Ok, this will have to be my last post in this exchange, so I'm making it long enough for you to get your money's worth.... ;-)
Suppose you travel back in time, and see what metals are on or near the surface of the planet. You take careful note. Then you jump forward in time, and you see the kind of aluminum that humans use today. You note the difference.
You go back in time again, and you see no elephants, nor anything that even remotely resembles an elephant. Then you go forward in time again, and you see elephants. Big difference!
In the first case, you attribute the change to intelligent design, but not in the latter.
Yet if you actually looked at humans manufacturing aluminum, what you would see is natural bodies interacting with other natural objects in the physical environment, resulting in the finished aluminum product. Nothing supernatural about aluminum manufacture!
And that's what you would see if you were to observe the emergence of elephants from some prior living organisms. Again, you'd be observing a set of natural physical processes.
But in the aluminum case, you say "This substance was intelligently designed." Not in the elephant case. But in both cases, what you would have observed is, in essence, a set of material bodies interacting with their physical environments in accordance with the laws of nature. So, again, the question is: what is it that licenses the design inference in the aluminum case but not in the elephant case?
You say, well, the aluminum we observe now was not observed prior to some point of time in the past. But we could say that of elephants too. At one time, there weren't any. And now there are. A time-traveler could have
truly said during a visit to the past, "Elephants are not found in nature (at present)". And an observer could truly say today that aluminum we use
is found in nature because,
from the point of view of an objective physical observation of nature, humans manufacturing things like aluminum, or Ford autombiles
is just as natural a process as any other. (Let's assume that the observer is an alien from another solar system. The alien sees birds making nests, monkeys peeling bananas, humans manufacturing aluminum, etc).
Now, you bring up another argument to do with maladaptive mutations to advance the claim that the biology we have doesn't appear to be very intelligently designed, if it's designed at all. Well, I find that an astonishing thing to say.
In order to improve on the biology, you'd have to change the basic underlying chemistry and physics. And I suggest that there is no very obviously mathematically coherent alternative chemistry and physics that would produce us with a better overall biological 'design'. When one is criticizing a design, you have to show that a superior design is available and feasible, etc. But nobody has yet figured out how life was created in the first place, let alone how complex life-forms could function without genes, and without mutations. There are guesses regarding abiogenesis, but that's all.
Now you're confidently saying that a truly intelligent designer could have not only produced life, but do it with better ultimate consequences than those we observe. Well, for that claim to have adequate rational foundation, you'd have to
specify how the alternative physics/chemistry/biology would work, in all detail and complexity, and calculating all benefits and harms; and then compare the total biological result to the actual biology we observe. Not an easy task, and not one that anyone has really carried out. The calculational difficulties would be immense.
However, let me just focus on a couple of more specific points regarding this one issue of harmful mutations. If we look at a ruined castle, we don't infer that it was badly designed straight off the bat. Castles interact with the environment. But even a very well designed castle might become a ruin under certain environmental circumstances. The environment includes a lot of stuff, including inter-stellar stuff produced by stars. Life needs stars, because stars are needed to create a rich array of elements, etc. But stars also give off harmful radiation and matter, some of which may cause mutations. So, to get rid of the mutations without getting rid of the stars (and hence getting rid of life itself) is actually a bit tricky.
What an intelligent designer would do is really quite hard to say from our vantage point, involving, as it does, all kinds of complex modal reasoning. Moreover, the intelligent designer has to look at the whole picture, not just one piece of the puzzle.
Secondly, let's suppose that some mutations that appear non-adaptive are the result of events governed by the laws of quantum mechanics.
Would an intelligent designer wishing to create intelligent physical life, capable of doing science,
nonetheless design and make a universe that is quantum-mechanical? There are reasons to think so:
In addition to the four factors listed above, the inflationary multiverse generator can only produce life-sustaining universes because the right background laws are in place. Specifically, the background laws must be such as to allow the conversion of the mass-energy into material forms that allow for the sort of stable complexity needed for life. For example,without the principle of quantization, all electrons would be sucked into the atomic nuclei and hence atoms would be impossible; without the Pauli-exclusion principle, electrons would occupy the lowest atomic orbit and hence complex and varied atoms would be impossible; without a universally attractive force between all masses, such as gravity, matter would not be able to form sufficiently large material bodies (such as planets) for complex, highly intelligent life to develop or for long-lived stable energy sources such as stars to exist. (an excerpt from
this fascinating piece).
