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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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ORIGINAL: ianz

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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But you know a particle accelerator exists and is man-made, so you have a head start.

What about something not man-made?

I don't know how to build a beaver dam, but I think it exhibits a level of intelligence.

Or better still, if I was an astronaut, and I came across a an obelisk on the moon buried hundreds of feet below the surface that had images on it's side depicting a being travelling from a nearby star sytem, I would recognize it as designed even if I knew nothing about interstellar travel.

What about a toasted sandwich with what appears to be the image of Mary on it?

Regards, Ian

Well, that is why ascertaining purpose is important to detecting design.

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Purpose? I don't follow?

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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Purpose? I don't follow?

Purpose, as in the function it carries out, what it does. A structure or system should have an identifiable purpose before one can ascribe to it the means of detecting design.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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Purpose? I don't follow?

Purpose, as in the function it carries out, what it does. A structure or system should have an identifiable purpose before one can ascribe to it the means of detecting design.

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How do we know that the toastie doesn't have a purpose? Many people do think it has a purpose, to convey a message from God. Perhaps it is. How are we to judge that something has no purpose?

The toasted sandwich is similar to your own example of the obelisk with markings - something is found which appears to bear an image which it seems likely could only have been formed by an intelligent being. What is the difference?

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How do we know that the toastie doesn't have a purpose? Many people do think it has a purpose, to convey a message from God. Perhaps it is. How are we to judge that something has no purpose?

The toasted sandwich is similar to your own example of the obelisk with markings - something is found which appears to bear an image which it seems likely could only have been formed by an intelligent being. What is the difference?

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Not everything designed have a function.
Some products of design have a purpose relative to a cultural understanding.

The Mona Lisa, Stone Henge, Pyramids in Egypt, monuments on Easter Island...
Things that one calls art another might call a collection of randomly placed rocks.

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My problem with "design" is that it defines everything as proof. Any organism or process that functions falls under the definition by default. IOW the absence of total chaos in the universe is taken as evidence of design.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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How do we know that the toastie doesn't have a purpose? Many people do think it has a purpose, to convey a message from God. Perhaps it is. How are we to judge that something has no purpose?

The toasted sandwich is similar to your own example of the obelisk with markings - something is found which appears to bear an image which it seems likely could only have been formed by an intelligent being. What is the difference?

Well, I think the problem with your comparison is that one would have to know who Mary is to think it looked like Mary. And not only that, but one would probably have to have a very iconic image in mind, one drawn from popular culture, in order to see that image there -so it seems fairly evident that the purpose would be ascribed, rather than inherent.

This would be quite different than the symbols in question. I don't have to be able to read Egyptian hieroglyphs to see them as a form of communication. Indeed, for centuries no one could - but even then their inherent design was evident.

The same might be said of something like Mount Rushmore; you wouldn't have to know who the presidents were in order to recognize how the faces are differentiated from the surrounding rock.

This is quite different than New Hampshire's 'Old man of the mountain' which is only evident from a certain angle based on the certain lighting by an imaginative viewer.

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That may be but you are still focussing on things which are within our capabilities. What you're basically saying is ID is capable of detecting intelligent activity but only where the activity is something we can comprehend doing ourselves or have witnessed. This seems a significant limitation.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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That may be but you are still focussing on things which are within our capabilities. What you're basically saying is ID is capable of detecting intelligent activity but only where the activity is something we can comprehend doing ourselves or have witnessed. This seems a significant limitation.

Well, we don't need to be able to do something to understand that it has a function; I mean we have yet to design a lung, but we what the inherent function of a lung is.

Basically we need to know these things:

Does the object or system in question do something? This something might be to accomplish a particular task, as machines do, or it might be conforming to a certain pattern, like a string of letters, or numbers, or radio pulses.

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Then there's the opposite problem.
Things that appear to be designed at first glance but upon further review prove to not be designed at all.

The Face On Mars
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast24may_1.htm

The Face On Mars story is the real-life equivalent to a particular line of reasoning used by ID proponents, but in the ID line of reasoning, they are stuck in 1976 with only one photo.

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But how can you assume the current function was always the function of the pieces that now work together? This is why IC/SC fails and most consider IC an argument from incredulity.

It was shown that individual components of the flagellum, and the immune system most likely served other purposes before they evolved into those systems we see today. Both of these examples triggered Dembski's explanatory filter, showing that it is unreliable. Perhaps there is some way to determine design without any other outside information, I'm not sure what that would be... but Dempski certainly hasn't found it.

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First off, I think we have to question the word 'shown'. No such thing was shown, it was however proposed to be the case.

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Jhud, this really isn’t a difficult point. I can’t understand why you’re continuing to miss it.

Your assertion is that we have to propose an unknown and unobserved process for the origin of flight in bats, because evolution would have been incapable of producing it. In order to support this point, you will have to show more than just that there’s no proof that a position other than yours is correct, because if evolution and intelligent design are both equally possible as explanations, Occam’s Razor favors the first one. Your argument depends on there being no possible way natural selection could have favored these mutations; the burden of proof is definitely not on me for this.

Do you really not understand this point? That when you propose the existence of an unobserved process whose support depends on something being impossible, it is your own burden of proof to show that this is the case?

