Re: A Summertime Philosophical Pondering

From: Georgie Hinklemyer <samoolives_at_yahoo.com_at_hypermail.org>
Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2005 05:17:23 -0000

Dean can't be bothered responding to such trivialities. However, the
logical question you posed is intriguing.

How can you tell when something has been artifically vs "naturally"
created?

I would suggest those beings from another planet compare the lifeforms
they find. They may find an interesting pattern. For example, take
something that exists today: genetically modified corn. Biologists
have spliced bacteria genes into the corn to make them pest-resistant.
 Bacteria which do not exist in any other "natural" corn today. This
new code may actually allow the "artificial" corn to outlive the
"natural" one. Beings from another planet will see there is only one
corn, the GM version. And they may even find different mutations of
that GM corn. However, there will be a plethora of other plant life
(I would HOPE!) which does NOT have a bacterial genetic coding.
Therefore the beings might assume something happened to create this
"difference." Can they determine it was caused by human design, by
other extraterrestrials bringing something with them and leaving it
behind, or by natural genetic mutation? That is something I don't
know. But I'm working on it!

(Ozzy says, "They consult their G. W. B. Blessed 'Exterterstial' Bible
and if'n it ain't in there...by Gumbo, it's artificial!!")

--G.H.




--- In OliveStarlightOrchestra_at_yahoogroups.com, "7visions"
<7visions_at_p...> wrote:
>
>
> 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 the 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 22:17:46

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