So the apparent non-adaptiveness of certain biological phenomena may be the result of things like stars and quantum mechanics, without which there'd be no life at all. It appears that life needs to be based on quantum mechanical physics and the formation of stars.
In short,
all design involves problems, which are logically inherent in finitude and in the deep underlying mathematical rules and properties of material reality. Intelligent designers solve them, incorporating the solution into the design.
A couple of recent books I bought are
Deep Down Things: The Breathtaking Beauty Of Particle Physics, by Bruce A. Schumm
and
Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe, by Leon M. Lederman
It is not clear that the actual particle physics which is responsible for mutations is dispensable in favor of something better, without losing many biological benefits, including the very possibility of life itself.
There have been any number of statements by any number of physicists who have noted that the precise laws and constants governing the physics of this universe are such that even very small changes to them would have rendered the universe uninhabitable. So I am not convinced that you know of a genuinely possible superior design that a truly intelligent designer would have selected in preference to the 'design' we actually observe.
Is there a published article in a refereed scientific journal describing the
complete alternative physics that would generate living physical beings at least as smart as humans are, but with less natural harm overall for those beings than humans are subject to, complete with all the relevant, independently checked and verified calculational details?
If the harmful mutations you mention are the result of the actual physics governing the universe (which I'm presuming they are), then improving upon the design might be much tougher than it may at first appear.
But returning to the main issue we're discussing, here's a summary of my view. I do not consider myself an adherent of ID. I regard it as akin to a philosophical argument, not a competing theory within biological science. But I do think that in its most sophisticated versions, ID is asking the right kinds of questions. In particular, it is questioning the ability of science to state categorically that there's no evidence of design in nature, because there are in fact no clearly established general scientific criteria for something being or not being designed.
Let's say we create self-replicating robots. Let's say we die out, and the robots take over the planet, building marvellous cities, etc. Let's say the robot race is visited by aliens. Would the aliens be making an error of reasoning if they posited that the robot race had been intelligently designed? We talk about Artificial Intelligence as being a respectable scientific notion. But suppose we are examples of it ourselves? (For a very stimulating essay on this, based on Stanley Kubrick's famous movie "2001: A Space Odyssey", go
here.
If science is or aims to be truly a complete theory of reality, then there will be a good science concerning intelligence, and a good science concerning design. I think we're still a long way from that. But I think those sciences are possible. And if they are possible, they will yield evidential criteria regarding the presence and detection of intelligence and of design.
So perhaps the only reason ID isn't well established is because the correct science regarding intelligence and design generally isn't well established yet.
The argument is really very simple, and I'll try to keep it that way.
1. We are familiar with the concepts of intelligence and design. We also generally take them to describe certain things in reality (such as people, and computers).
2. If science aims to investigate the whole of reality, then there ought to be a general science of intelligence and a general science of design, since we take those things to be real. Part of those sciences will explicate the notions of 'evidence of intelligence' and 'evidence of design'. There will be some level of material complexity and functional performance that will generally count as evidence of intelligence and count as evidence of design.
3. When those sciences give well-established, scientific criteria for intelligence and design (it's not clear that they are anywhere near being mature enough sciences to have done so yet), then we can ask the question of whether the biological data furnish us with types of evidence that meet those criteria.
4. In the meantime, it is premature for either IDers or Darwinians to say that there definitely is, or that there definitely is not, evidence of intelligent design in the biological data. We typically think that the existence of computers and computer code indicate intelligence and design. We need to make that inference more precise in order to be able to make, or rule out, a similar inference regarding biological data.
5. It is not a good objection to say that we 'know' that computers and computer code are intelligently designed, because we can see people at work doing the designing, and that this is why those cases are different from the evolution of species case; and that's because we
don't physically observe anyone's intelligent consciousness. What we literally see when we look at a computer scientist at work is complicated material bodies in various states of mathematically intelligible motion. That's also what we see when we observe any life form or investigate its history. In other words, the cases of intelligent design that we 'know' about are no different in terms of physical observation from the cases in biology, except for the precise form and kinds of complexity involved. So, if science is meant to explain and investigate everything, there must be a scientific way of making precise what types of material motions and complexity of structure and function license an inference to intelligent design, and what types do not.
6. The necessary degree of precision has not yet been established. ID is essentially asking that scientific criteria of intelligence and design be established, and then used to evaluate the biological data we have to see if those data license an inference to intelligent design.
ON EDIT: Guess what! An email advert for
this book just popped into my inbox. Sounds interesting!