Arguments against Design (General)

by dhw, Monday, August 03, 2009, 10:08 (5403 days ago) @ BBella

BBella: My theory is that all that IS is the creator itself...one ever evolving, living being that not only creates but experiences everything that IS. - I equated your initial statement with the atheist view of the laws of Nature, because if each element has "the ability to be what it was, what it IS and what it will become", there is no need for any sort of overall designer figure. The universe and the elements within it run themselves. However, if you say that God is the universe and everything in it, the question of consciousness becomes paramount. I don't know of any concept of a creator god that does not involve consciousness. So just what is conscious of what? - As usual, I'd like to apply the question to life on Earth. Apologies for treading the same old track. Your point that all the ingredients have been there for ever is difficult to refute, but even in a continuum you can still have new beginnings. Each birth results in a new creature, although we all know the sequence of cause and effect. The fact is that unless science has got things totally wrong, our world had a beginning, and life in our world also had a beginning. And so, at some point in the continuous history of the universe, there was on Earth a new thing we can call a self-replicating molecule. The question is: how did the self-replicating model come to replicate itself? - In your Universe as Tragedy post, "playing along with the what if's", you write: "Who is to say that a creator cannot grow in variety of shapes and sizes, having the ability to shapeshift yet also having a 'center' within all that IS that 'knows' it/himself." It's this 'center' that is the source of all the controversy. If the universe is a gigantic, evolving body, do you then see this evolution (e.g. the self-replicating molecule) as something that happens of its own accord, as something controlled by a conscious mind, or as something that happens independently of a conscious mind which experiences but does not control what is happening?