Thursday, 31 March 2022

A house divided II

The power of the media industrial complex?

Design Inference: Stone Structures Were Intelligently Arranged, Though We Don’t Know by Whom

David Coppedge

We don’t know who made them. We don’t know how they were made. We don’t know what purpose they served. But we know they were intentionally made by mindful individuals. At least, Live Science never questions the design inference about strange stone structures in Middle Eastern deserts that are shaped like wheels, triangles, and long lines (see the photo gallery).

Why Is Design the Obvious Inference?

There are hundreds of these structures. They extend over much of the Middle East: Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.

The “works of the old men” include wheels, which often have spokes radiating out from the center, kites (stone structures used for funnelling and killing animals), pendants (lines of stone cairns) and meandering walls, which are mysterious structures that meander across the landscape for up to several hundred feet.
The works “demonstrate specific geometric patterns and extend from a few tens of meters up to several kilometers, evoking parallels to the well-known system of geometric lines of Nazca, Peru,” wrote an archaeological team in a paper published recently in the Journal of Archaeological Science. (Peru’s Nazca Lines date to between 200 B.C. and A.D. 500.). [Emphasis added.]

World War I pilots readily inferred they were man-made. Bedouins call them the “works of the old men,” but apparently do not know who the “old men” were. It’s not clear what they were used for. The wheels might have been for forecasting seasons, since they tend to be aligned northwest to southeast to match sunrise at the winter solstice. But why the triangles? And the hundreds of “gates” with their long parallel lines? Who would make large structures that can’t be seen readily from ground level?

Why people in prehistoric times would build wheel-shaped structures that can’t be seen well from the ground remains a mystery. No balloon or glider technologies existed at that time. Additionally, researchers say that climbing to a higher elevation to view them was probably not possible, at least not in most cases.

Older than the Nazca Lines

New research using optically stimulated luminescence on the stones has produced dates of about 8,500 years for a couple of the structures. That makes them older than the Nazca lines. Were they burial structures? Signals to their gods? Animal traps?

Other points of interest aside, the mystery serves to illustrate the logic of the design inference. These structures demonstrate that it’s not necessary to know (1) the identity of the designer, (2) the motivation or purpose of the designer, or (3) the function of the design. It’s also not necessary to know when they were made, or how.

To make the design inference robust, however, it’s important not to jump to conclusions. There are similar shapes in nature that are not considered designed. In fact, there are vast areas of circular shapes in the Namibian desert that have defied explanation for years (see Science Daily).

Desert fairy circles are considered one of nature’s greatest mysteries because no one knows how they form. Different from mushroom rings, these fairy circles are large barren patches of earth ringed by short grass dotting the desert like craters on the moon or big freckles. Several groups are racing to figure out this bizarre phenomenon.

Geometric structures made by animals — like circular shells of diatoms, bird nests, or honeycombs — we do not attribute to the work of sentient beings. These are built instinctively for reproduction, feeding, or other life necessities. Intelligent agents like humans can organize natural materials for necessities, too, but have the free will to make things for other purposes — “gratuitous” purposes like art, conceptual communication, or ritual. Crows and chimps can make crude tools, but humans can make tools to make other tools. Animals make tools to eat. Humans make tools to explore outer space and email currency across the globe.

The Line Gets Fuzzy

Admittedly those are extreme examples. The line can get fuzzy in the middle. So how do we infer design for the geoglyphs in Jordan, but not the fairy circles in Namibia or the intricate circles in diatom shells? Here is where the Design Filter comes in:

Can the geoglyphs be explained by chance? No; stones do not randomly collect into triangles, wheels with spokes, and parallel lines due to unguided causes like storms or earthquakes. Circular craters can emerge by chance, due to meteor impacts or volcanic eruptions, but they do not look like these, and there is no evidence of shocked minerals or lava present.
Can they be explained by natural law? Natural forces can produce spirals like galaxies and hurricanes. They do not typically produce spoked wheels or triangles (see this earlier article at Evolution News). A bent-over blade of grass could trace out a circle as the wind shifts direction, like a compass. Snowflakes can produce a semblance of spoked wheels, but we know about the atomic forces that cause water to crystallize in hexagonal shapes. Nothing like that works on the scale of kilometers to arrange stones that way, especially aligning them with sunrise at winter solstice.
Is there a specification? Yes; we see an independent specification of the solstice that could guide a sentient being to choose to arrange stones with that preferred orientation. We also understand the human mind’s attraction for geometry and mathematics.

More Intuitive than Robust

To be sure, the design inference for these structures is more intuitive than robust. It’s conceivable that scientists may find a combination of natural laws and chance that generates these structures in that part of the world; unlikely, but possible. And since we don’t know of any clear purpose for the structures, our third test (specification) is weaker than one might like. Despite these caveats, the design inference is pretty sound. Nobody from the Bedouins to the pilots is questioning it. Compare this case to earlier archaeological mysteries that are more dubious.

Evolutionists try to explain the human mind as the product of chance and natural law, claiming it is the product of natural selection. The human mind is like animal design, they will say, simply more of the same. What’s the answer to that? Just turn it around. Such a position implies that the scientist’s propensity to speculate about evolution is also a product of natural selection. So if the evolutionists’ position is the result of blind, unguided processes, and if mental activity is an illusion, then reason evaporates; they have no way of knowing anything is true. John West’s book The Magician’s Twin sheds further light on this “argument from reason.”

Meanwhile, design advocates think that animals and their designs pass the design filter, too. Their bodies, behaviors, and instincts are the products of genetic instructions, making them act in a programmed way. We reasonably infer that their origins are the result of an intelligent cause.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in 2015.

Back to the old if a tree falls and no one hears question.

Lukas Ruegger: Homology and Phylogenetics Topple Darwin’s Tree

David Klinghoffer

I like that the new video series from ID explainer Lukas Ruegger, Basics of Intelligent Design Biology, is being released week by week rather than, as could have been the case, as one longer video. This way, the “drip, drip, drip” effect comes into play: Episodes 1 through 3 successively narrowed some available escape routes for Darwin’s troubled theory. In a brief manner that’s like an alternative and much more accurate version of Khan Academy’s science-challenged treatment of the subject, Ruegger showed why the fossil record offers poor evidence for evolution. (See here, here, and here.)

Perhaps with that distressing reality in mind, Richard Dawkins and others have said that the case for Darwinian evolution is perfectly sound even without fossils. Evolutionists, instead, have all the evidence they need in genes and morphology to draw the one true tree of life. In Episode 4, which is out today, Lukas asks, “Do Homology and Phylogenetics REALLY Support Darwin’s Tree of Life?” The problem is that the “trees” thus sketched are full of fundamental, mutual contradictions. Even if universal common ancestry is true, there seemingly is no drawable “true tree.” As Lukas says, “Those who study homology simply assume evolution to be true, but they’ve never actually demonstrated that the ancestral evolutionary relationships between different organisms are real.”

And, “If the hard facts of paleontology oppose the notion of there being a tree of life, and if that supposed tree of life cannot be independently established by genetic homologies, well, what evidence for Darwin’s tree of life are we left with?” The answer that Khan Academy doesn’t want you to hear is: Not much.

meditations of aservantofJEHOVAH

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