If you can see a creator that is less complex, can you also see one without intention? Discarding teleology seems to be the last big hurdle for many people.
That’s pretty dicey. The fact is, life forms are such unbelievable kludges that it’s far more plausible that they came into being incrementally.
We have giraffes, which have to do that whole spraddle-legged thing to drink. Grass-eaters that can’t digest their own food - cattle carry around bladders of bacteria to do it for them, while rabbits have to send it through twice. Land-adapted frogs and crabs don’t have waterproof eggs, so they have to return to water to spawn. We have sea-living animals that can’t breathe water or let themselves get cold, apes that can choke to death on their own food because their breathing equipment has been tortured into a mechanism for talking… Kludges, add-ons and rube-goldberg solutions everywhere!
Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy (i.e., it renders an argument deductively invalid), but science doesn’t proceed through logical deduction in the first place. That idea went out with logical positivism. So appeal to authority may not be a deductively valid move, but when a layman is discussing scientific matters, it is certainly the rational move (as you seem to acknowledge). And anyhow, scientists themselves don’t rely on authority–papers must be peer-reviewed, results must be replicated, etc. So in taking the word of the scientific community, you are receiving the hypothesis that is no doubt strongly supported by evidence.
But now you are admitting to holding a belief for aesthetic, rather than evidential, reasons. When Ernest Hemingway writes in *The Sun Also Rises * “Isn’t it pretty to think so,” he’s not suggesting you should for a moment *actually * think so.
Appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy when the appeal is made to someone who actually is an authority on the subject being discussed. Else debate is not possible unless all participates are experts in the field being discussed.
But here’s the thing. Scientists are willing to question and discard any hypothesis or theory that contradicts the facts. We always say that any given theory is our best understanding of how to explain the facts, knowing that that theory may very well be supplanted some day by something which better explains the facts. Evolutionary theory itself has undergone modifications since Darwin’s days.
If you are doing science, though, you simply cannot include “God did it” as a hypothesis. Supernatural explanations are outside the realm of science, which involves itself with explaining the natural world. If you want to postulate that life on earth was created (or tinkered with) by a race of giant spiders living on one of Jupiter’s moons, then that’s a testable hypothesis that science can deal with. Show us the spiders or some evidence of their existence. Of course you are then left with explaining how the giant spiders came into being. Once you invoke the supernatural to explain natural phenomena, however, you have abandoned science.
We are surrounded at all times by very complex things that were created incrementally. The economy, for example. Have you ever thought about how complex it is to make something as simple as a pencil? The wood that needs to be cut, the metal that needs to be created to make the blades of the saws that cut the trees down. The vehicles that haul them to factories. The effort that went into making the factories. The complex marketplace that ensures that pencils travel around the nation and are always available to anyone who needs one.
There is no central planning commission who came up with pencil manufacture. No grand designer. No inventor who figured it all out. Our ability to make and deliver pencils happened incrementally over time.
Or take language. There was no ‘inventor’ of the English language, or most languages for that matter. They evolved over time, from grunts and clicks to Shakespearean sonnets.
In fact, I’d argue the exact opposite of your premise - the more complex things are, the more likely it is that they were created incrementally through a process of experimentation and adaptation than to have been created out of whole cloth by one ‘designer’.
I disagree. I don’t think science is methodologically naturalistic. I think it is naturalistic in its conclusions, however. But that tells us more about the alleged existence of the supernatural than it does about any supposed bias on the part of science. There is a long history of scientific exploration of the supernatural. Consider, for example, the Society for Psychical Research or the Parapsychological Association, the latter of which is even today affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. What is telling is that scientists (particularly around the turn of the 20th century) were very open to investigating the supernatural, but they didn’t find anything.
The supernatural (like telekinesis and ESP), if it exists, has ramifications in the natural world, and hence can be studied. The fact that no evidence has been found is telling.
The scientific method cannot be used to test supernatural phenomenon. And by “supernatural”, I mean something that isn’t part of the natural world. If someone were to prove that telekensis was real, then it would be part of the natural world. Scientists investigating so-called paranormal phenomenon still have to use the scientific method. They are, in fact, looking for natural explanations for what seems like a supernatural thing.
Hence the distinction between a supernatural God and the giant spiders on one of Jupiter’s moons. The latter can be investigated, but not the former. If God could be investigated, then he’d just be some other life form, or part of the natural world.
While the Divine Watchmaker idea appears to have some merit on it’s surface (who wouldn’t agree that a watch found was probably made by someone?), there is a fundamental difference between it and living organisms that the watch proponents don’t take into account.
A watch is made of molecules that are not self-replicating. They are relatively static.
