Arguments against Design (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, July 29, 2009, 13:13 (5408 days ago)

George has declined my invitation to start a new thread on the subject of objections to design. Fair enough, but I would still like to take it out of the evolution thread, which has become far too overcrowded. I would also like to reproduce some of your own objections, George, as you have put the case very succinctly. - First, however, in your latest post, you have queried my phrase "the mechanism which gave rise to evolution". You wrote: It could mean "the way in which molecules first came together to produce self-replication in a molecular system" or it could refer to "the processes of variation and natural selection". - This is central to the argument about design, which is why I'd like to clarify the phrase. The mechanism does not refer to the process, but to the means which enabled the process to take place. Self-replicating molecules would not have been able to undergo subsequent variation (by mutation, combination or environmental influence) if there had not been some mechanism in place that allowed for reproducible change. The design argument therefore refers (a) to self-replication, and (b) to the potential for variation. It has also been argued by proponents of design that some of the developments in the course of evolution itself are too complex to have come about without the input of a designing intelligence. - In spite of my abject failure to bring order to the evolution thread with a summary, I will now try to summarize the objections to design, plus the complications involved in such a concept: - 1) It is not necessary to postulate a designer. Chance and the natural laws provide an adequate explanation.
2) The postulation of a designer merely replaces one mystery with another. George: "We need to know how the gods themselves evolved and acquired their powers to intervene in nature."
3) George: "Since a conscious designer would be a life-form, such a hypothesis entirely undermines the theory by assuming that life already existed before life evolved."
4) The free-for-all of life on Earth shows no sign of the presence of any kind of designer. 
5) What form could such a designer take? We only know of the material, natural world. Any immaterial, supernatural being is pure imagination. - Feel free to add more objections, to comment on these objections, to disagree with these objections, but please remember that they are an attempt to provide a neutral summary and I am not putting forward arguments of my own. Yet.