Intelligent Design

The theory is cloaked creationism by Christians, but entertaining an idea without believing in it is the mark of education, so, old testament aside, what if some ET being(s) made the earth and life?

What evidence might support the idea? I have read and listened to a lot of creationism, and the main argument is the amazing complexity of nature. It is not much of an argument, but of Aquinas' five proofs for the existence of God, it remains the most convincing. Scientifically, a few billion years and molecular logic is a better explanation, so it only convinces people who feel like being convinced by conflating awe and worship.

I'm genuinely asking this next question, and doing it here for the delightful variety of skeptics and believers.

From our perspective, on the earth's surface, the sun and the moon are exactly 2 degrees in diameter. What are the odds of that?? It's a bit creepy that the moon faces the planet even as it revolves around it, but gravitational drag seems like a reasonable explanation for that.

I know that the evolution of life on earth depended on a large satellite stirring up the tides, and so the odds may be shortened a little but, really, what are the odds of a planet with intelligent life also having a moon which exactly covers the sun? Weird. It's like a trick, or a mind game, or maybe a clue.

So, again, a genuine question, what are the odds of the moon and sun appearing to be the same size by chance alone? If it's an unlikely coincidence, like impossibly unlikely, then what hidden causes might there be?

I see three possibilities off the top of my head, but one of them is that this is the matrix, so it kinda counts as intelligent design, which is the second. The third is some kind of weak planetary anthropic principle... egotistical and advanced species only evolve on planets which feel like the center of the universe. All the other, more heliocentric seeming planets, are too existentially dreadful to allow proper consciousness. I guess another explanation for it would be a very weak anthropic principle: Arguments about intelligent design evolve on planets with cool symmetry in the system.

P.S, I remembered it's the 21st century and googled it. Short answer, it's /just/ a coincidence, and maybe contributed to the evolution of religion, if not thought, if not life. Still it reminds me of Terry Pratchet's early sci fi Strata: ancient and extinct planetary engineers leaving a little clue out of vanity or as a practical joke.

So, having read some guy's intuitive response on Yahoo answers, I guess the thought experiment is over. My new question is this: It is weird, though, right?

 

I guess it is a little weird, but on the other hand there are plenty of other things which don't neatly line up, and nobody remarks on how that's proof that there isn't a creator. For example, there are 365.2422 days in a year. That's a super inconvenient number. A nice round 360 would have been much easier to deal with. Also, having only one moon means that sometimes it's really dark at night - having several moons might have helped with that. Or a nearby friendly gas giant. And what's with all the cancer?

So, basically, yeah, if you take the moon's relative size in isolation, you can make it seem suspiciously specific, but in aggregate with everything else... meh.

 

Meanwhile, mutations and maths aside, the big coincidence is the biggest light show in the sky. If there were just one clue, so obvious it's invisible, well, the moon would be a neat choice.

I'm not suggesting this is evidence for Genesis. Just that, hey, the universe is bigger and older and weirder than we assume even now - gosh - centuries past the Enlightenment.

If, just for example, the moon were a seed for life sent on a fifty million year snooker shot five billion years ago, one of millions in the galaxy, and the ancient aliens are dead, indifferent or just inscrutable, our little monkey brains would, by and large, reject the idea. It's hard enough for many people to accept the idea of an empty, impersonal universe, let alone a crowded, impersonal one. Even if they also sent immortal AIs along to nursemaid life into civilisations, and the AI wasn't personable or ethical or human enough for us, we'd reject the idea.

We need some kind of certainty, some kind of sense of importance and control, but it's always an illusion to one degree or another. I am entertaining the idea, not believing in it, and I think it has some value as a theory, although it would surely fall under occam's razor. I can certainly understand the 'meh', though. Even if it were proven true and accepted, it is way out of our scale of time and size and notions of the meaning of life. Meh is probably the only sane response.

On the other hand, maybe the galactic community is patiently waiting for us to pay attention and grow up, but we are still, patently, not ready. We'd be all like, "We didn't ask to be engineered!" And, "If aliens made viruses which built cells five billion years ago, then fuck you for cancer, God!" In fact, at this stage of our development, our first reaction would probably be a combination of cults and nukes.

In any case, dear Smuel, there is no reason to assume that (1) the creators were aiming for cro magnum man as the apex of evolution, or (2) that they care at all about our comfort or convenience. See, conflating a theory of planetary origins with our infantile projections of a good parent is exactly the sort of primitive thinking that keeps us from being invited to the star parties.

