What is design?
Behe
It might be interesting to try to establish what Behe means by design or
intelligent design.
"Design is simply the purposeful arrangement of parts."
pp 193 Darwin's Black Box
But this means that we have to detect purpose. Can natural forces lead to a
purposeful arrangement of parts? Of course. If design is merely defined as
above then natural forces can lead to design. So how does one eliminate
natural forces as the designer?
"The problem with the statement -- that anything could have been
purposefully arranged -- is that "we cannot know that something has not
been designed." So then, how can we confidently detect design?"
pp. 194 Ibid
Behe recognizes that anything could be purposefully designed so how does one
confidently detect design? But even if we can detect design confidently, he
still has to deal with the problem that one cannot exclude natural designers
without more evidence.
"For discrete physical systems-if there is not a gradual route to their
production-design is evident when a number of separate , interacting
components are ordered in such a way as to accomplish a function beyond
the individual components. The greater the specificity of the
interacting components required to produce the function, the greater is
our confidence in the conclusion of design."
pp 194 Ibid
So detecting design is not that hard, we just see purpose in something and
detect design. But that is not going to help us detect if something was
naturally designed or not. So how does Behe infers design? By elimination of
gradual routes and there is specificity of the interacting componentes
required to produce the function, then our confidence in detecting design is
greater. But that still does not allow us to eliminate natural pathways,
unless natural pathways are "gradual routes".
So in case of IC we have identified function and specificity, is this enough
to detect or infer design? Behe seems to disagree. There is also the
elimination of gradual routes.
Behe
"We must also consuder the role of the laws of nature. The laws of
nature can organize matter --for example, water flow can build up silt
sufficiently to dam a portion of a river, forcing it to change its
course. The most relevant laws are those of biological reproduction,
mutation and natural selection. If a biological structure can be
explained in terms of those natural laws, then we cannot conclude that
it was designed."
pp 203 Darwins Black Box
So how does Behe infer design for IC systems?
"Throughout this book, however, I have shown why many biochemical
systems cannot be built up by natural selection working on mutations: No
direct, gradual route exists to these irreducibly complex systems, and
the laws of chemistry work strongly against the undirected development
of the biochemical systems that make molecules such as AMP."
So one has to show that no gradual routes exist before one can conclude
that it was designed.
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