Re: Intelligent Design: who designed the designer?

I found that video here:
http://apolojet.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/who-designed-the-designer/

“if you dropped into South Dakota and saw Mt Rushmore, for instance, you might know nothing about its origins, about the engineers and the sculptors that created it, but you could tell it was designed by its effects, by the specific patterns and complexity that it exhibits, this is how we always detect design. We don’t see design by peering into intelligent agents directly, we see the activities of intelligent agency by its effects, and then we infer to an intelligent cause. And so we can tell if something is designed, whether it’s a human artifact, or, in biology, without knowing where the designer himself or herself came from, that’s a secondary question. We can detect the activities of an intelligence whether we have any answer for the secondary question of the origin of the designer.”

The problem with this reasoning is that in every example of known design that Intelligent Design advocates ever give is always something that we conclude design due to direct experience of humans designing it. Thus we actually infer design because we know characteristics about the designer. For instance someone who wasn’t aware that Mt Rushmore existed, but did know that humans build statues, upon seeing Mt Rushmore would conclude, due primarily to the fact that Mt Rushmore is a likeness of 4 human heads, and the fact that the person would know that humans build statues of human likenesses, that Mt Rushmore was designed by a human. Even without knowledge of the fact that humans build statues a likely inference from the fact that the mountain is a likeness of 4 human heads would be that the mountain was shaped by humans.

Essentially Mt Rushmore’s obvious nature as a designed thing comes more from its similarity to not only human heads in general but 4 specific human heads that also happen to share the fact that they were important United States historical figures in common with one another. The complexity is actually a red herring. Anyone who tries to argue that Mt Rushmore is any more complex than any other mountain side is fooling themselves. If anything complexity had to be removed to make the shapes recognizably what they were intended to be. One has to wonder what standard of judgement is being employed here to assert that Mt Rushmore is more complex than, say, Mt St. Helen, or Mauna Kea. Not to mention the fact that not everything we know that humans design is complex. Sometimes the evidence for design is subtle, but unrelated to the appearance of complexity, for instance tool marks are often pointed to when identifying ancient adz’s. Very simple ax like tools from the stone age. In our every day familiarity with the world we live in we would all recognize pencils as something designed, though I don’t know anyone who would consider a pencil complex.

And then the famous watchmaker argument. Yes if a stumbled across a watch on a beach I would immediately infer design. Why? Because I know that humans design watches. Or more generally I know that humans build machines and electronics, which includes watches. If I somehow found myself on a distant planet that I knew that no human before me had ever visited and found it devoid of life but covered in the ruins of buildings and machines I would know that the buildings and machines were designed, why? Not because of the complexity, but because I have experience of intelligent entities designing and building machines and structures. Again I would not be inferring design from the effects so much as my experience a similar type of designer. In that instance humans would be the similar type of designer. We could then use the ruins and the machines to discover more about the differences between us and whatever left them, much the way we do here on earth in the field of archeology.

The problem is that while I have direct experience with known intelligent entities designing certain classes of objects, like machines, circuits, sculptures, works of art which are recognizable as such to me and other humans, etc. I have no direct experience of anything that could design a universe. Thus I wouldn’t be able to infer design or anything about a designer from properties of the universe alone.

Of course the assumption that complexity implies design is flawed and I could and probably will dedicated an entire entry to that point alone. Suffice it here just to say that complexity by itself is insufficient to prove or even imply design. Unless we assume some things about a designer (for instance existence) there’s no way to point to anything not known to have been designed by man and prove design. And to make the proof stick you would naturally have to convince everyone to accept the assumption of the existence of the designer in the first place.