Phil Forum : Design or No Design

[Gnomon]

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussi ... ent/344942

Your justification is that every instance of things we conventionally define to be ordered, derives from a ‘designer’. You infer from all instances of design-designer you’ve seen, that order in the natural world must also be from a designer. — aporiap

From what kind of logic could you infer otherwise? Do you have any reason to believe in spontaneous creation of organization, energy, laws? The reason Aristotle postulated a First Cause, was that an eternal regression of causation is an empty gesture that doesn't answer the question of origins. The Prime Mover concept answers the question with a "buck stops here" assertion that does not imply spontaneous emergence from nothing, but intentional creation from everything.

Logically, in eternity-infinity all things are possible. Once an organic system has been created (by magic, if you like), all subsequent order would be produced by cause & effect Necessity, not magic. But we now know that the space-time universe is not eternal or infinite. So its origin must lie outside the boundaries of space-time, in the infinite "unbounded" -- what I call G*D, as the job-title for Creator, Designer, Programmer, Energizer, World-Maker functions.


Spontaneous Generation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation
"Anaximander, who believed that all things arose from the elemental nature of the universe, the apeiron (ἄπειρον) or the "unbounded" or "infinite,"

[Gnomon]

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussi ... ent/345771

So, 'design', then isn't really the result of 'designers', it is fundamentally a result of the way the universe is intrinsically structured. So, in this view, there is only ever one ultimate source of order [and disorder] which is nature itself. — aporiap

I agree. But I also infer from the constructive order of the universe that the "intrinsic structure" of the system was not a random accident. And, since the structure as a whole is evolving in an apparently positive direction, I can't buy the Genesis account of a "designer" who made a perfect world, and then was chagrined to see it quickly falling into disorder. That's why I prefer the analogy of an Evolutionary Programmer who uses randomness to generate novel options, and selective criteria to guide the process toward an optimum solution.The search method is heuristic : a journey of discovery, not a fait accompli. That's why I think evolution is not just about the destination : "getting there is half the fun."

Intrinsic = essential, inherent

Anyway I've gone on a limb and did a cursory search for clear examples of order arising from entirely unpredictable, random processes. . . . results entirely from the disorder of the inputs to the system. So here is one case in which order comes out of disorder. — aporiap

Chaos Theory is based on the fact that there is potential for order in randomness. For example, the random interactions of heat, moisture, and wind produce recognizable weather patterns, that forecasters can analyze to predict short range future arrangements. But the key to such ephemeral capricious phenomena -- which caused the ancients to infer that whimsical gods were responsible -- is only possible because Natural Laws (criteria) combine with Initial Conditions to produce repeatable patterns under similar conditions. But, since those "Laws of Order", and the Energy to enforce them, were in effect at the very beginning of evolution, they must have been established prior to the Big Bang.

So, of course there is order in random behavior. And although those simple patterns seem to arise spontaneously, the "Rules of Order" are intrinsic in the system. Yet, weather patterns are never progressive, but cyclical. The image link below is an example of design by Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Programming. Marvelous, but the codes and criteria for the process didn't emerge spontaneously. They were input by human "designers" of the goal-oriented process.


EVOLVED ANTENNA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna