What IS evidence of design? (CLOSING STATEMENTS ONLY)

Maybe going back to look at Aristotle's Four Causes might help:

quote:

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A thing's material cause is the material of which it consists. (For a table, that might be wood; for a statue, that might be bronze or marble.)

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A thing's formal cause is its form, i.e. the arrangement of that matter.

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A thing's efficient or moving cause is "the primary source of the change or rest." An efficient cause of x can be present even if x is never actually produced and so should not be confused with a sufficient cause. (Aristotle argues that, for a table, this would be the art of table-making, which is the principle guiding its creation.)

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A thing's final cause is its aim or purpose. That for which the sake of which a thing is what it is. (For a seed, it might be an adult plant. For a sailboat, it might be sailing. For a ball at the top of a ramp, it might be coming to rest at the bottom.)

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Or to take another example: Michelangelo's David has a materal cause (marble), a formal cause (the likeness of a particular human being), an efficient cause (Michelangelo himself), and a final cause (the intention to create a great work of art).The whole question we're debating here is how to identify something's efficient cause; in this case, life on this planet. As Mr Jack suggests, part of the of your criteria for deciding whether or not something shows evidence of being intelligently designed is going to have to be that you can't account for its formal cause in terms of natural processes. Therein lies the rub, of course, because if you assert that God works by means of natural processes, then the how question becomes meaningless. If saying Goddidit explains everything, then it explains nothing.Sometimes identifying something's efficient cause is easy. If you're looking at a human artifact, you can identify its efficient cause with greater or lesser precesion because you have have prior knowledge of how something like it was made. The specifics might be lacking - for example, I don't know the names of the factory workers in China who put together my D-Link router (which is only working half the time these days, piece of crap), nor do I know anything at all about how it was put together or how it works, but I do know enough about how other things like it are made that I can say pretty confidently that its efficient cause is human and not natural, unguided processes.But in the case of ID, the whole point is that the efficient cause isn't so identifiable. So what does looking at the other causes do for us?Obviously, indentifying a thing's material or formal cause won't do much to tell you whether it was designed or not. But in this context, maybe you could say something shows evidence of being designed intelligently if its final cause is not something intrinsic to itself. A tree growing in the forest has an intrinsic final cause - producing seeds to make more trees. However, a row of trees planted at even intervals along a sidewalk have an identifiable final cause that is NOT intrinsic to themselves - the landscaper's desire to make a pleasant thoroughfare.So. What's the evidence that living things on this planet have final causes that are not intrinsic to themselves?

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