re: #757 cenotaphium

What does this mean?

Whoop, if you check back later:

Before Darwin, there was no actual scientific theory of how any sort of complex design could occur by nature alone. There was no theory that could explain the natural world in any sensible way without invoking a god, no matter how remote— there wasn’t an idea that algorithmic processes alone could have the power that evolutions does.

I was being slightly cheeky in saying that, because obviously people like Hooke, who were geniuses and natural scientists, had the opportunity for honest atheism.

But the position of “Designed things must have been designed by a mind, and the universe functions as a large design” was actually a perfectly reasonable position. We had no conception of anything that could promote complex design in a way that would explain the variety of the animal world, and very few people had access to the information that would allow them to understand even the simple complexity of an ice crystal.

The Intelligent Design people are idiots in the modern day, post-Darwin, but before him, when you whipped out a microscope and looked at the natural world, it seemed to be a very designed thing, and no one had proposed a theory of design arising outside a conscious mind.

If you haven’t read Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, do so and it’ll give you a better sense of what I’m awkwardly trying to express.