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To: Right Wing Professor
This is a quasi-religious assertion that there are beings of superior intelligence to ourselves, whose purpose is ineffable to our limited intelligences

Not at all. You've basically said that since it doesn't make sense to you it must not be designed. That's not an argument against design, though -- it's simply an argument from personal ignorance.

Until you can show me some system that works, but whose principles are beyond the power of contemporary rational analysis, that's an unproven and decidedly mystical claim,

Human technology is a sufficient example. Modern electronics would have been incomprehensible to people even 100 years ago, and certainly to people 1000 years ago. (They're still incomprehensible to most people, including me, even today.) The technology of 100 or 1000 years hence may well be equally incomprehensible to us. Would it be "mysticism" to claim that future technology could achieve things (including the creation of life) that is not comprehensible to us now? Not at all -- it's just a fact of life. And thus we see that you've once again, unintentionally, stumbled back to an argument from personal ignorance.

552 posted on 11/29/2004 2:18:40 PM PST by r9etb
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To: r9etb
You've basically said that since it doesn't make sense to you it must not be designed.

Not at all. I've said that there are generally recognized features of intelligent design. Enginers and architects take design classes, and get graded based on these features. You think their grades are bogus? If you take a course in C, and spend hours writing your own subroutine instead of making a call to a more efficient library function, and you get points knocked off for that, is that an arbitrary, subjective, capricious piece of grading?

Modern electronics would have been incomprehensible to people even 100 years ago, and certainly to people 1000 years ago. (They're still incomprehensible to most people, including me, even today.) The technology of 100 or 1000 years hence may well be equally incomprehensible to us. Would it be "mysticism" to claim that future technology could achieve things (including the creation of life) that is not comprehensible to us now?

Alas, you're creating a hypothetical where I asked for a real example. And even your hypothetical is dubious; had we been presented with a transistor in 1890, from who knows where, do you really think we couldn't eventually have worked out how it works? After all, we've pretty much figured out the mitochondion, and that's orders of magnitude more complex than a transistor.

And even before we had our present understanding of the mitochondrion, we understood in broad terms what it does, and we could make statements about its limitations, its efficiency, etc.. So, I won't claim to completely understand the genome, but I can state, without much fear of being wrong, that the defective gene that prevents humans from making vitamin C, but which is still present in our genomes, is a bug, not a feature. Your claim, in contrast, seems to be that the great Bill Gates in the sky may have included it as a feature, but hasn't bothered to document it.

(Is it clear yet I'm a Mac user?)

580 posted on 11/29/2004 3:14:28 PM PST by Right Wing Professor
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