ID explained (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, January 28, 2021, 15:04 (1393 days ago) @ dhw

First part transferred from the misleadingly named thread on “human evolution: we are entirely improbable”

DAVID: Reproduced here: "only a living, conscious mind can design life and consciousness, and therefore our life and consciousness were designed by a living, conscious mind which was not designed by anything at all. Logical?" Of course logical. Design requires a designer and without a first cause there is nothing. Logical?

“Design requires a designer” is logical, and “without a first cause there is nothing” is logical, but if life and consciousness require a designer and your God is alive and conscious, then he must have been designed. And so you solve the mystery of life and consciousness by telling us that they had to be designed but they didn’t have to be designed.

You have left out the obvious: a first cause must be eternal and we may be the last and current iteration of His/Hers efforts.

ID explained

QUOTES: Yet Darwin argued that this appearance of design could be more simply explained as the product of a purely undirected mechanism, namely, natural selection and random variation. Modern neo-Darwinists have similarly asserted that the undirected process of natural selection and random mutation produced the intricate designed-like structures in living systems.

dhw: There is nothing in this article that we have not discussed over and over again. There are two chapters of life involved in such discussions: 1 is the origin of life itself. 2 is the origin of species, i.e. evolution. In Origin of Species, Darwin explicitly says he is not dealing with the origin of life, and in later editions he actually attributes it to “the Creator” and says that his theory “should not shock the religious feelings of anyone”. You and I have from the very start dismissed his theory of random mutations as the mechanism of evolutionary innovation.

“There is simply too much information in the cell to be explained by chance alone.”

d hw: Agreed donkey’s years ago.

QUOTE: “the theory of intelligent design is not based upon ignorance or “gaps” in our knowledge, but on scientific discoveries about DNA and on established scientific methods of reasoning in which our uniform experience of cause and effect guides our inferences about the kinds of causes that produce (or best explain) different types of events or sequences.”

dhw: No attempt to distinguish between Chapters 1 and 2 of life. So let me fill in the gaps: nobody knows the origin of life – i,e, of the complex cells which have evolved into every life form in history. No one will deny that common descent requires the restructuring of cell communities. If we reject random mutations as the driving force behind this restructuring, we are left with a stark choice: either every life form was designed by a designer (or a team of designers), or every life form was designed by the cell communities of which it is made, i.e. by cellular intelligence. The article makes absolutely no mention of this theory – it is stuck with chance in the form of Darwin’s random mutations, which we have agreed to reject. It’s called flogging a dead horse.

Cellular intelligence means the cells have knowledge and can plan by thinking. You never answer how they developed those abilities or where their knowledge came from. It is then a nebulous conjecture. Remember 50/50: either so-called intelligent cells simply follow intelligent instructions or they have arranged their own intelligent processes. The immerging understanding of the extreme complexity of a single operating cell demands a well-planned deesign by a designer.

dhw: Of course we can only have life as we know it if conditions are right for life as we know it! But how can anyone possibly know what other conditions might be conducive to other forms of life? How can anyone possibly know the extent or the history of our universe, since even the big bang (if it happened) may have been one episode in its history? We are talking here about infinity and eternity. The article never makes one single attempt to explain the origin or whereabouts of the designer. ID-ers dare not do so, because they know that this will raise just as many questions as the problem of the origin of life and species. You do not solve a mystery by creating another mystery!

There must be something or someone who is eternal. Something from nothing is impossible.

dhw: In brief: yes to intelligent design in Chapter 2 of life. Unsolved mysteries: the origin of life itself, and what is the designing mechanism that has enabled living organisms to diversify into all the life forms that exist and have existed? The article makes no attempt to solve either of these mysteries.

ID never dares to name God. They simply logically show design requires a designer. And you are trapped by it, and logically can't be an atheist. Your Devine foot is on exhibit, in the door..