ID explained (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, January 29, 2021, 10:35 (1182 days ago) @ David Turell

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?
dhw: “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.

DAVID: 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.

Of course a first cause must be eternal, but that does not make a conscious first cause any more logical than an unconscious first cause. Your speculation that humans may be the purpose and last product of evolution has nothing to do with the illogicality of your belief that life and consciousness must be designed but were not designed.

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.

DAVID: Cellular intelligence means the cells have knowledge and can plan by thinking.

It certainly means they have knowledge, but it does not mean they plan in the sense of foreseeing the future. My proposal is that cells RESPOND to requirements.

DAVID: You never answer how they developed those abilities or where their knowledge came from. It is then a nebulous conjecture.

I merely repeat ad nauseam that we do not know the origin, and that your God – so nebulous a conjecture that your ID-ers dare not even mention him - is one possible explanation, and others are chance and some sort of panpsychism. Why do you keep pretending you’ve never heard this before?

DAVID: Remember 50/50: either so-called intelligent cells simply follow intelligent instructions or they have arranged their own intelligent processes.

Precisely. That is what I have said in the bold above. If it’s 50/50, even you have no reason to reject it.

DAVID: The immerging understanding of the extreme complexity of a single operating cell demands a well-planned design by a designer.

Back you go to the origin! Our disagreement is over Chapter 2 of life, with your claim that your God’s sole purpose was to design H. sapiens, but he directly designed every life form that ever existed, 99% of which had no connection with humans.

dhw [on “fine tuning”]: 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! [...]

DAVID: ID never dares to name God.

I have just said so, and I have said why.

DAVID: 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..

Why are you telling me what I keep telling you? I accept the logic behind the design argument, so I’m not an atheist. I accept that there is no logic behind the argument that life and consciousness have to be designed, but the life and consciousness of a designer do not have to be designed, so I’m not a theist. I have one foot inside and one foot outside the door, or I remain sitting on the fence. This is called agnosticism.