Posted on 09/20/2005 7:02:45 AM PDT by Right Wing Professor
ITHACA, N.Y. - Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor, was volunteering as a docent at the Museum of the Earth here when she was confronted by a group of seven or eight people, creationists eager to challenge the museum exhibitions on evolution.
They peppered Dr. Durkee with questions about everything from techniques for dating fossils to the second law of thermodynamics, their queries coming so thick and fast that she found it hard to reply.
After about 45 minutes, "I told them I needed to take a break," she recalled. "My mouth was dry."
That encounter and others like it provided the impetus for a training session here in August. Dr. Durkee and scores of other volunteers and staff members from the museum and elsewhere crowded into a meeting room to hear advice from the museum director, Warren D. Allmon, on ways to deal with visitors who reject settled precepts of science on religious grounds.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Again, so what?
So what that you're making a distinction without a difference? There's such a thing as reality outside a dictionary. You're treating words as ends in themselves, rather than means to an end. Their purpose is to communicate an idea that actually signifies something.
What was the intention of the designer of diseases and parasites and carnivoires?
No, I am making a distinction but somehow failing to communicate it to you. The distinction between design and non-design in otherwise identical circumstances is whether or not the result was intended.
You're treating words as ends in themselves, rather than means to an end.
No, I am trying to make sure you and I mean the same thing by the word design so that we can tell if, as you have asserted, the outcome of an evolutionary process can never be called designed.
In the context of my "conversation" on this thread, I think you mean motivation rather than intention; kind of a second order intention. Strictly speaking disease could be a design with no underling reason, it need merely be intended and brought about.
I don't know if those things are a design, much less motivation there might be, but I can relay a speculation I've heard: human frailty is an opportunity to show our quality (or not). Kind of a supernatural version of tough love. Obviously many other reasons could be propounded, for example they may not be intended at all but somehow be the natural result of "the fall."
Now say I draw up the plans for a house, in every detail, but don't build it. Say I then show the plans to you, and you then give the go-ahead to build it, and it gets built. Most people would consider me the designer, but under this definition above, you could be considered the designer. You knew what you wanted the house to look like (because I showed you the plans), you acted by giving the order to have it built, and the intended result did obtain.
So...to repeat a previous question, if ants enslave aphids and thereby alter their genomic destiny, is that (natural) selection or (unnatural) selection? How about if humans enslave dogs? How about if taurian lizard people enslave humans? How about if taurian lizard people engineer our ancestral seed directly with DNA-creating machines?
I think that is too strict a view - design can be a shared activity. If the house is built then you and I together share in that design. Depending on the relationship between us even the details of the house may be more attributable as my design. For example, I may have instructed you that it should be a four bedroom, two bath duplex with an attached garage. But at a minumum, it was entirely my design that a house be built on that plot.
I also think you're the one picking nits and for our purposes the "designer" can be treated as a single agent. Let's not wander from the original question: on what basis should we call the result of an evolutionary process a design? As before, I maintain that it can be a design if the result was intended.
But I hope it does not escape you.
That is the general usage of the term, but humans are part of the natural world.
Very, very few people would see it that way. If I actually draw up the plans, and you have no input other than agreeing with the design that I come up with, then no one I know would say that you had any part in the design of the house merely because it was you who gave the order to have it built.
And that answers the question about evolution. You might know beforehand that an evolutionary process might result in a certain form, just as you knew before hand that giving the order to build a house would result in a particular form of house. But in neither instance are you the designer, by any common usage of the term. In the first instance the design came about naturally (as opposed to artificially), in the second, someone else came up with the design.
Now, stripped of all the excess semantic baggage, what Darwinian theory posits is that life forms changed into new forms through a process of gradual variation regulated by natural selection. What ID posits is that intelligent intervention was involved at various points throughout (or all throughout) the process of speciation.
But there is a difference between natural and supernatural. Despite disclaimers, nearly all Id advocates are not talking about humans or space aliens as the designer. Some are talking about direct creation, some about occasional interventions, and some are talking about fine tuning at the time of creation.
In all of these cases, the designer is responsible for the result, the good, the bad and the ugly.
ID itself says nothing about who or what the designer is, whatever the personal views of individual proponents of the theory may be. Certainly the theory doesn't say anything about anything "supernatural".
Well, fine, but artificial vs. natural isn't the same question as supernatural vs natural--how many definitional ratholes are we going to wonder into? If it weren't for the ID proponents that think supernatural vs. natural is the relevant question, we'd not be under any more pressure to consider ID a science than we are to consider crystal healing energy a science. May I take it you think aphid evolution is natural, but dog evolution is not? Because humans are smarter than ants? What is the value of this distinction?
Let's see if I understand your position. I think you are saying two things. First, design is *only* the intention or plan. The carrying out of that intention or plan is a different thing. Second, it must be a completely detailed design. IOW that the final structure must have been specified in detail ahead of time or it isn't designed. Do I have that right?
I wonder that myself, considering that you think there's some all-important distinction between artificial and "supernatural". Perhaps you can elaborate on that somehow, seeing as how it's the word you keep insisting on using.
May I take it you think aphid evolution is natural, but dog evolution is not?
Same way that an anthill is natural, but the Pentagon is not.
What is the value of this distinction?
Ask Darwin. He was the one who came up with the term "natural selection", specifically in contrast to the type of evolution that comes from man's breeding of animals.
Right, there's design, and then there's implementation. Two separate things.
Second, it must be a completely detailed design. IOW that the final structure must have been specified in detail ahead of time or it isn't designed.
Whatever part is designed is designed. If you design only the general outline of something, then the details that get filled in later are not part of your design. Only the general outline is.
Considering that we just had a discussion in which you denied that ID is primarily about the supernatural version of ID, If you can't distinguish between "artificial" and "supernatural", then this is an "artificial" rathole, and you're the rat who intentionally designed it. I am inclined to think you are simply trolling for amusement to see how long you can get someone to twist in definitional limbo before wising up, and unless you come up with sometihng meaty to talk about, I think I'll probably decline to participate further.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
