This whole thread is out of control and failing to address head-on the two main questions posed.
A lot of you are claiming the argument from design cannot work because the existence or non-existence of God is beyond logic or rational proof; there can be no evidence for or against the existence of God.
But the same could be said for everything if you adopt a thourougoing skepticism – we could all be brains in vats. The whole world might not really exist. How do we really know anything? This is the old sceptical arument, and I cannot really find a way to kill it it at this time. But it seems odd to me that anyone who argued from this sceptical point of view could believe in God, since God would be just as dubious as everything else if one takes scepticism seriously. (Decartes argued that the existence of God was certain based on a priori argumentation, especially the ontological argument, but the ontological argument is really a very poor argument.)
So if you are a sceptic, you cannot really take the existence of God seriously. If you are not a sceptic, that is, you believe that evidence can count for or against the probability that some proposition is true or false, why could not there be evidence supporting or tending not to support the existence of God? Why is the existence of God different from anything else? Why can we have good or bad reasons to believe in the theories of science, but not to believe in the existence or non-existence of God?
Some might answer: well, God is a question of faith, not reason. I don’t understand this. I can have faith in something and at the same time rationally say it is unlikely. And I can also find out that something I always believed (in which I had the utmost faith) is actually wrong or unlikey, so faith is open to revision in light of good reasoning and evidence.
Now, I admit that we don’t have enough evidence to definitively prove that God does or does not exists. This has no relevance to the original question I posed. The question was about the rationality of believing one thing over another. I will probably not win the lottery tomorrow, but it is possible that I will. I may think I have good reasons to believe God doesn’t exist, but this doesn’t mean I have proved that he does not or that it not possible.
My question was whether the argument I made was good. I think that the argument from design vis-a-vis the watch iteself is good – anyone who found a watch on the beach and believed it was not man-made but was randomly made by the ocean current would have to locked up in the looney bin. So how can God, a complex being, be made by a random process? If there is a complex but not-guided-by-intelligent-being-process that created God, something such as evolution, then God is really not the King of the universe. Something is more elemental and prior to God. If a higher God created God, who created the higher God?
My question was specifically geared towards the view of a God who is the end all and be all ultimate explanation for everything. I recognize the fact that the word “God” is vague. So I want to say that my question is regarding an intelligent designer who is fundamental, nothing being higher, more basic, or having created him.
Keeve mentioned the fact that Judaism regards God as non-complex. When I hear this, I think one of two things:
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God is some kind or energy or force or some explanatory principle of the universe-- if this is the case, you cannot really deny there is a God; of course there is something there that explains the world. But if God is nothing more than a physics principle, I think most people who believe in God would be pretty disappointed.
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It cannot be that a non-complex being could Intelligently create something. If the universe is complex, does not there have to be an idea in the mind of God that reflects this complexity? How else could he create the complexity. And if the idea is complex, then there is something complex within God. He cannot be totally undifferentiated. It also just seems intuitive to me that a blob of jello cannot think.