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Fri 26 Oct, 2012 12:53 pm
A God-given, intelligent design has the same form as a randomly-given, Dawkinian designoid. Intelligent design is not the construction of an object through a crude physical or quasi-physical manipulation of matter, but the construction of the form - the identificatory framework - that allows objects to be identified. This is the same form, and a hidden premiss, that Dawkins fails to acknowledge in his argument for the designoid or mere appearance of a designed life-form.
The tables are turned. Now it appears that it is the creationist who is, after all, promoting the hegemony of a physical reality found at the heart of, and requiring brute intervention by, a displaced God, and Dawkins who is, after all, promoting the hegemony of a non-random supernature found at the heart of, and making sense of, chaotic physical reality. We can say more on this using the example of Dawkins' fish's eye:
To notice a fish's eye we must apply the form of a fish's eye upon the flux of objects that greets us in physical reality, for a fish's eye does not identify itself. Objects in nature do not, unlike cartoons, have outlines drawn around them. Physical objects, like our fish's eye, require identifying conditions, such as a physical template, or a cultural practice, or a personal understanding, to draw the physical limits upon the physical world so that objects may be seen, may have physical limits proper to objects, may arise. For example, without the framework (or, after Wittgenstein, form of life) or concept of entertainment we would not be able to distinguish a TV from the carpet it stood on.
The argument for and against intelligent design misses its target. Both Dawkins and the creationists unknowingly assume an identifying framework for objects - objects arise not through their own existence but through the means of their identification. It is that framework that needs to be designed or created. It is not itself a physical object, it is the means for identifying objects.
Sadly, this meeting of minds between Dawkins and the creationists is missed by both parties. Both parties may insist, for the confusion of their respective positions can allow it, that the fish's eye identifies itself and manifests itself as an eye. This is animism - the idea that objects take on characteristics that are normally given only to living things, life. Animism is one belief in which they are united, for their confusion allows it.
Stepping back from the charge of conspiratorial animism we can simply address the confusion over their ontological premises. The creationists regard the fish's eye as a design itself, and the Dawkinians regard it as a random structure. Here, both are wrong:
1) The creationists are wrong because they cannot assert that the fish's eye is itself a design - we do not have a faculty of being able to see how something is in itself. I would also make the observation that Dawkins can only "suggest" the creationists are wrong, hinting that the eye is, instead, a random structure.
2) Dawkins is wrong because he needs a design template or condition to identify a fish's eye. This makes a designoid more than mere empty appearance - the designoid's "apparant" design is used to identify a real, particular, random structure
@JohnJones,
Quote: and Dawkins who is, after all, promoting the hegemony of a non-random supernature found at the heart of, and making sense of, chaotic physical reality. We can say more on this using the example of Dawkins' fish's eye:
Im not a fan of DAwkins and even I understand the concept that a single genetic step predetermines the limits of the next steps. Its not supernaturl at all. Its simple limit theory.
@JohnJones,
Simplistically....
You've not worked out that "identification" and "making sense"equate to "human functionality", so you are begging the question of "Man created in God's image" which Dawkins turns on its head.
@JohnJones,
There is a "John Ivor Jones Anti-Philosophy Blog". The inital post is a reprint from that blog:
http://johnivorjones.blogspot.com/2011/08/intelligent-design-and-dawkins.html
@wandeljw,
i prefer jim jones myself
@JohnJones,
I thought he was great in Hogan's Heroes.
@JohnJones,
Quote:... but the construction of the form - the identificatory framework - that allows objects to be identified. ... To notice a fish's eye we must apply the form of a fish's eye upon the flux of objects that greets us in physical reality, for a fish's eye does not identify itself. Objects in nature do not, unlike cartoons, have outlines drawn around them. Physical objects, like our fish's eye, require identifying conditions, such as a physical template, or a cultural practice, or a personal understanding, to draw the physical limits upon the physical world so that objects may be seen, may have physical limits proper to objects, may arise.
I admire the Kantian-like undercurrent to your nomenclature, but it's really no problem if sticking to the former's original scheme. The "physical world", as a product of the a priori forms of perception and understanding that regulate experience and organize the influences of things by themselves[2], thus lends itself to an empirical realism concerning these objects that commonsense and occasionally science identify[1]. Phenomenal bodies may be representations of "things", but the phenomenal world does not correspond to a noumenal world -- it is not a copy or interpretation, it exists for the first time as the spatial relations and governed behavior of outer sense. As such an offspring of intuitions and concepts, it does actively play a role in showing the fish's eye to be a fish's eye.
