P1) we can tell when something is designed because it is clearly different from things we find in nature

P1 is not an accurate extrapolation of my point.

To state it simply I will quote WN, "things that look designed probably were designed".

We infer a watch has a designer because it looks designed and has complex inner workings.

Similarly, we infer our world has a designer because it looks designed and has complex inner workings.

Note:

It is kind of weird because we exist inside the "Matrix" if you will. We don't have any other universes we can compare our universe to.

This post is hugely influenced by emotional interpretation. 'Beauty', 'power', 'intensity', calm', you're anthropomorphizing nature and seeing a mind behind it are you not?

It's not unreasonable to posit that something exists because it was 'made', it's as likely as everything else to be true. Where it breaks down is in our assumptions about the maker(s) since a complex universe could easily be the result of entirely natural and unguided processes, whether set in motion by a god or not.

'The universe exists, therefore a god might have made' it I have no choice but to live with but 'the universe is complex, therefore a god made it' is not reasonable.

Sure they can when they're caused by radiation. An energetic particle knocks a little bit of DNA and instead of dying of cancer you grow an extra toe and it turns out to have survival benefits etc etc etc

Unless you're saying that energetic particle was aimed at the creature it hit by an intelligence?

I am not quite sure what you are objecting to, could you clarify?

Sociologically, this is not quite correct. The people who are most associated with the Intelligent Design movement generally reject a literal interpretation of Genesis (e.g. they are usually old-earth creationists, and they typically accept the reality of evolution--just not natural selection).

I am certainly aware of that, and mentioned it briefly above. In other words, in order to discredit the idea of Intelligent Design (ID), some are taking the most extreme creationist interpretations of ID (that try and use ID to discredit evolution), so that by discrediting those who believe in creationism they can prove (not just believe) that ID and God does not exist.

In actual fact, many who believe in ID also believe in evolution and find nothing inconsistent about them together. IMO there is no reason to believe that evolutionary mutations are completely random, and more than the other forces of nature (gravity, weak force, strong force, etc).

Close but no cigar. Natural selection does clearly occur to some degree, and can be proven. What ID adherents believe is that at least some (or maybe all) of the mutations upon which natural selection chooses from are not random. Many "true" evolutionists (aka Darwinists) believe that 100% of all changes upon which natural selections has to choose from occur from random mutations (a belief that I find completely illogical and contra-intuitive).

"Creationism" and "a literal interpretation of the Old Testament" aren't really the same thing (though there is clearly an overlap). There are still a lot of people who think of Creationism as merely representing the idea that the unvierse was created by God. For example, this is why there's a specific "Young Earth Creationism" to indicate the literal interpretation of the Bible and distinguish it from other conceptions of Creationism. It's also used by many persons (probably like yourself) as a merely dismissive derogatory term.

I think the term has probably become sufficiently muddled that it doesn't really indicate much of anything anymore.

This really puzzles me. Darwinists believe that humans evolved from micro-organisms (as do most who believe in ID). The development of intelligent humans is just part of the evolutionary chain of events. So if a human makes an arrowhead, why is that not part of nature?

Now, maybe you are saying that that life is different from nature, and that those things that occur in nature which have no life (like rocks) don't exhibit any intelligence design, but that all living cells do have some intelligent design in them? But no one claims that rocks are part of evolution, only that life is evolutionary, so the whole analogy of nature vs design does not address the issue of whether there is ID in the evolution of life.

The reason why it is called Intelligent Design is because it is claimed that the kind of design present requires some kind of conscious thought or planning beforehand. Insofar as you think this is a prerequisite of something being designed, I will say that the termite mound cannot truthfully also be said to be "designed."

On the other hand, if by "design" you mean something like complex, ordered, or purposeful then sure--but as per the theory of natural selection, we know that intelligence is not required for the development of complex, ordered or purposeful organisms or structures.

I think if you do some even moderate research on this, you will find many evolutionists (especially Darwinists) who claim that all evolutionary change is the result of natural selection upon 100% random mutations.

How something "complex, ordered or purposeful organisms or structures" can come out of random mutations is beyond me, but some seem to claim that it can, primarily because by doing so they think they can prove that God does not exist (and not just be agnostic about it).

