Why is a \"designer\" so compelling? (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Friday, July 17, 2009, 23:55 (5606 days ago) @ dhw

5) In your latest post (reiterating your framework post) you have written: "If we invoke a creator, there isn't really anything we can say or do or study about it. We just invoke it. It's also unfalsifiable, which is one of my criterion for accepting something ... anything ... as truth." 
> 
> The statement that life came about through design is unfalsifiable. The statement that life came about by chance is equally unfalsifiable 
> - Incorrect. If the mechanism(s) that brought about life can be created AND we can understand the entire system, we can create a probability distribution that would allow us to ascertain the odds of the proper sequence occurring. If it turns out that the odds are infinitesimally low than we know that something else had to happen in order to the proper sequence to appear. In this case, you could say that life coming about by chance would be falsified. If however the converse were true, and the sequence repeatedly manifests--then you have a confirmation of chance. - - If falsifiability is indeed one of your criteria for accepting something ... anything ... as truth, you will have to discard both chance and design as your explanations. What can be studied is the process of how life came about, and that can be done without even mentioning an unknowable prime cause. The fact that you can discuss and study chance as a subject in itself is of course irrelevant, as is the fact that you can discuss and study "God".
> - No... not quite. You can speculate about God. But you can't study God. You can do both with chance.

--
\"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.\"