What is design and what does it imply?
Our starting point must be ordinary language. As David Stove points out, "it is a fact about the meaning of a common English word, that you cannot say that something was designed, without implying that it was intended; any more than you can say that a person was divorced, without implying that he or she was previously married." (Darwinian Fairytales, p. 190, emphasis added.) In other words, it is an analytic proposition that a designed object is one that was intended in the same way that it is an analytic proposition that a divorced person is one who was previously married. These are two conceptual truths, and anyone who uses designed object and divorced person in a way counter to these truths either does not understand these concepts or else has some serious explaining to do.
I should think that Richard Dawkins has some serious explaining to do. Consider the subtitle of The Blind Watchmaker. It reads: Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design.
Now I think I understand that. What Dawkins will do in his book is argue how the modern theory of evolution shows that the natural universe as a whole and in its parts is in no way the embodiment of the intentions and purposes of any intelligent being. Thus a bat, a piece of "living machinery," is such that "the 'designer' is unconscious natural selection." (p. 37) The scare quotes show that Dawkins is not using 'designer' literally. What he is saying, putting the point in plain English, is that there is no designer. For if there were a designer, then he would be contradicting the subtitle of his book, which implies that no part of nature is designed. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, on the same page Dawkins says the following about Paley:
His hypothesis was that living watches were literally designed and built by a master watchmaker. Our modern hypothesis is that the job was done in gradual evolutionary stages by natural selection.
But now we have a contradiction. We were told a moment ago that there is no designer. But now we are being told that there is a designer. For if the design job is done by natural selection, then natural selection is the designer.
Now which is it? Is there a designer or isn't there one? What this contradiction shows is that Dawkins is using 'design' and cognates in an unintelligible way.
Some will say I am quibbling over words. But I am not. The issue is not about words but about the concepts those words are used to express. I am simply thinking clearly about the concepts that Dawkins et al. are deploying, concepts such as design.
If you tell me that design in nature is merely apparent, and that in reality nothing is designed and everything can be explained mechanistically or non-teleologically, then I understand that whether or not I agree with it. But if you tell me that there is design in nature but that the designer is natural selection, then I say that is nonsense, i.e. unintelligible.
One cannot have it both ways at once. One cannot make use of irreducibly teleological language while in the next breath implying that there is no teleology in nature. The problem is well expressed by Stove:
. . . ever since 1859, Darwinians have always owed their readers a translation manual that would 'cash' the teleological language which Darwinians avail themselves of without restraint in explaining particular adaptations, into the non-teleological language which their own theory of adaptation requires. But they have never paid, or even tried to pay, this debt. (DF 191)
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