So, Francis and Leslie, who Designed the Designers?
by KrauzeJay Richards has already dealt with the question of who designed the designer, but I thought I'd add some more comments. Most people in this discussion have heard of Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel who proposed that the first lifeforms had been planted by intelligent extraterrestrials. What fewer know is that they also adressed this concern, more than 30 years ago.
As Crick and Orgel point out, "the historical facts are important in their own right." In other words, if it really is the case that intelligence was behind the origin of life, this wouldn't change just because we had to admit ignorance about the origin of that intelligence. As far as I know, this point hasn't been adressed by any ID critics.
Victor J. Stenger, a physicist writing in Free Inquiry magazine, provides an example of how Crick and Orgel's point is ignored. In a critique of atheist-turned-deist Anthony Flew, Stenger writes:
"[Behe and Dembski] assert that a complex system can only arise out of something with high intelligence. Although complexity is difficult to define, we can reasonably expect a highly intelligent entity to be highly complex. Thus, it can only have arisen out of something even more intelligent and complex, in infinite regress. It's Intelligent Designers all the way down, not Aristotle's first cause, as Flew seems to think.
Fortunately, we can avoid an infinite regress. We can just stop at the world. There is no reason why the physical universe cannot be it's own first cause. As we know from both everyday experience and sophisticated scientific observations, complex systems develop from simpler systems all the time in nature - with not even low intelligence required. A mist of water vapor can freeze into a snowflake. Winds can carve out great cathedrals in rock. Brontosaurs can evolve from bacteria."
Stenger expresses no concern about "the historical facts"; he only writes about what can happen. Intelligent extraterrestrial could also have designed life, but we don't regard that as sufficient evidence that they did. Take the example of stone tools that were mistakenly attributed to geological processes that I mentioned the other day. Obviously, the explanation that they were designed by humans who then arose some other way involves more regress than the explanation that the stone tools simply arose by themselves. In fact, explaining the "complexity" of a flint axe is considerably easier than explaining that of a human. The reason why we prefer the explanation involving humans is that this was in fact what happened.
References
Crick F.H.C. & Orgel L.E. , "Directed Panspermia", Icarus 19:341-6 (1973)
May 8th, 2005 at 4:13 pm
Hi Pim,
"It should be self evident that appeal to aliens is not going to resolve ID's claim that only ID can create complexity."
I'm not appealing to aliens to resolve the claim that only ID can create complexity. What made you think so?
As for the rest of your post, how about actually reading my post and dealing with the points raised?
Comment by Krauze — May 8, 2005 @ 4:13 pm
May 8th, 2005 at 4:30 pm
Dembski says:
"Design-theoretic explanations are proximal or local explanations rather than ultimate explanations. Design-theoretic explanations are concerned with determining whether some particular event, object or structure exhibits clear marks of intelligence and can be legitimately ascribed to design. Consequently, design- theoretic reasoning does not require the who-designed-the-designer question to be answered for a design inference to be valid. There is explanatory value in attributing the Jupiter Symphony to the artistry [design] of mozart, and that explanation suffers nothing by not knowing who designed Mozart. Likewise, in biology, design inferences are not invalidated for failing to answer Dawkin's who-designed-the-designer question."
Comment by Jack — May 8, 2005 @ 4:30 pm
May 8th, 2005 at 8:18 pm
Actually what you've just described is Darwinism not ID. Let's reverse the question to Darwinists. Who is the designer? Is random mutation and natural selection the designer? This is a putative conjecture and not an evidential answer. The reason is that if RM&NS is the designer then Darwinists will have to show historical evidence the actual event and not inference from historical artifacts. How did this designer designed all the biodiversity that it purportedly have produced. How did RM&NS assembled the first living DNA/RNA? How did it design the first eukaryote from a prokaryote? We need details and evidence not conjecture of a putative process of what might or could have happened. We know that is impossible because there is no way to look at that actual event. Yet Darwinists are certain about the designer. I guess that standard of inquiry does not apply to Darwinists.
Comment by teleologist — May 8, 2005 @ 8:18 pm
May 9th, 2005 at 1:17 am
Teleologist: Let's reverse the question to Darwinists. Who is the designer? Is random mutation and natural selection the designer? This is a putative conjecture and not an evidential answer. The reason is that if RM&NS is the designer then Darwinists will have to show historical evidence the actual event and not inference from historical artifacts. How did this designer designed all the biodiversity that it purportedly have produced. How did RM&NS assembled the first living DNA/RNA? How did it design the first eukaryote from a prokaryote? We need details and evidence not conjecture of a putative process of what might or could have happened. We know that is impossible because there is no way to look at that actual event. Yet Darwinists are certain about the designer. I guess that standard of inquiry does not apply to Darwinists.
There are big differences between IDism and MET. MET actually has described processes which can be observed in living organisms and which explain the fossil, genetic and morphological evidence. IDism doesn't have a clue how the designer designs, design of biological organisms has never been observed, and IDism has no explanation for the evidence except when the ID theorist in question decides to coopt MET. Demanding that evolutionary scientists do the impossible, produce a videotape of the complete history of life on earth, does nothing to improve the credibility of IDisms nonexplanations.
Comment by Aagcobb — May 9, 2005 @ 1:17 am
May 9th, 2005 at 7:42 am
You are obfuscating and conflating 2 different theories here. ID theory is certainly different than Darwinism. You are obfuscating about Darwinism by claiming that it has a sucessful explanatory process. It does not. You have to understand, no matter how many times you repeat the mantra that small changes will accumulate to major biodiversity. It doesn't make it real. LOL! There are no observable macroevolutionary changes through natural processes. Why is it unreasonable to demand a videotape when you can demand ID to produce a designer? Besides Darwinism not only fails at producing such a "videotape" of the creation event, it can't even reproduce any of the macroevolutionary changes in the lab. Show us Darwin's God.
The very nature of the ID theoretical does not require it to identify the process of how it was design. Do you not understand anything about ID? The whole point in these to and fro has been that to recognize/detect/identify if an artifact is design does NOT require knowledge of the designer or the method by which it was designed. Several examples have been given to demonstrate this fact and all the ID critics have done is to argue about some EF strawman or we don't know any aliens. Please! If it is legitimate for Darwinists to infer naturalism without any empirical details, why would ID need to know the designer to infer design. You also conflate the theoretical premise of ID and Darwinism by imposing a mechanism. This is completely bogus. A mechanism is a method of deriving what? Well? Do you know? I doubt it. You've been so indoctrinate by Darwinism that you probably can't think outside of the Darwinian bubble. A mechanism is the method of deriving origins. If you do not know how an artifact came about, your methodology requires you to determine a mechanism for the origination of that artifact. ID does not require a mechanism because the origination factor has already been determined. What the ID critics are trying to do is to impose your failures onto ID. The failure is in Darwinism not in ID.
Comment by teleologist — May 9, 2005 @ 7:42 am
May 9th, 2005 at 8:04 am
[...] D
May 9th, 2005
I like summarize the points that I've made in a debate over at telicthoughts. ID theory is certainly different than Darwinism. Darwinism claims that it has a [...]
Pingback by Teleological » Darwinian failure imposed on ID — May 9, 2005 @ 8:04 am
June 26th, 2005 at 1:08 pm
[...] is is Darwinian Cliché #2. Second, other IDists have addressed this quite adequately, here, here, here, and here. To Darwinians like Wesley Elsberry and Richard Dawkins, their objective is not abou [...]
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