Talk:Intelligent design

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The Quotations Are Very, VERY Condescending[edit]

My further argument against Intelligent Design (at least i think it's mine)[edit]

It's all bollocks! Exactly which 'Intelligent' designer would design organs such as testicles that only work properly when outside the body they belong to, yet are so delicate that they cause extreme pain to their owner when even slightly knocked or bruised? QED

Ps. I'm very new here and tried to add this once already but it disappeared, no idea what i did wrong, just the fates punishing me for hubris i guess...hope you don't mind my temerity, i've been reading here a long time and like what i see. Changeling (talk) 23:41, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

Better question: why would a perfect Intelligent Designer create external sexual organs only for humans to cover them? Why not hide them to begin with? --It's-a me, Lgm sigpic.png LeftyGreenMario! 03:47, 5 August 2017 (UTC)
Good post! Reverend Black Percy (talk) 14:51, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Indeed, it's a very quirky not to say perverse designer that will do that for whales and delphines, that apparently have no sense of shame, but not for humans, whose sense of shame is seriously over-developed.Changeling (talk) 04:57, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Maybe it's the whales that are God's chosen people... Reverend Black Percy (talk) 14:51, 5 August 2017 (UTC)
I like it! Perhaps Noah was merely an oversight, and the whole Ark story was made up by the accidental survivors to cover up their marginal position in the great scheme of things. Changeling (talk) 18:50, 6 August 2017 (UTC)

It's pretty obvious that design is really pretty unintelligent. Everything is based on things that came before. A God "intelligent designer" would have been able to uniquely design every beast to uniquely fit it's role without any consideration of the designs of other organisms. (Yes, I understand that that's a better argument against the "Young Earth" version of ID.)--Bob"Life is short and (insert adjective)" 16:38, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Trial and Error Design[edit]

We know that some 99% of all species that ever existed are now extinct. If god is in charge, that means he made a species, later decided he could do better and wiped out that species, replacing it by better. Then he later decided he could do even better so wiped out the improved species and made better, and so on, for species after species after species. This is not Intelligent Design but Design by Trial and Error.(184.22.101.203 (talk) 04:15, 30 January 2018 (UTC))

It all depends upon how you define 'better' - and often there is a transition between one species and the next. (Sometimes there #is# a significant change - as with the Great Oxygenation Event, Dinosaur Asteroid, creation of the Deccan Traps etc - or a species suddenly moves into a totally new environment and has to evolve rapidly to survive.) Anna Livia (talk) 18:04, 7 March 2018 (UTC)

Reverse engineering[edit]

If 'the design' is 'intelligent' what can be deduced about the intelligence - were the construction plans peculiarly incomprehensible (we all know the feeling)? Anna Livia (talk) 18:04, 7 March 2018 (UTC)

another possiblity[edit]

The gods of the various planets are involved in a game of exquisite corpse/consequences - they have to make the best they can of the entities they are presented with. Anna Livia (talk) 17:23, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Moving the goal post[edit]

the page makes this claim:

"One problem with finding evidence for intelligent design is the inability to distinguish "naturally" evolved mechanisms from "designed" mechanisms. Nobody knows what the "design" of a supernatural creator looks like; how can we tell what was and was not designed?"

And then a few sub sections latter brush off the floundering of abiogenisis as not their problem.

It would seem to me that as time goes on the idea of a self replicating chemical that can form the basis for life spontaneously forming get's more and more unbelievable as we learn of all the things that need to go right for it to form. The difference between the mechanisms is That the naturalistic one would seem to tell us that probability against the formation of life is literally beyond astronomical while the design hypothesis does have any such implication. If a thing is highly improbable to exist it makes more scenes to ascribe it dissing rather than chance. If someone came up to you handing the complete works of Shakespeare then puts a gun to your head saying "if you get question right i'll let you live. Was this book produced by humans or a million monkey's at typewriters?" What would you answer? If you play poker with your friend and he always has a royal flush would you expect him of cheating? The answers should be obvious to any rational person so why then when we are presented with even greater odds do you insist their must be a naturalistic cause? — Unsigned, by: Jkevo / talk / contribs

You're missing the point of the quote, and removing it from the context of the paragraph leading to it makes it sound as if it's asking a different question than it is. Intelligent design fails to construct its own explanatory description of what design actually entails. It merely sets itself as "that which cannot be explained any other way(and please ignore the theory with a ton of explanatory power for exactly the things we're claiming)".
So the quote is asking that intelligent design proponents propose a theory of what attributes designed things would have.
For human design there's a number of dead give aways.
  • Modularity: when humans design useful objects, we design them to be modular with components that can interconnect on specific interfaces. As an example, take a look at the many devices that plug into a computer via usb.
  • Right angles: Useful for storage and organization, objects with right angles(possibly with smoothed corners) are incredibly common in day-to-day life.
  • Perfect circles: whether for wheels or ease of construction or uniform lighting, things with a perfectly circular cross section are extremely common aspect of human designed objects.
  • Interchangable parts: like, but not the same as modularity, this is a recent(only 2 centuries old) expansion of human design, but being able to replace a broken component with an identical one from elsewhere is huge, and as result of purposeful design
  • Fixed sizes and ratios: All the gears in my watchmakers watch, they're all different numbers of milimeters accross, predictable and useful for getting exact timing.
  • Solid materials: making a consistent material for construction of each component gives huge advantages in terms of predictable characteristics. This is useful when designing objects so you can know how they'll work.
All of these things are things one can look for(and indeed archaeologists do look for) when identifying human designed objects. Notably, not a single one of these apply to supposedly intelligent-designed organisms. So the challenge should fall to the theory's owners to craft such elements. And they don't because they're just creationists under shallow cover. ikanreed 🐐Bleat at me 15:43, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

You set forth a set of criteria that would show something was likely designed and I showed that life met those criteria. We have one theory that rest on "chance" and just so stories which makes few predictions with what few it does beggars belief and another one that make predictions like there should be apparent design witch seem to be born out by the evidence. It would seem to me that the only reason to hold the former theory and not the latter is an irrational denial of non-materialistic things.Jkevo (talk) 23:04, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

Believe me this is more effort than anyone affiliated with ID or the discovery institute has ever put towards that kind of attempt. Suffice it to say, I appreciate the effort, but there's some big problems, like right angles and the golden ratio having jack shit to do with each other. And wheels not being the only circles in designed things. Look at any given object on your desk, and tell me there's no circular components. ikanreed 🐐Bleat at me 18:35, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
Let us suppose we land on another planet and we find a relatively large amount of object that are equilateral triangles and perfect octagons which include buildings and tools. Would It be reasonable to deny the possibility of design because it lacks circles or right angles? There are a myriad of reasons it could be that other intelligences could choice not to use right angles and perfect circles maybe they are ascetically displeasing or perhaps they don't fit in with their technology. Unifying design choices are whats important not specific ones so I would argue that the golden ratio suffices for at least weak proof of design.Jkevo (talk) 20:15, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
Different numbers of digits on each limb (3, 4 and 6 are probably more practical than 7+) or 'millipede-oids' would probably cause such differences. Anna Livia (talk) 20:27, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
I would find their engineering suspect, as octagons don't fucking tessellate. ikanreed 🐐Bleat at me 20:35, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
To first find engineering suspect you must admit their was an engineer so my point was made.Jkevo (talk) 01:17, 16 November 2019 (UTC)