Reply #116: Does the stuff in museums come with labels

[Stunster]

saying "Not Intelligently Designed"?

How do we know if something is intelligently designed or not? In general, and scientifically?

That's the key question. You see a guy making a watch, and you say, "He intelligently designed the watch". What scientific observation did you make to come to that conclusion? What type of empirical evidence did you rely on? How do you know that it didn't just happen by nature, with atoms moving here, there, and everywhere, and thus resulting in the watch?

Unless you answer that question correctly, there's no scientific basis for denying or affirming that the watch was intelligently designed.

Now you look at genes, and you see them moving this way and that, and then producing a tiger. And you conclude the tiger was not intelligently designed. What scientific observation did you make to come to that conclusion. "Oh, I don't need to posit any intelligent design involved in the genes-to-tiger process". Ok, then why do you need to posit any intelligent design in the watchmaker's bodily movements-to-watch process? Why not just say of the watch that there was no intelligent design involved in its production, and that it "can all be explained" by observed movements of molecules (the molecules of the watchmaker's body), without positing any intelligent design?

What I'm getting at is that the statement "This was intelligently designed" said of the watch, and the statement "This was not intelligently designed" said of the tiger cannot be verified or falsified unless you have a scientific criterion for deciding when something is intelligently designed or not. So, the Darwinian statement "Tigers were not intelligently designed" is either scientific, and hence depends on such a prior scientific criterion for being intelligently designed not being empirically observed to obtain in the case of tigers; or else it's simply a nonscientific statement deriving from a philosophical worldview. So if it's the former, what is the scientific criterion in question?

Either instances of intelligent design exist or they don't. But if there are instances of intelligent design (let's say the Egyptian pyramids are some instances), then what's the scientific basis for coming to that conclusion? Unless you show what are the general criterion (or criteria) is for something being intelligently designed, then it makes no scientific sense to affirm or deny of anything that it was intelligently designed.