E. Coli vs. Linux (Humans)

by dhw, Tuesday, May 18, 2010, 08:18 (5302 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT: What I'm attempting here...is to cast doubt on the idea that life *had* to have been designed. Our economy wasn't designed: in fact, direct design tends to destroy it. (This goes for both governments, uncouth businessmen, and cartels.) Generally: a nation prospers the more it allows individual actors free rein to use its resources.-I think any disagreement here is due to a different view of what constitutes design. Perhaps we need to distinguish more clearly between design and teleology.-You want me to "abandon the notion of human interference and simply go back to when governments didn't exist and it was just people trading things. There was no "invention" of the economy. It is a word that is simply applied to describe what it is that people do to get what they need." But people doing something = human interference. Every single transaction is the result of a conscious decision. When a human first offered to give another human a chunk of meat in exchange for a fur coat, he did so with full knowledge of what he was doing. What follows is a process of evolution, leading eventually to the complexities of whole economic systems ... but every single stage of that evolution has been the result of conscious decisions, although the overall systems were not planned. Each decision, then, is a design, but beyond each individual goal there is no teleology leading to a system. That's why I said your analogy would only hold up if you believed that individual cells also took conscious decisions to make a leg, eye, backbone, penis, brain etc. My personal interpretation of evolution is the same as yours: no teleology ... which means that life was not "designed" in the sense of it being orientated towards a particular system or goal. But the first transaction was designed by its participants (i.e. it happened because two men deliberately chose to perform an action), and all subsequent transactions have been the result of intelligent "interference", so I would argue that while there is no "direct" design of the overall economy/evolution, your analogy strengthens the case for "direct" design of the original mechanisms that gave rise to them. 
 
Perhaps BBella's post makes the distinction clearer. She agrees with your argument that direct design tends to destroy society, and so do I. Given the choice between totalitarianism and democracy, I'll go for democracy every time! I also agree that "in a sense this is a good argument against design", but in what sense? If we are the product of a deity's inventiveness (= design), he may well have given us free rein to follow our own paths (= non-design). He may have created the mechanisms for evolution in general (= design), and then sat back to watch what they came up with (= non-design). "Design" depends on your starting-point. David's argument has always been that the complexity of the mechanisms that have given rise to life and evolution is so great that he can't believe they came about by accident. Nor can I. David goes a lot further than that, because he actively believes in a designer, whereas I am stuck with my negative non-belief. However, the argument ... with which I agree ... that the course of life (and of economics) is not designed has nothing to do with the argument that the original, astoundingly complex mechanisms that gave rise to it all are the product of some kind of intelligence. In other words, let me repeat, your analogy in my view works on the level of teleology, but not on that of design.