…non-interactive, invisible, silent, hidden, indifferent, concealed Designer
I cringed when I heard an IDist say something to the effect, “we use forensic science all the time to infer design, and this same science demonstrates an Intelligence made life”. The problem is forensic science identifies designs made by humans (or something human like). People generally believe some designer made Stonehenge because they see humans making comparable designs all the time. Many IDists don’t seem to appreciate invoking a never-seen designer poses a challenge for accepting design in biology.
Even if God created life, because we don’t experience His presence in the same way we experience a human designers’ presence, many find it hard to accept the idea a Creator exists. If God exists, as far as every day human affairs, He appears absent, non-interactive, invisible, silent, hidden, indifferent, concealed etc. In human terms, then, like the tooth fairy, the concept of God in the modern day among the educated, seems irrelevant at best, false and harmful at worst.
For someone to accept God as creator, he must come to terms with the problem of God’s lack of obvious interaction in every day life. Why the silence, and concealment? Were it not for the Design argument, I’d almost be right there with the GNUs saying how stupid theism is.
However, because of the design argument first, and the creationist argument second, I came to reaffirm my belief in the Christian faith after being an agnostic for a season. For others, the design argument isn’t persuasive enough to raise any interest in things of Jesus. I respect that, but that is not the path I’ve chosen.
The almost forgotten ID classic, The Hidden Face of God and other books by Gerald Schoeder influenced world-famous atheist Antony Flew. If God is the creator, He has surely gone to great lengths to conceal His existence. For me, and I suppose for Antony Flew, the Design hypothesis made it feasible for some to believe there is a concealed and hidden face of God.
God gets glory from concealing things; kings get glory from investigating things.
Proverbs 25:2
Complete Jewish Bible
[title truncated by Lizzie]
Well, and here I thought ID was all about science, not religion. Nah who am I kidding?
The trouble with the design argument, is that it is based on misunderstanding biology. The ID proponents repeatedly describe evolution as unguided random chance. But there is a lot of internal guidance within biology, so there is a lot of self-design. A developing organism is designing itself during that development period. The DNA is not an exact specification of how the organism should develop.
Origin of life, I’ll grant as unexplained at present. But, once life originates, evolution is itself a design process. The ID people deny this, because to admit it would be to debunk most of their argument.
Rumraket, Salvador is not an IDist. He’s been doing his utmost to distance himself from ID.
Neil, nice to see you’re finally catching up with respect to the evidence but sadly failing in your conclusions about ID.
Neil:
Evidence?
Self-design does not follow from internal guidance.
Indeed. Another way to say this is that the genotype does not determine the phenotype. So what does?
If organisms are self-designing, why do they converge on the same form during development?
Salvador: People generally believe some designer made Stonehenge because they see humans making comparable designs all the time.
ok, so what does this have to do with forensics?
I’ve never personally observed humans making things comparable to Stonehenge, but perhaps others have and could related their observations?
p.s. I don’t consider tossing 2000 coins comparable to Stonehenge, but that’s jsut me.
Salvador:
Remind us again why you say you are a Christian?
Rum,
I’m an IDist.
I’m just not Mung’s kind of IDist, that is to say a Kairos Obfuscation “self-evident” cicumlocusion 2LOT 2nd_law_SM –> communist persecuted me, of materialism dogmatist, FSCO/ID-SFOD-D —> …
–> excuse me but kindly look at my irrelevant references which I pretend to comprehend but don’t
–> incomprehensible garbage
–> NAsh
–> Jaynes
—> Witgenstein
—> Darwin deniability
kind of IDist.
Naw, that’s a pretty solid theological point of view. Well, maybe not among US Evangelicals, and maybe not the part about “indifferent”. The question isn’t how Sal can claim to be a christian if he thinks that; it’s how any person can call themselves christian if they don’t think that. After all, you christians supposedly believe that god is omniscient and your lives are just part of god’s perfect plan. Why would a god with a perfect plan want to consult with you about it? Why would it need or want to show itself to you or speak to you just to jack up your faith? Why would you be such a miserable faithless wretch that you would doubt your god for remaining concealed from you?
