BEAR 3.5 - Daniel Dennett on dysteleological arguments

(To BEAR 3)

There is simply no denying the breathtaking brilliance of the designs to be found in nature. Time and again, biologists baffled by some apparently futile of maladroit bit of bad design in nature have eventually come to see that they have underestimated the ingenuity, the sheer brilliance, the depth of insight to be discovered in one of Mother Nature's creations.

Dennett, Daniel. Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Simon and Schuster, 1995. Print.

Joe Holman:

our token Christian debater... made the remark that God wasn’t responsible for making bad human bodies because he only “made” Adam and Eve in a perfect state. I love it when Christians make this statement. It’s the ultimate pass-off for the poor design of our bodies. Adam and Eve were perfect. The rest of us just weren’t fortunate enough to be Adam or Eve.

Coyne flip

I've been reading Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True and have been markedly unimpressed by its arguments.
He says over and over things like, "Creationists have no answer for this", yet I'm able to think of an answer with 2 seconds of reflection most every time. He utilises one BEAR many, many times, and a future BEAR many other times.
He also bases most all of his case on the fossil record. Ouch and ouch. On the cover are 4 images showing a dinosaur gradually morphing into a bird. Double ouch.
I'd like to do a more complete review, but I don't know if I'll have time before I leave for two weeks out of the country, in two weeks.

BEAR 3 - Assume you are a better designer

(What is BEAR?)

Our third installment comes in the form of a response to the contention that an intelligent designer is the best explanation for the life we see today.

ID person: "A designer is the best explanation, blah blah blah..."

Evolutionist type: "But if a designer did all this, then what about the poor design of the _____? Why did(n't) God the Designer do what any human engineer would have done, and ... the ... ?"

A few responses to this:
1) If naturalism is true, to precisely what standard, what teleology, do you compare this? There is no designer, therefore no design. There is no "good" design and therefore no "bad" design. If the designer had _____-ed the _____, who are you to dictate that that would definitely be better than the way it is now?

2) And so what if there exists some "appearance of design"? It's all in your imagination, because it WASN'T designed.

3) Maybe the designer tried really hard and managed to design life more or less as it is but couldn't get all the minutiæ down pat, like he wanted. Consider this the counterpart argument to the Flying Spaghetti Monster - no one believes it, but it's conceivable, a thought experiment.

4) Maybe the designer just didn't design it like you would have, bottom line. Why should anyone think that even your "new and improved" design would be preferable to the designer's? What was the designer trying to accomplish? You don't know, so how can you assume you know how to make the organism better?
It would reduce pain or discomfort, you say? It would help it run faster so it could escape predators? It would allow every member of the species to obtain and maintain a Swiss bank account in the millions of dollars? How do you know that's better? Why should anyone think your vision of the way the world should be is to be accepted by anyone else? You're into ToE, which posits death and genetic mistakes as two of the main driving forces of the mechanism, and you're all of a sudden into how awesome life is and better genes are?

5) In every design, there are trade-offs. My eyes can see a large cone of the 180º of sight available from the front of my head. Maybe my eyes could be moved further to the sides of my head, but then I'd lose out on focus and have to cross my eyes all the time.
Maybe I could have been made with wings, or gills, as John Loftus sorta-famously suggested. But then I'd have to have the musculature and different skeletal structure to support the wings, and different lungs to work with the gills. And those would be subject to different strains, sprains, and breakages. The different lungs would be subject to all sorts of other diseases, from parasites and different germs floating around in the water I'd breathed in. And then these skeptics would complain about THOSE, no doubt - there just can't be a designer b/c he forgot to make us immune to these diseases, these sprains, these bruises.
Would they ever stop complaining until they were made like God? No, and then they'd no doubt complain that they were still subordinate to God.

6) You think you're such a big hotshot and you could do it better? Do it.
Create one single-celled organism out of dust.
...
Then, before you break out the bubbly, get your own dust and do it again.

