When does design become intelligent? (AS OF 8/2/10 - CLOSING COMMENTS ONLY)

When does design become intelligent? Crashfrog claims the eye would be an intelligent design if the Retina face the light-sensing layer out towards the front, where the light comes in; not backwards, towards the inside of the scull, with two layers of light-insensitive cells between the iris and the incoming light. I have a solid rebuttal to that argument if anyone would like to hear why its actually a more sound design they way it is rather than the design regurgitated by Crashfrog.The current human eye isn't an intelligent design? What does it take to be considered of intelligence? Millions of cells lining the interior of each eye function as photochemical receivers that convert light waves into a myriad of electrical impulses, which are forwarded, at a speed of about 200 miles per hour, to the brain-and then sorted, organized, and analyzed. This is accomplished in milliseconds.
What about the eyelashes, blink reflex and the eyelid protecting the eye? Pupils dilate to allow more light in for better vision at dim times and constrict to protect our retina from excessive glare and to improve daytime vision. All this sounds pretty damn intelligent to me.
Is the eye perfect in every way, able to adjust from microscopic vision up to telescopic vision? No. When the eye is healthy, does it enable us to comfortably encounter life here on planet earth? YES. Its obvious the designer wasn't trying to design a super bionic body.
If the designer is all knowing and all powerful, and he loves his creation then he must have a reason to have designed these bodies with weaknesses. Why do we have pain sensors? If it was to just warn us of harmful actions to stay away from like putting a hand in the fire then what's up with ability to experience extreme pain? The answer is found in a modern quote; "No pain. No gain" This train of thought is for another thread entirely. I just mention it here because its important to know there are profound reasons why things are the way they are.Lets get back to the issue at hand. Is a paperclip an intelligent design? Why or why not? Is the space shuttle an intelligent design? If the paperclip is not an intelligent design and the space shuttle is, at what point does design become intelligent?ICDESIGNEdited by ICDESIGN, : No reason given.Edited by ICDESIGN, : No reason given.Edited by ICDESIGN, : No reason given.Edited by ICDESIGN, : No reason given.Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Add "(AS OF 8/2/10 - CLOSING COMMENTS ONLY)" to topic title.

Thread copied here from the When does design become intelligent? thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

OK. So what is the reason?

I say it would depend on how intelligent one says this intelligent designer is.A rather stupid, but still intelligent one could come up with the route for the RLN for example. It would then in the loosest sense be intelligently designed, just rather stupidly.If however, the intelligence is said to be rather more than ours, then doing such a thing becomes inexplicable, unless it wanted to deceive us into thinking that it was dumber than it actually is, or that it wasn't designed at all.So either, the intelligent designer is dumber than the average earth engineer, or he pretends to be, or he didn't design at all. In the case of the first, it's really confounding how he could've designed at all then. In case of the latter, he is a deceiver of the worst kind.

He decided to create a world in which there will be mystery; in which we can not understand many of the things that go on in it until after we leave this level and proceed to the next. He didn't want us to know everything right now.Now, is that any more ridiculous to believe this, then to believe that a chaotic whirl of cosmic chemicals settled down in the right place in the right order to then cascade into a random spiraling of carbon mixing, using a mechanism that we don't know, and which have no empirical evidence for, and one in which we can just create just so stories about how a turtle turned into a Tiger then turned into a monkey, then turned into Richard Feynman-in a world perfectly tuned to allow this to happen, because we can also fabricate more just so stories about this being one of zillions of other universes that we can't see-but somehow some are more wiling to believe in than believe in a spirit? Edited by Bolder-dash, : No reason given.

One of the mysteries being --- why does the living world look(a) exactly like a product of evolution would(b) as though any putative creator must be staggeringly incompetent?Of course, these things are only a mystery to you. I know the answer. Your strawman is ridiculous. Not to mention dishonest.

Who are you talking about? Or is that all part of the mystery too?

The first paragraph tells us nothing of importance.The second paragraph is simply total misrepresentation of what the Theory of Evolution says. It is just nonsense word salad.The two things that you should take away from this is that any designer is unimportant except for historical interest and for assigning credit and blame.It does NOT matter who designed the first radio. BUT, it is important when life is involved to assign blame for faulty designs. If you are going to claim that, for example, humans were intentionally designed then there is a definite case for a product liability case against the designer.Fortunately, when we look at any specific example of biological life we do not see the signs of design.Long ago, back in this Message 8, I posted the following: The error most Intelligent Design proponents makes is in thinking that humans or any other example of living thing was a "desired outcome".There is simply no evidence to support such an assertion.Now, if you take the position that life in general was the design goal, then you might have a case.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

In short, things that look like good design are evidence for an intelligent designer but things that look like bad undesign aren't evidence against one.So whatever the natural world was like, you could still claim to see intelligent design in it. If it had a thousand times more stupidity, cruelty and waste in it, you could still recite: "If the designer is all knowing and all powerful, and he loves his creation then he must have a reason to have designed these bodies with weaknesses", and not ever admit that you were looking at a series of screw-ups unworthy of a wise and benevolent God.This has the dubious merit of ensuring that you would never have to notice that you were wrong in attributing nature to the work of such a God even if you were as wrong as wrong can be.Me, I prefer my hypotheses to be falsifiable.

Hi Bolder-dash, Yeah! I hate people who make up stories like that! Turtles turned into tigers? Preposterous! People who make up stories like that must be real jackasses.Except...I can't think of anyone who seriously claims that tigers are descended from turtles. Not a one. Probably because tigers aren't descended from turtles.Nor can I recall anyone claiming that monkeys are descended from tigers. No-one claims that. It would be pretty stupid; monkeys aren't descended from tigers.Neither was Richard Feynman descended from any living species of monkey. Something very much like a monkey perhaps... but not really a monkey per se. Certainly not a tiger, or a turtle.So... I guess you must have made those up yourself. Dontcha just hate it when people go and make up just-so-stories?

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In all seriousness, stuff like this undermines your credibility. It's all very well to disagree with the scientific consensus. That is your right. What really isn't acceptable though is for you to disagree with that consensus without even understanding what the scientists are actually saying. Your expressions of incredulity come across as pathetic when you so plainly demonstrate your lack of understanding of claims being made. If you insist on churning out such obvious strawmen, all you will ever manage to do is to waste your time tilting at windmills.Why not learn what biologists are actually saying? Then, if you're still not happy, you can argue with the real Theory of Evolution. Just a thought.Mutate and Survive

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod

I'll do you one better. Dicky is still a monkey. All apes are monkeys afterall.

Not quite. Monkeys and apes are both primates, but apes are not monkeys.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Hmm...Ok, forget I said anything. That subject is not on topic anyway.

Hi Huntard, Well if you want to be like that about it, Feynman was a kind of highly derived fish. Personally, I'm not too fussy about the distinction between "descended from monkeys" and "descended from a monkey-like ancestor". Whatever the last common ancestor of humans and monkeys was like, it would have been sufficiently monkey-like that, were it in a modern zoo, it would be kept in the Monkey House. "Descended from monkeys" is an over-simplification certainly, but it's hardly the worst thing I've ever heard a creationist say.We're just not descended from turtles is all. Mutate and Survive

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod

Yeah, I agree. It isn't that bad to say that. The problem I have with it is that it conjures up images of modern monkeys "morphing" into humans wiht those not "in the know". Nor from tigers.