I don’t know that there’s any christian sect which has as dogma the statement that “god is hidden” but I know that “invisible god” is in title of a christian hymn. I honestly don’t see much difference in denotation between “hidden / concealed” and just plain “invisible”.
Christians say something like “God speaks to us in the beauty of nature”. Only that’s the same as god being silent; god’s words (if any) are never actually spoken and are only symbolized by something (beauty) which is guaranteed to be misunderstood. If that’s not exactly silence, it’s the next best thing.
It’s true that I always feel a little thrill when a christian openly admits “god appears absent”. I keep waiting for the day when one of them notices there is probably no difference between “appears absent” and “IS absent”. But I also have to say I don’t know any logical or historical reason why a true christian must refrain from noticing the apparent lack of involvement on god’s part in current human affairs. It’s not heresy, is it?
Indeed, Salvador is not my kind of IDist, because I don’t equate ID with belief in God.
Read, once again, the OP.
Hotshoe,
I like a lot of what you said.
Not heresy. Though some preachers and Bible teachers act like it is.
A person who denies the active involvement of God in human affairs is not a Christian.
To say that a Christian can deny the active involvement of God in human affairs is a contradiction in terms.
To be a Christian just is to believe that God is not absent, is not non-interactive, is not silent, is not hidden, is not indifferent … etc. etc.
It is sad really, that Salvador in his anti-ID zealotry, cannot refrain from taking positions which are historically anti-Catholic.
STcordova,
When you say “If God exists, as far as every day human affairs, He appears absent, non-interactive, invisible, silent, hidden, indifferent, concealed etc”
How would you know this?
You have evidence of a whole shit load of things that you can’t explain how or why they exist in the universe, and then you say, but if some outside force created this, he sure seems hidden.
What you really seem to be saying is, why doesn’t he reveal himself to me, THE WAY I WANT HIM TO REVEAL HIMSELF?
And you double down with this statement:
“Many IDists don’t seem to appreciate invoking a never-seen designer poses a challenge for accepting design in biology.”
Where is the logic there? Because you can’t see the designer, this makes it less likely? Where do you get this? You mean the rules aren’t the way you would have them? You prefer to see the designer? You prefer to see someone like the designer, so you can know the way they design?
Why not turn it around Sal? Why not ask, what do things that aren’t designed, that have no plan, that have no organization look like? Then compare that to the living things we see around us, and ask, is this comparable to things that were never planned or designed. Then you can decide if you have evidence for your non-designer.
So far, I don’t think you have good evidence for your never seen before non-designer.
Salvador is not a REAL Scotsman 😉
//People generally believe some designer made Stonehenge because they see humans making comparable designs all the time.//
This is Humean to the core, wow, I am quite surprised to find that an IDist is so tied to Humean logic. You need a dose of Thomas Reid, he refuted this nonsense long ago, if we had to infer design based on experience, we could never begin to make any design inferences in the first place (hence, this is NOT how we infer design):
“No man ever saw wisdom [“intelligence”], and if he does not [infer wisdom, intelligence] from the marks of it, he can form no conclusions respecting anything of his fellow creature. How should I know that any of this audience have understanding? It is only by the effects of it on their conduct and behavior, and this leads me to suppose that such behavior proceeds only from understanding. But says Hume, unless you know it by experience, you know nothing of it. If this is the case, I never could know it at all. Hence it appears that whoever maintains that there is no force in the argument from final causes [design], denies the existence of any intelligent being but himself. He has the same evidence for wisdom and intelligence in God as in a father or brother or a friend. He infers it in both from its effects and these effects he discovers in the one as well as the other…. From marks of wisdom and intelligence in effects, a wise and intelligent cause may be inferred”[1]
References:
1. Thomas Reid, (Reprinted in Lectures on Natural Theology, University Press of America, 1981.)
I never said we had to infer design based on experience. I did say there is difference between inferring designs made by humans versus designs made by a God you’ve never seen.
