The Nature of Design (Evolution)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Friday, September 11, 2009, 22:43 (5361 days ago) @ dhw

dhw takes up my aphoristic comment that "life is far too complex to have been designed. It could only have evolved."-To be more explicit, what I mean by this is that something that is Designed by a Designer such as the artifacts found in The Design Centre in London or the machines found in the Science Museum or the Watch found on the Heath by Dr Paley, have an elegance and clarity and logicality and inevitability and, dare I say, simplicity, about them that are the characteristic that enable us to conclude that they were Designed by a Designer.-On the other hand the structures and systems found in Nature are messy, untidy, illogical, inelegant, tangled, in short complex, and indeed often unnecessarily complicated (e.g. the long routes taken by human nerves and ducts). These are the characteristics to be expected of something that has been produced as the result of chance and chaotic processes, i.e. has Evolved.-dhw writes: "The theist evolutionist argument is that the whole process was set in motion by a designer (and perhaps on occasions the designer may have intervened)."-Such a "designer" is not really a Designer at all, merely a lighter of the touch-paper, or setter off of avalanches. -dhw cites Darwin writing to Asa Gray (1860): "I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance." -This is Deism not Theism.-dhw claims: "... the progress of science has not taken us any further in the quest for the ultimate truth about life's origins."-As usual dhw is ignoring all that we have learnt about the development (I would say evolution) of the universe preceding the appearance of life. In particular the (natural) creation in the earliest generation of stars of the elements necessary for the (natural) creation of life. He is also ignoring all that we have learnt about the chemical structure of living creatures. All this is part of the "ultimate truth". -dhw writes: "It is a distortion of Darwinism ... to associate it and him with atheism. He denied ever having been an atheist, and generally referred to himself as an agnostic." -I agree that the evidence shows that Darwin towards the end of his life was an agnostic. Though the term was only coined in 1867 by T. H. Huxley. But this doesn't mean that modern followers of Darwin's ideas in their modern context have to be agnostics too.

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GPJ