Humans made the straight lines. God made the curvy lines.While this advice may be good for differentiating man-made and non-man-made features on a map, it assumes everything was designed by either humans or a god. What if we discover that something was developed through purely natural processes? It might change the advice to this: "Humans made the straight lines. Everything else is yet to be determined." While this is a better statement, it doesn't role off the tongue like "God made the curvy lines."
A recent commenter asked this question, which I believe deserves its own post:
What would it take to convince you that something was intelligently made? What is your standard to judge between what is natural and what is intelligent? If you do not have a standard to judge, then how do you eliminate intelligence as an explanation?Let us consider an Object A. Object A fits in my hand, looks like a duck and it appears to be made out of wood. I picked it up at the county fair for $5. A man with a long beard and a knife tells me, "I whittled that myself." I don't have a reason to doubt the man, so I believe him. I could be truly skeptical and ask the man to carve another wooden duck in my presence. That would certainly convince me that it was intelligently made.
Ray Comfort once held a copy of the Mona Lisa on national television and said that a painting must have a painter. I guess this is true if your definition of "painting" requires a painter. Nobody alive today had any contact with Leonardo da Vinci, but it could be shown that the Mona Lisa really was a da Vinci painting by comparing it to other works by da Vinci. Sometimes it's not as simple. Jackson Pollock dipped a paint brush into a can of paint and flung it at a canvas repeatedly. If I were to knock a paint can full of brushes off of a table and onto a canvas and through happenstance created an identical image to that of a Jackson Pollock painting, I still just created a mess. Two identical images were made, but one was deliberate work of art and the other was an accident. Determining whether a painting was intelligently made should not be limited to the narrow examination of a single painting, for we might deceive ourselves. (Let us not confuse our own physiology as products of an accident. We are products of evolution, which is not an accidental process.)
William Paley described a hypothetical event where he was crossing a field and spotted a rock. The rock was unimpressive, so he quickly moved on. But then he spots a watch. A watch is a complex device used for precision timekeeping, it has a clear purpose, and thus it must have a watchmaker. Our world is filled with complex organisms, each with their own subsystems, and those subsystems have outlined purposes. By using the same reasoning, we must all be intelligently designed. We are left to wonder why Paley failed to see the evidence for design or purpose when examining the rock.
The watchmaker analogy is still alive today in the form of the Intelligent Design movement. In part 5 of the popular 12 part series on Christian epistemology, "The Truth Project", Dr. Del Tackett teaches that Paley's watchmaker analogy is a convincing alternative to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Dr. Tackett failed to notice that it even convinced Charles Darwin at one point. Darwin once remarked that this was the best argument available for the existence of God, but that was before he wrote "On the Origins of Species."
But why would Darwin eliminate intelligence as an explanation for the origins of species? Simple: he conceived an alternative idea, tested it, and it worked. His hypothesis was that organisms slowly change across generations, and these generational changes eventually give rise to new species. He tested his hypothesis repeatedly using plants and animals, then he refined this new theory till it could be defended in the public eye. Darwin's idea was not a thought experiment such as Paley's watchmaker analogy; it was theory that had conclusive supporting evidence. Darwin ruled out intelligence through experimentation.
Issac Newton was one of the greatest thinkers to ever exist, yet he still advocated Intelligent Design. Let us be reminded that Newton invented calculus because existing mathematics failed him when trying to understand gravity. Newton saw only natural forces at work when trying to explain the speed at which objects fall to the ground, but then he saw the God of the universe when trying to explain the revolution of planets around the Sun. The only way the planets could orbit was through the power of God. When a different scientist, Pierre-Simon Laplace, created the necessary mathematical models to explain the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter, he was asked why there was no mention of God in any of his explanation. His reply: "I have no need of that hypothesis." Laplace ruled out intelligence through experimentation.
Science works through the "law of parsimony", which is often called "Occam's Razor". Among two or more plausible explanations, the simplest explanation is usually right. In the context of the original question, this is a debate between a natural explanation and supernatural explanation. Natural explanations can be tested and repeated independently and we can be intensely critical of the procedures and results. It is much harder (some say impossible) to examine the supernatural with a critical eye, which is why all supernatural arguments can safely be ignored. Carl Sagan says that we should give supernatural explanations the Scottish verdict of "not proven".
My standard for ruling out intelligence is through experimentation. I advise you, the reader, to accept the natural explanations when there is supporting evidence and withhold judgment when there is not. This skeptical outlook is partly the reason why I am an atheist. Thank you for your question.
Part of this post was derived from a talk given by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
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