In the case of humans you have two lines of evidence: the structure of something like a watch which does not naturally arise, plus seeing humans build watches. Hence, it is easy to say watches are designed by two lines of evidence.
In the case of God-made designs, unless you are Moses or Pual on the Road to Damascus, you only have one line of evidence.
2 lines of evidence are more reassuring than 1 line of evidence. If you don’t understand this, then you don’t comprehend the argument I made.
Of course I accept ID for biology, but only on 1 line of evidence, not 2. Seeing God as Paul saw on the road to Damascus or Thomas seeing Jesus walk through walls after the resurrection — that would be more reassuring that my design inference was correct. It would be a slam dunk at that point if we had such evidence in the current day. Right now the only inference we have is a shot by “seeing through a glass darkly”.
Salvador, the point is, we cannot observe intelligence directly. Whether human or non-human, this is Reid’s point. We infer it, based on the nature of the physical effects induced, the same evidence which leads us to conclude that a human agent is intelligent (as opposed to being a zombie) is the same evidence which leads us to conclude that a transcendent intelligence is behind the patterns we observe in nature.
We do not infer intelligence for watches because we have seen humans made watches, this is simply not how the design inference works. We would infer design for structures, even if we had never seen human agents make these before, and we do not know that someone is busy designing arrow heads simply by seeing that someone is busy chipping away at a piece of rock, only by observing the actual form of the rock, can we conclude that someone was making or trying to make an arrowhead.
Can you please explain your logic of capitalisation with regard to ‘design’, ‘Design,’ ‘designer’, ‘Designer’, ‘creator’ and ‘Creator’? Is the capitalisation intentional or unintentional? Is there any purpose to it? What does it mean to express?
RoP, I asked you 3 questions twice in another thread, in case you missed them.
Actually, Catholics have by and large seen through IDism, an ideology that Mung has not yet shown himself to even acknowledge. And William Lane Craig, an evangelical apologist, recently claimed that Christians don’t have to accept IDism (which he acknowledges with uppercase ‘Intelligent Design’ theory). This is a significant blow to the IDM (thus Mung thus far totally ignores it), which is partially reflected in stcordova’s strangely still IDist/creationist perspective that “there is no positive case for ID” or YECism and that “ID should not be promoted as science.” Again, I agree with those statements, along with many theists (who saw it long before stcordova’s recent ‘conversion’ to this position).
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-farrell/intelligent-design-losing_b_790527.html
stcordova is a protestant and Mung can’t seem to get his slippery story straight (but he’s some kind of theist too). As I said before, it is hilarious to watch these 2 IDists going at each other. And also rather sad.
What is perfectly true and utterly undeniable is that many people experience profound comfort, inspiration and a sense of direct communication with the entity they call God.
The reality of that experience is hard to deny, and the fact that it is widespread supports the conclusion that it is based on some external, objectively observable reality.
God may be the ultimate placebo effect, or not, but there is no doubt that divine experience has an effect. It can empower to people to do extraordinary things that they would not otherwise have attempted, or achieved, and the experience itself shows up in functional bran scans.
If you want evidence for God there is plenty of it without resorting to postulating additional physical forces of supernatural origin capable of pushing nucleotides into novel positions that will better equip bacteria to kill impoverished babies.
I think that evidence has a perfectly good non-supernatural alternative explanation, but it does require one if the more obvious explanation is to be rejected. And even then, we cannot reject its utility. The great thing about the placebo effect is that it is a real effect. If homeopathy is an efficient way of harnessing it, the homeopathy works – just not in the way its proponents conceive it.
Prayer works too. It still works for me, though I probably shouldn’t call it that any more.
Wow so many problems with this, not sure where to even start. First of all, killing babies can only be wrong if God exists. To assume it is wrong for God to make organisms that harm babies is to assume a moral standard that becomes unintelligible once you reject theistic metaphysics. Second, how could it even be wrong for God to kill babies? (God as the Creator, and ultimate source of being has every right), how can we possibly judge God? It is wrong for us to kill others, because we don’t own other people.