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Jhud, I know you’re debating with a few people at once here, but I would like you to at least attempt to address the point I’m making about how your own point with me relies on the evolution of bats’ wings being impossible, and why in order to support this argument you’ll need to show that natural selection definitely wouldn’t have favored any of the mutations responsible for their structure. Do you understand what I’ve said in post #185 and #215 about why when your argument relies one something being impossible, the burden of proof is on you to show that it is?

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Did I say it was impossible? I mean I may have somewhere, but I don't think I did.

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What you said, in reference to the mutations that would have been responsible for flight in bats, is “every independent change poses a number of potential problems for the survivability of the organism to which they are occurring”. If this is really true, then for all practical purposes the origin of flight in bats via evolution alone is impossible, and you’re right that we’d have to come up with another explanation for their origin, even if that involves some sort of unknown and unobserved process. In order to support this assertion, though, you will need to show that every independent change really does pose a problem to the organism that has it. The burden of proof is definitely on you for this.

I pointed this out twice before in this thread. The first time you didn’t appear to understand my point, and responded that even though your argument relies on knowing for certain that these mutations couldn’t have provided any advantage, the burden of proof was on me to show that they did. When I explained why the burden of proof definitely is not on me for this, you didn’t respond at all. This is the point I made in post #215, and I’d appreciate you not ignoring it.

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Well, for the record, I don't consider it impossible; simple so improbable as to be not worth taking seriously.

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All right, but my point about this is the same either way. You’ve already explained why you think it’s so astronomically improbable: you say that since natural selection could not have favored any of these individual mutations, the only way flight in bats (or any similar function in another animal) could have evolved is if all of the mutations responsible for it came together as a result of random chance. I know I’m simplifying your argument, but what’s important here is that it depends on the premise that these individual changes definitely could not have been useful. In order to support this point, the burden of proof is still on you to show that they couldn’t have been; I explained the reason for this in post #215.

Are you able to support your argument about this?

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As you might remember, I had previously proposed several functions these mutations could have served, such as gliding. I obviously can’t prove that’s the function they had, but as I explained there, in this case the burden of proof is not on me to show that they did because your own argument relies on knowing for certain that they couldn’t have. But since you didn’t reply to this, I asked you again:

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Now, what you’re doing in this thread is basically restating everything you said that I’ve already answered, plus a few ad hominem attacks and things Gluadys refuted in the “Failure of Natural selection” thread. The most interesting example of this is that you’ve resumed claiming that the burden of proof is on me to show what function these mutations would have provided—while still making no attempt to address what I’ve said about why the burden of proof cannot be shifted onto me in this way.

In other words, option three. And by pointing out how our discussion went in the other thread about this—the ways in which it was different from what you’re claiming now, and how while you have replied to my posts, you have consistently made no attempt to address my points in them, or support your own in the way that I’m requesting—I am able to make this fairly obvious to anyone else who reads this thread.

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One of the points in your “designing a bat” thread was that people have identified some of the specific mutations responsible for bats’ anatomy, and that they’re actually harmful if they occur on their own. As you put it, “every independent change poses a number of potential problems for the survivability of the organism to which they are occurring”. Two such mutations that you mentioned are one that causes the bat’s fingers to become longer, and one which causes it to have a membrane of skin between its fingers, both of which are insufficient for powered flight. In response, I mentioned that longer fingers could have been useful for climbing, and a membrane of skin between its fingers could have been useful for gliding in the same way it’s useful to a flying squirrel. I also linked you to the description of this fossil, an early bat whose morphology shows that it depended on gliding in a way that modern bats don’t. We don’t have “no indication” that flying and gliding were ever used by the same mammal; I’ve posted this indication before, and you’ve simply forgotten it.

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Here you are again, implicitly saying the burden of proof is on me. You say that one transitional fossil isn’t enough, that I need to find an example of this particular species when it first appeared rather than the apparently late-surviving specimen that’s preserved, that I need to provide an explanation of the function of every mutation which would have led to flight in modern bats, and that I apparently need to find fossils showing the precise function of every mutation, and how it would have been useful, because “speculation” isn’t enough. Or alternatively, we can insert these mutations one at a time in lab mice, and pretend that this will tell us what would have been useful or harmful to an animal that lived 50 million years ago in an environment that’s only known from fossils.

And so your own argument about this is because we can’t always determine a specific benefit from these mutations in lab mice, and I’m unable to meet your impossible burden of proof to show what exact benefit every one of these mutations would have served, we can assume for certain that “every independent change poses a number of potential problems for the survivability of the organism to which they are occurring” and the only option is to propose an entirely new mechanism for the origin of this function. Do you still not get what’s wrong with this argument, even after having it explained to you until the only things you have to say in response are incidental little comments? That in order to show that the evolution of functions like this are as improbable as you say, and that we need to propose an unobserved mechanism for their origin, your own argument depends on knowing for certain that for these mutations would have been harmful, and proving this requires far more than showing a lack of evidence for what specific functions they could have served?

I can’t describe how bizarre I find this. Once again, you’re using an argument that’s already been refuted—about how it’s supposedly possible to tell from lab mice that something couldn’t have possibly been useful to an animal 50 million year ago—and as I pointed out before, in this case you obliquely acknowledged the refutation with your comment about how there’s no way to disprove an imagined function in an animal whose lifestyle we can’t observe. Yet here you are, using the same claim again. Either you’ve forgotten what you said about it before, or you don’t care.