I would also point out, that if humans are part of the evolutionary chain (they are), and they (sometimes) exhibit "conscious thought or planning beforehand" in the things they create, how can that happen without ID already existing? Can that "skill" be obtained or exhibited from random events? Do random events evenutually lead to "conscious thought or planning beforehand"? I doubt it.

First of all I haven't been in uinversity for quite a few years so don't hurt my brain with words like anthropomorphizing.

Anyway I don't think I am personifying nature in a bias way.

People perceive storms as intense.
People perceive beauty in nature
People feel calm when they watch a sunset
People perceive the ocean is powerful

IMO these are universally held axioms.
It was not my intention to personify nature more than the average person would/does.

I am not saying, "wow its raining that means God is crying".

EDIT: So much straw manning going on ITT I can actually feel my allergies acting up

I don't like cigars anyway. Anyway, as far as I am aware, the biggest idea to come out of ID is irreducible complexity. The idea here is that natural selection is insufficient to explain how objects that are irreducibly complex arose in nature. Thus, they reject natural selection as the explanation for the evolution of these kinds of objects. Generally, they then claim that irreducible complexity is present in cases of macroevolution and so natural selection can only explain microevolutionary changes. So yeah, I think it is fair to say that they don't accept natural selection--with the addendum that they think it can explain some intra-species variation.

Now, here you are going a further step and claiming that they accept an alternative explanation--that God (or some intelligence) is influencing the mutation process in a non-random manner so that these kinds of organisms evolve. Maybe so. I haven't seen them make this claim myself. However, it would be just as compatible with their view that God is manipulating the selection process rather than the mutation process.

i agree. 'or' doesn't have to mean 'defined as', it can also mean something like 'different than, and as an alternative'.

and i agree that both are different than Intelligent Design.

But that doesn't stop many from using them interchangeably, which is why I recommended that contextual clues be used to determine what the speaker is actually referring to rather than just the phrase itself.

The error seems to run deeper than that. The sentence that you used following the one I quoted was

People from BOTH groups could be talking about the Bible (at least implicitly). I also think that those who use them interchangeably are actually quite rare, and Original Position's point speaks to this as well.

Please point me to these many "Darwinists" who claim that all evolutionary change is the result of natural selection upon 100% random mutations. Since it would only require "moderate research" for me to find this, I assume you already have some in mind. Just to make this clear, I am looking for Darwinists that reject genetic drift, that don't accept gene flow, etc.

Okay.

What about for those many scientists who are either agnostic or theists, but yet still accept the above. What is their motivation?

What are you pointing out here? Seems more like you are asking a question. The answer is this: by using their brain.

Yes.

Yes.

Okay.

One problem here is that there are lots of different flavors of evolution and lots of different flavors of ID.

Natural selection does not explain anything, other than why some mutations survive and others disappear. It doesn't explain how the mutation occurred in the first place, prior to selection of which mutations survive.

I completely disagree that most people who believe in ID completely reject natural selection. Natural Selection is obvious in at least some instances. Those changes that are beneficial to a species surviving and being able to multiply will stay around, while other changes may make it harder for a species to survive and they will die off. Clearly that happens at least sometimes, regardless of one's beliefs on this whole subject.

But even though there are mutations (and some mutations may be at least quasi-random) that cannot explain why life evolved from micro-organisms to much more complex human beings. Cockroaches can survive much easier than humans, so that does not explain why evolution did not just stop there. There must be some other forces of change in evolution beside random mutations.

It appears to me that life exhibits some sort of evolutionary genetic road map (not caused by random genetic mutations) so that it becomes more complex over time (and not just going in random directions). In the same way an acorn has all the genetic information to enable it to grow into a more complex oak tree, life itself at the macro level seems to have some evolutionary change road map that goes from simple to complex over time, which includes the evolution of humans who (sometimes) can clearly exhibit intelligence of their own.

As to who created that road map, that remains to be seen, but it looks like it has at least some Intelligent Design built into it.

The same way the purposeful outcome of “the house wins” comes from all the random activity in the casino games: the games are designed to lead to a desired outcome just because of the randomness. To me, designing a system that leads to a desired outcome requires a higher degree of intelligence than slipping in a pair of mutated dice from time to time.