The watch has no mechanism for creation other than outside forces.
Living organisms, on the other hand, are made up of systems of self-replicating molecules/groups of molecules.
Once you have molecules/groups of molecules that self-replicate, you now have a mechanism for potentially creating additional complexity.
Paley actually talks about this in his famous presentation of the argument from design. He has you imagine that the watch you have just found has an ingenious system of lathes and mechanisms that allows it to produce replicas of itself. He argues that this would strengthen the design inference, not weaken it. (Of course, he hadn’t read Darwin.)
Not sure I agree. If you had something supernatural that intervened in the natural order, you would in principle be able to detect these interventions (since by definition they are interferences in the natural order). You might then be able to make inferences about the nature of this supernatural force; you would at least be able to make inferences about its existence.
No, you would never be able to trace it back to something supernatural. As soon as you could, it we become natural. If someone 15’ tall appeared before me right now and said he was Jehova and I better get my act together, and then he vanished in a bolt of lightning, I would assume I imagined it or that it was a space alien. That’s the problem with proposing a God who interferes with the natural world-- there is no way to tell the difference, scientifically, between such a God and a space alien with advanced technology.
Is this a point about verifiability–that is, all we have (evidentially) is the modifications to the natural world, and so in principle we have no direct evidence of anything beyond the natural world and so can’t make posits about it or talk about it?
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Why?
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That argument relates only to young-Earth creationism. Intelligent-design theory acknowledges the existence of long processes of biological evolution producing incremental changes in organisms, insisting only that such evolution cannot have been random but must have been guided.
Maybe we’ve already been interfered with but won’t know it until we reach the next evolutionary stage of recovered memories!
What if we’re only relatively sophisticated? What if we discover that, in the grand scheme of things, we’re only “sophisticated” when compared to…oh…say…a rock?
I like the ‘Irreducible Grotesqueness’ argument better.
http://www.fstdt.com/winace/designed_organisms/index.htm
In an environment where life evolves, things just can’t help but be ‘complicated’.
A more obvious ‘creation’ scenario would be everything is simple, like the churchy people claim it is. Every question is answered with ‘Goddidit’, including the question, “Why are people so dirty, starving, sickly, and ignorant?” which is what you tend to see in places where faith is more important than reason.
But why does that mean it can’t be happening “supernaturally”? As in, magic really exists- a kind of magic that science could never explain because it’s actually a real supernatural phenomenon (above or beyond what is natural; unexplainable by natural law or phenomena)?
You mean like quantum mechanics?
Erm, because ‘electricity’ at a certain point in the not-too-distant past was ‘supernatural’. Bolts from the gods to strike down the unbelievers. Before it was measured and explained and demonstrated and turned into industries worth trillions of dollars. Churches still refused to use lightning rods for years after they were invented, and continued being burned down and bell ringers killed when their steeples and bell towers were struck.
Take a walkman, er sorry iPod back 1000 years and play some music, and they’d have you tied to a stake and be stacking kindling at your feet before the song ended. OK, I exaggerate. They’d torture a demonic confession out of you first, then have a ‘trial’, and THEN burn you alive.
Tons of fame and money awaits anybody who could demonstrate a talent like this for real, not least from the JREF. I mean, look at Uri Geller, an obvious fraud, but he got fame and fortune for pretending to tweak spoons, and stayed famous even after he was repeatedly proven to be a pitiful fraud.
Just think what someone who was the REAL DEAL could do.
Instead we have an endless parade of con-men and the self deluded claiming they have ‘a gift’, and invariably turning out not to have any special abilities at all beyond standard sleight of hand cons.
In case it’s not obvious, I’m a bit of a skeptic myself. Assuming they’re real, it’s downright amazing how many ‘supernatural’ things just can’t be demonstrated in a controlled environment. Get a camera rolling and a few skeptical observers watching, in a setting that would prove fairly conclusively that an ability exists, and all of these things just seem to disappear.
A one-in-a-million coincidence happens to over 6,000 people every day. Does it prove supernatural occurrences, or statistics? Pair that up with the fact that when you calculate ‘average’ intelligence, 50% of all people are going to be below your average, by definition, and when you meet and talk to them, ‘average’ people aren’t really very bright, either. ‘Average’ people drive to Vegas and participate in slot machine tournaments.
People tell me I should buy lottery tickets. I’m thousands of times more likely to be struck by lightning. I should probably wear a metal hat grounded to spike-metal soled shoes, then. Statistically you’re more likely to be killed by pigs than sharks, too. Shows just how good people are at reckoning risks and rewards. BTW, for sudden, violent death, it’s motor vehicles you should fear.
How much money can you get for being struck by lightning, though?