ID PRATT List

ID PRATT list: (Points Refuted A Thousand Times)

Who was/ is the designer?

If we knew the designer we wouldn’t have a design inference- ID would be a given. The only way to determine anything about the designer(s), in the absence of direct observation or designer input, would be to study the design.

Knowing who designed something adds nothing to the understanding of the design unless the designer conveyed all that information to you.
We can use known examples of designed objects to show that we don’t need to know the designer in order to understand the design.
Obviously knowing who designed something the detection process can be skipped.

In any investigation of a dead body, first you would attempt to determine the cause of death and attempt to identify the body. If homicide is inferred then you use the evidence to run an investigation to determine the killer(s). If they knew the killer before the investigation, what an easy job they would have.

Who designed the designer?

Who designed the designers of Stonehenge? We can only study what we can observe.


How was it designed?/ How was the design implemented?

Without direct observation or input from the designer, although interesting questions answering them is not necessary to achieve the objectives of ID- that is the detection and understanding of the design.

In the end we may be able to put together a reasonable way to implement the design, i.e. formulate a process that would yield the same result. And we may be able to verify that the method we constructed yields that result with regularity. However we will always have to use caution if we try to say our method was the method originally used.

Usually the reason for constructing an implementation process is to confirm your inference. For example the Easter Island figures were once thought to be deposited by ETs because no one thought humans of that era could produce them. Engineers & scientists demonstrated that with the technology of the era those figures could be accounted for by human craftsmanship. Does that mean that ETs didn’t put them there? No. It just means that other, more plausible explanations exist.

However interesting these questions are they serve to show that ID does not purport to have all the answers or attempt to answer any ultimate questions. Also if we knew the answers to those questions then ID would be a law, it would no longer be an inference. And if the only evidence that you will accept is to meet the designer(s), have that designer(s) show you the design and implementation process, and then tell you why, you are sadly looking in the wrong place. You are also applying a standard that no historical science can meet.

IDists know that only by studying the design is there any hope of coming to a scientific inference about the designer or the implementation process.

Also ID was no more formulated to answer those questions as was the theory of evolution formulated to answer abiogenesis. Pre-biotic natural selection is a contradiction in terms. What is fitness to non-living matter?

It is also not necessary to know how airplanes are designed, manufactured or who first designed them in order to understand how they fly, operate, maintain, or repair one.

ID is another way of saying “I give up looking.”

Nothing could be further from reality. In reality whenever design is detected the work is just getting started, just ask any archaeologist or SETI researcher. To say my car was designed affords absolutely no knowledge about the car. To gain that knowledge research must be conducted.

Once we determined Stonehenge was designed did all work on it stop?

The design is a poor design. Why would a good designer allow so many extinctions and so many obviously cobbled-together systems?

I would love to see the critics who use this line of attack do a better job. However I digress. No one says that the design had to be perfect or that even if it started out “perfect” that it had to remain that way. Some critics will point out what they perceive as faulty body parts, that a real intelligent designer would have designed something better. But in the real world we see design compromises all the time and we also see design mess ups. History is littered with intelligently designed things that didn’t work and/ or were dubbed “engineering blunders”. So what? That is why we use the term intelligent design- to rid the unnecessary baggage of someone’s idea of perfection and/ or optimality.

This list is sure to grow...

Added via edit:

Who designed the designer and why it is irrelevant to ID.