Bacteria is actually crucial for our biological existence, life here would be impossible without bacteria, so I can understand why God had to design them.
Finally, most importantly, to show that certain species of bacteria are harmful or fatal to babies in no shape or form help explain their origin, or the origin of any of the molecular machinery that make up their cells via unguided natural processes. This is like thinking it is easier to explain a bear trap, because bear traps are harmful, no benevolent human engineer would have designed something like that.
Religious arguments like this were invoked by Darwin too when he tried to argue against design in biology, the problem is, they are logically flawed.
We can observe intelligent beings act directly, and because we can, we also don’t doubt their existence and action.
For most, unless one was Moses or the Apostle Paul , they don’t have the luxury of seeing the intelligent being of God directly or his action of design. Why is it so hard for you to not see we are talking two categorically different situations with human-made vs. God made designs? In case of human -made designs, the existence humans is not even a question, in the case of living organisms, the mere existence of a non-human intelligence is a question.
2 lines of evidence are more convincing than 1, and the 1 line of evidence for biological ID rests on an inference, perhaps even conjecture, not direct observation. Though I believe the ID inference for biology is true, promoting it as some sort of infallible conclusion is a bit of stretch.
FWIW, I reject many of the “self-evident’ tautological “proofs” of ID and God. I think Jesus was right to say there must be an element of faith in someone believing in God.
I believe in the Christian God, but in human terms He appears to most humans to be non-participating in their lives. I accept His participation on faith, not by sight.
Actually there is an un-intended insight here about the dark side of the Design conjecture. If the Christian God is the designer, God kills babies via intelligently designed bacteria as He is claimed to have done in the intelligently designed plagues of Egypt.
Not only is the Christian God invisible in most every day affairs, if He exists He has designed curses upon the world. The Designer can act very very cruelly.
Believing in the Christian God as the Intelligent Designer doesn’t exactly simplify one’s world view, and I wouldn’t say it is always comforting, but rather fearful.
It wasn’t unintended, Sal.
Sal, there are relatively benign forms of theism, even of Christianity. Why don’t you check out Quakers, for instance?
You don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and the bathwater really needs throwing out.
First of all, not at all.
Humans are perfectly capable of figuring out that some things are harmful and some things are good without bringing God into it.
What a lovely suggestion. The first girl who ever kissed me was a Quaker. 🙂
I have two great friends who are Quakers. They are just lovely. Were I to be persuaded to some kind of religious belief or ethic, Quakerism would rate highly as a candidate. They don’t push it (that Quakers don’t proselytize is resulting in a decline in numbers, in the UK at least) but I have an open invitation to a meeting. I might even go, one day.
You are still trapped in Humean induction. You cannot tell someone is intelligent by observing them acting, this is the problem. We can only distinguish between zombies and intelligent agents based on the nature of the physical effects induced. It is in what intelligent agents *do*, that we know they are intelligent (not by observing their bodies). We cannot observe their intelligence otherwise. We have the same evidence therefore, for human intelligence, as we would have for a transcending intelligence, had we found signs of intelligence in say, biology, or physics.
Jesus also commanded us to love God with all our mind. It is an impossible command, unless we can have good reasons for believing in God.
No I am not. You don’t seem to appreciate the difference between seeing an intelligent human being and never seeing an intelligent God like Moses supposedly did. You’re trapped in your confused comprehension of how humans ordinarily come to accept the existence of something.
What’s wrong with desiring more evidence. You act like gullibility is a virtue.
We cannot observe intelligence directly! You still seem not to grasp a very basic inference, how we infer intelligence. You have a very weird materialist conception of God if you think Moses saw God because he saw some physical body or object!
You don’t seem to have a basic grasp that intelligent human beings are visible and an intelligent God is invisible to every day life. Ergo, belief that intelligent human being exists is easier than belief in an invisible intelligent God.
If one has seen God, one then believes He exists, and then the Design conjecture becomes believable. We have examples of that in the Bible. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, and people believed as a result. Seeing a deity in action inspires belief. Why is that so hard for you to comprehend?