It is all these deviating post-Kantian idealists, positivist phenomenalists, and continentalists that followed in later decades, who couldn't abide Kant's things in themselves while also mistakenly believing the latter to be Kant's "external world", that are stuck with sorting-out just what they believe some areas of science are up to. Whether it is merely investigating more of the conditioned realm or literally beginning to intrude upon what they dismissed long ago. Kant himself safely tucked all future discoveries into the observable / testable reality that sensibility and understanding deliver[3].
Theoretical reason, and all the specific and diverse ventures that might be contended as subsumed under it, was also finally aimed by Kant at its proper target: The natural or empirical environment. Whereas practical reason / philosophy acquires its rightful focus on the unconditioned or noumenal, the merely argued territory for human freedom / autonomy.
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[1] Immanuel Kant:
The transcendental idealist, on the contrary, may well be an empirical realist or, as he is called, a[n epistemological] dualist; he may admit the existence of matter, without taking a step beyond mere self-consciousness, or admitting more than the certainty of representations within me [us] ... For as he considers matter, and even its internal possibility, as a phenomenon only, which, if separated from our sensibility, is nothing, matter with him is only a class of representations (intuition) which are called external, not as if they referred to objects external by themselves [unconditioned], but because they refer perceptions to space, in which everything is outside everything else, while space itself is inside us [material phenomena are distinguished / made distinct from each other by their spatial separation in outer appearances].
We have declared ourselves from the very beginning in favour of this transcendental [critical] idealism. In our system, therefore, we need not hesitate to admit the existence of matter on the testimony of mere self-consciousness, and to consider it as established by it (i.e. the [interpersonal] testimony), in the same manner as the existence of myself, as a thinking being. I am conscious of my representations, and hence they exist as well as I myself, who has these representations. External objects, however (bodies), are phenomena only, therefore nothing but a class of my [our] representations, the objects of which are something by means of these representations only, and apart from them nothing. External things, therefore, exist by the same right as I myself, both on the immediate testimony of my self-consciousness, with this difference only, that the representation of myself, as a thinking subject, is referred to the internal sense only [introspective half of experience], while the representations which indicate extended beings are referred to the external sense also [extrospective half of experience]. With reference to the reality of external objects, I need as little trust to inference, as with reference to the reality of the object of my internal sense (my thoughts), both being nothing but representations, the immediate perception (consciousness) of which is at the same time a sufficient proof of their reality.
The transcendental idealist is, therefore, an empirical realist, and allows to matter, as a phenomenon, a reality which need not be inferred, but may be immediately perceived. The transcendental realism, on the contrary, is necessarily left in doubt, and obliged to give way to empirical idealism [Cartesian skepticism], because it considers the objects of the external senses as something different from the senses themselves, taking mere phenomena as independent beings, existing [in the metempirical sense] outside us. And while with the very best consciousness of our representation of these things, it is far from certain that, if a representation exists, its corresponding object must exist also, it is clear that in our system external things, that is, matter in all its shapes and changes, are nothing but mere phenomena, that is, representations within us, of the reality of which we are immediately conscious.
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[2] Immanuel Kant:
For only by means of these fundamental concepts can appearances belong to knowledge or even to our consciousness, and so to ourselves. Thus the order and regularity in the appearances, which we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce.
[...] First: How is nature at all possible in the material sense, by intuition, considered as the totality of appearances; how are space, time, and that which fills both -- the object of sensation, in general possible? The answer is: By means of the constitution of our Sensibility, according to which it is specifically affected by objects, which are in themselves unknown to it, and totally distinct from those phenomena.
[...] Secondly: How is nature possible in the formal sense, as the totality of the rules, under which all phenomena must come, in order to be thought as connected in experience? The answer must be this: it is only possible by means of the constitution of our Understanding, according to which all the above representations of the sensibility are necessarily referred to a consciousness, and by which the peculiar way in which we think (viz., by rules), and hence experience also, are possible, but must be clearly distinguished from an insight into the objects in themselves.
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[3] Immanuel Kant:
The enlarging of our views in mathematics, and the possibility of new discoveries, are infinite; and the same is the case with the discovery of new properties of nature, of new powers and laws, by continued experience and its rational combination. [...] Natural science will never reveal to us [...things in themselves...], which though not appearance, yet can serve as the ultimate ground of explaining appearance. Nor does that science require this for its physical explanations. Nay even if such grounds should be offered from other sources (for instance, the influence of immaterial beings), they must be rejected and not used in the progress of its explanations. For these explanations must only be grounded upon that which as an object of sense can belong to experience, and be brought into connection with our actual perceptions and empirical laws.
@G H,
Kant and Wittgenstein exercise a confusion that need not muddle the point I am making.
Against Dawkins and the creationists I am saying that the material world does not, cannot, present objects (such as life-forms) to us, because there is no material property that tells us where one object starts and another begins. This is self-evident even to the most hardened of atheists. A form does that. And Dawkins and the materialists forget the fact that form needs to be created. THAT is the the intelligence of design.
