Even if there was a Designer, does it matter?

You are sometimes a little wee clone of jars! IF a designer or a Designer exists, it won't change our reality. The only thing that bothers me about this is that I prefer an interactive designer, sorta like a player/owner in sports.

Well, that's just the thing - if there is a designer with a plan for life on Earth, then the mechanisms we think drive evolution are wrong. Life would not diversify via natural, random mutation guided by natural selection, but would instead diversify by the guiding hand of the designer, who must cause specific mutations and select for specific features pursuant to his goal.Essentially it would mean that life on Earth did not evolve naturally but is instead the result of some massive breeding program.So think of it this way - does it make a difference that we know that dogs and horses and pigs and bananas and corn and a thousand other species have been purposefully diversified by human interference as opposed to simply evolving naturally without human intervention? I think that's a pretty large difference that changes our predictions for future diversification, what we expect to find in the fossil record and genetics, etc.If there's a designer, there's a plan. If there's a plan, then, if we are able to ascertain what that plan is, we should be able to predict future evolutionary developments in humans and other species. Identifying that there is in fact a designer would be a huge increase to our predictive abilities.That said...the data we have (and we have an awful lot) shows that the predictions made from the mechanism of natural selection and mutation without a celestial breeder are basically a perfect fit for what we observe in reality. That would be an awfully large coincidence - that the designer's plan would perfectly match what appears to be a completely unplanned set of events. That's the equivalent of having a dog breeder somehow produce exactly the same results as dogs in the wild, selecting for exactly the same criteria that nature does. At that point, you'd have to question whether the breeder was actually a breeder at all - if his interference produces no different results, has he really interfered?

The topic is about designers, though; not managers, which is what you describe.Jon

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Yes, understanding the model and mechanism would be a large increase in our predictive abilities, but it would also render the designer itself even less significant.Once we understand the mechanisms, and in the case of life we are dealing with methods that work at a low energy level, it is simply a matter of technology.If there was a designer, the designer itself still just gets relegated to either a historical footnote, or as mentioned, in Product Liability suits.

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

OK, perhaps a better example would be Jack Nicklaus designing a golf course upon which he then plays.The way my simple fundie mind sees it, God sent His human son to experience the human that God created.We find meaning, value, and purpose in believing that a Designer not only created, but has participated in the human evolutionary experience. (at least I do)

Does that change anything? Does it matter who pushes the ball if we're only studying its movement? What drives evolution now? Non-designerism? This topic is about a designer, though; you are talking about a manager, an endless meddler. Does the designer of your car regularly come to your house to change what he's designed? What will the car of the future look like? Again, the topic is about a designer; not a meddler, not a manager. There might be something worth discussion in what you've said, but that's just not the topic as I understand it given what has been asked in the OP.Jon

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What does any of that have to do with the potential usefulness of knowing about a designer?Jon

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The question is: Does it matter if we're wrong? If all of our ideas about natural mechanisms are wrong, will that prevent us from curing diseases and putting rovers on Mars? If we do discover a Designer sitting on the couch when we get home, will that help us cure diseases and put rovers on Mars?How will knowing the exact population of Paris change my life?

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"It appears that many of you turn to Hebrew to escape the English...." -- Joseppi

This is of course not true. A designer could have designed life with the plan to let it evolve.The existence or non-existence of a designer does in no way change anything we already know about the world. Evolution by means of random mutation, natural selection etc. takes place, so if life was really designed with a plan, evolution must have been part of that plan (or the plan went wrong).Edited by Dirk, : No reason given.Edited by Dirk, : tyop

I suppose that you have a point. There is technically nothing useful in knowing God, since that whats this all about.

This is what frustrates me about you. You always make a case for humans having to be fully responsible for anything and everything that happens in reality. Of course, if we eliminate the original sin cop out, I suppose we have no need for superman God to intervene.

There is absolutely nothing in this topic about knowing God.Jon

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And that's what frustrates I.D. proponents. They can not nor will not imagine a universe where God is irrelevant.When I think about it, it makes me a bit queasy as well. I can accept the premise, however. The SOURCE (Designer) is unimportant. The CONTENT (all that can be subject to testing) is the basis of the arguments. For this reason, I don't accept I.D. as valid science since it conflicts with the mainstream established science already published.I simply don't believe that some scientists are approaching the methodology all wrong while others are apparently enlightened due to awareness of a "Source." I agree. How the universe came into existence can be examined without need of referral to the SOURCE of the existence.(unless we are all somehow deluded)Edited by Phat, : added features!

Rahvin has already done a nice job of answering some comments on what I said, but I would like to collect some of them and reply myself. There is a big difference between directly designed products and a designed evolutionary process yielding those products. The usual ID argument takes the first as its starting point, and that's what I'm objecting to. If the products are designed then our method of finding out how they came to be is flawed, because we think they have evolved. Of course it still moves, but we would be wrong as to the mechanics of it. Someone pushing it is not quite the same as a force field. But we're not only studying its movement, we want to know about the mechanics behind the movement. No, but neither does my car change on its own. In nature, designs change. Whether a designer is involved in these changes, or whether it's evolution, is hugely important for our understanding. Again, it depends on the extend of the design. ID-ers usually find the eye (or the blood clotting chain, or the flagellum, or what have you), in short, the products themselves very strong proof of ID, and not the process of evolution. If that's the idea we're up against, I couldn't disagree more. If we're talking about a first cause only, then I couldn't care less, because we just don't know.

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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.

It doesn't render the designer less significant if it turns out that teh mechanisms we thought guided evolution turn out to be incorrect, and that instead the designer is the one doing the guiding. There's just no way to conceive of that as a diminishing of significance. You might as well say that, once we figured out how god breeding works, the breeder himself becomes less significant in the process of creating and maintaining dog breeds. That's simply preposterous.Your question in the OP and your continued position seems to be asking whether "evolution as we currently understand it, all of the mechanisms being accurate" is significantly different from "evolution as we currently understand it, with all of the mechanisms being accurate, but caused by a designer."The problem is that the presence and influence of a designer fundamentally changes everything - it's not just a tack-on, regardless of what IDists like to claim. A designer changes the ballgame, making the mechanisms we think guide evolution false, and replacing them with the influence of the designer. The appearance of new or modified genes and features is no longer due to random genetic copy errors, but are now due to some other mechanism used by the designer. The selection of beneficial traits is no longer done by nature (or at least not exclusively so), but is now done by the designer. Sexual selection may be wrong as well, and could be the manifestation of the designers influence in breeding new species.It's not minor at all. Current theory states that evolution has no direction, no intent, and is not a ladder but rather a bushy many-branched tree of life. The presence of a designer completely falsifies that entire model, giving intent and direction to evolution, making it a series of branching, complex interrelated ladders all reaching towards an eventual goal.It's not just a matter of attribution. All of our predictive models completely change. The new ID Theory of Evolution would be that life diversifies according to a divine plan through designer-caused mutations and designer-guided selection.The specific identity of the designer is a historical footnote, just like the identity of the dog breeder who gave us Pomeranian dogs is a historical footnote. But the existence or nonexistence of a designer is a huge difference, not in any way an insignificant footnote, unless you think that the difference in the mechanisms that gave rise to all of our many dog breeds and the evolution of natural canines is insignificant. Which would be absurd.