Seeing may not be necessary, but it sure is reassuring.
Religion of pieces,
You further make no distinction between observing real time activity versus making inferences about past activity. Activity observed in real time with our own eyes is far more believable than historical reconstructions from extant objects.
I’m going to try this one more time. Human *bodies* are visible, human intelligence is not. Observing bodies is not the same thing as observing intelligence, it is in the way such bodies act and the effects they leave behind, that we infer they are intelligent (as opposed to being zombies).
Religion of pieces,
In case you missed it, I’ll repeat:
You further make no distinction between observing real time activity versus making inferences about past activity. Activity observed in real time with our own eyes is far more believable than historical reconstructions from extant objects.
That’s the issue being posed. You’re framing it in some bizarre philosophical exercise. I’ve stated it in terms that ought to be accessible to most individuals except students of philosophy who find creative ways to confuse themselves.
Yep, exactly.
It is not simply that we cannot see a Designer re-designing living things in real time. We can’t see ancient potters designing pots in real time either.
But we can see traces of their tools, their living quarters, their middens, and their bodies, and in their artefacts we can see traces of their worksmanship and can infer their techniques.
Nothing like that is evident for, say, a bacterial flagellum. There is no trace of a designer’s footprints, or lab, or body, what s/he might have been used to edit the DNA to produce a new sequence; any evidence of any forces being used to move the nucleotides around other than the regular ones we know about.
To expand on my blunt “Yep” …
There is clear difference between inferring the presence of human intelligence when we witness human bodies in action v. inferring the presence of divine intention when we witness some plant growing or some animal reproducing. And I admit, people’s actions are all we can directly witness, because we can’t see inside the operation of their minds. So, yeah, there’s a possible philosophical question about whether all y’all are zombies and I’m the only person with genuine consciousness in operation — but there’s no actual reason to believe that y’all are zombies, and assuming we can agree to move past the college bullshit philosophy, it’s not a major leap to infer intelligence when I see you doing something that appears intelligent, something which if I did it myself I would see as arising from my own intelligence, Indeed, it’s pretty illogical (in the folk sense of “illogical”) for me to infer that what you’re doing is NOT intelligent if it’s the same thing I would do based on my own intelligence. Why would I assume two separate motivations/causes? That’s not parsimonious.
So, inferring other human intelligence is basic, it’s first level.
The problem is that such a reasonable first-level inference is not available to us in the question of god’s supposed design intentions, in the absence of directly witnessing god’s “body” in action. It might be that we could make a valid inference about god’s action, but it would be second-level; it would not be direct in the same way that inferring human intelligence is a direct result of witness humans in action. As Sal says, inferring god’s intention is comparable to “historical reconstruction” and it literally cannot be as convincing as seeing action in real time with our own eyes.
It’s stupid for some religionists to pretend there is no difference. When they claim something
[bolding mine] it just makes them sound gullible. NO, no, it’s NOT THE SAME evidence. It might be evidence of some kind, to some people, but it’s not the SAME evidence at all. It’s second-level evidence. It’s not believable direct witness, it’s (perhaps believable, perhaps not) reconstruction from “patterns” left behind. Patterns which quite likely admit of more than one reasonable explanation …
The quickest way to turn non-believers away from any possible respect for christianity is to insist that it’s as obvious, has the same evidence for it, as seeing other humans as intelligent. No, no, it’s not obvious, not at that level at all.
I mean, I’m not dumb, and while I hate the christian church as a political entity, I’m not so prejudiced as to allow my bias to totally obscure my vision. I’m plenty smart about what constitutes observable evidence and I’m open to being convinced, but merely shouting “it’s obvious” is not in the least convincing.
People of good faith can admit that god (if it exists to begin with) appears to be hidden / invisible / silent. That’s totally reasonable. What’s not reasonable is the people of faith who say, basically, “You dumbo, it’s as plain as the nose on your face, god is right in front of you acting in all things,which we know from the patterns in nature.”. To which I can only respond: What? Where? All I see are human agents, and natural unguided forces in action. Are you sure you’re not hallucinating?
