Intelligent Design-Whodunnit?

In My Humble Opinion
61

I said that Davies was an atheist who was a honest enough to not let religious appeasement get in the way of the observable evidence. The old system you spoke of was based on the Ptolemaic system, i.e. geo centrism. This notion can be traced as far back as non Christian pre-Socratic philosophy, and it stood as the science of the day until the Christian theologian Copernicus refuted this same notion, and instead proposed the helio centric model that we have now today (with some adjustment of corset. And you are wrong. The Copernicus principle is false in the the sense that we supposedly occupied a special place in the universe. In fact just the opposite. Copernicus brought us out of the realm of a belief that the earth was closer to hell where evil dwelled.

It was once believed that earth was a place of heaviness where objects fell from the skies because of this heaviness. Again it was Copernicus that changed that and which was confirmed hundreds of years later. Today we now realize just how special a place we are. Even the militant atheist Laurence Krause said that if we were anywhere else, we would not be able to understand the universe as it truly is, and that from a different position we would have a false perspective of the real universe.

As for the anthropic principle, it is based on a tautology, and it completely ignores the exponential statical impossibilities (and within orders of magnitude involved) It is a philosophical attempt to hand waive away an empirical observation of fine tuning. This principle did not convince many, and instead other came up with inflation theory as a counter argument and proposes multiverse which is a hypothetical model which proposes that there are billions or possibly an infinite amount of universes out there, and that this universe just happened to get right. Again Davies doesn’t even regard this as a science and neither does Penrose as well as many others in this field.
Of course many in the field realize the weakness of the AP, even Krause and Dawkins don’t buy into it as pleasing as it sounds. The AP is akin to jumping off an 80 story building every hour for a trillion years, and not even breaking a bone or getting killed and each time then saying to yourself….Its no wonder I’m alive, because if after all, I was dead, I wouldn’t be able to appreciate the fact that I’m alive.

As for your flower analogy, I think you missed the whole point. The Bible speaks of just how special we are, and the fact that we are the only known intelligent life forms in this universe able enough to contemplate and appreciate this, is a testament to that. Again, I say that to believe that nothing dunnit, requires much more faith in magic. I believe in cause and effect. Not nothing did it. This is not a satisfactory answer for me.

And sure at some point the question of infinite regression and first cause has to be asked, and an all powerful omnipotent being that can exist out side of space and time & that is not restricted by space and time and and can truly be thought of as alfa and omega is to me the best explanations. Even Laurence Krause reluctantly agrees that this would solve a lot of theoretical problems. This is my position.

62

Magic man done it!

63

I don’t know if there’s a name for the type of logical fallacy THEMAYAN is falling pray to, but it’s an important yet fine difference that basically amounts to the opposite of the Anthropic Principle.

It’s like looking at this chart, the Odds of of You Being Born, in the way presented. That the chances of you existing, when you start from the bottom up are so close to zero, that it must be some sort of divine result that you do.

But in reality, it’s the opposite angle; the top down. You’re the end result of a zillion random occurrences, plain and simple.

64

Or maybe I should say when you start from the top down, as in the poster’s depiction, rather than from the bottom up, in how you should really see it.

65

It’s more or less survivor bias, I think, or an offshoot of cherry-picking.

A very similar example to your chart is…you. Only about one quarter of creatures born actually manage to reproduce, but EVERY SINGLE ONE of your billions of direct biological ancestors did. The odds of that are one in hundreds of trillions, but it’s true not only of you, but everyone you know.

Same deal with bridge hands. Every hand you get is a one in 16 billion or so possibility. And yet there it is sitting in front of you.

Rarity of an outcome doesn’t prove anything without knowing how many possibilities there are, and how many times the experiment gets run.

Frankly, I’m surprised by the number of scientists in THEMAYAN’s mega-cite that don’t get this. Some of the quotes are clearly out of context: stating a contrary position without the corresponding refutation. And a bunch of them are from previous eras, when science was less rigorous. But an awful lot of them seem to be saying just what he claims they’re saying. This must mean he’s right…oh, wait! It’s survivor bias again. Out of the thousands of scientists who’ve weighted in on this (an overwhelmingly large number of whom self-describe as atheists), we’re only given the small number who agree with the position presented, not the statistical balance. Again, we don’t know what size this set is of the actual sample (or rather we do, but we’re being encouraged to forget it.)

