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This is something that I was thinking of recently that seems to give an almost apriori advantage to design believers and wanted to know if there’s a fallacy here or if this is sound.

Suppose that one finds no evidence of design behind an item, say, a rock. Nothing so far suggests that it could have been designed apart from nature running its course. However, it seems that a theist for example could resort to design and say “God just used natural laws to design even this stone or used some other way to design it.” Now, this hypothesis is hard to get rid of or disprove. It seems that someone who is steadfast in believing in design has a permanent get out of jail card.

On the other hand, if I observe a human for example literally designing a pot through pottery, I now have evidence for the pot being designed. I may have been the most ardent believer that pots aren’t designed but after directly witnessing it in action, it seems that I can’t stay married to my prior belief no matter what: my senses would contradict them.

So, does this mean design has a get out of jail card in a way that “non design” doesn’t?

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    The history of philosophy is full of a priori beliefs that has been proved false...
    – Mauro ALLEGRANZA
    Commented Mar 10 at 17:11
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    "Design" isn't the "get out of jail card" in your first example, "God" is.
    – JonathanZ
    Commented Mar 10 at 18:15
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    Oh ye of little insanity-by-way-of-pure-reason. There are legions of people ready to line up and tell you that the pot was in fact not designed, and that the person is a mindless and inevitable fact of Nature whose consciousness is an illusion. Now, these people also get morally outraged if you bite them for no reason, instead of acting like it was inevitable fact of nature and that their pain is an illusion. So a person could be excused for thinking that they were all lying. Nonetheless, they will insist upon it.
    – g s
    Commented Mar 10 at 19:15
  • @gs What if one argues that your proposal is more ridiculous than the proposal that something is not designed? As in denying design when it’s in front of you is more ridiculous than upholding design despite the observed absence of it
    – Baby_philosopher
    Commented Mar 10 at 19:54
  • @gs not sure if you intend there to be a difference between getting “morally outraged” vs getting “outraged”, but the people you mentioned could chalk up their reaction to another inevitable fact of nature. It is not inconsistent for them to hold such beliefs while being outraged.
    – confusedcius
    Commented Mar 12 at 4:37

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The idea that design is somehow more difficult to rule out than the lack of design is complete nonsense - a terrible argument from ignorance. It's making the fallacious assumption that because we don't currently understand the natural cause behind something like the formation of a rock, we should automatically infer design by some cosmic baker.

Look at the history of science! What once seemed designed or guided by external forces - the origins of the universe, the diversity of life, the workings of the human body - has been steadily explained by natural causes as our understanding progresses. To claim that unexplained phenomena are therefore designed is just breathtakingly unparsimonious.

If you want to behave like a scientist, you have to begin by ruling out all materialistic explanations before you off-load it onto the shrug-of-the-shoulders supernatural. And not being able to explain something right now does not constitute evidence for the improbable idea of cosmic design.

The fact is, no matter how statistically improbable something seems, it only has to happen once for its existence to be inevitable given the right conditions and laws of nature. Unless you can provide some independently testable evidence for this supposed designer you've got nothing.

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  • A planet with rings! A couple more... Many planets with rings. Ho hum.
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Mar 30 at 23:22
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it seems that a theist for example could resort to design and say “God just used natural laws to design even this stone or used some other way to design it.” Now, this hypothesis is hard to get rid of or disprove.

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence

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