 

Those are all good points. But in that case I'd argue that if the benign overlords were intending to leave a clue as to our origins, "the moon is roughly the same size in the sky as the sun" is actually pretty weak. It's along the lines of the clues in the old Batman TV show. "Holy smokes, Batman. It happened at sea... Sea. C for Catwoman!" I mean... c'mon guys.

Believe me, I'd like to play along on this one, but I just can't get out from under the crushing weight of my own scepticism. Sorry, old bean.

 

Robin Williams had a marvelous skit illustrating how the "intelligent" part of intelligent design, really depends on how you look at it. Is it very intelligent, that the male testicles hang outside the body and are extremely vulnerable and debilitating when harmed? Surely if you were designing an entire being from scratch you could come up with another way to regulate their temperature. Or just come up with more heat resistant sperm.

It never occurred to me to think the relative size between the sun and the moon is weird before. I guess that's just another point in the long list of evidence on how subjective our worldview is and how growing up into an idea can make the ridiculous seem natural. My initial reaction was to say it's not weird at all. My second reaction was to say that it's probably not weird, since if the universe is as nearly infinite as we understand it to be and as full of planets and moons and stars as we know it to be, every relative star-to-satellite ratio is accounted for somewhere. It only seems special here, because we subconsciously assume there is some sort of correlation between that unlikely event and the unlikely event of life.

Of course the probability of an event is not proof of anything either way, but it bears consideration, that barring physical impossibilities, the probability of pretty much everything in an infinite amount of time and space approaches, never reaches, but approaches one.

I don't know how relevant this was to the discussion, but those are the thoughts you provoked in me.

 

Yes, it makes sense from a species' point of view, that the DNA bags are subject to intrasexual and intersexual selection by way of a kick to the groin.

Also, from a space-god point of view... I figure, logically, an apex civilisation would be mostly about the reality tv for the countless startup civs and species.

Population times processing speed equals boredom approaching infinity. They love it when people get hit in the groin!

This also might explain why a giant asteroid hit a million dinosaurs in the face, because fuck yeah!

 

If our testicles didn't hang outside our body, people who have a fetish for ball torture would have to get their kicks elsewhere, so to speak.

 

I would think deliberate malice can come up with far crueler things than vulnerable testicles.
Exhibit A:

Spoiler

But I can't say I don't like the way you guys think.

 

Obviously the human testicular arrangement works well enough. They are pretty well protected from blunt force trauma between the legs, and clothing mitigates most other ball hazards. I don't think the human race is in any danger of population decline caused by ruptured testicles.

Putting aside spiritual feelings and beliefs, I think the most compelling argument for intelligent design is the sheer improbability of anything approaching the complexity of DNA or RNA just spontaneously forming in some sort of primordial soup.

 

Your mom certainly seems to think so.

 

The sheer absurdity and out-of-place-ness of this line got a chuckle from me.

 

Actually I started typing out a long riposte to Japes' serious point, about how things that are intelligently designed look like they evolved. For example you can trace how the modern car with all its advanced safety features progressed from more primitive versions - the modern car didn't spring into existence fully formed in the mind of a designer one day. And Tolkien didn't come up with the entire LOTR mythos from scratch - elves and dwarves were in stories long before that. And computers, and music, etc. So if you find something complicated that doesn't have any known precursors, saying that therefore it must be intelligently designed doesn't make sense - if it WERE intelligently designed, we would expect to see earlier versions!

Then I realised that nobody cares, so I insulted Japes' mom instead.

 

My point wasn't against evolution. It was against the spontaneous appearance of DNA, the presumable starting point of self-replication. Whether you think life formed on its own and evolved, or that a creator got the ball rolling and evolution got us to where we are today, that first self-replicating cell had to come from somewhere. I won't pretend to know much about biology (or any science for that matter), but I have yet to hear a satisfying explanation of how even the most basic single-cell organism could spontaneously generate, no matter how primordial the soup.

In other words, your mom.

 

The amazing complexity of life is still the most compelling argument, but having studied genetics and ecology, I'm more impressed by the unlikely position of the moon relative to the sun than I am by sloppy* clockwork. The fact is, cells with all their DNA and the many nanobots which spin it into an organism, including primordial viruses, prions and symbiotic prokaryotes, seem to be an ancient, chaotic ecosystem of* molecules, and not a perfect machine.

