I think you sort of quote mined that and set up a strawman. Nobody is saying you can't question scientists (many enjoy questions by curious outsiders), but so many anti-evolution types are just so dishonest you can't really talk to them like you would a normal adult. I think that statement was somewhat born out of this frustration and he meant more people who disagree with such simple experimentally verified things don't really deserve to have people take them seriously.

I previously offered this as a possible explanation for the appearance of design. I'm sure you'll be just as unsatisfied with it as you were the last time.

Just like last time, this is not a satisfactory analogy, as it implicitly assumes the universe is, in fact, designed.

Why exactly isn't the solar system an example of something random with apparent desig? The orbit of the Earth is something that you can set your watch to and probably arose from just the same laws that seem to govern everything else. We are saying that it is likely that life arose the same way.

I didn't quote mine - I read the article cited by a poster contra Berlinski. The quote is on point because Berlinski was questioning Darwinism and the article cited to undermine Berlinski is saying he shouldn't even be asking questions. I call that relevant. And B wasn't questioning anything experimentally verified - he was questioning how, starting with the simplest possible life form, through chance as the main driving force, the order and complexity we see is even possible.

The word universe implies a collection of things(and the word things itself implies something identifiable, which requires a system) that IS ordered. So you're asking me to describe something that has order but is disordered. If there was a reality that truly had no order whatsover it couldn't be described because there would be no category that would apply to anything in that reality - as soon as you have a category or class, you have order.

man has two arms and therefore simply can't make assertions about the boundaries of the possible

Your claim is actually not a simple proposition, and it remains to be seen if it is logical. I'm not the first person itt to point this out, by the way.

You've said this a couple of times, and unfortunately no one has called you on it yet! No scientific discovery can ever decrease the likelihood that "God" exists, when "God" is something that can be defined in a just-so way, unfalsifiable by definition.

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I think this really gets to the heart of what NotReady is saying. On some level, we cannot know anything about anything; this could all be an illusion, and any god, devil, or spirit could be at the master controls.

But we move on from there, for the sake of conversation. A few of NotReady's posts itt get a little hairy, but I think by and large, he has not made a single claim that cannot be answered by prepending every statement by Max Raker, Arout, Eddi, etc., with: "Assuming everything is as it appears, as opposed to operating according to a hidden agenda, we can build an internally consistent understanding of the world around us which includes the following:"

The fact that you can consider this internally consistent understanding and observe "You can't disprove the notion/claim that God did all this" just doesn't seem to be relevant to me. All of the preceding itt is completely separate from questions like "why should anyone believe in any particular religion or gods?"

I just don't understand how poking holes in scientific theories is going to weigh one way or another on those kinds of questions, unless you have already established a link between your religious views and physics or evolution, or what have you.

What I'm saying is that if there is apparent design, and the fine tuning of the solar system including earth and moon is enormous, then it's reasonable to believe it is designed. But life is way more complex that anything astronomical and looks designed in a far greater way. I've asked this before - why did Dawkins call his book The Blind Watchmaker if reality doesn't LOOK like a watch?

It claimed in the article that he denied the existence of natural selection itself (not just evolution) and that has been verified. Either way, it doesn't matter too much what some dude from Slate says about some crackpot and I'm sure you realize that the author of the essay doesn't mind honest questions of science just the earth is flat sort of lunacy of Berlinski.

So, by your lights, anything that can be called a universe must appear designed. Since you think it reasonable to assume appearance of design => designer, this reduces nicely to universe => designer.

Correct?

How is any of this even relevant? You asked of a way in which randomness can create apparent design (in reality that question probably doesn't even make sense but ignoring that) and I said the solar system. Now obv this wasn't formed from randomness but the standard model plus gravity, but it didn't require anything more than these basic physical laws. Are you claiming that it is impossible to explain life in a similar manner?

It's fine to look for signs of design, but then, to be fair, you also have to look for signs of randomness. Sure there is a lot that is amazing out there. But there are inefficiencies too. It would be trite to bring up the apendix but three are tons of other examples out there. Even the enormity of the universe itself with so many uninhabited planets out there. There is wonder and there is horror. Efficiency and inefficiency. Strength and weakness. And plenty of mistakes.

