thecountryshrink
dwilli58Atheists and purely naturalistic evolutionists accept or reject teleological principles on the basis of their worldviews. Whereas those who view things from a Intelligent Design perspective are logically consistent with their views on teleology. As an illustration, I’ll lay out a simple perceptual test.
The question for each picture is, “Does this appear to have been designed?” Write down your answers so you can find out what you are at the end of the post.
1.
2. 
3. 
4. 
5. 
6. 
7. 
Now here’s a really simple perceptual test. To believe that ID is the correct way of looking at things, you’d answer “yes” to all of the odd numbered photos. To believe that naturalistism is the correct way of looking at things, you’d answer “yes” for 1 and 3, but “no” to everything else. If it is considered to be “living” then everything we know about complexity and design is irrelevant. It’s only those things that we can observe being designed that matter. If we can’t observe it being designed, then everything we know is false. This, despite the fact that every living thing is more complex than anything designed by man. This is an incredibly logically inconsistent perspective. The question is, how does one make inferences about any type of design from a naturalistic perspective?
I suppose it goes a little like this.
1. It has to exhibit complexity.
2. The complexity has to be specific.
3. It cannot be alive.
4. It cannot be a virus.
5. It cannot be a prion.
For those with an ID perspective, there are not “It cannot” statements.
1. It exhibits specific or functional complexity.
Now, atheists and naturalistic evolutionists like to point to snowflakes, polymers, and crystals as naturally occuring things that have complexity. Though with the simple ID criteria, none of those things would be seen as designed, and rightfully so! But, they just keep banging away on a specious argument–trying to get as much milage as they can from it.
Filed under: Intelligent Design, evolution, science | Tagged: design detection, evolution, Intelligent Design, naturalism, perception
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If Dembski’s “complex specified information” is more than arm waving, if it is really possible to use Dembski’s techniques to detect design, then we should be able to put his techniques to the test.
Here are five alphabetic strings. Four of them are just random strings of letters. The fifth string was designed by me-it is an English sentence encoded using a standard cryptographic technique that does not require the use of a computer.
String 1: qxoigpfrrqnglbn
String 2: jezpnmtottrtwci
String 3: zzvxtodudponqxb
String 4: rgsojkybqxjdqwu
String 5: ahxfsfyevzyozcg
Please identify the designed string, and tell me how you used Dembski’s “explanatory filter” to identify it. Mind you, I am not asking you to decrypt the designed string. I am only asking you to use Dembski’s techniques to do what he claims to be able to do: to detect design.
Good luck!
Good quiz.
Materialists will no doubt reveal their a-priori assumptions while responding.
They will correctly conclude that if the biosphere looks designed, then perhaps……(*gulp*)…… there is a ….Designer! But since We All Know That There is No Designer, THEREFORE even though living forms APEAR designed, they were not!!!
[...] see a car that it was designed by someone with intelligence? How about other objects? The post, A Simple Perceptual Test and Intelligent Design, brings up some of these issues over on an Intelligent Design blog. Sometimes it does seem like [...]
John, you make a useless argument with your test.
I’ll illustrate by analogy. Lets say like nearly every other human being on the planet, you can identify a ball when you see one. And everybody is good at that. Now, with your test, you hide the ball under 5 cups and say, which one is the ball under? And when the wrong one is chosen you say, “See!! I told you that you didn’t know what a ball is!”
Or, it’s like asking a microbiologist to look at 5 different slides that contain micro-organisms. And you say, “We’ll just see if you are a microbiologist or not. One of these slides has a micro-organism. Please identify it without using a microscope.” When the microbiology incorrectly identifies the slide, you say, “Ha!! I knew that you couldn’t do it. He’s not a microbiologist. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
You are confusing the ability of an intelligence to HIDE design with the ability to detect design when it has not been intelligently hidden. So, I tell you that your entire comment was intelligently designed as my answer to your question.
Anyway, how did you fare on the perceptual test John?