This anthropocentric hubris is sad and funny at the same time. These people claim to be so focused on the empirical and the reasonable, the observed, and here they are poking fun at God, acting like they could do better. How do they know they could do better? Sure, humanity has been able to make TVs that last for years. But many decades? Hard drives, which sometimes fail catastrophically right out of the box. Space shuttles and lunar craft and space robots, which have a fairly high failure rate as well. Obviously, humanity has invented and done many amazing things, but no one is perfect and no one has ever made anything that is perfect. And no human has ever created an organism! These armchair critics are apparently only interested in throwing rocks and mockery, but they've never even gotten close to this accomplishment, nor can they even bear to give credit where it is due.

7) In reality, God created the world good. What everyone always forgets is that after Genesis 1&2 comes Genesis 3 and the fall of man. Sin has a very powerful and deleterious effect on the entire world, and God's perfect design has become imperfect because of sin in the world. God will redeem the world and make it perfect again, but not yet. Skeptics conveniently and frequently forget Christianity's doctrine of the fall when it comes to these arguments.

BEAR 2 - Assume it happened

(What is BEAR?)

Our next installment of bad evolutionary arguments comes courtesy of dang near half the commenters in the super-long debate thread in which I've been busily embarrassing the naturalist crowd.

I had asked what commenters' favorite lines of evidence for evolution was. A few responses showed that Hox genes were up there.
I asked neil, who has also done some commenting around here, to "explain how specifically this supports the idea that there *WAS* a common ancestor many billions of yrs ago". He answered:

Because of the pattern of those genes in living organisms. There is a clear predictable pattern of their distribution. Patterns of differences in sequence and duplications are perfectly consistent with what common ancestry predicts.

This is the same pattern repeated for other genes, ERVs, for pseudogenes (found out what they are yet?) etc.

So what's the big deal with Hox genes? They "(define) a region or position in the embryo", thus influencing more or less what parts grow where in the developing baby organism.
It's not my intention, nor is it very interesting to me, to re-summarise what Myers said in the linked article, but apparently evolutionists find it very significant that they can exercise their powers of assumption with Hox genes as their foil.

Just look at how Myers himself makes the running leap straight into midair:

There are also a few gaps; with duplication comes redundancy, and the possibility of deletion without detriment, and so we also see some examples of culling duplicates in our history.
Speaking of history, one of the things we can do with a phylogenetic analysis of the Hox cluster is see fascinating aspects of our ancient history...The anteriormost and posteriormost genes in the complex are the most different from one another, so we can surmise that they diverged earliest, and have had the most time to accumulate differences.

To repeat, the question at hand here is this: Is the data best explained by the hypothesis that a Designer DID all this, or the hypothesis that unguided natural selection working on random mutations DID all this? We're asking about what happenED. Notice that there is no argument given to take us from Point A to Point B in this.
The fact - Hox genes exist.
The interpretation - They diverged early on.

But what about...?
The interpretation - The Designer made them that way. To almost quote neil, but to go ahead and take him to the logical conclusion he so fears, "Patterns of differences in sequence and duplications are perfectly consistent with what a Designer hypothesis predicts."

Only two answers have been given so far, and I'll discuss the other one in my next BEAR post.

For now, today's answer is perhaps best revealed by neil.

No not with what a designer predicts. Only with what a designer mimicking common descent would predict.

That is precisely the point. Neil here concedes that the data is just as well explained by a Designer.
It looks like it could have evolved. Sure, whatever, fine. A Designer could also have done it. When I ask for proof for evolution in the context of a debate about ID, I'm expecting you to share some of your "mountains of evidence" with me that could not just as easily be evidence for ID. Get to work.

Bad Evolutionary Arguments Refuted 1

(What is BEAR?)
I've been mulling over this topic for a few weeks now, so I'll go ahead and get started on what will be a series of posts. Note the nearly infinitely-clever acronym title and writhe in your pathetic not-cleverness.

