Killing the Watchmaker (Origins)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Monday, May 30, 2011, 02:43 (4705 days ago) @ dhw

dhw,
> The wheel has come full circle. When you joined us ... so long ago! ... you recommended an article (I forget by whom) in which the author grandly stated that XYZ behaved in exactly the way one would expect if life was not designed, and I asked how he could possibly know. Dawkins uses a similar argument: "Evolved organs, elegant and efficient as they often are, also demonstrate revealing flaws ... exactly as you'd expect if they have an evolutionary history, and exactly as you would not expect if they were designed." ('The God Delusion', p. 134 hardback edition). Again, how does he know? Is there any design that works perfectly for ever? (In any case, the argument for design is not incompatible with an evolutionary history, but that's a different tack.)
> -Yeah, Hume put a pretty big exclamation point (!) at the end of that one!-> Of course there are "some aspects of the universe" in which it's difficult to see a purpose. But regardless of whether you're a theist or an atheist, does anyone seriously question that the function of the eye is to see? Of the sperm and egg to reproduce? Of the bowel to process and get rid of waste material? As is so often the case, we need to decide what level we're talking on: specific functions, or an overriding raison d'être? What is the purpose of Beethoven's Ninth? What is the purpose of asking what is the purpose? If you can't answer, does that prove that Beethoven's Ninth, or your philosophical question, is not the product of conscious intelligence? Maybe God just lets it all happen for the sheer hell/heaven of it. (Incidentally, Hubble vs Eyeball was your analogy, not mine ... you cited Hubble as an instance of human design being superior to that of Nature.) 
> -Well, some criticism still stands: Why does the eye only see one band of light, when there would definitely be an advantage if humans could also see IR? Lets remember that atheists are railing against essentially "special creation" that man is intrinsically special to the universe by our high and almighty creator, who is omnipotent etc. etc. It DOES stand to reason that if we were supposed to be superior, that we would have been blessed with stronger spines, IR eyesight, any of a number of different advantages that would actually stand to make us "superior." (I deeply question whether or not we really are "smarter" than most other animals just because we write plays... intelligence alone doesn't make us "superior...") -And for your last criticism--I was trashing my own argument. Trust me, I may seem a drunkard, but I know when I've been gutted! -> I agree that "both the universe and life are events unique enough in known history to have no legitimate analogy among any and all human endeavors." But the crucial question of Chance v. Design does not NEED analogies. Do you or do you not believe that a functioning eye, penis, bowel could have been formed by means of a mechanism that initially assembled itself through the chance combination of inanimate materials? Whichever answer you give requires one kind of faith or another, unless you withhold belief (= agnosticism).
> -Maybe you and I are in similar boats here: Faith is categorically unjustifiable. -> MATT: The rest of Pigliucci's arguments are really more targeted towards pure creationist arguments and don't really have any meaning for the players involved here. An interesting note; the father of modern "Intelligent Design" thought, Phillip Johnson launched his campaign in order to find a way to definitively bridge the gap between nature and God so there would be a strong basis in order to refute Dialectical Materialism. The grander point of Pigliucci's book is that Intelligent Design—as a movement—is politically minded and motivated from the very beginning. It doesn't really care about David's arguments; It's a battle to destroy all materialism that has its modern root in Cold-War propaganda and its ancient root going back to the enlightenment. In other words, it's a new "holy war."
> 
> You are right, the argument has no meaning for us as current contributors to this forum. But it's worth noting that when the forum opened, three and a half years ago, atheist websites castigated it as a vehicle for creationism. The fact is that fundamentalists on both sides cannot abide any questioning of their basic principles, and no doubt that is why we brave, well-balanced, open-minded, ever-questioning but ever-tolerant agnostics are spurned by one side as creationists and by the other as atheists.-I will never forget when I voluntarily withdrew from alt.atheism some years ago. I had an... argument, where someone claiming to be the physicist Michael Gray. I was challenging him on several philosophical points, most notably that I thought saying "God does not exist" really IS an expression of faith, if we're to be epistemically accurate. Because its entirely within reason that "Everything man has ever thought about God is false except that it exists." -The series of ad-hominems from him was so vitriolic, so off-base, and so... just purely hateful, that I ended my life there with probably one of the most venomous attacks of my own that I'd ever written, and I never, ever looked back for a response.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"