The thing in itself of Kant isn't a hidden object from recent Kantian analyses. It's simply the name we put to an object when we deny the identifying conditions of an object. You see, objects are not items of existence, they are items of identification.
@farmerman,
You said,
"Im not a fan of DAwkins and even I understand the concept that a single genetic step predetermines the limits of the next steps. Its not supernaturl at all. Its simple limit theory."
But how do you determine which object is "next"? and which is a "genetic step"? You are already applying non-material templates of function and outcome, and these aren't material properties. Where did these templates come from?
You have already fallen into animism if you think that chemicals can themselves inform us which of them are genetic, which are not, and which is a "next" step.
Nature does not have any convenient outlining mechanism that tells us where an object, any object, starts and ends. We need forms to do that.
@fresco,
you said,
"Simplistically....
You've not worked out that "identification" and "making sense"equate to "human functionality", so you are begging the question of "Man created in God's image" which Dawkins turns on its head."
Man created in Gods image simply means that we have the power to impose forms on random nature. Even Dawkins says that there are appearances or forms that we create - designoids. But he never tackles the question of where the forms come from, choosing instead to argue against the much stupider idea of where the mechanic comes from.
Dawkins is an animist. He believes that forms are mechanical creations.
Dawkins is also a disgruntled theist. A theist because he believes that nature has forms or designs, and disgruntled because he thinks they are illusory or not significant. But forms are not mechanical in any case.
Dawkins need not be disgruntled. I believe in everything Dawkins says. But he simply hasn't followed through on his own position. He muddles forms with mechanisms, selfishness with sin, survival with reincarnation. The list goes on.
@JohnJones,
we can only evaluate in retrospect. The evidence is quite clear. The series of evolutionary steps can easily seen to limit the next steps/hen you have fur, you aint gonna evolve scales . If you "Believe" otherwise, then you are practicing superstition.
Belief is where one concludes without any available evidence, suprstition is where evidence is available and one concludes to the contrary
Quote: You have already fallen into animism if you think that chemicals can themselves inform us which of them are genetic, which are not, and which is a "next" step.
Ive not leaned on the chemicals at all. I "believe" that genes are merely the "Bookkeeprs " of evolution.
@farmerman,
no one ever accused Wittgenstein or Kant of thinking in the mode of science.
Do you have any famiiarity with Dawkins work at all? How about any researchin evolutionary theory,
Youseem to be a critic of an individual for something that he patently IS NOT
@JohnJones,
******* meta physicists.
Quote:Dawkins and the materialists forget the fact that form needs to be created.
All I would like to know is why the same "misrepresentation of physical forms" logic is not applied to the concept of creation itself? "Creation" is a manufactured concept, one which helps us understand something the human mind is inherently incapable of understanding. Arguing ad absurdum benefits no one.
@ZarathustraReborn,
quite true. We had to create "Creation"
I believe in a progressive manifestation of focused covalent bonding, and surface chemistry bonds coupled with progressive solutions to an energy balance
what is absurd is not ur ways but all u
how to reduce the absurdity of creation wills u invent creatin creations that u must invent how u achieve to force forms being created steady
as if wrong could b denied by being wrong and callin that yea u r conscious awaken enlightened by god
u r such stupid from surely what evil hate logics bc its only issue is to kill the truth so it could stop pretendin through truth objective facts and act to himself as if it is all him, while all logics are bc of truth so it must so much irritate u when u see that true logics exist, that is why surely u mean to invent more living creations wills creatin creations for creations to b definitely real
u will finally reach ur unsanity will, so creatin creations would lead u to stay u alone the liar, meaning to create that u r there by any regular sign
which is the reality with truth ways from the start by always stayin free of absolute objective superiority recognitions anyhows
and a more acurate conception of those pictures of now, how at the end what is left is smthg true alone bc no other is true to recognize it so smthg true clearly havin no rights at all, and everything being a reality of infinite numbers of liars individually that objective truth force it to stay one evil life
@tenderfoot,
even if he tried to make sense he doesnt have any englih language skills . So he just sounds like he babbles on.
@farmerman,
babble urself farmer that confuse itself with animals to possess for any sense of livin pretense being god, if any powerful figure show being **** u would run to imitate what could mean **** life
what babble is u who cant ever say a word, while who can say a letter watch out if any sentence is meant
piece of dirty moron head
@imans,
the more you try to write, the more idiotic you sound.
AND THIS COMING FROM THE MASTER OF THE TYPO.
Seriously, you should go farther in your ESL classes before you try to communicate with native English speakers., theyll just keep making fun of you until your head eplodes.
I see that youre very close to getting violent now, thats a bad sign.
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