Is there a legitimate argument for design?

Well, we can measure, or at least provide good estimates of, the mutation rates of various organisms. These mutations would by hypothesis by neutral, since they would be affecting genes that weren't being used yet. Now, there is a beautiful piece of math that proves that the rate of fixation of neutral mutations in a gene pool is equal to the rate of incidence of neutral mutations in the individual. So if you take the mutation rate per base pair per generation (let's say 10^-10, which is the smallest figure I can find with a quick look round the internet, and take some suitable conservative guess such as a billion generations since the origin of life, well, we get 1-(1-10^-10)^{1,000,000,000} = ~10% chance that any given base pair would be damaged.(And note that I've chosen those figures to favor you: you don't get mutation rates that low except in bacteria, which have a shorter generation time.)The average gene size is ~3000 bases, so on that basis we would expect 300 random changes per gene, when even one can be fatal to the operation of a gene. So it's extremely unlikely that one of these genes-in-waiting would work when it finally gets switched on.This is all very back-of-the-envelope, but since I've chosen my figures so as to favor your hypothesis, I don't see how you could do any better for yourself with more rigor.

You said that everything "reeks" of "sophisticated design". Your position now seems to be that you can imagine that anything might be designed, even if you can't for the life of you think why a sophisticated designer would have done it, which is "not your place to argue". This hardly supports your original claim. Indeed, it renders it utterly unfalsifiable. We could point to anything, a fish that only swims backwards, a monkey with no sense of balance, an armadillo that explodes when it hears loud noises, or whatever --- anything, no matter how laughably inept and stupid --- and you could say "Oh, well, it's not my place to argue why the designer, in his infinite wisdom, chose to do that."

So now we're down to "nothing that could be mistaken for design"? That's a tall order, people can be pretty darn mistaken when it comes to design.

I only pointed out that psychology would qualify as a science of ideas. The relevance you must decide for yourself. The thing about love is an analogy.If ID needs some science of ideas, and if we don't have such a science, that would be a problem with ID, not with evolution. Just as it's not a flaw in the theory of gravity that someone can claim that love makes the world go round and yet not have an objective scientific theory of love. That would be his problem, it wouldn't be a problem for physicists. As I pointed out, science does almost nothing but determine the truth of ideas, that's what it's for. It seems to me that that's implicit in what you're saying, though. ID, you say, conceives of "the notion of an original idea". We don't have an "objective science" of ideas, you say. This makes ID hard to study, you say. In your words "such a science might be necessary to take the ID question from endless debate into final, scientifically derived conclusion". This is the basis of your argument. Well, if you are right then you have identified a flaw in ID, something that ID is lacking that might elevate it from vague speculation to the status of a scientific hypothesis or a theory.

But it seems that we can answer questions about design. For example, none of these would give us any real trouble:(a) Did ancient Egyptians design the Great Pyramid?
(b) Did ancient Greeks design owls?
(c) Did I design the Taj Mahal?
(d) Did Ustad Ahmad Lahauri design the Taj Mahal?
(e) Did pandas design goats?
(f) Do people design automobiles?
(g) Did someone design the Willendorf Venus?... etc, etc. All without whatever an objective science of ideas would be if anyone could think of one to your liking; even without that, we can give definitive answers to questions about intelligent design, so why can't we do the same to questions about Intelligent Design with capital letters? Is this not just special pleading?

No, of course not. Aaaand there you go committing petitio principii. A miracle.

The only things ruled out a priori are logical contradictions, e.g a four-sided triangle. And in fact, the correct way to look at this is not to say that we are saying "A priori, four-sided triangles can't exist" but "A priori, anything can exist, but whatever it is we would never describe it as a four-sided triangle: if it has four sides, we would not call it triangular; if it was triangular, we would not say that it had four sides."

Legos?Perhaps you could explain, if atoms were designed to be building blocks what are the inert gasses for?

I dunno, what do you want to use it for? I mean, if you want to open bottles with it it should be a lot bigger and shaped like a corkscrew.

Let me explain about the inert gasses.Hydrogen atoms on their own are useless as building blocks. All you can make out of them are hydrogen molecules, H₂. Boring. To make anything interesting you really need lots of sorts of atoms. We would have to postulate that the whole periodic table is a sort of construction kit.Except that we have all these elements knocking about like helium and radon and argon and neon and xenon which you can't connect to anything. They're like a bunch of screwheads without shanks, you can't do anything with them.So we have to think that if the periodic table was designed as a set of building blocks, it was designed badly, since it's got lots of "building blocks" that you can't build anything out of.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well no, if I take some useless lego bricks, melt them down, and use the plastic to make more useful lego bricks, that doesn't mean that the original bricks were good building blocks. It means that they were wasting raw material that could have been made into good building blocks. Well, that was worth making an element for.

All the words are English, but the language is not. Yes it is. If you said that certain anatomical features were designed because they are evidently well-suited to their modes of life, then that would at least be a step away from circular reasoning, or it would at least somewhat disguise the circularity. When you write that anatomical features are "specifically constructed with a goal" the circularity is naked. And waving its cock at us.

Nonetheless, his failings would be a good answer to anyone who claimed that the referee was omniscient. But this is one of those arguments that's too good for its own good, because you could use it to defend anything, no matter how obviously shitty. As I said to taij, we could point to anything, a fish that only swims backwards, a monkey with no sense of balance, an armadillo that explodes when it hears loud noises, or whatever --- anything, no matter how laughably inept and stupid --- and you could say "oh, look, the referee fallacy", and go on thinking that the world was well-designed no matter how much evidence of undesign you are shown.Your argument merely insulates your beliefs from the evidence. Such an argument may help you to cling to your idea of design once you are convinced of it, but it can never convince anyone to start believing it.And the utility of your sort of argument is not limited to questions about ID. Suppose, for example, that a Nazi comes to me saying that Hitler was perfectly wise and kind and good. I say, "What about the Holocaust?" He says "Oh, but if you were as kind and wise and good as Hitler, you'd realize what an excellent thing the Holocaust was".Again, this sort of argument can keep the Nazi believing in the justice and wisdom of Hitler, but can it persuade anyone not already so convinced? Of course not, you'd have to be a moron to swallow reasoning so perfectly circular.

But God could.I'm not arguing against the standard model.

Where is this in Taoist texts? Only I read for example the Tao Te Ching, and see stuff like this: What I don't see is the Tao being imagined as like the creator-god of the Christians.