Natural Teleology: More Thomas Nagel (The limitations of science)

by David Turell , Sunday, February 10, 2013, 18:48 (4302 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: but there are plenty of people who do believe in chance or different versions of panpsychism, with the first cause being unselfconscious energy, i.e. they do not have to assume that something came of nothing. By all means reject their beliefs on the grounds of complexity, but do not assume that the only alternative is something from nothing.-I'm not assuming 'something from nothing', you are. Where did the 'unselfconscious energy' come from? Was it eternal? If eternal, so is my self-aware God who is the UI. Something must be eternal. The base of everything is energy, so energy is eternal. Our disagreement is on whether that energy is organized or not and I do not think unorganized energy can become organized, except by chance and you and I have rejected chance as a likely possibility. I do not think unorganized energy can produce the reality we see. And I know you cannot explain how unorganized energy can advance to the organization we see today. It requires mind work or chance, so we are back to intellect.-
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> dhw;I do not reject the idea of God. It appears that I am even more open to different concepts of gods than you are. As I keep trying to explain, my form of agnosticism entails neither believing nor disbelieving ... I consider chance to be as unlikely a creator of life as an eternal, infinite, self-aware form of energy, and as an eternal, infinite, "intelligent" but not self-aware form of energy....... One of these concepts must be true, but I have no idea which one.I would suggest that the logical conclusion is: we don't know, we can't know, and therefore we shall have to keep an open mind.-And I disagree. Only one choice is logical, a planning self-aware mind. There is no way an amorphous clump of energy can do any more than degrade according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. An eternally organized UI most likely does not experience entropy or it would not, by definition, be eternal.