused to post in for nearly two years. (Confidence in evolutionary science)Bertot kept repeating the claim, and not supporting it. I take this as evidence of Bertot's failure to support the POINT.I was hoping for a bit of good faith debate, not repetition with CAPS LOCKS - but two years is clearly not enough to bring (intelligent) Design on an equal footing with evolution.Edited by Modulous, : edited to make it more of a summary than a reply.