Re: If ID were true, what would that tell us about the designer's

hersheyh wrote:

Some time back, a creationist by the name of Pitman made the following
claim:

"The argument of nested hierarchy as evidence for the common descent-
only hypothesis is based entirely on the notion that "No intelligent
designer would have done it that way."

[snip most of post]

The choice of whether
there is or isn't a 'designer' is a matter of personal faith. Whether
you think that designer worked through evolution or by magical poofing
some 6000 years ago depends upon whether or not you think the designer
is honest or is trying to deceive us.

You have a choice of creationist replies:

1) Who's to say there are functional reasons for everything that you
just aren't clever enough to see? (Note, however, that this does nothing
to explain why functional similarities should be organized into a nested
hierarchy, and why it should be the same nested hierarchy for different
features of the genome.)

2) Who are you to question why God does anything? He has some reason we
don't understand for making a nested hierarchy. But it's not for
deception, 'cause it just isn't, so there.

3) God wants us to believe in him through faith, not evidence. Therefore
he has produced false evidence to test those with insufficient faith, so
that they end up in eternal torment for the sin of paying attention to
their own lyin' eyes rather than His Word.

I believe Sean has concentrated on 1 and 2, and has never mentioned 3.
But others have.

By the way, modern ID theory (snicker) stands Bishop Paley on his head
in one way: natural theology was supposed to help us infer the
attributes of God by observing His creation. But IDers deny that we can
learn anything about the Designer other than the mere fact of its existence.

And one more thing: let's not confuse ID with anti-evolutionism. I know
that Sean does, and that several IDers do also. But one can always point
to Michael Behe as an IDer who fully accepts most of evolutionary
theory, including all of common descent. What you're really critiquing
here is separate origin of species, and there are in fact both ID and
non-ID versions of this. So we have four possible positions, all of
which are taken by some group of people: ID + common descent, no ID +
common decent, ID + no common descent, and no ID + no common descent.

.

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