EvC Forum: What IS evidence of design? (CLOSING STATEMENTS ONLY)

jar writes:

The assertion that there is some evidence of design seems to get batted around a lot but never really explained.

Or at least, most of the explanations don't hold up to much scrutiny.

jar writes:

In some cases it's pretty easy. For example the keyboard I'm using right now has a "HP" label, a warning telling me to read a safety and comfort guide which it claims will somehow reduce the risk of serious injury, and also a bunch of labels identifying the functions of each of the keys and buttons.

If I go out front and look at my car it has Dodge written on it. If I look further inside the door I find Dodge/Mitsubishi which tells me that it was designed by one or both entities. I can look even further and find labels showing the designer for many of the different components in the car from engine to tires to seat-belts to radio to ...

That's evidence of manufacture ... and we infer design. Not necessarily the case with human-manufactured artifacts since some have developed over time, with people adding items ad-hoc.

In fact 'design' as a discipline is still a relatievly new thing in industry ... quite scarily so in some cases!

jar writes:

We also have a long history and lots of experience of human designers. We can look at a history of human designers going back thousands and thousands of years and see what constitutes a human designed object as opposed to something that was not designed.

We can only state that items for which we KNOW there was a designer were disgned ... the rest we infer that they were designed.

It's this whole inference led approach that has (in my opinion) mis-led IDer's.

jar writes:

We can look at two rocks and tell which one was designed as a functional tool and which was not. The way we determine that is by observing knappers today and experimenting ourselves with knapping. We can then look at an unknown sample and see whether or not it shows the same characteristics we seen in the known samples.

Again this is only an inference.

There are structures under the oceans (off-shore at least) that some claim to be man-made while others claim them to be natural .

Sometimes for the same reasons!!

jar writes:

We can look at a jumble of stones or mound of earth and determine whether it was the result of normal geological processes or human intervention. For example the jumble of rock that was once Stonehenge was determined to be a design because many of the rocks came from locations far away and at those locations there was evidence of HUMAN quarrying.

It's still an inference ... though in this case I'd suggest it's correct.

There are plenty of formations around that are not so clear whether they were man-made or not let alone designed.

jar writes:

But when we look at living things we do not seem to find similar examples of design.

We don't see evidence of human manufacture ... but then most of us have a pretty good idea of how living things get 'manufactured'.

jar writes:

As I pointed out in from an engineering perspective there is no Intelligent Design and again at Some thoughts from a designer, we do not see anything that approaches "Best Practices of Design" in living critters.

From an Engineering perpsective I don't think we can say.

Sub-optimal design in living things isn't evidence of no design, only of poor design. We have plenty of that in human-made objects.

jar writes:

So what exactly is this "Evidence of Design" that Creationists and Intelligent Design marketeers assert is there?

Hopefully you can already see my opinion.

Even with items that we are pretty certain were man-made there is doubt, and of those that we are absolutely certain are man-made we still can only infer design UNLESS we are given the design documentation.

Basically I agree that there is NO EVIDENCE of design in living things ... but wanted to point out that it's also very difficult to prove design in items that we KNOW must be designed.

And that's where the ID argument falls : 'It must be designed because it looks like it was designed.'

Not much or an argument really, is it?

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