To put it another way, it would be like me bringing up in every unrelated thread the massive wins for gay rights at the last election, that solidifies just how strong the momentum for gay rights is. As fun as it is to mock you for your ridiculous claims in that thread, there is no value in bringing it up in every thread. So find it in yourself - if you can, we both know you have trouble restraining yourself - to stop bringing up this issue you rather falsely think you scored some kind of point on.

There isn't any. They all convey the same meaning, which is the most obvious interpretation given the context. If you can't think of a reason why they are different, no technical definition has been presented, and I've given no indication that any one of those adjectives carries a distinctive meaning, then there's no reason to think that I'm intending them to mean anything different. Most people don't need to be told this, but I understand why you might.

Then why are you playing the non-cognitivist game? Why does someone have to tell you what design is? If someone says something like "this looks designed" and you say "no, this doesn't look designed" why must someone come up with a definition of design to try to satisfy you? This does not need to be a definition game.

Besides, the most likely outcome is that even if someone gives you a definition of design that allows for understanding the universe as being designed, you will merely reject the definition and say it doesn't actually represent design.

Duffee even answered you and gave you a definition. What did you do? You brushed it off and just told him that he's exchanging one set of undefined terms for another. This is representative of the type of tact that one would expect given the position you've staked out.

Edit: To fill out the analogy with "intelligence," it would be like arguing whether a slime mold "solving" a maze doesn't actually represent intelligence. If someone doesn't think that the experiment represents intelligence, then it doesn't matter how carefully you craft your words to define intelligence. The slime mold won't be thought of as intelligent.

Your insistence on this point is just silly. Nobody needs to satisfy you with anything. You can reject the argument and get on with your life. Nobody owes you an explanation, and nobody is trying to convince you that anything in particular is designed.

You keep talking about THE teleological argument as if there's exactly one of them, and exactly one way of understanding it. I'll let you do some research to understand why you're wrong. Or if you really think you're right, go ahead and formulate the deductive argument you think THE teleological argument is.

You cannot accuse me of misrepresenting you when I am essentially quoting what you said you meant. You said that it's OBVIOUS that "man-made" means "carried as mental content in the human mind" and that's the hill you're going to let that argument die on. Fine with me.

I think it's obvious that you have used it in a ludicrous manner, and that NOBODY in their right mind takes "man-made" to mean "carried as mental content." This is why there was a misunderstanding at the front end (and it's not the misunderstanding you accused me of). But that's what you said you meant, and that's where things will continue to stand until some point when you change your mind about the meaning of "man-made."

Feel free to do so. If you think my political libertarianism is relevant to the present discussion, you can bring it up.

I brought up "manmade" here because you're harping on language usage, but you have a history of really bizarre language usage yourself.

With two identical dams, one made by a beaver and the other by an intelligent being with an end in mind, the former is not designed and the latter is. That is, it doesn’t matter what it looks like, or what it is made from, or what it does—it is designed only if its creation is due to serving a mind-dependent end.

How specific does this end need to be, and why can't the beaver be said to of thought it?

I don’t think beavers think in terms of means and ends, but since I don’t know what it’s like to be a beaver, I can’t say definitively. So you can just insert a dam created from a storm or whatnot in lieu of the beaver's dam.

lol. Some of us - and I know this might be a shocker - are actually interested in advancing arguments with other people and trying to come to a more informed understanding of the world. Explaining what the various burdens are for people to satisfy to advance specific arguments is part of that. If someone wants to advance the teleological argument, they ought to advance the premises and part of doing that is giving some level of definition for the terms being used. It isn't a matter of "owing" anybody anything. And you are just as welcome to dig a pit and believe the conclusion of an argument you can't support all you want, insulated from any adversarial challenge. If you want to do this, then there is hardly any further need to keep reading.



Obviously. i was just laughing at your changing language.



"must" and "have" have hopefully been addressed above. A basic tenet of advancing a logical argument is that the terms included are defined. It isn't a definition game in the sense that definitions are just that, and we can have many different definitions of design if we want. While I might point out problems in definitions (such as lack of well definedness, or that it doesn't match intuition in various examples), I am more than happy to accept, for the purpose of an argument, somebody elses definition. So there is no game here.

