Intelligent Design

[Obsessed]

I couldn't just let this go. I feel that we can all have some fun discussion about ID. I'll start this off by responding to a recent argument for ID.

You've caught me at a lovely time... I've just finished up a paper on intelligent design.

I beg to differ that there is no evidence that a creator could exist. Irreducible complexity is quite the factor for proponents of ID. Take the human eye, for example. One factor goes missing, and you no longer have an eye. You can't reduce the function that it has and still expect the organism to survive as well as it could without sight.

There are also these fun little things called Anthropic Coincidences. Let me dig up a few of them for you... A change in the elliptical orbit of the earth around the sun by 2% or -2% would make it either too hot or too cold for life on earth. If the earth rotated a bit faster or a bit slower, temperature differences could be either too great for life or more weather effects (e.g. hurricanes) would occur. If the electromagnetic force was any larger, atoms would hang on to electrons so that none could be shared, and if it was smaller, atoms would not hold onto electrons at all. Etc etc etc... There are over 300 of these 'mere coincidences.' They are also all mutually exclusive. Only one of these would need to differ slightly to eliminate life on earth. It seems incredibly unlikely that life could have magically occurred exactly perfectly so that we could all flourish so freely on this planet.

Let's take a quick look at Robert Paley's thoughts on a designer... He uses the metaphor of a traveller walking along a beach and discovering a rock. The traveller, of course, would naturally assume that the rock had been there for quite some time before. But, let's say he discovers a watch further along the same beach. Would it be logical to say that the watch had always been there? Certainly not. The complexity of the watch implies designer.

The human eye is not irreducibly complex. This video does a very good job at explaining it, and provides examples of each step.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEKyqIJkuDQ

Meanwhile IC is a flawed argument. The entire idea relies on personal incredulity.

As for the 2% and we'd be fucked bit. Well the Earth is 149.6 million kilometers away from the sun, and this amount varies over the course of the year. 2% of 149.6 million kilometers is quite a lot. There is a pretty generous range for the distance the Earth could be from the Sun. You're being deceitful, trying to make it sound like the slightest change in the sun's distance would have a huge impact on us.

Also

Those who believe in ID often argue that the multiple contingencies required for us to have come into existence are tenuous and improbable, therefore there must have been a design or plan. The anthropic principle counters that since we are here, any arguments of contingencies are irrelevant--we are already here, the probability of our existence is 100%, so the universe must be adequate for our existence, otherwise we should not be having such a dull argument.

The anthropic principle is often associated with the concept of the "fine-tuned universe" - the idea that if any one of several fundamental constants were slightly different then stars would not form and life would be impossible. This argument is sometimes used to support the idea that he universe was "designed" as it is claimed that this situation is so highly improbable that it must be deliberate.

However in August 2008 New Scientist ran an article "In the Multiverse Stars Burn Black" in which it pointed out that the above assumption is simplistic. While it is true that changing one, and only one, universal constant may render life-supporting universes impossible - that is not the case if various constants are changed at the same time. When theoretical experiments were run on different potential universes with multiple variations in their constants, some 25% were found to be capable of forming stars.

As for your watch analogy: A watch is manufactured out of other materials, while the case with the Universe is unclear. Your analogy is faulty.

I suggest you rewrite your paper if it happens to be for a science class.

 

[VKCA]

I thought the anthropic principle was something along the lines of "Given the ridiculously large number of planets and stars in our galaxy, it is necessary that we live on the one in 6 bajillion planets that is inhabitable for us to contemplate it."
Am I mistaken?

 

[cantab]

Wikipedia copy-pasta

Weak anthropic principle (WAP) (Carter): "we must be prepared to take account of the fact that our location in the universe is necessarily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers."
Note that for Carter, "location" refers to our location in time as well as space.
Strong anthropic principle (SAP) (Carter): "the Universe (and hence the fundamental parameters on which it depends) must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage. To paraphrase Descartes, cogito ergo mundus talis est."
The Latin tag ("I think, therefore the world is such [as it is]") makes it clear that "must" indicates a deduction from the fact of our existence; the statement is thus a truism.

Intelligent design has been debated at great length, and I doubt there is anything new to add.

 

[Firestorm]

Locked on request.