… or I don’t understand your question.
Your point is lost on me.
I very clearly asked if the mere observation of an object alone leans towards the existence of a designer. To respond with a “debunk” that talks about things other than mere observation can rightfully be challenged as irrelevant to the discussion.
Your “logic” makes no sense. If your creator can exist eternally, why can’t matter descend from energy, and the arrangement of that matter adhere to physical laws enforced by the nature of the matter? Why can’t that simply be a cycle not requiring am intelligent creator? More importantly, if you are going to go " Ah Acid, but who started the cycle?" I would answer that I don’t know, and though brighter minds than myself might eventually figure it out, I don’t need a god, designer, or any other nonsensical fictional entity to fill the void in my knowledge. It has no bearing at all on life now. You seem to be arguing from a stance of intellectual laziness.
“It’s just easier to envision a creator than bother with all that pesky science and logic.” sort of thing.
Nobody knows that the first cause will even make sense to us. As mortal beings, we understand things to have physical first causes. It might not be that simple.
The point is, how much complexity is needed before Qagdop starts to think a designer is more sensical? Is there no amount of complexity capable of doing it?
But this is the fundamental disagreement of the discussion. I’m going to respond by saying “atom”, which brings us right back to the OP.
How does one do everything at once, without being able to see how time will affect one’s creations? We, and everything around us, is time-dependent; cause-and-effect and all that.
Sure you do, but just to play along, you are asserting that the univesre needs a creator. You are obviously not claiming that the creator was a human. Anything “designed” by humans was designed by a product of the universe itself. What do you see in the universe that you think reqiures a designer who was not a product of the universe itself?
But theists have the same problem. Either the Creator has existed forever or the Creator emerged spontaneously out of nothing.
Mere observation only proves that something exists. How we interpret the observation is what the whole discussion is about. Of course if we’re observing a watch we conclude that it was man-made, because we know watches and how they’re produced and any other conclusion would require a lot more evidence. The same is not at all true for an atom. And after multiple requests you still haven’t given any other example of a not clearly man- or animal-made object that you think clearly demonstrates it’s been created by an intelligent creator.
And who drew up the list of initial possibilities? Was the list all-inclusive? Did it account for the possibility that atoms weren’t created through natural means?
Well, not just how were they were created, but what really impresses me is the atom’s structure, complexity and functionality. Science does not have answers to where atoms got those things from.
… And no, I can not answer your science trivia question, nor do I think I need to for the purposes of this discussion.
None that you’ve been able to demonstrate. Whether such a thing could hypothetically be demonstrated is another story. The point is that, so far, it never HAS been. All you have to do is show something in the universe that could not have come into existence by purely material, natural processes (and human activity IS a natural process, so you can drop that angle altogether).
If the existence of the universe appears to the Creator as one instantaneous occurrence, the creator would see the affects of time all at one.
Um, yeah, it does.
But we’ve already shown you that the atom does not meet that criterion. The atom is demonstrably a product of natural processes. Try something else.
Whereas you seem to be rather eager to jump on it without any provocation. What’s wrong with saying ‘I don’t know, but here’s some options we currently know of’?
What you’re doing is essentially the same as saying that because you don’t understand David Copperfield’s tricks, they must be real magic.
And I do entertain the idea of a creator – it’s just not a very good hypothesis in that it goes against everything that’s so far been observed and doesn’t usefully explain anything (far be it from me to even demand something like testable predictions or a criterion of falsifiability).
Again, there are more options than you are permitting – time might be circular, and the universe may be its own cause; time may well be finite (into the past), but have no starting point (like the open interval (0;1) doesn’t include a smallest number), ‘nothing’ may simply be not possible (like you have quantum fluctuations in even the best vacuum). Don’t confuse the constraints on the conditions in the universe with the limits of your knowledge!
So… what?
Err… you mean other than how I very specifically asked:
And you’re wondering why I’ve labeled a response detailing things other than mere observation as irrelevant?
This doesn’t make any sense. How can any being see everything at once and still make sense of it? Take a movie and cut the frames apart and stack them in order, then project the whole on a screen. You’re looking at the whole movie, all at once. Now, how do you make sense of it? How do you describe the interactions between the characters?
I don’t really know what you mean by this. If you’retrying to say that some things in the universe look “designed” to you on a purely superficial level, then all I can say is so what? What does that prove? I can tell you that closer inspection has never born that perception out ( a perception I’ve never personally shared, incidentally, so it’s not universal).
No I don’t, I never said a creator is necessary. I said it makes more sense, when we look at how magnificently complex, structured and functional an atom is.
Actually that’s not what the theory says, and yes I am familiar with it. Regardless, any theory that requires all natural explanations be eliminated before supernatural explanations can be considered is going to be a pretty useless at detecting an intelligent creator, if one exists.
So an uncreated quantum matrix is a believable idea, but just not an uncreated intelligent designer? That’s not fair.
There was no need for this list to account of “the possibility that atoms weren’t created through natural means.” This list had nothing to do with such philosophy. It’s based on simple observation of physical effects. Examples of some of these effects you might be familiar with are splitting atoms in a laboratory and nuclear power. We hypothesized what we would get as a result of these tests, then revised theories based on the results. The list of possibilities for the creation of atoms is based off of observable data. These theories weren’t created by people trying to ignore the existence of a creator: they were created to explain what was observed. If there is no observed evidence of something additional then there is absolutely no reason to include it. They had no evidence of something additional, and so had no reason to include the possibility of a creator.
Yes, science does. An atom’s structure, complexity and functionality are all the result of basic physical properties. The same properties which, on a large scale, account for the shape of a piece of mica. The atom is a result of the particles that form it. You would have better luck focusing your argument that we can’t explain something on an object that isn’t the center of nuclear theory and isn’t split apart in laboratories every day.