Saturday 4 November 2017

Lifeforms Can't Only Appear To Be Designed If They Are


A football can't only appear to be a football, if in every defining way, it is one. So for something to, "only appear to be X but not actually be X" it must in some superficial way of appearance look like X but when we dig into the issue, investigate what it truly is, it can't remain "only an appearance of X" if it is X.

This is called The Law Of The Excluded Middle. Something is either P or the negation of P.

A lifeform can't be both designed and not designed. (Law of non-contradiction) You can't say that something that is defined as designed, "only appears to be".

So for example if you thought you saw a football, it would appear to be one in the sense that it might be the same shape and have the same type of paint on the outside, a similar design. But imagine if you kicked it and broke your foot because it was made out of lead. That would be an "appearance only", because it would appear to be a football but not be one.

In the same way all of the features of intelligent design have to be truly present for something to be more than an appearance of design. When we look at a ferrari car, we check all the parts, we find contingency planning, specified complexity, clear teleology, so it both appears to be designed, and is designed.

So logically we know something can appear to be designed and actually be designed, but once we find out it is designed we can no longer say, "it only appears to be" because this is a contradiction.

Imagine you see in the distance a bridge that APPEARS to be designed. How can we know whether it appears to be designed and is or only appears to be designed but isn't? Well, imagine if we examined the bridge and there were no side-rails so that people couldn't fall over the side. One element of intelligent design is contingency-planning. We know that if it was really designed, the designer would have put rails there. Secondly, the surface is rough, it is not constructed for walking on. Again, this shows there is no real specified complexity. There is no design to the arch either, showing detailed patterns that can't come about by chance. Can you see what is happening yet? We are seeing that our bridge is revealed as something that only appears to be designed but actually isn't because the true elements of intelligent design are missing. Imagine now we see the material the bridge is made from is crumbling away, and the top part is wonky. A designer would use materials built to last, not crumbly, loose material. One element of design is use of the correct materials.

In the same way when we investigate lifeforms, they over-qualify as designed. They're riddled with the defining features of design;

Specified Complexity
Viability
Contingency Planning
Correct Materials
Irreducibly Complexity (to an extent)
Aesthetics And Symmetry
Teleology And Goals
Information
Function
Directed Energy
Energy Efficiency