E. Coli vs. Linux (Humans)

by dhw, Monday, May 24, 2010, 13:00 (5105 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.-DHW: 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.-MATT: I don't think this is possible. The word "design" connotes if not denotes a teleology.-You are right, but if I've understood you correctly (always a big "if"!), you're trying to use the economics analogy as an argument against design, working back from the principle that no purpose means no design. I'm trying to work forwards from design to absence of purpose, as I'll try to explain. Just for the moment I'd like to abandon the economics analogy, because it's causing more confusion than clarification, and go back to the object of the analogy. -David's argument is that the mechanism of life and evolution is so complex that he believes it was designed. However, neither you nor I see life and evolution as having a goal (your post of 11 May at 23.16). My argument is that there is no discrepancy between these two theories, because they look at life from two different angles. Let's say, for argument's sake, that God designed life for his own entertainment. God's entertainment would then be the beginning and end of the teleological aspect. The avoidance of boredom, however, necessitates a completely random development of life, borne out by what you and I see as the higgledy-piggledy comings and goings of species, and the unpredictable course of the world's history. In other words, life itself is not directed. This leaves us with something deliberately designed (the mechanism) to develop without design (the history). The claim, then, that life and evolution from our perspective are undirected, are heading nowhere in particular, and have no goal has no connection with the claim that God designed the original mechanism. That's why I tried (rather unsuccessfully) to draw a distinction between teleology and design.-The other aspect of your economics analogy was that complexity need not point to design, but you have broadened this out to a far more abstract use of the word "economic", whereas originally you were using it to denote man-made economics. The latter of course cannot function without intelligence, which was why I argued that it supported rather than undermined the case for design. The more general, abstract sense in my view simply leads straight back to David's argument: the economic interactions of molecules which over time produce complex ecological (not to mention biological) systems are the result of original mechanisms so complex that it is difficult to believe they are not the result of design. And so round we go again. As you indicate elsewhere in your reference to your eagerly awaited epistemology thread, it boils down to our subjective levels of credulity. And I can assure you I don't regard that argument as "logically obtuse"!