If god made dna, and maybe he did, then he spent eons fiddling around with* it before he made even a cell, let alone a beast* and the workshop floor is still littered with tiny screws and things that went sproing across the room. The watchmaker seems to have been blind, after all.

As I biologist, I could accept an exo-planetary first cause for life on earth, but if it were a superior being, it would raise the question of what its cells were made from, and how it was created. It is more likely that life evolves by simple laws of physics than by geneering, and more likely that finite, organic extraterrestrials would geneer* life, than an unknowable almighty.

On the other hand, if the whole universe is an artifact and we are some kind of target for an infinite being's ennui or artistic impulse, then Occam's razor is always going to be wrong.

*Your mom.

 

I agree it would be a damning blow against evolution if it turns out that DNA spontaneously generated of its own accord. However, my point is that it would also be a damning blow against intelligent design. Was the car intelligently designed? Yes, and we can trace the history of the design choices that were made. Were The Avengers intelligently designed? Yes - we can see the hilariously primitive versions of Iron Man in early comics. In none of the examples I've given did anything spontaneously generate. So when you say that spontaneous generation of DNA is a "compelling argument for intelligent design", that makes no sense to me - spontaneous generation doesn't occur in any other example of intelligent design that we are aware of. So why should it be evidence for intelligent design all of a sudden?

Fortunately, ytzk has pointed out that there is plenty of evidence of failed earlier versions of DNA, so it looks like both evolution and intelligent design are still both viable hypotheses. Hooray!

And if you're after some evidence of my DNA, ask your mom.

 

In terms of the DNA spontaneously appearing, I think that on an infinite timescale anything like that is possible - and while time wasn't infinite back then there was a shit load of it. At a group meeting yesterday, someone was discussing how a reaction they put on yielded a by-product they weren't looking for - however then my supervisor asked whether the formation of this by-product was known in the literature from a purely synthetic standpoint as it was producing something interesting, and people didn't seem to think it was so as such they might try and cobble together a short paper on it in the future. Point being, this was a reaction between two relatively simple molecules and yet in terms of reactions people anticipate would happen it was producing something novel.

How many of these type of reactions are possible that produce interesting functionalities that we just haven't discovered yet is likely staggering, and so I don't find it at all implausible that DNA on the timescale we're thinking of could potentially form through reactions like these. I think eventually people will find some interesting organic precursor molecules in space that lend credence to the formation of DNA, however since this hasn't happened already it's only speculation.

In terms of idiots arguing about intelligent design (not that I think the idea is itself stupid or I'm insinuating that anyone here is an idiot, just that it's great to watch idiots argue any point) - I always liked The Atheist's Nightmare. Immediately after it was released, people pointed out the amount of huge amount of selective breeding that went into the modern banana and that God had little or nothing to do with how it looks, handles or tastes today. I also find the way that they say it's a perfect fit for the hand (or even worse, the mouth) completely ridiculous, surely by that dint dicks are a great fit for the male hand and therefore we should all be gay for one another. Or some varieties of venomous snake. It has to be one of most stupid, facile and easily counter-able points to an argument I've ever heard.

 

What?

 

Yknow, 2/360ths of the distance around the whole sky.

Edit - diameter being the distance across the 'disc' or apparent face of the moon AND sun.

From the lenses in our facehole-balls.

Walking around on the surface of the earth ball.

And by exactly I mean not really but yeah almost exactly, both span 1/180th of the visible sky.

Neat.

It has been helpful in astronomy, that we get a perfect eclipse now and then, and so I guess another perspective is that the moon is exactly far enough away to cover the sun, but no further. Or, indeed, closer.

 

It's also rather a coincidence that if you hold your thumb up at arm's length, it's just big enough to cover the sun or moon. The creator was clearly following a rule of thumb when designing everything. Kind of shoddy if you ask me.

 

So we've gone from 'exactly' to 'kinda sorta as long as it fuels this mystic spookiness I seem to be digging right now'. You realise that stuff in the sky moves and changes its apparent size, right?

And drawing a line from Coincidence to Creator? How about a bit more originality. Out of the possibly infinite ways everything could have come into being, you're going to pick one that neatly fits a concept you already have pre-packaged in your little head? One that people have been thinking for thousands of years already? So arbitrary and lazy. Or is this some Romantic 'noble savage', maybe-they-knew-something-we-don't, hippy rhetoric helped along by a would-be defamiliarising vocab? Facehole-balls? Earth ball? Eyes and earth is fine. C'mon man.