>"The phrase of yours that particularly bothers me is, "How you
>could conclude from looking at this that there is an intelligent
>designer is beyond me." Are you really serious when you make
>a statement like that or are you just posturing? I see all sorts
>of things around my house that have varying degrees of complexity.
>I conclude that from the end product that someone designed them."
Generally I agree with Pim's response -- that it's extremely difficult to
prove objectively that an object in nature was designed. I'd like to
respond to the original comment from a slightly different perspective,
though. When we look at an object such as a watch, we recognize that it is
designed not necessarily because of its complexity (indeed a watch is a
pretty simple device compared to say a mathematical model of weather
dynamics), but because we recognize what human designers do. So when we
look at designed objects, we are as much identifying the designer -- or at
least the class of beings he belongs to -- as we are making an objective
judgment about whether nature could have concocted this object. A number
of years ago a creationist movie someone told me about apparently claimed
that primitive people could recognize that an airplane -- as opposed to a
bird -- was designed and made by humans. Somehow this was supposed to show
that people can recognize design, but I submit these primitive people were
simply reasoning that nature doesn't make things with polished surfaces,
some of them transparent, and with clean lines not softened by feathers,
and with rotary moving parts like wheels and propellors. They were
identifying the _source_ of design, not the fact of design.
Bill Hamilton
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
William E. Hamilton, Jr, Ph.D. | Staff Research Engineer
Chassis and Vehicle Systems | General Motors R&D Center | Warren, MI
William_E._Hamilton@notes.gmr.com
810 986 1474 (voice) | 810 986 3003 (FAX) | whamilto@mich.com (home email)