I think point three is required 99% of the time. Don’t ID proponents claim that the fine tuning that lead to us was done intentionally so that we are here? The whole point of their claim is that things are the way they are because they’re supposed to turn out this way. I haven’t heard an IDer claim the universe was created with no plan in mind. Maybe those folks are around and I’m simply not aware of them.
As for there being one or multiple designers, that’s too fine a distinction for my basic question. Feel free to make it plural. Using the engineer analogy, it doesn’t matter whether it’s one or more engineers designing/creating something, the engineers(s) will know everything about the ‘something’. But again, how many IDers are willing to give credit to a group of designers? If they do, they will be admitting to there being multiple deities, and that’s a no-no.
I posted on terminology in the GENERAL DISCUSSION forum. Would appreciate your thoughts.
@3point14rat
I think point three is required 99% of the time.
I would disagree with that wholeheartedly. That's a pure assumption based simply on our inability to conceive the amount of knowledge and power it would take to do something so complex. In fact, there is more than one assumption made in point 3. It was done on purpose and the thing created is as it was intended to be are two of them (which you brought up, I see). But the fine tuning argument is so deeply flawed it's not even worth considering. Its essence breaks down to little more than this idiotic statement. "Assuming that the current state of the universe and our existence is as intended, the fact that we are here today shows that the universe was fine tuned to get this result, thus proving that the current state of the universe and our existence is as intended." The premise and conclusion of the argument are identical.
And the second point is even more ludicrous. It assumes even more. It assumes that creating a universe is difficult. Maybe it’s not difficult at all “outside” our universe. Again, we don’t know the rules there. Maybe farting creates a universe. Or maybe, to create a really good universe with lots of stuff in it requires a really good shart instead. Maybe imagining a universe creates it without any effort, perhaps without even knowledge of its creation. This is unknowable, so it’s certainly un-claimable. Unless you can define the nature of the place this deity is from and it’s rules then you cannot make any of these assumptions about it.
If you really lay every point of the argument bare it’s all just meaningless nonsense because every single claim is based on multiple assumptions made from what we know about our universe, the creation, to extrapolate the nature of the creator. But such an extrapolation is impossible because the creator would not be bound to any of the rules we know or conform to any of the qualities we have seen unless those qualities were purposely planted hear by that creator to mimic his own qualities. But even that is just a wild assumption. To even begin to define the nature of something “outside our universe” you first have to ask yourself, “What do I know about outside our universe?” The answer is quite simply “Absolutely nothing”. We have to throw out all of the rules of the universe, all of our observations within our universe, everything we know about everything because NONE of it applies anywhere but our universe. We are left with just a single bit of knowledge; the universe exists. That is not enough information to even say there was a creator, much less define its properties.
It argues that the banana was clearly designed for humans to eat,
Actually bananas really and truly were designed specifically for humans to eat - it's simply that it was humans doing all the genetic tinkering to get there. ;-)
Okay I’m just repeating what Mriana said,
Funny enough, Ray Comfort didn’t realize bananas have been GMO for a long time. It was one of the first things we genetically manipulated. It didn’t start out in the shape it is. Humans made it like that. Yeah, I had to look it up when I first heard about it.
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The irreducible complexity keeps coming, but if they can’t provide any actually legitimate examples, shouldn’t that be challengeable?
All of ID is nothing more than an attempt to refute evolution. It doesn’t actually say anything other than, “Nuh uh!”