Irreducible Complexity and TalkOrigins

This whole idea of finding design in Mt Rushmore is a bit silly. I don't see how this boils down to anything other than a poorly constructed argument from analogy. As others have begun to point out, we all recognize design in these giant stone heads because we've all seen human faces, and we've seen the humans who make statues and paintings and models of human faces. The analogy is reasonable here.But just as when Hume dismantled this argument more than two centuries ago, this analogy as applied to universes, or worlds, or even organisms has no basis. While perhaps everyone has seen a person construct an artistic representation of a human, NO ONE has ever seen a grand designer constructing a universe, a world, or an organism.There is absolutely no basis in our experience to make such an analogy. We have only one experience with one universe, so no analogy is possible. This is called making stuff up.

Thanks to all for the warm reception. Thanks for the tip, RAZD. This is intriguing. I think we're on the same page with this, but would you agree that our ability to recognize a modified genome is only made possible by our knowledge of genetic modification techniques? That is, in order to reasonably infer that modification has occurred, we would need to know the natural (normal) state, what conditions would be necessary for modification to occur, and if it's likely (or even possible) that someone could have made those modifications.For example, say we found a glowing green mouse running around the house, and it has the gene for green fluorescent protein (GFP) identical to that found in aequorea. We might reasonably infer that it was genetically modified by having the GFP gene inserted into its genome, since no mice are naturally found with this gene and the technique is well known. However, we can't say the same thing about the jellyfish, since we have no experience of divine hands inserting genes into organisms in the wild.In other words, we could conceivably test for human (or other intelligent) tinkering against a known, natural pattern, but I don't see yet how we could test the original pattern itself for signs of design. But I could be wrong...