philosophy of science: defining design by part placement (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, June 16, 2021, 23:03 (1045 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Michael Behe returns:

https://evolutionnews.org/2021/06/recognizing-design-by-a-purposeful-arrangement-of-parts/

"...a mind can arrange parts to achieve its purposes. Of course, we ourselves have minds. And it is a fundamental power of mind that it can discern purposes. Thus we can recognize that a mind has acted by perceiving a purposeful arrangement of parts. There is no other way that I can think of by which we can recognize another mind.

"For purposes of detecting other minds, “parts” can be virtually anything. Examples include: the purposeful arrangement of sounds in speech; words and letters in writing; mechanical parts in machinery; the timing of events in a surprise party; combinations of all those things; and an infinite number of other ways. There are many other things to say to fill this out that I can’t go into here (especially the issue of “spandrels,” that is, features that are unintended for themselves but are the side effects of constructing designed systems). Nonetheless, the overriding point is that we can only recognize design/mind in the purposeful arrangement of parts.

"Other phrases that people use to indicate intelligent design all boil down to purposeful arrangements of parts. For example, Stephen Meyer likes to point out that we know intelligent agents produce information, so when we come across coded information in a computer program we can conclude it was produced by an intelligent agent. True enough. Yet how do we know there is information in a string of zeroes and ones — in a computer program? Only if we find that they are arranged for a purpose; that is, if the computer program has a function, if it can do something purposeful. In the same way, irreducibly complex systems resist Darwinian explanation, but how do we know they are designed? Because we see they can do something, that they have a purpose, they are a purposeful arrangement of parts. (As an aside, IC systems have two relevant properties — their discontinuous nature resists Darwinism and their manifest purposiveness strongly points to design.)

"Finally, in the case of the eye, rather than “specified complexity,” I think it is much, much easier to parse design for a lay audience (or a professional one) as a purposeful arrangement of parts. Audiences will immediately recognize the purpose in the arrangement of the eye’s components. In my view, the phrase specified complexity only obscures the same meaning as found in purposeful arrangement. The “specified” in the phrase specified complexity is pretty much the same as “purposeful,” and “complexity” the same as “arrangement.” Yet the phrase “purposeful arrangement” is at once less mathy, less forbidding, more accessible, and clearer."

Comment: As Dawkins said, it sure looks designed.