What IS evidence of design? (CLOSING STATEMENTS ONLY)

Unfortunately, many IDists see this as one and the same, "If it's ordered and structured, then it must have been desiogned." and they'll use the arguments like "You won't get a 747 from a tornado in a junkyard." They see science throwing around the words "random" and "chance" and they think that means the universe is a chaotic, swirling thing that takes order and blows it apart unless something is there to keep it orderly, or at least make it orderly to begin with.

I think, what this thread shows is that there are so many possible definitions of "design" that no one can really claim to know what it is without first defining it, and once it's defined, someone will come along and say their definition is bunk and heres why...And this is mostly relegated to just figuring out if we can decide what is designed by entities we're all intimately familiar with and can objectively agree exist. Any ID proponent has their work cut out for them if they want to argue that design is obvious, esepcially if they're proposing that the designer is something we can't study or even agree exists.

This is one way to design. Is it the only way to design? If you can't say that this type of process is necessary to design, you can't rule out the possibility of non-conscious design, can you?

Good luck with that. That's sort of the crux, there is no definition for design that can be universally agreed upon, and even if there were, ascribing that to some supernatural designer is at best begging the question, and at worst, just plain fallacious.

Par for the course. Most IDists tend to scatter once we star asking for specifics. Either that, or they ignore those requests and keep making bald assertions. I have to admit, I'd much rather they stop talking rather than ignore our questions, but I'd love it if one of them would have the courage of their convictions and stick around honestly.

Then it will remain so for the foreseeable future.But I do see some areas of contention. First of all, a supernatural creator, by definition, isn't natural. Everything you've shown with any creative agency is natural. That's a pretty large difference, so much so that any inferences we derive from one may not be applicable to the other.When you bring in something supernatural, which by definition is able to throw our normal, naturalistic ideas of causality and even existence out the window, we're really trying to compare rocks and unicorns.Everything that we know creates something, does so naturally. A supernatural entity is not restricted by that necessity, and therefore could create in such a way that we wouldn't see it.Of course, that also removes the ID argument, since if we can't see it, we can't claim to know it's there, but there's just something nagging the back of my mind when we try to apply our knowledge of natural agents to supernatural agents and expect to get homologies.

What is your evidence for asserting this? At the moment, there is exactly one known instance of life in the universe: Earth. The formation of said life was so far in the past, regardless of whether you believe in thousands or billions of years, that we can't say how it happened. So, we have a sample size of one, and the origin of that sample is unknown. Seems like a very weak bit of evidence to make such a certain, absolute claim. What is the difference between living matter and non-living matter? Matter is made up of atoms, which form molecules, whether that form is living or not. When you get down to it, biology is just chemistry, which is just physics. Tell me what law forbids a chemical reaction from perpetuating itself if given the required components of said chemical reaction. Your evidence for saying so seems to rely on a house of cards supported by unfounded belief. Better hope it doesn't get breezy.

Well, way to go skipping over most of my post to jump on one line that can be debated. Does that mean you agree with the rest of my post?As for the difference between living and dead, the difference comes down to a perpetualized chemical reaction. Life is that which has an effective self-perpetuating reactrion, wheras non-life doesn't have self-perpetuating chemical reactions.Again, what law of nature would stop this from being able to happen on its own?

Why? We've only been able to look at the barest fractrion of a percent of our own solar system, let along the rest of the galaxy, and even that's only the merest fraction of a percent of the universe. If I were to look at just my backyard, would I be justified in saying that elephants, tigers, any plant over a couple inches, and koalas don't exist becasue I don't see them there?If we find life elsewhere, would that be evidence to you that life can arise naturally, or would you simply assume that God, or someother "designer" just happened to create life there as well? I'd say that life is indeed just a self-perpetuating chemical reaction. Consciousness, thought, these are emergent properties of certain types of life, but when you get down to single celled creatures, the difference between chemistry and biology bgins to become very fuzzy.And is there some law that says given nearly infinite volume and time, atoms can't arrange themselves in this way naturally? I don't agree with the fallacy you pointed out. You're still just making assertions without evidence.The very smart Arthur C. CLarke once said, "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong." And don't take this as an insult, but you're not even an elderly or distinguished scientist.

The fact that we've hardly looked can hardly be used as evidence to say that life doesn't exist anywhere else. We've also only looked at places that are very different from Earth, if it turns out that certain requirements for life arising naturally don't exist in the small smaple we've looked at, we're left with an empty sample and trying to determine anything from an empty sample is problematic at best.Beyond that, the argument for design fails the same test. We haven't found designed life anywhere we've looked in the universe (setting aside the debate about life on Earth). Why would a designer not design more life considering the vast universe he obviously created for it? Good for you, most Creationists would not feel the same way. I applaud your willingness to change your mind. I readily admit that there are things that would change me into a theist of some kind were they to occur.I'm not sure how you feel, but I certainly hope we're both participating here when the discovery of life outside of Earth is discovered, and I look forward to us discussing it. I guess it depends on exactly what you mean by saying "life." Being self-perpetuating is an emergent property of the alignment of the molecules in DNA and RNA, but that emergent property can be explained, and even predicted by studying chemistry and physics. Depends on the field you study. I was originally an astro-physics major in college. Physics claimed to be the most pure science, since chemistry is simply a subset of physics and biology was a subset of chemistry and any other science was a combination or subset of those three.I will agree that life is a very special type of chemistry, but I won't back away from saying that life, when boiled down to its essence, is chemistry. There's nothing inherently unchemistry-like that prevents chemistry from becoming life naturalistically. I disagree. He's the one making the claim. I'm asking him to justify it. If he has no justification for making the claim, then there's no reason to refute it.If I say that I believe pigs can fly, is it up to you to prove me wrong, or should I provide some reason for my assertion before we even begin to debate it?

We've never seen some "Intelligent Designer" creating life either. Does that mean we have no reason to believe in one of those, either?There is no reason to believe that life can't arise from non-life. There is a pretty clear continuum from stuff that we all would agree is living, through things like viruses that some might say are living and some would say aren't, to strands of RNA and amino acids that we would probably all agree aren't life. Why is there any reason to assume that life can't come from non-life? As we've said, we only have a sample size of one, and since life is already here, it's pretty hard for anything new to find room.Similar to the question I asked slevesque, when scientists show that life can arise from non-life, will you admit that an intelligent designer is not needed for life to be here?Added in response to your edit: You DO realize that Pasteur's work wasn't a universal truth? Spontaneous Generation and Abiogenesis are not the same thing. Pasteur's work showed that maggots didn't form from rancid meat and similar spontaneous creation events, as some people believed in those days.Before you try to quote scientists to further your beliefs, make sure what your quoting applies and agrees with what you're trying to argue.Edited by Perdition, : No reason given.

That's what I thought. You're going to hide behind the fallacy that the scientists did it, thereby showing only that intelligence can create life.The scientists would be taking components that exist naturally, adding things like electricity, which exists naturally, and trying to get life. Would you consider that showing that it could have happened naturally, or would you say that the scientists were a necessary part of that process?

Nope.

Ok. Then I expect to see you back here in probably 5 to 10 years, when we do exactly that.

I'll make a deal with you. If the rapture comes, I'll convert to Christianity, if scientists show that life can occur naturally, you accept science over dogma.How about it?