08.17.08
Unintelligent counterarguments
Unintelligent Design
by Gary Marcus – Huffington Post
From Dawkins site:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-marcus/unintelligent-design_b_110082.html
Unintelligent DesignLost amid all the recent discussions of intelligent design — including Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s decision this past Friday to sign a bill that allows teachers in his state to “supplement” classes on evolution with talk of creationism — is one simple basic fact. The human species isn’t intelligently designed.
When you get right down to it, from an engineering perspective, the design of the human mind (and for the matter the human body) is a bit of mess.
Although I am not a proponent of design, and willingly to acknowldege up to a point the cogency of this objection to extreme forms of the design argument, the fact remains that this counterargument is a bit weak, at least to the degree of justifying Darwinian selectionism. If we exclude these extreme forms of the design argument (i.e. divine omnipotence as a character of the designer ??), and retreat to some version of natural design the objection not only fails but misses the point entirely. Natural design (or ‘natural teleology’) might well show imperfections, ad hoc changes of parts into something else, or even goofs.
(For that matter, human designers of anything often make mistakes or fail to foresee complications.)
Arguing with creationists is too easy. And it induces the illusion that by refuting nonsense Darwinian thinking is somehow validated.
Biologists/Darwinists need to be their own critics and apply a dialectic to their own assumptions instead indulging in the luxury of debating religionists.