Design

10/25/2008.

There is no evidence whatsoever that the human body is designed. There are 2 types of evidence needed to support an inference of design:

     1.Evidence that the thing claimed to be designed does not exist in nature or attributes of it do not exist in nature. For example, if a rock has tooling marks that do not occur naturally, that is evidence that primitive people machined it for its apparent purpose.

     2.Evidence of a designer. For example, we know that there exist watchmakers who fashion watches out of component parts, therefore a watch was probably designed.

The argument is based on the erroneous assumption that we can infer design from a complex arrangement of parts suitable to a particular purpose. The problem is, when you try to use this, you get false positives if you don't require both of the 2 things above to be the case.

For example, we know primitive men tooled rocks to use as hunting weapons. But this does not mean that a rock that's particularly suitable for hunting was necessarily designed for that purpose by primitive men. You would also need, for example, evidence of tooling marks or scrapes not found in nature.

The universe itself is partly designed, that part of it made by humans and not found in nature is clearly designed. As for that part of it for which we don't know of a designer and that appears to occur naturally, there is no basis to infer design.