Friday, March 26, 2010

Recognizing Design

David Coppedge places tongue in cheek and chides University of Kansas anthropologist John Hoopes for concluding that the stone spheres he's studying in Costa Rica were intelligently designed:

Coppedge writes:

An archaeologist has been studying stone spheres in Costa Rica and has concluded they were designed.

According to PhysOrg, he doesn't know who made the spheres, when they were made, or why they were made. Why is he jumping to a conclusion of intelligent design? He should be considering natural explanations. There are plenty of natural forces that can make a sphere and even simulate hammer marks. By concluding design, he has brought the scientific investigation of these stones to a standstill.

To be a scientist, you can't take the easy way out and assume design every time you see something you can't explain. Some designer, too; some of the stones are up to two inches out of round. Who is the designer? And who designed the designer? Science is supposed to be about natural explanations for natural phenomena. These stones are perfectly natural; they are not made up of some angelic material or something. If this professor doesn't have a good enough imagination to make up a naturalistic story, he doesn't belong in science.

Every sentence in Coppedge's little satire is taken from arguments that have been used by Darwinians against those who believe that the enormous complexity of the hundreds of molecular machines which perform incredibly sophisticated operations in living cells is the product of blind chance and natural forces. There is no justification, the Darwinian insists, for thinking that these biomachines are the product of an intelligent agent, but simple round rocks, on the other hand, well, they're obviously the work of purposeful artisans.

Pretty funny.

RTG