However, to repeat my earlier point: I don’t understand how you can claim “spontaneous existence of miraculous being that can deliberately create X” is a simpler explanation than “spontaneous existence of X.” It’s by definition less likely.

66

I have not quoted anyone out of context. They were speaking on the fine tuning observation and I cited sources. I also mentioned that many were atheist yet honest enough to admit the implications of this observations. I have no need to make up what is common knowledge.

Maybe you didn’t hear me say that according to Paul Davies there is now broad agreement among physicist and cosmologist the universe is fine tuned for life, i.e. the conditions that life requires. He also has no reason to lie, and as far as I know, no one has disputed this statement.

Again if even Hitchens admits this should not be trivialised or taken lightly then coming from the Hitchster that says a lot. If you have no reason to not believe a spontaneous big bang coming out of nothing is not magical, then I see no reason that to believe in a teleological cause to an effect is any less magical. Something from nothing is what no one has even tried to address. If nothing created everything is a satisfactory to you, then we have to agree to disagree.

67

At some point something had to come from nothing, Intelligent Designer or not. So, then, you’d posit this Designer came from nothing, just as the universe, on its own, would’ve anyway.

Unless something (rather than nothing) has always, eternally existed,* and our universe is just one of infinite permutations, one of which happened to be capable of giving rise to life; perhaps even more, or all of them.

Our world may never know.
*my personal, philosophical conclusion.

68

Heliocentricity is not important to my point. The distance to the stars is. If, as in Dante, they are embedded not very far away, we have a nice, small, universe, just us and God. The reason the supernova of 1572 was so important was that it belied the notion of the unchanging stars.

Copernicus? Perhaps you mean Galileo, who did experiments rolling balls down ramps.

I’m sure you misunderstood him. At the least, if we were on any planet a similar distance from the center of the Galaxy we’d have a similar view.

We have no idea what the probability of our life-supporting universe is. We don’t know that all your variable are independent. And since time begins with the Big Bang, there are plenty of opportunities for many different universes - many of which can be created in parallel. What we do know that there is no one in a non-life supporting universe to be disappointed. The AP doesn’t really explain anything (and no one is stopping the search for answers because of it) it just means that we should not be surprised that the universe we live in supports us.

Where does Dawkins not support the AP? What he doesn’t support is the concept that evolution is random. The AP also tells us that we shouldn’t assume God created us in his own image because we have two legs, two arms, etc. Any intelligent being could think the same thing, no matter what it looked like.

Of course no one is around jumping off anything in non-life supporting universes. Oddly, plane crash survivors thank God (no matter how many died) and feel special because they survived - which is a better example of it at work.

Only known intelligent species means little, since we’ve only just now even found extra-solar planets. But it doesn’t matter how much intelligence there is - the universe is hardly designed for the benefit of life.
As for you believing in cause and effect - quantum theory cares little what you believe. It is.

Sure - “And then a miracle happens” solves lots of things. In an ugly way. I’ve asked many people over the decades this - even assuming there was a first cause, justify belief in any human god because of it. Western theology gets the story all wrong. It is far more likely for a God who created the universe to have done it for the benefit of a species who arrived less than 14 billion years after creation. Maybe their story is finished and done with, and we’re living in the remains of the universe built for them. We just had better hope God doesn’t decide to clean up the mess. Far more plausible than our god doing it and getting the story wrong, isn’t it?

69

Clearly one of us us not hearing something, yes.

70

Drat, hit send too soon, all snark, no content. Trying again:

Clearly one of us us not hearing something, yes.

[QUOTE=THEMAYAN]
The AP is akin to jumping off an 80 story building every hour for a trillion years, and not even breaking a bone or getting killed and each time then saying to yourself….Its no wonder I’m alive, because if after all, I was dead, I wouldn’t be able to appreciate the fact that I’m alive.
[/QUOTE]

…and there it is. If this is your take on it, then you’re misunderstanding it. A better analogy would be a billion people jumping off the building once, then claiming that the one survivor is proof that the building was designed to make jumps survivable.

