Categories or Degrees of Existence (Agnosticism)

by dhw, Sunday, July 18, 2010, 20:19 (5241 days ago) @ Tim

Tim, I've just returned from a family holiday and have read your very interesting response to my post of 4 July and the interchange between yourself and David.*** -First of all, I'm sorry you've had trouble posting items on the forum. As David says, it's always best to make a copy. I usually draft responses in WORD and then copy and paste before clicking on "submit".-I don't think there is any disagreement between us on the topic of subjectivity/objectivity, and I particularly like your additional category of relevance/irrelevance, which I'll come back to in a moment.-Concerning intelligence/design, you wrote that all things evolve, and "our only problem is in finding, presently, the beginnings of it." That observation lies at the heart of our discussion, and David's response concerning the complexity of the simplest of cells is one aspect of my own basic dilemma. The materialist argument seems to me deliberately to minimize the problem ... start with something simple, and evolution will inevitably lead to greater complexity. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The cell is NOT simple. We start with something so complex that it is able not only to reproduce but also, ultimately, to vary itself and adapt to changing conditions. And it is THIS initial mechanism (what you call "the beginnings of it") that we are expected to believe somehow managed to assemble itself spontaneously.-In your response to David, you have commented on this: "I fully believe that it is NOT a choice about whether or not there IS Intelligence (or Design) behind life, as this just seems so obvious as to be an utter waste of precious time. Rather, this choice needs to be sorted into a box that has not yet been built." I presume your "box" is a definitive description of this intelligence (you wrote: "It is the notion of Intelligence that needs to be clearly defined"), and of course we have no way of knowing its nature. All we can do is speculate. The basis of our speculation can only be our subjective assessment of the evidence before us, and this has nothing to do with science, which can only attempt to explain the technology behind the so-called design. A conventional theist will look at life and claim that the world is filled with evidence of the creator's consciousness and love for his creation. A conventional atheist will see life as an utterly impersonal process in which the world is governed by blind chance and the unconscious laws of Nature (which you rightly call "a type of logic"). David's panentheism involves a conscious designer, but none of the anthropomorphic trappings of the established religions. You have also mentioned the need to minimize "anthropomorphic bias". I would put forward two separate points here: 1) If you believe in CONSCIOUS design, is it not feasible that the design might reflect elements of the designer? In other words, the anthropomorphic elements are perhaps not imposed by the product (us) on the designer, but are the designer's reflection in the product. Could love and hate, a sense of beauty, imagination, reason come into being within us if they did not already feature in the conscious intelligence that produced us? 2) If, however, you believe that the creative force is unconscious and hence impersonal and without such attributes, I would take up your own categories, and suggest that this is a combination of (subjective) truth and irrelevance, in so far as it is a force with which we can have no relationship. (The latter argument also applies to a conscious deist God.)-One further aspect of my agnostic dilemma lies in the inevitable question: If the Universal Intelligence is conscious, where did its consciousness come from? If you can believe in the spontaneous generation of such a UI, you might just as well believe in the spontaneous generation of life on Earth (= atheism). -And so there, in brief, you have the confusing jumble of irreconcilable factors and possibilities that form the basis of my agnosticism. I wonder if they are also the basis of yours.--*** I will try to work my way through the remaining posts in the next couple of days.