I had offered an analogy (detectives trying to determine whodunit) to
illustrate the weakness of Walter's case against evolutionist logic. Walter
replies:
>> Sometimes analogies are not apt, and tend to mislead or confuse, rather than
>> teach. . . . His analogy has the obvious failing that a thief has different
goals and
>> motives than a biotic message sender. In all, it's not worth slogging
through his
>> misplaced analogy.
I'm sure Walter would agree that sometimes objections to analogies are
also not apt, and tend to miss the point by focusing on irrelevant
dissimilarities. (If analogies had to be similar at *all* points to the topics
they were designed to illuminate, analogies could hardly exist at all.) In this
case, I was not pretending to establish anything at all about the "biotic
message sender," only about the fallaciousness of Walter's particular objection
to Loren's particular argument. So the question is not whether a thief is like
a designer, but whether the 1st detective's logic is like Walter's logic.
But let's say my analogy is as poor a thing as Walter implies. All he
needs to do, then, is to skip over the fable and deal only with the moral of the
story, which I explicitly supplied right afterwards:
" The evolutionist is not implying that *all* the designer's actions must
improve the
" organism's chance of survival, or else the organism was not designed: only
that,
" if the *mechanisms 'aimed' at survival themselves* show design flaws, that
" would point away from a perfect designer. If the designer were engaged in
" another activity -- like leaving incontrovertible evidence that he was
responsible
" for the organism -- his design could be as non-functional as he pleased."
Therefore, there is no inconsistency in saying, on the one hand, that
design flaws point away from a perfect designer, and, on the other hand, that an
unambiguous signature would very much point towards a designer (though not
necessarily a perfect one); and therefore Walter's objection to the
evolutionist's "plasticity" is not justified.
Jeff