Who designed the ID designer(s)?

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According to Darwinism, the universe as now known is an accident, life is an accident, and man is an accident.

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Darwinism neither addresses the origins of the universe or life."Implication 1" falls on those factors alone."Implication 2" does not follow either. It is unlikely that natural selection would sleect for particular beleifs as suhc. However it is almost certain to select for an ability ot leverage our intelligence - and how can we reliably do that without the ability to form true beliefs ? And how could rejecting Dariwnism offer any greater guarantee that our beliefs are true ?"Implication 3" is just silly. The quote from Aldous Huxley is irrelevant, since Huxley is talking of Nihilism, not Darwinism. And Libertarian Free Will is threatened moee by it's own lack of coherence, than by Darwinism.

Essentially Dariwnism is about explaining the diversity and distribution of life on Earth, as it is distributed through space and time. It can be - and is - extrapolated to apply to other forms of replicator. It may play a role in the origin of life but (as discussed on another thread) that requires that non-living replicators already exist (and requires that we do not consider them life, although they would seem to have a better claim than viruses).

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I submit that to be a Darwinist leads to Nihilism.

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I submit that Darwinists are not concerned with finding the truth of our existance, but with destroying meaning.

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I submit that ID serves to suggest meaning, which is why Darwinists are so against it.

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What evidence can you offer for these assertions ? Especially the second and third which appear to be baseless attacks.

I'd really say that major discussion of the philosophy should probably take place in a different thread. Or threads if we want to get past the nihilism issue and on to the other alleged implications.

At the most basic level, a designer needs to be able to visualise the design, and so the designer must be more complex than the design in that respect (i.e. their internal representation of the design will have all he complexity of the design - not the designed object - and that will only be a part of the designer's complexity).However, a designer can use tools to manage greater complexity, so we can imagine a bootstrapping process whereby more and more complex designs become possible.However, a more basic point is that the designer must be intelligent, and it is hard to see how an intelligent entity could fail to be complex in the usual sense of the word (I except rather odd theological concepts which seem to be the usual reply - although relying on these would shoe that ID is creationism).

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If we take an IDist favourite such as the "genetic code" then it could be argued that this is relatively simple yet leads to great complexity through application.

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The code itself might be simple - but so far removed from implementation as to be pretty useless as a design. I don't think that will fly.

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But on this basis it remains possible for an entity with some intelligence to create more complex entities than itself through a process of "bootstrapping" (as you called it) doesn't it? So would you disagree with Dawkins that a designer must be more complex than that which it designs?

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Sure, provided the designer starts off complex enough to start the process. Not that that really helps. The IDists need the designer to be so simple that it doesn't "need" a designer itself. Which for a typical ID position would mean something much simpler than a human brain. But what basis is there for thinking that something much simpler could support human-level intelligence or better ?

I'd say that humans have a clear record of the sort of "bootstrapping" process I mean. Instead of holding an entire design in our heads we have various physical representations like blueprints and models - and more recently CAD databases to design things that would be beyond our unaided capabilities. I don't think that we've got to the stage of designing anything more complex than us (especially at the level of the design, which is what I am talking about) but we can certainly deign things that are more complex than we could manage without our tools.

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Do you think there is any reason to consider it innately impossible that with the aid of such tools we could one day be responsible for designing something more complex than ourselves?

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In principle, I would have to say that the answer is no, but it won't be easy. I think that it will have to be done as a hierarchical design, where the sum total design is beyond the complexity of an individual human. By this I mean that at the base level we have individual components or modules that are designed and built from raw materials. At each level above that the components form the next level down are assembled into large and more complex modules, culminating in the overall design. The individual design tasks are all relatively simple, but the final design is hugely complex, when all the details are considered.Of course we can also use techniques which are not strictly design, from "training" neural networks, to employing genetic algorithms to create designs for us. (Perhaps ironically, considering that we are talking of ID, both methods are inspired by processes found in nature). I would think that the AIs of the Singularity - if it is possible - will have to be more grown than designed, and much of their complexity will come for that. I do not think that humans will design a superhuman intelligence, as such, more likely we might produce a system capable of becoming one.I suppose that I should add that I am not sure that Dawkins position is as you have stated it. He certainly argues that the designer must be complex - but we both agree with that.