Another simple way to refute the perceptual test is with the oft repeated reminder that
“The appearance of design is not evidence of design”
as anyone who has given the matter more than the most casual thought knows – you can obtain the appearance of a designed solution through taking an approximation, producing many slight variations of that, and seeing which make a better approximation. Take those, discard the rest, and repeat the variation and selection. Repeated enough times this process can produce solutions that equal or improve upon the best ‘intelligently designed’ solutions we are capable of.
This process is observed in nature (where its called evolution), and has been reproduced in computers using what are called “genetic algorithms”. The results of these cycles of variation and selection have produced pharmaceuticals, aircraft wing designs, boat sails, and many other items that look designed.
The usual response to this argument is along the lines that the computer experiments are themselves designed, so there must be a designer of the ‘world experiment’ . This has also been often answered – but is beyond the scope of this comment whixh is just to show that the perceptual test above is meaningless as proof of or evidence for the existence of a designer of life.
Malcolm … Your idea would help only with those with a purely naturalistic view of evolution and the universe. If you notice, the designed items in my test are in order of increasing complexity. Yet, you assert 1 and 3 are clearly designed, but the increasingly complex 5 and 7 are not designed. You use the a priori assumption that there is no designer for life, therefore, those things were not designed. Circular logic. Please find me a car or arrowhead like the one pictures that was “selected” by natural processes. I’ve addressed the issue of “genetic algorithms” in a previous post. It uses intelligent design and microevolutionary processes.
So are you saying that Dr Dembski explanatory filter doesn’t work if the designer was trying to hide the design?
Does that mean that the explanatory filter can give false negatives?
Does that mean that the explanatory filter can give false positives?
Does that mean that we can’t be sure what is designed and what is not designed?
Next time use a real picture of a bacterial flagellum instead of an intellegently designed drawing.
Yes. But I see no evidence that the designer was trying to hide the design. What’s your evidence?
Yes. Only if the designer is trying to hide the design. What is your evidence for hidden design?
Same as above. What is the evidence for your position?
No, that is teleogically obvious.
You made a comment about design being hidden and I just wanted to be sure I was clear on your position.
I see no evidence of design being hidden because I fail to see the need to hypothesize a designer. I find the simpler explanation of there being no designer sufficient.
I have yet to see Dr Dembski’s explanatory filter being subjected to a controlled test. I do not see Dr Dembski or anyone else using it to analyse objects or events. It is an argument based on assigning probabilities to events that we do not fully understand. I have not seen a paper on this idea published in a reputable mathematics or biology journal where people who are knowlegeable about the topics it addresses have given it their approval.
I would very much like to see the explanatory filter being tested because I would believe an honest and rigorous test result. Give me the proof that the method works. It would be easy enough to set up a test, I’m sure Dr Dembski has stated what kinds of data or information it is applicable to.
Countryshrink said “Yet, you assert 1 and 3 are clearly designed, but the increasingly complex 5 and 7 are not designed. You use the a priori assumption that there is no designer for life, therefore, those things were not designed. Circular logic.”
Actually if you read my comment you’ll see i made no such assertion. All i said was (in a lot more words) “just because something looks designed it doesn’t mean there really was a conscious designer involved in making it look that way.”
You know nothing about my beliefs (but make the a priori assumption that I’m a materialist…
.
I’ll tell you gratis that I accept that the process of natural unguided evolution is responsible for the shape of most of the lifeforms we see around us. There may have been times or events where a conscious being intervened in that process, but – and this is the key point – we have no evidence that this has ever happened.
I repeat – You cannot assume, a priori, that because something looks designed it must have been designed.
If you do choose to believe in a designer or a God, and feel that faith is not enough to justify your belief you need to look to something other than the appearance of design….
Malcolm, actually you said,
Now to say that you can ‘refute’ the test, it follows that you were making the assumption that I stated above. Just because you repeat and reassert a statement doesn’t make it any more true than the first time you said it. To believe that there is a designer you need not look so much to faith. To believe there is a God, you need to look to more than design (on that much we agree).
