One of the characteristics of intelligent design is that the designed object has a goal which makes some sort of sense to the designer. We find a car to be intelligently designed because we think that its primary purpose is (certain kinds of) transportation. This transportation in turn has a purpose, and so on; there is a very broad network of purposes. Furthermore, each part of the car (e.g., a tire) is intelligently designed and hence has a purpose. If the universe is intelligently designed, then each part of it should have a purpose for which it is well-suited. But there might be a problem here: it seems that we could simply observe what each part of the universe does, and declare that to be its purpose. Thus, herbivores would be designed to eat plants, black holes would be designed to create accretion disks, specks of dust would be designed to gravitationally attract distant galaxies, and so on. In fact, it would be impossible to conceive of a universe that *wasnt* intelligently designed, if this were all that was required. Even a universe created by chance would appear to be intelligently designed. But surely there is something wrong with that! Evidently, more is required as evidence for intelligent design than some assignment of purposes that makes each component, as well as the whole, suited for its purpose. What is that extra something? I suspect that, in order to have good evidence for intelligent design of an entity X, we need some evidence for the design and construction of X by some intelligent being Y, independent of Xs looking designed. For example, I think cars are intelligently designed because I have reason (independently of their looking designed) to suppose that intelligent beings, namely humans, make them with certain ends in view. I could get such evidence by going to car factories, or by reading technical literature about car design and manufacture, or histories of manufacture in the 20th Century. I think that Mount Rushmore is intelligently designed, not only because it is unlikely that natural forces would create a mountain shaped like four human faces, but because my History teachers told me that it was designed by a sculptor. It is true that even if I had not been told this, upon seeing it I would be inclined to suppose that it had been intelligently designed, but that is because I know of other sculptures, or at least that humans exist and are the kinds of beings that might take it into their heads to sculpt something. There used to be, in New Hampshire, a geological feature called The Old Man of the Mountain, which, seen from a certain angle, had the appearance of a profile of an old man. Yet no one, as far as I know, ever claimed that it had been intelligently designed as such.
Posted on: Wed, 28 May 2014 23:12:06 +0000
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