A Summertime Philosophical Pondering

From: 7visions <7visions_at_prodigy.net_at_hypermail.org>
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2005 22:09:47 -0700

The following is not mine: The amazing thing is that this came off of a Futurist Website which has a plurality of rationalistic adherents, and quite a few hard core athiests. ( I am especially thinking of your response, Dean :)

Lenny



CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING HYPOTHETICAL: Suppose that advances in biotechnology soon allow scientists to design thousands of new species of animals, plants, bacteria, etc. Some of these species are modifications of existing species, and some are completely artificial creations that are made to look and function like normal organisms. Suppose then that humanity itself becomes extinct in, say, a hundred years (e.g., from a nuclear war, a plague, an asteroid strike, or whatever), but that many other species survive, including many of the human-created life forms. These species continue to evolve on their own through natural selection, as all species do. Over time, records of which life forms humans had created eventually disappear through deterioration. Imagine, then, that in a million years, intelligent beings from another planet arrive on earth and start investigating our biosphere. Here's the question: In the absence of any records from human beings, would the aliens be able to determine which life forms were th
e result of human design and which weren't? How? This isn't just an empirical question, since it relates to the question of the falsifiability and verifiability of both intelligent design and naturalistic theories of the origin of life on earth.

This is NOT a question about whether "creation science" is a plausible biological theory, or whether we should teach it in public schools, or whether the Bible allegedly tells us how life (or human life) came to be on earth. Rather, this is the philosophical question of whether we can observe any given pattern found in nature and know whether it came about by the interplay of natural processes alone, or whether it came about by the actions of an intelligent creature in concert with natural processes. This "pattern found in nature" could be, for example, pocket watches, or it could be the structure of living organisms or species that have been evolving for a long time.

Without communication from a designer (if there was one), how can we determine if an intelligence was or was not behind some or all of nature's creations? Just because we don't know how some biological characteristic or creature evolved does not entail that it was designed. On the other hand, just because someone can provide a plausible naturalistic account of how some biological characteristic or organism could have evolved doesn't entail that that is the way it actually happened. So, how can we tell if some or all life on earth was or was not designed in the distant past, either by some kind of Deity or by smart space aliens, and then left to evolve in the usual way?
-----------------------------------------------------------


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Received on 2005-07-11 22:05:21