The mistakes are forgotten quickly. The mutations that never spawn a baby, or results in one that dies young, never to reproduce. The species that are too weak to survive. Humanity which in some ways is the most wondrous of species, and in other ways the most repulsive. The fact that there are rocks in space that every so often can crash into the planet causing cataclismic damage.

If there is design, then the designer has a weird sense of humour (see, that's more polite than saying he's incompetent.) You're then stuck with the awkward task of saying: well, yes, that's sub-optimal, but its because of a greater plan that we just can't conceive and have to accept on faith is the most perfect plan that can be.

Ok, so I'm not a statistician or a logician, but my argument is almost the opposite of design theory: it is simply: the more that the universe can be explained through natural causes, the less likely it is that there is a God. Now this in no way eliminates the possibility of God. So maybe there is a formal reason why my argument is wrong, but I'd need to see it laid out to get it. Maybe "less likely" is the wrong concept, but that's how I see it in my head.

I would say anything that can be described has some element of order. Order can be called appearance of design. Appearance of design means it's reasonable to infer a designer.

How would you describe a universe that isn't designed? Or anything? Take a random falling of leaves from a tree. There is no apparent order to the arrangement. But that which makes up the random pile does have order. To go to another level you would have to have a random pile of that which can't be described. So with a universe. It's reasonable to believe that if order predominates then design is behind the order. It's not a proof. It's a defense that belief in ultimate design is reasonable based on the appearance of design.

Your third sentence totally contradicts your second. You say in 2 the solar system is random. You then say in 3 it obviously isn't random. And I'm not claiming it's impossible for ultimate reality to be completely random. But if it is then certain major consequences follow logically. My main claim is simply that it's reasonable to believe in a designer when there is appearance of design.

Can you think of a criteria separating randomness from order that doesn't appeal to the judgment of a human observer?

If you can't, what does that tell you about these concepts?

Of course, order and design are rational concepts. That's why we think, if there is order and design, rationality is the explanation.

Edit: Can you think of reason without personality?

But this is what I was getting at in that thread a few months back. 'Appearance of design' is not a viable concept, as far as I'm concerned. At the time, I offered an analogy. Most people would say that, from Earth, the Sun has the appearance of orbiting the Earth. This is not strictly correct, since it seems impossible to describe how it would look if it did not have that appearance. Note that the fact the Sun doesn't orbit the Earth is not relevant, since it's appearance alone that we're discussing.

That's why I called 'the appearance of design' a 'non-starter' in that thread, after you repeatedly failed to describe how the universe would look if it didn't look designed, before settling on the defence that it's like being asked to describe a square circle (it isn't).

I wouldn't, as per above. It's not a phrase that holds any particular meaning to me.

What exactly is this claim based on? There is a gazillion things that have appearance of design (which I really interpret as "have simple patterns") for me yet are known to NOT be designed.

It's amazing that this gets overlooked so often in these threads when we're on A POKER FORUM!!

These guys recognize selective memory in poker (I hope), so why not everywhere else? Sometimes you go on a rush, sometimes you don't. The shuffle is always random, but appearances would make us think otherwise; that is...if we didn't have pokertracker/stats and didn't know any better about the reality of mathematics behind the game.

Right, NotReady?

It was reasonable to believe the sun orbited the earth. Finite beings can make mistakes. There's no large consequence to being wrong about the orbit of the sun. There is about design vs. chance. We can be wrong, even though it's reasonable to believe in design. There are large consequences either way.

Dawkins disagrees with you. He does give a good definition of what he means by appearance of design and simple patterns are excluded. Read The Blind Watchmaker.

Is the shuffle random? For us it is because we don't have the knowledge to accurately predict the outcome, but it's at least possibly predictable. I've said before that chance for us is just a synonym for ignorance - we don't know all the facts and laws that apply to a given event, but if we did, we could eliminate chance - which God can because He's omniscient.

And I told you several times itt that no god(s) can do this in quantum mechanics. That you ignore them doesn't make facts go away.

You didn't answer the question.