Personally, whether or not there is a creator is completely irrelevant to the question: Is it possible that every human religion is wrong?
If there’s a human religion that has a nugget of unassailable truth to it (i.e. something that is demonstrable and can only have a religious explanation), I’ve yet to see it. Heck, if the atom is unassailable proof of God, why doesn’t Christianity refer to it anywhere in scripture? Is Christianity ignorant?
It does seem as though for every demonstrated fact that’s been discovered since the Bible has been written, Christianity has taken a step back into the cracks of our shrinking ignorance.
I’ve asked basically that question for around 20 years, and have never gotten an answer. Even if we bought CalD’s argument, it would be irrelevant to our life. No religion has gotten the creation story, what we can see of it from the evidence, right. If a god created the universe for his children, it seems that his children aren’t us. Perhaps we evolved accidentally given the way the universe had to be set up. Maybe God has already finished with the creatures creation was meant for, and we’re hanging on here after the party is over, hoping he doesn’t come back with a mop. But this brand of creationist is very egotistical, just certain that the universe must be meant for us.
Possible? It’s highly probably that every human religion is wrong.
Religions contradict each other all over the place: How many gods are there? How are they supposed to be worshipped? Is there an afterlife? And on and on.
They can’t all be right. In fact, most of them must be dead wrong about most of the things they’re teaching. If most religions are dead wrong, then spiritualism must be a really crappy way of learning the truth about the world. So ANY conclusions about the nature of the universe that are arrived at from spiritual experiences should be treated as highly suspect.
Sorry I’m late, dopers!
CalD, I have read this entire post and I really think
I might shed some light on this for you…
(Dio, Czar, et al, grab a beer)
Your post seems to start with an assumption, one that finds
the atom complex, therefore requires a creator. At least the possibility
of one since it is, after all a component of most living and dead things
us humans know. In general, I find it egotistical, much like saying,
“humans are so great we MUST have been create by a creator,
definitely intelligent.”
I can say a lot why I don’t believe in ANY creator
of any kind, but that is pointless to your question.
It’s just like you have been saying a lot about
why you IMAGINE this to be possible, because you find things
so complex and, I guess, amazing in nature.
You have asked for an example of something so complex
that we have witnessed which could prove a designer was involved,
or not involved.
I present the beehive. Heck there’s even matrix of sorts inside,
like you and other posters have mentioned.
A beehive, thanks to Cecil (aka Ed Zotti, maybe) is where
bee vomit is made. Not sure if you like it, but you probably
call it “honey”.
We know exactly who, how, where, and why these
vomit factories exist, why bears like them, heck, even
why people like to eat it. BUT… if an insect vomit factory
is the works of a creator, definitely one we should bow no head to.
I think you are “honey”, unfortunately, while most of us dopers
might prefer the “bee vomit” vibe. A beehive appears and we like to study it,
not believe in it.
If one allows that the Big Bang was the work of the Creator, your two hypotheses, as far as you indicate, are one and the same.
CalD,
While a believe there is a Creator (sans denomination), complexity as you’ve been discussing it doesn’t seem to be a good to go about arguing for his existence. As far as I understand the argument via complexity, the argument is two-fold. One, states that certain things, the eye for instance, are complex and couldn’t have evolved because components of it would have evolved simultaneously. The other argument is that if you start with the basics organisms on earth as they came into being, there simply isn’t enough time for evolution to have taken things from Point A (then) to Point B (now). I don’t have the time now, but IIRC, there was a guy at MIT that did the math and the time was insufficient. Great leaps were needed, greater than could be accounted for by the types of mutations that would have survived and be passed on.
Well, that’s good enough for me. Where do I sign up to be a creationist?
And no actual example of such an impossible to evolve structure has ever been found. The eye in fact is a good example of evidence for evolution; it’s clearly evolved and not designed. The various steps necessary for a modern eye to evolve have long been theorised; it’s not the mystery you claim. And it’s full of flaws that no designer would include.
Not very specific, but such arguments tend to be based on deliberately flawed premises. Usually by calculating how long something would take to occur by pure chance, which evolution isn’t.
You might not have read the OP (and consider yourself lucky if that’s true) but his point was that the atom was too complex or something to spring into being without being designed. If a creator touched off a big bang, and the atom appeared through purely natural means, the point of the OP is just as invalid as if there were no creator.
I’d love to take a look at that, if you have the chance to find it. I’m sure there are many flawed premises. “Guy from MIT” is not much of a justification of anything. I wouldn’t have trusted some of my MIT philosophy professors to balance my checkbook.
This is Behe’s “irreducible complexity” myth. That the eyeball couldn’t have evolved is a popular crationsist canard, but it’s total bullshit. No example of so-called “irreducible complexity” has been demonstrated to exist in biology and even clowns like Behe and Demski have never tried to offer any such arguments for peer review. It’s just a gimmick to sell books and skin the rubes on the lecture circuit. They depend on the ignorance of their audiences when they work this con.
Nope. This didn’t happen.
Not just theorize. Every step can be demonstrated already to exist in living species.
Actually, I can easily believe that ‘some guy’ at MIT did the math & found that there wasn’t enough time for stuff to evolve naturally. In much the same way I can easily believe that some guy at the University of Utah did an experiment and found room-temperature fusion. What I have trouble believing is that either of the two ‘discoveries’ was accurate.
“Some guy” with MIT credentials might have made the claim, but no one has actually made any credible demonstration that the time was insufficient. There is no such “math.”
We agree on your last point.
I did read the OP, which is what spurred the my post after my one to you. It, in essence, says:
I was simply offering him what the arguments due to complexity actually were. I can’t tell you how shocked I am that they’d be pooh-poohed on these boards. Shocked, I tell you. But I wasn’t shocked that one painfully predictable poster went as far as to insinuate I was lying. I love it.
As you may recall, my argument for a Creator is the First Cause argument, not that of complexity. We’ve been down that road before, so I’ll not go down that road again. To refresh your memory, you were totally convinced and thanked me profusely for helping you see The Light.
You can’t blame people for thinking you were doing more than that, since you said, “I don’t have the time now, but IIRC, there was a guy at MIT that did the math and the time was insufficient.”
Maybe if you would have said, “and he concluded.”
Why shouldn’t they be? You do realize the facts of evolution speak louder than “a guy at MIT”, and creationism nonsense that eyes can’t be the product of evolution, right?
I didn’t see any posts that suggested you were lying. Can you point it out?
Cool, since the special pleading that exempts your Creator from needing a cause is laughable.
That’s fair. I inadvertently omitted the word “said”.
Yawn. I don’t doubt evolution for a second.
I’ll let you hone your skills on that one.
Sure, whatever you say, He Who Knows The Secrets Of The Universe.
I’ve better things to do than rehash old territory. AGAIN. If you want more of my thoughts on the subject, do a search.
Amazing that some people’s arguments for a Creator are even weaker than First Cause and irreducible complexity, isn’t it? If you’ve read further, you’ll see that the OP’s argument against evolution seems to be that he has never bothered reading any of the evidence for it.
And I immediately ran out and joined the High Church of Atheism. We have lots of First Causers who understand that accepting this argument without any other leaps of faith is externally equivalent to atheism - no god derived morals, no personal god, no reason for anything except that which is internally created.
Then you understand why I said what I did. Not sure what’s boring you.
Is this a puzzle site? I read over the posts. Where is the implication that you’re a liar?
Yawn. I don’t need to be omniscient to recognize special pleading.
That’s why I said “cool” and explained why it was.
Thanks for the permission, but I’m aware of the flaws with the first cause argument and I doubt you’ve got any new insight on it.