Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

What defines “good” design in the composition of music and the tuning of musical instruments?

“Bad design” is one of the most formidable arguments against intelligent design. I’ve responded to this by saying that what constitutes “good design” depends on the goals of the designer. If fuel efficiency is the criteria of good design, then a motorcycle is a better design than an SUV. But some will argue the SUV is a better design for snowy and icy conditions when transporting babies, thus an SUV is a better design. The problem is what constitutes “good design”, and who decides the criteria for good?

[Knowing Elizabeth Liddle, in addition to being a scientist, is a teacher of music theory and an accomplished musician, I thought I’d frame one aspect of the ID discussion in terms of musical ideas and philosophy at TSZ. This essay is a cross post of an discussion originally featured at TSZ.. I thought the discussion there was unusually good relative to the sorts of discussions that usually occur between the UD and TSZ.]

We also have the paradoxical situation where good drama needs a bit of “bad” designed into it. If a great novel told a story with no problems, will it be a good drama?

“Once upon a time there were no problems…there were never any problems or difficulties….they lived happily ever after”.

Read More ›

New PNAS paper: Large, related groups of animals diverge from each other quite early in their evolution

Not the long, slow process advocated by Darwin’s followers.* This has long been known, if course, it just gets conveniently buried in the “We’re working on it” pile, lest anyone ask more basic questions. One burial method is obfuscated prose. Read More ›

Understanding self-evidence (with a bit of help from Aquinas . . . )

It seems that one of the pivotal issues in reasoned thinking about design-related questions — and in general —  is the question of self-evident first, certain truths that can serve as a plumb-line for testing other truth claims, and indeed for rationality. (Where, the laws of identity, non-contradiction and excluded middle are foremost among such first principles. And where also, some ID objectors profess to be “frightened” that some of us dare to hold that there are moral truths that are self evident.) Where also of course, self-evident does not merely mean perceived as obvious to oneself, which could indeed be a manifestation of a delusion. Nay, a self evident truth [SET] is best summarised as one known to be Read More ›

Darwinists say “there is no point in studying designs and its designer once we decide something is designed”

When Darwinists say that ID hinders science because once we decide something is designed, we stop inquiry. That is like saying, “there is no point in studying designs and its designer once we decide something is designed.” This is like saying once something passes our own personal Explanatory Filter, and we recognize design in an artifact, we just give up trying to learn more? I don’t think so. When I first heard this wonderful piece of music, I wanted to learn more about its architecture, I wanted to study the written notes that generated the music, I also wanted to learn more about the designer, Massenet himself. [youtube 96d9mlRmjus] As a child, when I first heard a piano rendition of Read More ›

God: Lawgiver or Hypocrite? Loftus attacks divine command theories of ethics

In my last post, I critiqued Dr. Sean Carroll’s claim that the existence of evil in the world renders the existence of God unlikely. In this post, I’ll be responding to skeptic John Loftus’s claim that God is a hypocrite, in his recent post, Two Unanswerable Dilemmas Concerning God and Morality. Why Loftus believes we shouldn’t imitate God In his first dilemma, Loftus (pictured above) summarily disposes of the notion, held by a few religious believers today, and by a small number of famous theologians in the past (notably William of Ockham), that the moral law we are obliged to follow is nothing more than a set of arbitrary decrees by God. Such a view, argues Loftus, turns God into Read More ›