Afterlife: Pinker's skeptical thought (Endings)

by dhw, Wednesday, June 03, 2020, 10:53 (1632 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: My fellow humans simply told me there was a force that caused our reality. They named it 'God', but that is just a name they used. We've agreed there has to be a cause, and you have named three without choosing one. Based on one point, the complexity of the design required, there must be a designer! Which for me makes only one of your three causes possible. A designing mind which is eternal. Chance is not possible. I don't accept any third cause. Panpsychism as straining credulity. It again is the unexplained consciousness of the designer in a spread out form. There has to be a driving force to explain the constant trend from simple to complex. And finally a driving force must have a purpose. Our very improbable appearance cements the point. We are the purpose. I see driving force from a First Cause. How do you explain the increasing complexity we know occurred? You don't.

Let’s try again. We have a mystery: the origin of life and all its complexities, including consciousness. You claim that these can only have been designed. And so your solution to the mystery is an even greater mystery: a conscious designing mind that was not designed but has existed for ever somehow somewhere nowhere. You have even called it the “unexplained” consciousness of the designer. You ask me to explain complexity, as if that were enough to invalidate any alternative theory, and in the same breath you say you can’t explain your own solution! But I take issue with you on the question of “increasing” complexity. I don’t see that as a problem: once single cells began to merge into cell communities, and these learned to cope with or exploit ever changing conditions, increasing complexity seems to me to be a natural process. It is the ORIGIN of the first cells – themselves enormously complex – that I regard as the mystery. I have offered you three possible first causes: your own unexplained and inexplicable mystery, the second is chance, and the third a form of panpsychism. Bearing in mind that we cannot possibly know what preceded the beginning of our universe, you refuse to consider the possibility of first cause energy and matter eternally forming new combinations until at last there was a stroke of luck. And you refuse to consider undesigned “primitive” material consciousness that evolves from bottom-up, preferring to believe in undesigned total consciousness that has always been there and works top-down. I find all three first causes equally difficult to believe in.