71

It’s hard to determine without proper context, but many of those quotes seem to refer to “God” in the metaphorical sense, or merely describing the emotional impact from observing the majestic beauty of nature. In any case, expressing a belief in the Divine, with no hard data to back it up, should never be mistaken for scientific fact – scientists, like all human beings, are fallible.

72

It would be nice if the kind of people who use the Socratic Method as a sort of intellectual bludgeon just occasionally took it to its natural conclusion.

73

To take a fine-tuned universe seriously, you’d have to presume these things:

  1. Our universe is the only universe ever to exist, and that will ever exist.

  2. If you changed any of the aforementioned variables, intelligent life would still not be possible. Some are far less obvious than others.

  3. That even if all these things had to be ‘just so’, you would have to conclude an ID, despite the seemingly astronomical odds. Which isn’t necessarily the case, even at that.

74

Because it was all the fault of a hacker.

If intelligent design is being postulated, isn’t that just saying our universe has been hacked?

Though aliens did it is a far simpler explanation. Except we have zero evidence of aliens.

This is fun.
Maybe earlier hominids realized their species were doomed and created us through selective breeding.

75

Someone, from an alternate timeline, in what we would consider the far distant future—billions of years hence, on the verge of our sun inflating into a red giant—where intelligence did eventually evolve, invented time travel, going back to 150,000 BCE, fucked a hominid, and boosted intelligence by billions of years in order to give humans a chance at extrasolar colonization.

Or something.

76

Ed Fredkin said that the universe was a simulation, and that miracles observed in the past were the result of bugs which got fixed.

However much of the design of our bodies seems to be the result of too little sleep, too many hours coding, and too much Jolt. So, hacking is a pretty plausible answer.
Kludges upon kludges upon kludges

77

It doesn’t matter if they are independent or not, this still does not answer the question of fine tuning, and no, I dont mean Galileo. I’m speaking of a non biblical notion but a notion nonetheless that preceded Copernicus in that the earth was once believed to be closer to hell, and was a place of heaviness. Fine tuning is an empirical fact, and its based on one of the most dependable quantitative tools we have in the world of science, and that is math. In fact the world of mathematics is the foundation of what we now refer to as the modern science.

78

Your right. AP does not explain anything. As I said before, it is a tautology, i.e. a way of trying to hand waive away FT.
Multivers is not a science. It is an idea that has been popularized in sci fi movies and is also a part of some Eastern religious philosophy. Again I cite Davies and Penrose who discount it as an idea and not a theory. Again this hypothetical idea is being used to hand waive away an empirical observation.

79

I will stick my neck out here and claim that God exists…as a “setter of things in motion”…and the rest is up to us.

I don’t know what to believe. I think that the order (and chaos) of the Universe is far too big to really understand, hence a cosmic presence, but not God in the Christian sense. A cosmic traveller, if you will.
That’s how I choose to think about God.

80

Yep; all of this. For example, we have no idea of the possible limits of some of these “fine-tuned” physical constants. The “Gosh, it’s so miraculous” interpretation depends on them being free to take on a wide range of values; but we don’t know that. It’s entirely possible that, say, the charge on the electron can only take on a very small range of values.

Stephen Jay Gould modeled snail shells, and came up with a lovely (simplified) snail shell that relied on (if memory serves) only three constants. These three constants defined a large cubical space, within which you would find all sorts of things that resembled real snail shells. But there were “forbidden zones” in which the abstract mathematical model functions, but real snail shells simply didn’t exist.

Creationists (I once had the misfortune of listening to Henry Morris) love to expand the denominator of the fraction as far as possible. Life is as improbable as one in a billion… No, one in ten billion… No, one in ten trillion… But they never give anywhere near as much emphasis to the numerator. Why only one? Why not ten in ten trillion…or fifty billion in ten trillion? Forcing limits on probabilities solely for the ad hoc purpose of making something seem unlikely is excruciatingly bad science.

(I’m sure there are fewer than eight billion people who would disagree with this!)