However, I do maintain that there is a large problem with definitions in this argument. Further, it seems like you have agreed that defining design is problematic, and that it is in general difficult to distinguish between design and non design. If I am to accept the premise that the universe exhibits design, at the very minimum I am going to have to know what this means. I don't currently. You have not actually even tried to demonstrate what it means.



It isn't a tactic or a brushing off. It is my actual opinion of what happened. I don't think he has come up with something that is at all useful for determining whether there is design in the universe. I am allowed to have that opinion without it being disregarded as just some sort of debating tact.




While it is true that there are many variants, I am not aware of any that are presented as "frameworks" and instead are quite explicitly arguments for the existence of God. If you believe one of these variants is sound, then you can say so and if you want to be more precise then great! But I don't have any preferred variant.



Outside of you, and your initial misunderstanding, I doubt there is anybody who takes "man made god, not the other way around" in the literal sense that man literally made a god. I think everybody would agree that it is the metaphorical sense of man making the IDEA of god - or making the mental content of god to use your words. I have - quite genuinely - zero idea as to why you think anybody would take the phrase at all differently. It seems very standard and very obvious. So maintain not just that you misunderstood but that you are almost exactly wrong on what "everybody" or "nobody" would say. Incidentally, while I stole the expression from hitchens, I use it quite frequently. Nobody else has ever gotten confused like you did.

It isn't relevant. That is the point. So I shouldn't bring it up, even if I delight in laughing at your ludicrous positions entertained in that thread (which were far more than just "political libertarianism" but also included, among many other things, a very, very confused perspective of where the movement was headed).

Okay.

If we are using "mind dependent end" as design's definition, then wouldn't the scraps of paper in Aaron's paper man hypothetical count as designed? They are the result of a "mind dependent end", after all.

Also, under the presumption that God created the universe, every speck of dust in the universe would be the result of a "mind dependent end", and thus designed as well, wouldn't they?

I don't see how you determine this. A beaver intends to build his dam, does he not? Or is it that a beaver is not a sufficiently intelligent animal to intent to do anything? But let us suppose I agree. Can you give an example of something that is not made by man or other sufficiently intelligent animal, that is easily seen to be intended by a mind? As in, according to your definition, I don't know where to begin to know whether a quasar was designed or not.

From your definition it seems like things that are designed are things that have purposes, but how do I know what things have purposes?

No. The basic tenet is that the terms are UNDERSTOOD. Just think about naive set theory. We define a set as a well-defined collection of objects that we call elements. But we never DEFINE what an element is. We know that they're out there, and that's good enough. And we recognize that this lack of definition can lead to paradoxes. But this doesn't stop us from starting from there.

Replace "tact" with "tack" and read it again. I'm not accusing you of applying a "tactic." What I'm saying is that your response to the presented definition is predictable based on the position you've staked out.

Do you consider an argument by analogy to be a formally deductive argument?

An "explicit argument for the existence of God" is not the same as a "deductive argument for the existence of God." This time, word choice is HIGHLY relevant, as it was when you used "majesty" which doesn't convey anything remotely close to "design."

I NEVER took it to mean that anywhere in that thread. This only reinforces for me how lost you were in that conversation.

That's not what it means for something to be "carried as mental content." This is precisely why you got so stuck on coming up with an idea that's NOT man-made, and why the conversation made zero sense.

Edit: By the way, if you are convinced of your right-ness in your understanding, bump the other thread and we'll continue it there. I'm not going to continue this aspect of the conversation and potentially derail a conversation that's going somewhere.

Lol. Okay sure, my statement is exactly the same. The supporter of this argument needs to make sure his terms are understood. Yes there are a few points at the very foundation of the development of mathematics, like concept in the philosophy of math like a mathematical object, that are not defined explicitly but accepted as sort of foundational concepts. From that grounding onwards, however, we continue to define every term we use as explicitly as possible. If you want to make some argument that design is one of these foundational concepts then sure, but it is oddly late in the argument for you to raise this objection. Much more likely you are just combing through trying to find any objection you can possibly raise, even though this one hardly changed any argument so far.



