Quote from Teleologist: TraderNix wrote: The design inference came first. No one goes looking for designers before they determine something is designed. To make this perfectly clear let's move stonehenge to the Moon. If Stonehenge had been discovered on the Moon, archaeologists would still have inferred it was designed even though they had no idea who designed it. The inference to design would be based solely on features of Stonehenge itself. Thus, you do not need to know the designer to infer design. To infer design you need to recognize the characteristics of an artifact.
Right. Exactly the same situation that archaeologists encountered at Stonehenge. They knew it was designed even though they had no idea who designed it! Specifically, that is. They probably put the chances that is was designed by space aliens at less than 0.000001% and by a sophisticated but extinct species of apes at something close to that. Therefore, it was overwhelmingly likely that it was designed by humans. Ah, the characteristics of an artifact? Hmmm... now this becomes a bit problematic. What are the characteristics of an artifact to you? What is the definition of an artifact? This seems a bit like the proverbial foot in the door. I mean, if sentience is, for you, a characteristic of an artifact, then you can put a bow on ID and shove it under the tree. If you want to call something an artifact, you have to prove that it is so. You can't just say, "This has the characteristics of an artifact, so it is an artifact". That wouldn't be very scientific.
Oh, actually no. There are plenty of things in the natural world that, if you didn't know any better, you would swear are artifacts. In fact they are naturally occurring things. Nature has a wondrous symmetry sometimes. I think we've hit a crucial point. Opponents of ID will reject this idea outright. The 'features' of a thing are not enough to say that a thing is the product of intelligent design, not for those who don't have faith that a certain set of features could not be the product of anything other than intelligent design.
The sand castle built on the foundation of ignorance is what you have... An intellectual foundation of ignorance, not chosen randomly of course, but by design...
Welcome to your self induced ignorance by intellectual design, accepting and believing in spontaneous random mutations as some "fact" of life, as unscientific as it is... For those still with their head in sand, randomness is a human concept, not a fact of biological life...
I am not making the argument that all te universes are designed. (they may be but i would tend to doubt it.) What the argument is - is that the new argument about millions of universes is untestable unverifiable bullshit - proposed by the best minds in physics. Why? Why would scientists propose untestable faith based hope into the field? Because they recognize that due to the conclusions one must make after understanding the cosmological constant. There is only one conclusion one can make if we only have one universe. The cosmological constant forces one to conclude the univese is designed. (or you have to speculate that we live in one of an almost infinite amount of univeses.) this is not me making that statement -- it is todays highest level physicists.