Design not divine? (Origins)

by dhw, Wednesday, September 26, 2012, 19:17 (4220 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: If you have enough faith to believe in a self-generated universal intelligence able to create macrocosms and microcosms, you can also have enough faith to believe in a self-generated set of conditions and a self-generated cellular intelligence. Alternatively, you can join me on the fence of the faithless.-DAVID: I can only apply faith in one direction. How does anything self-generate? From nothing? I firmly believe in causation. One action causes another. The lights come on becuae I flipped the switch, but prior to that a plant generated the electricity. Prior to that an electrician wired my house. and so on. There HAS TO BE a first cause which put all that intelligent information into the cells that adapt to whatever. I don't like your picket fence.-I agree that nothing can come from nothing. How does an intelligent creator self-generate? Your answer is that it doesn't ... because it's the eternal "first cause". How does a universe self-generate (not necessarily ours but whatever preceded ours during the same for ever and ever in which you believe your own first cause has existed)? The answer is that it doesn't ... because it's the eternal "first cause". A consciously creative forever (God) is no more credible than an unconsciously creative forever (the universe). We cannot conceive of either, but many people have faith in one OR the other. I can understand very well why you don't like my picket fence, since life and human intelligence are too complex not to have been designed. Atheists don't like it either, since one can hardly argue that life and human intelligence are too complex not to have been designed, and yet at the same time claim that a living intelligence which designed life and human intelligence didn't require a designer. Nobody loves us agnostics, but we agnostics love everybody - except the fundamentalists, of course!