So for clarity, your position is that the teleological argument is not a deductive argument? I have no idea what you mean by a "framework" but presumably it is something different than that.


You clearly didn't internalize my response the last time I explained it to you. The beauty or majesty of nature is not the same thing as design, it is often submitted as an example of design. As in a beautiful painting is designed.



I should probably refrain from ever endorsing expressions you give, because who knows what you ever mean by them. Nonetheless, the expression is, and always has been, painfully obvious. Man made the IDEA of God. If you think the mental content thing means something different, then I don't accept that. The only possibly way I can see that this could be misconstrued in my mind is that man literally made god. You say you didn't think this. What possible other misinterpretations could there be?

This is an incredibly simple expression. In what is years of saying this since borrowing it from hitchens, you are the ONLY person who has ever been confused by it.


This is PRECISELY why I told you to stop bringing it up. I am not going to let you sit back and repeatedly make quips about it when you are continuing to be just so ridiculous about it. If you want to talk about it, then yes go ahead and bump the thread. But don't keep bringing it up and then tell ME to bump it whenever I push back. Just stop bringing it up. Lordy.

This is the wrong question to begin with.

Do you understand what it means for something to be designed?

I think that it can be deductive and it can also be analogical. In the latter case, it provides a framework of understanding ("this is like that").

Here is what you said:

I am highly doubtful that those people would say that God "designed" the Grand Canyon. However, I agree that they would say that God "created" the Grand Canyon. Do you understand that there's a difference?

You can't help yourself. Go bump the other thread and make sense of your nonsense. Until you clear up your issues with whatever you think it means for something to be "carried as mental content in the human mind," I will continue to hold that as an example of your misuse and misunderstanding of language (and logic).

Edit: Never mind. I'll bump it.

"Plan for" implies purpose for the object designed, which is not what is implied by design. Design implies a plan via creation, construction, crafting or similar, i.e. a "plan behind".

In its basest form this can even mean designing due to a desire to design, which applies to work of some artists. In this case there is no purpose of the actual object - merely in the act of making it.

I'm sure this sounded very clever when you wrote it.

I'm not sure I agree with your language usage. Consider the following hypothetical statement from an artist: "I have a plan for that piece of marble."

To me, this statement says that the artist has an intention to use the marble to create art. This does not say that the end result will have a "purpose" nor does it say that the artist has a complete (or any) sense of what the art will look like.

I don't see the phrase "plan behind" functioning in the same way. That almost sounds more like a past tense/future tense issue, and not so much a disagreement on the underlying "design" concept.

I have absolutely no idea how I would even begin to look for design out in the universe. There are certain domains where yes I think it is understandable (and I doubt there is much difficulty in defining design in the domain of things that humans design, so the understandable vs definable distinction probably doesn't matter, but if you want to maintain it go ahead). But the domain in question for the teleological argument is not one where I have any idea what design is, let alone looks like. This is precisely the problem. You gave the analogy with intelligence. We might be quite content thinking humans are intelligent, just as we are content thinking a watch is designed, but have no understanding of what this means in some other far removed context.

Can you spell out explicitly what the analogy is? I have never heard of the teleological argument presented as an analogy. This seems incredibly nonstandard and far removed from its standard presentation as a deductive argument. Nonetheless, since you maintain that it CAN be a deductive argument, can you say whether you think some version of that deductive argument is sound.

When queried for examples of design in nature, is not the beauty of nature often cited as an example? I mean if nobody ever does this, then fine. It isn't like I personally think it is a good example. I just think the beauty of nature is one often given example of design. You mistakenly interpreted this as me replacing "design" with "beauty" or "majesty" which was just not the case.

