Asking of the Designer what we would of any other designer (The atheist delusion)

by whateverist , Thursday, July 28, 2011, 13:52 (4867 days ago)

"something cannot have been designed if we cannot explain the existence of the designer"-It seems to me that when we come across examples of design it is very compelling to seek to explain the capacity for that design. A beaver dam, a honeycomb, a weaver's nest .. are a few of the designs we come across in nature. We know who constructs them but that is hardly the end of it. It isn't enough to say "well the honeycomb is designed by bees". We very naturally want to know how they evolved that capacity. The same is true for our own many and varied designs: where'd that capacity come from? -So to ask the same of a hypothetical cosmological designer seems to be a fair enough question. When you think about our capacity for design, it is obvious that we are progressing. From shaped rock, wood and bone to metals, rockets and silicon chips is quite an improvement. Given what we know about ourselves as designers, it seems fair to ask of a cosmological designer how he/she/it acquired the capacity to design us. What stretches the imagination is to imagine a designer with no beginning, no apprenticeship, no history of any kind.-Yet that is where we end up if we are skeptical about the powers of chance. Of course chance only enters into it once DNA, the machinery of evolution, is in place. From there adaptive/reproductive advantage of the rare chance mutation over eons of time makes perfect sense. But where'd that DNA come from?-Perhaps the formation of the pre-organic molecules from which DNA is formed is as inevitable as the formation of rust and crystals. Given the nature of the material itself and its interactions with its surroundings under the necessary conditions, crystals and rust are inevitable. The same may be true of pre-organic molecules. If the nature of the materials under the necessary conditions were sufficient to bring about the formation of DNA, then I think chance by way of evolution can account for the variety and complexity we see.