Anyway, today's bad evolutionary argument to refute goes something like:
"If you have something to offer that has predictive and informative value, then produce it."

This statement was directed at Intelligent Design. I'm a creationist, which is a position that has certain overlap with ID, but is typically more specific than ID and certainly not identical to it, sharing only a few characteristics such as the position that an intelligent and powerful agent is responsible for life.
The point of the question is that science can make predictions of future events and future behavior based on observation of what has gone before, and the questioner does not believe that ID can. I am not sure I agree with that, but defending ID doesn't put meat on the table for me and I haven't thought a great deal about that since I'm not an expert on the run-of-the-mill ID arguments.

However, if Christian creationism is true, we'd expect to see all sorts of things:
-The universe would carry an appearance of design (since it was in fact designed).
-Rival worldviews would be irrational.
-The God-man would resurrect from the dead in a unique fashion, when He said He would.
-God would change lives like He said He would.
-Formerly twisted and immoral people (like myself) would end up living sanctified lives.
-Most people would not have saving faith in God.
-Quite a few even would mock God.
-People would have innate ideas of right/wrong and fair play.
-Evidence would be a good way to discover truth.
-The world would operate virtually all the time according to regular laws.
-Yet occasionally God would perform a miracle, for a specific purpose or set of purposes.

...just to name a few.

Let me call attention to the last 2. Skeptics tend to misunderstand Christianity and claim that we think that everything is God's hand working all the time. To some extent that's true, but that does not make God the direct cause of everything. Virtually all events in the world take place according to the natural processes that God has already put in place.

Ephesians 1:11 - In Him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will...

God has ordained everything that comes to pass. He has defined that these natural processes will pertain on the Earth and in the universe until the Eschaton, at which point we won't need to worry about it anymore anyway. On naturalism or some similar worldview, one can only study data going back some decades to know whether the processes in place today are similar or identical to those in place a short time ago (an infinitesimally short time on the view of current conceptions of naturalism). So one uses inductive reasoning to say that such processes have generally been the case before so they will overwhelmingly probably be the case one second from now, one minute from now, one year from now. Problem with induction is that it just takes one example to knock down from a good inference from what has always been to what is in doubt.
There is no security in these processes on naturalism, neither in the unobservable past nor in the future, whether immediate or long-term.

Further, on Christianity there is plenty of reason to think that a person's cognitive faculties are reliably aimed at producing true beliefs. On naturalism or some similar worldview, nothing popped into everything, and was organised by no one so that some impersonal "process" is responsible for there being order instead of total chaos in the universe. Atoms coalesced into molecules, into larger clumps of matter. Rocks became amino acids became proteins became unicellular organisms became bananas, platypuses, humans. Bananas don't think. Neither do cans of Dr Pepper. Why assume that another lump of matter (arbitrarily and customarily called a "brain") can "think"? A can of Dr Pepper, when shaken, produces fizz. The liver secretes bile when called upon to do so. The brain secretes brain fizz when called upon to do so. And the brain is somehow special?
Also see Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism.
The point is that, on naturalism, there are no predictions to be made at all, no matter how you want to dress it up with a pretty label like "science".

What is BEAR?

I am beginning a series called Bad Evolutionary Arguments Refuted. The acronym BEAR is sufficiently awesome that it requires no further fanfare.

This is the explanation post for the series. Every post will examine a different bad evolutionary argument, mostly from the standpoint of naturalism. That is, I will grant most of the time the presupposition of naturalism, thereby granting huge swaths of rhetorical ground that I don't in reality grant at all and thereby tying both hands and one foot behind my back to see how the evolutionary position fares when everything is going its way. The BEAR series is a mostly an internal critique of naturalism.

All BEAR posts will be under the label BEAR, and all of them can be organised into an exclusive view here.

I of course welcome all interaction, but evolutionists - you do yourself few favors trying to defend these bad arguments. I recommend you come up with better ones.