Clearly the person who cannot help himself is you. I have explicitly - and repeatedly - asked you point blank to stop bringing this up. You can hold whatever bizarre misunderstanding of that simple phrase that you want, but keep it to your self from now on. I don't want to see it, as you have done, popping up in thread after thread. But we have seen your reticence to controlling your behavior when others ask you to refrain from doing something in the past.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/te...cal-arguments/

Now, I want you to try again. Can you spell out explicitly what you think the (or any) deductive argument is? My suspicion is that you can't. Your apparent lack of knowledge about this topic is a big clue. You can prove me wrong by citing a SPECIFIC argument that you want me to consider.

If nobody ever does this, why are you making this the cornerstone of your criticism? Your presentation here gives the impression that you really don't know what you're arguing about, and you're just kind of making up crap as you go.

So I'll leave it more to you to do your own research. Do people regularly use things like the Grand Canyon as evidence for design in nature? If you can find an abundance of examples, then you have a leg to stand on.

But you can't simply cite "beauty of nature" as being sufficient to mean that EVERYTHING in nature is designed, and even people citing "beauty of nature" isn't sufficient to make the "theistic" link of attributing it to God. After all, even Dawkins admits the appearance of design in nature.

Right. As demonstrated in the article you linked is not discussing some "framework" to understand things, even though you have never defined what on earth you mean by that, it is giving an explicit argument for the existence of God. It is a basic modus ponens with variants of (sometimes probabilistic variants): the universe has demonstrable design, things that have design have designers, therefore the universe has a designer. Now I pushed back on the analogy thing because I thought you were talking about your undefined "framework" thing. But of course, one of the major ways people establish the premises is by analogy. As in, there is design in the universe because it shares properties with things human designs. Or whatever. I am more than fine with this. Perhaps there is no actual disagreement here, you are just using the word "framework" in some bizarre way.

Kind of like how you use "man made god, not the other way around" in a bizarre way. See both can play that game.

it isn't a cornerstone of anything, it is at best an offhand comment. I obviously do NOT think the beauty of nature is sufficient to say it is designed. If nobody disagrees with me, then GREAT! I maintain that the beauty of nature IS often cited as an example of design in he universe. But I feel little need to invest researching that minor claim because if nobody cites this then it offer precisely zero influence on any other aspect of my argument.

Well, in your example God made that piece of marble as well. Thus there must also be a plan behind that.

As already stated... that there might also exist a plan for it... is interesting but largely irrelevant.

Wow... are you REALLY going to drop the word "deductive" and think you're talking about the same thing?

It is NOT explicitly a deductive argument. It is not modus ponens. Analogical arguments are NOT always deductive (though they can be sometimes), and don't need to be deductive to be a reasonable argument.

The further you go with this, the worse it gets for you. Do yourself a favor and take the time to do your research and read about stuff you don't know about rather than trying to fake it.

Sure, but I'm not talking about trying to make this speak towards what God did or did not do. I'm illustrating the language usage. Having a "plan for" something and a "plan behind" something conveys two very different meanings, and "plan for" is closer to the meaning that is used for design arguments than "plan behind."

I don't believe that "plan for" necessitates some sort of end-functionality. It just entails specific intent of construction or fabrication. A "plan behind" is more broad, and includes outcomes that were not specifically intended.

Where did the word "framework" go? That is the part I am debating and you have now magically dropped reference to it. As I have repeatedly said, I have no idea what you mean by this. The dropping or not of the deductive is that not all logical arguments are deductive and at no point was I trying to dispute this. So someone can give a probabilistic variant, for instance, and I want to be able to include that. But the point is that it remains not this amorphous term of a "framework" but quite explicitly is an argument that - as you correctly point out - is sometimes deductive but not always. You can either find that argument to be compelling or not. But it isn't a "framework" unless you mean something bizarre by this word.

Yes, but this does not give you license to interpret this to mean that everything in nature is designed.

You made a specific claim:

Yes, there are a LOT of people who have thought the bolded. But this is NOT "precisely the kind of beauty that people claim as precisely the kinds of examples that show the design of a deity." Or at least, you've utterly failed to show this.

You like to make these types of statements to characterize the beliefs of others, but if you're wrong in the characterization, it's intellectually inappropriate. And it's even worse intellectually because you then go on to try to defend it as if you're right.