One of the more interesting books I ever read that dealt with complexity and randomness was Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. One has to attach a bunch of caveats to recommending it, since Wolfram comes off in it as a massively self-aggrandizing egotist, but the actual cellular automata he studies are fascinating. The automata rules are not random and so this doesn't directly relate to your statement (although see OrP's corrections about how absolutely random natural selection is taken to be) but I would suggest that the unintuitiveness of complexity-as-a-result-of-simple-or-random-processes is something that you shouldn't take to be dispositive.

Okay?

I acknowledged that they grant that natural selection can have some intra-species effect. What I said was that they usually deny that it can have much inter-species effect. The issue, to me, is whether natural selection can explain speciation.

This misunderstands the nature of natural selection. Changes arise in response to changes in the environment or due to genetic drift. However, obviously different organisms face different environmental pressures (e.g. compare a squid with a butterfly). Thus, the success or failure of one species is only relevant to another if those species are in competition for the same resources. By and large, cockroaches and humans and their ancestors were not competing for the same resources. Thus, the reproductive success of cockroaches didn't crowd out the development of more complicated organisms.

Mostly it just seems to me that you can't wrap your mind around the idea that the variety of life might have not been the result of some prior plan. Ultimately I think that is based more in your philosophical or theological rather than scientific commitments as there isn't really a problem here from a scientific point of view.

I would submit that genetic drift and gene flow (as defined by most scientiss) are random, since they can exist without the existence of some prior intelligence in the universe.
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosit...1aRandom.shtml

I think they believe in evolution, but don't want to be publicly associated with ID because that would be academic or professional suicide (sort of like being a Republican on a University faculty). If one believes that some evolutionary changes are not random, and there is to some degree intelligence in evolution that moves from simple to complex (as opposed to moving randomly or backward), then they effectively believe in ID even if they don't want to admit it.

Yes, but did the brain become cable of intelligence due to randomness in nature? Can intelligence be caused by something that is not intelligent? I doubt it. Seems statistically unlikely, sort of like being dealt pocket aces 20 hands in a row. I think intelligence had to already exist in the universe before it could be instantiated in advanced life forms or humans. Sort of like 2+2=4 existed before humans evolved from lower level life forms, or even before life itself existed.

Concur

No, I am not saying there is prior set plan. I am saying that evolution of life clearly seems to have a force in it that goes from simple to more complex, beyond random mutations or genetic drift. An acorn has genetic material that allows it to become a tree, even though environmental factors will affect the exact nature of what the tree will look like when it grows (water, nutrients, wind, forest fires, other trees nearby, etc). It also appears logical to me that intelligence must have existed in the universe before being being instantiated in higher level life forms such as humans. Randomness cannot create intelligence. Neither rocks nor amoebas can do arithmetic, but clearly 2+2=4 existed before humans were around to do the math.

There is no problem from a scientific point of view of evolution because science does not have to explain how something which never existed before (intelligence) can come into existence (in humans or other higher level animals). Science only has to explain what appears to exist and not why it exists. So ID is not necessary for a "scientific" explanation of evolution, but a purely scientific explanation seems very shallow to me, and leaves a lot of important questions unanswered.

I'm assuming you mean counter-intuitive. In which case I think you'll find that many discoveries we make tend to be counter-intuitive, all the way back to the idea that the earth is a sphere.

Okay? I was just pointing out that your statement was false. Most neo-Darwinists accept genetic drift as one of the mechanisms for change, thus they don't think that all evolutionary change is the result of natural selection. As for whether they are random--I'm not willing to agree with you here because I suspect you have a different understanding of "random" from the one I use.

Lol. If you think this is true you don't understand science at all. If real scientists thought that ID was correct and wrote evidence-based articles in support, they would quickly become some of the most famous scientists in the U.S. They would be able to write bestsellers, go on TV, make hundreds of thousands on the lecture circuit, get plum positions at Christian universities and think-tanks and so on.

Furthermore, any scientist that presents evidence showing major problems in the theory of natural selection would become hugely important within the field of science itself. Their articles would quickly become one of the most cited in the field, they would be regarded as a major thinker, etc., etc.

Finally, it is not just a matter of them keeping quiet. Some of the most prominent foes of ID are Christians--people like Ken Miller, who testified against ID at the Dover trial, or Francis Collins, who started an organization to show Christians how evolution by natural selection and theism is compatible.

Yes.

Yes.

Okay.
Okay...

We're still just at the stage of you expressing incredulity at the idea.