If we had exactly the same evidence for god’s intelligent action as we do for human intelligent action, then every single human being who ever lived would be a god-believer Simple. Except it’s not that simple, because evidence for god’s action is NOT on the same level as evidence for humans (not zombies).
Sal is right (surprise!) and Religion-of-pieces is wrong (no surprise).
I love how clearly you put this, Elizabeth.
So inferring god/intelligent designer is actually third level inference. Inferring existing human intelligence with real-time actions for evidence is first level. “Historical reconstruction”, that is, inferring the potters from traces of their tools and their middens, that’s second level.
But as Elizabeth makes clear, inferring a designer for biology (or anything in the non-human world, actually) is not on the same level as inferring the ancient potters and stone-tool makers. It’s yet another level removed from direct witness, since we not only cannot see the maker in real time, we also can’t see any tools or traces. We have to make yet another jump if we want to infer “design” as ID does, considering the lack of toolmarks.
Third level. Not a very convincing level to most rational people.
And you make no distinction between a human body and human intelligence. Design inferences are very stable over time (while scientific theories come and go), a centurion in the first century AD observing the Stonehenge will reach the same conclusion that you would draw (I hope) by observing that pattern today. We do not tell that someone is busy making an arrowhead by observing him in action chipping away at rock (whether in real time or not) until you can see a glimpse of the form. You have to look at the object to tell whether this was intelligent design, or merely random chipping at rock.
This is quite ironic coming from you, you are so confused, you confuse human bodies (which are physical objects) with human intelligence (which is not), you even implied earlier that God is a body or some other physical object!
The one confused here is you, oblivious to the fact that you are wedded to the logically flawed Humean inductive tradition.
There are two arguments from design. The first one is classical theist kind, the other is personalist theist kind. The latter is represented by the famous evangelist debater Craig and it is also associated with the ID movement. Craig’s argument is quoted in early work by Dembski. (Or was it vice versa, Craig quoted Demski. Or maybe they both quoted each other.)
Craig’s argument goes as follows.
1. The fine tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.
2. It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
3. Therefore, it is due to design.
Notice how the triad of necessity, chance, and design is central to Craig’s argument. The classical (scholastic) argument from design is different. It goes like this.
1. All things have an order or arrangement, and work for an end.
2. The order of the universe cannot be explained by chance, but only by design and purpose.
3. Design and purpose is a product of intelligence.
4. Therefore nature is directed by a Divine Intelligence or Great Designer.
Notice how here the dialectical work is done by the dichotomy design/purpose versus chance.
This difference between the arguments is important, because the definition of “design” in them is different. In Craig’s argument, design is distinguished from “necessity” which must mean that mechanistic laws of nature are distinct from design.
In the scholastic argument on the other hand, mechanistic laws of nature – say, gravity or why not even evolution or natural selection – are design. Given scholastic premises, the entire exercise over at UD, attempts to “detect design” as distinguished from “undirected processes” (the term used by UD), is futile and counterproductive. The scholastic premises have no dispute with the current natural sciences in terms of design. Laws of nature are design, the manifestation of intelligibility of the universe.
RoP,
Y’know, when people on the internet are seen to avoid facing questions by people on blogs, a variety of reasons are possible. But onlookers usually don’t pass by such silences unnoticed.
It is completely obvious that IDists are most uncomfortable with theists (rather than atheists) who reject IDism, especially theists who are scholars, who have studied closely IDism and found glaring holes in the ideology.
This is the 3rd time asking, I will not do so again:
Do you know what univocal predication is? Have you read Edward Feser’s philosophical critique of IDT? Do you acknowledge that ‘human designer’ and ‘divine designer’ take different categories or do you conflate them?
Added to that: are you aware that Discovery Institute fellow William Lane Craig has just recently said that theists need not accept IDT? Why do you think he said that?
