11.09.05
Pernicious Character of Design Arguments
Updated.
Criticizing Darwin tends to energize the carefully schemed ID strategy of framing the debate between natural selection and design. But the alternative is false. That’s especially vexing since alternatives to Darwin won’t come easily, and it is mostly exploitation of our confusion confronted with the rising curve of complexity that fuels the current false success of ID.
Science and Theology News restates the mantras.
William Paley topped off this reservoir with his 1802 publication of Natural Theology, culminating centuries of design argument based on everything from the properties of water to the engineering of insects. In his book, Paley describes finding a watch while walking through the country. Paley argued that studying the watch’s interconnected mechanical parts would compel one to assume that an intelligent force designed it.
Modern intelligent design theory, or ID, however, takes the concept a step further, stating that science will prove that some aspects of nature are so specific, complex or functional — like the parts of a watch — that they must be the work of a designer.
The answer to Paley is ultra simple. NOONE has ever found a watch in nature that wasn’t humanly designed. Period.
So what is the argument? The many examples that Paley gave from nature, cases of adaptation, are misleading, granted that we were equally misled by Darwin. They just aren’t design examples.
A watch is an artifact, not the same as a biological clock, btw, so the argument wouldn’t transfer to nature. A watch shows no development in time, only the construct of parts that aren’t living matter. No human designer can (as yet) construct a living entity by design.
Nor is it valid, for just this reason, to claim that a watch shows ‘complexity’, since in fact it is a restricted device following Newtonian reductionist principles. We could hardly compare its simplicity to the complexity of nature, in which we see many complex things that are clearly not the result of design. Thus complexity is really making an absolute of our relative degree of ignorance.
All this is a prelude to another catch 22 for design, worthy of another post: Religionists make prior assumptions about historical design.
So does, e.g. the Old Testament, show evidence of design?
Clearly not!!! although this case will confuse historical materialists, to say the least.
We have no evidence of ‘divinity’ acting by design in history. We do have evidence of a mysterious ‘macro’ factor, and the ‘evolution’ of religion is bound up in that.
Thus, here, in the test case, religion, design thinking fails.