The Illusion of Design
| September 18, 2005 | Posted by William Dembski under Darwinism, Evolution |
The September 17th issue of the New Scientist features ten articles on “The World’s Ten Biggest Ideas.” These include the “Big Bang,” “Science,” and “Evolution.” Who did the article on evolution. You guessed it:
The path to complex life is one of the greatest human insights in history, says Richard Dawkins
The world is divided into things that look designed (like birds and airliners) and things that don’t (rocks and mountains). Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed (submarines and tin openers) and those that aren’t (sharks and hedgehogs). The diagnostic of things that look (or are) designed is that their parts are assembled in ways that are statistically improbable in a functional direction. They do something well: for instance, fly.
Darwinian natural selection can produce an uncanny illusion of design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant.
So powerful is the illusion of design, it took humanity until the mid-19th century to realise that it is an illusion. In 1859, Charles Darwin announced one of the greatest ideas ever to occur to a human mind: cumulative evolution by natural selection. Living complexity is …
41 Responses to The Illusion of Design
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Arnhart,
I don’t agree that we recognize design because of of experience in observing human design. I think we can recognize intelligent design.
Do you really believe that if aliens existed, you wouldn’t be able to determine if one of their tools was created by them or if it came about by natural processes?
Arnhart, the design need not be divine. We don’t know that.
We need not know if the designer is human, divine, or alien.
SETI is spending many man-hours in the search for alien intelligence, confident that they will be able to infer design with no prior knowledge of what form that alien has, or what might be its motivations.
taciturnus,
Yes.
Charlie,
Are SETI researchers looking for divine intelligence–i.e., disembodied, omniscient, omnipotent intelligence–which would be required for creating the universe and all irreducibly complex forms of life?
“required for creating the universe and all irreducibly complex forms of life”
Whoa, there – I’m with you on the universe, but why does it a take a “disembodied, omniscient, omnipotent intelligence” to create a irreducibly complex form of life? We humans create irreducibly complex things all the time.
Hume’s objection to Divine causality has no force outside his extreme empiricism and denial of the intellect as a distinct power of the mind. If you follow him consistently, and Hume was not always consistent, then you must also deny causality in general, substance, both material and spiritual, space, time etc. Science would be rendered impossible and we would end in scepticism as he did. But we do possess an intellect capable of abstracting from experience and so we can understand those elements of design that belong to that concept and apply them to situations beyond our experience.
Arnhart says
This is an admission that the probability may be zero. In the case of zero probability, design is the only option.
Be careful what you admit for if you admit this then the only logical thing to teach is that biological evolution could be design or could be accident or some combination thereof. It can never be known for sure.
LOL!
The best that arguments for unguided evolution can ever achieve is a stalemate. The worst case is that design will be proven. In my more magnanimous moments I offer a draw, but not very often, as the quality of mercy is not strained.
Arnhart:
Can you prove humans with advanced technologies did not exist billions of years ago?
Or is the best you can do an argument from ignorance (nobody has seen a trace of ancient humans ergo none existed)?
HAHAAHAHAHAAHA!!!!!
Care to accept a draw?
Actually we don’t know enough about the nature of the universe to guage what kind of technology is required to create one. For gawd’s sake we don’t know the nature of 95% of the “stuff” that makes up the universe. The vast unknown is termed “dark matter” and “dark energy”. The whole observed universe may be just a juvenile science project for a sufficiently advanced techology utilized by an intelligence that exists in the 95% of the universe we don’t have a clue about.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” -Arthur C. Clarke
You may substitute “divine” for “magic” without changing the meaning.
Arnhart:
Einstein expressed the desire to know the “mind of God.” Implicit in such a statement is the notion that “human” intelligence is on a continuum, at the very least, with “Divine” intelligence. Einstein wanted to know how God “designed” the universe. Hence, the radical empiricism of Hume apart, it is not self-evident to assume that the intelligence that “created” the world would use “design” methods that fall completely outside anything the human mind could grasp. Rather, if a bacterial flagellum looks like a motor attached to a long rotor, it would appear that human intelligence indeed CAN grasp the “mind of God.” Your argument begins to look a bit like a “straw man” argument.