I’ve been watching IDists for more than a decade and have seen the DI and the IDM from within as an observer. RoP’s recent enthusiasm here is noted. His/her arguments are nevertheless as weak as most IDists (even if they try to challenge stcordova’s mixed-up messages for IDism & YECism). He still wants to vacuum Hume & thump his/her own chest as if he/she holds healing power that the whole world simply needs to buy for the price of a Discovery Institute DVD. Insular apologetics sniff USA not even in disguise.
Religion_of_pieces,
We don’t have rocks. We have copies of copies of copies of copies over billions of generations of the original ‘rock’, if such there ever were. It’s a bad analogy.
Well said, thank you. Amen!
Yes I have, and I have also read the responses to Feser (have you?), I’m afraid he is simply confused when it comes to ID (or the arguments from design in general). Ironically, Feser is a reductionist when it comes to man-made machines, in response to his reductionism, Jay Richards wrote the following:
“Feser assumes that unless a whole is already present inherently in its parts, then there really is no whole. “[T]he object,” we’re told, “is ‘nothing but’ a collection of wood and metal parts.”viii Such reasoning is a universal acid. One could just as well argue that Handel’s Messiah is nothing but a compilation of musical notes and words to accompany them!
The reasoning is equally absurd when applied to machines. In truth, even the simplest human machines, like a mousetrap or a cotton gin, are greater than the sums of their parts. You can lay out the parts of a mousetrap on a table and they won’t do anything useful. They certainly won’t reliably trap mice. Indeed, in even the simplest human machine, the parts are taken up, as it were, in service of a function imposed on them by an agent. Practically everything interesting about the machine is its arrangement for a function. That function is distinct from the parts, it is real, even if when separated from them, it doesn’t exist except in the mind of the builder. That’s why we issue patents and have intellectual property laws. The function defines the purpose of a machine–its end. Since such machines aren’t even reducible to their parts, they certainly aren’t reducible to particles, laws, extension, or matter.”
Ps, I like Feser, I just wish he would stop trying to force a marriage between Darwin and Thomas.
=
Applying this logic (Lizzie-tool inference) then, we would have to conclude that crop circles are the product of unguided natural processes, since we cannot find any trace of the tools used by the artists in making them. Guess we can all go home then guys, nothing to see here, we evolved.
I’m surprised Feser has the small following of sycophants that he does. He appears stuck in the nineteenth century with his simple assertions and arguments from authority. His misogynistic views on abortion and gay rights are pretty abhorrent too.
Religion_of_pieces,
That’s only a response to one out of 3 questions and it is less than half-baked. To call Feser a ‘reductionist’ is absurd. But likely no shame or awareness for saying so, of course 😉
What is this some kind of high-faluting general designist ideology? Yes, apparently RoP is an ideologist for generic designism. The exaggeration & conceptual inflation of such a position is easily demonstrable.
The 2 other questions await; perhaps you might offer something more? Richards is clearly no match for Feser (nor other Catholic leaders). E.g. “function imposed on them by an agent” … “patents” … “intellectual property”. Feser was probably the easiest of the questions and yet RoP has crashed already.
“I meant to do that” like Pee Wee Herman is typical IDist delusion.
One thing we can see: pride and over-confidence, not humility nor scholarly rigour nor respect of anti-IDism theists (nor free speech). That is clearly witnessed in this most recent IDist voice at TSZ.
You haven’t looked very hard. It’s amazing what a couple of guys can do with planks and twine.
Well, for a start we have. For a second, it’s not the only thing you have to consider.
“Take a few bits of metal, work them into various shapes, and attach them to a piece of wood. Voila! A mousetrap. Or so we call it. But objectively, apart from human interests, the object is “nothing but” a collection of wood and metal parts. Its “mousetrappish” character is observer-relative; it is in the minds of the designer and users of the object, and not strictly in the object itself. “Reductionism” with respect to such human artifacts is just common sense.” ~ Edward Feser
I just said, I like Feser, I just think he is dead wrong on some things. Heck, I even think Dembski and Plantinga are wrong on some things, and these are some of my favorite theist philosophers alive!