Jerad,
You’re certainly entitled to your opinion. I find no designer insufficient. Ocam’s razor has repeatedly sliced the wrong way in biology. First with early notions of abiogenesis, and next with ideas about the complexity of single-celled organisms. Consistently, things are found to be more complex than previously assumed.
I too would like to see it tested, but I think the testing would come in the form of psychological research looking in to the ability of people to detect design. Which is kind of what is at issue here. Can people reliably detect when something has been designed? That’s the question I make with this post.
The point I have to make is that when viewing an object is upon first glance our initial assumption of its origins. If you assume natural forces created something, you are going to approach an analysis of it in a vastly different manner than if you assume an intellegent mind made it.
I’ll use the Silbury Hill as an example.
If you dismiss the unusual levels of complexity and composition and assume a naturalistic perspective you would seek to determine what forces were at work to create the hill and how it worked together to generate it and preserve it.
If you look at it and the hints of design lead you to assume a designed perspective you would instead try to determine how it was created, the purpose it served, and how its design served to keep it in existence.
Everyone knows that natural effects can generate things that look designed. Just as designed structures like Silbury Hill can come to appear as natural features. What is key is how we interpret what we see. If archaeologists had dismissed the quirks of Silbury Hill as “undesigned looking designed” many years would have been wasted searching for an explanation to its existence. Theories tossed about until finally they realized that it wasn’t a natural structure at all and they’d been barking up the wrong tree for years. The reverse however is much easier to correct. If you assume design but then find no tool marks, no real indicators of intellegent intercession one can assume a naturalistic origin.
This one is for “malcolm”. You brought up an interesting point but one that is lacking. What you seem to miss is that the perceptual test isn’t meant to be
“proof of or evidence for the existence of a designer of life.” – your words.
Rather it is meant to demonstrate a simple idea. That the way we view an object ultimately affects how we approach it. One does not approach a car and wonder “What forces were at work to create this?” or at least I hope you don’t. You ask yourself “I wonder who built this?” You do this because the hallmarks of design are so apparent that you very naturally assume someone made it. I’ll put a thought experiment to you. Imagine you are the Captain of a ship exploring deep space. You come upon a world full of creatures which cannot die. You take one aboard and upon analysis find an organism which is very different from any normal organism and only has one function. It repairs any damage done to its host and when injected into a new lifeform possess special coding which prevents rejection in the host. Now the truth is that a long time ago an alien race in their own experiment injected an animal with the organism which then spread to all other lifeforms on the planet. So my question to you is this. With no other evidence that the organism is intellegently designed than its own unusual qualities, is the assumption that it is intellegently designed outright dismissed and if so, why?
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Not sure I will get an answer, but the questions are to the Author of this Interesting Blog.
If Intellegent Design says we create it… that is it is created from our own imagination. What happens when a person says ” yes” to all the pictures?
In my mind I can see where every other picture looks as if the object or creature (when left alone) develops in it’s natural state. Yet I too can see how elements in motion could disturb it’s true state, or otherwise modify it’s true state. Therefore I was wondering (since you have an education… not being snide), could the elements in motion which may disturb, modify or somehow change it’s state actually be apart of Intellegent Design?
Even if these things are naturally evolving and we see how the elements are able to change these things then it would seem as if the elements are naturally speaking to each other. Take that rock formation for instance. By itself it seems to not be doing anything, but sitting there looking pretty. And honestly I see it as just a rock sitting there looking pretty and if you leave it there for 100 years I cannot imagine it having any other changes made through natural intellectual causes.
so if that rock was subjected to changes due to natural elements in motion would that be like saying nature automatically and chaotically thinks to make these changes? And if nature systematically makes these changes then it still would be considered Intellegent Design; yet limited to heat, cold, wind, water and structural disturbances.
Interesting thought: Jesus was able to command the wind in a storm. Sounds as if the wind understood who it’s Authority is. Otherwise the wind would not have backed off.