Feeling Reality (General)

by dhw, Monday, February 14, 2011, 17:40 (5029 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The first issue to consider is the famous Leibnitz' question, "Why is there anything?" Logically if there was no beginning to anything, there should be nothing. But there is something: this universe and perhaps others, so there is a beginning unless we assume that the present universe(s) (is) are eternal. -Those indeed are the alternatives. You go on to talk about the Big Bang and quanta, but you can bang on about the bang, and quantificate until we all get quantummy ache, but we still finish up with your very own devastating conclusion: "The question ,'who caused the first cause', will remain a mystery. Why is there anything will remain as a mystery." Absolutely. That is why some of us are agnostics. -We are still left with a theoretical choice between a UI and an impersonal, non-conscious universe, but your next step fails to cover the problem I raised in the post to which you have responded. You wrote: "But there is something, and the odds favor design, the odds gradually increasing with the development of more and more scientific discoveries of how complex life is. This is an argument from complexity, not incredulity."-It is an argument from complexity AND incredulity, because neither you nor I can believe that such complexity could arise by chance. Where we part company is that you actively BELIEVE in a Universal Intelligence, and my point was that if you can actively BELIEVE in "a form of non-designed, conscious, intelligent life" which is infinitely more complex and intelligent than our own, you might just as well believe that a lesser form of life (us) could also be non-designed. In other words, the argument you advance for believing that complexity must be designed has to be applied equally to the even greater complexity of a UI. The design argument therefore leads us down the same cul de sac as the 'first cause' argument ... who caused the cause / who designed the designer? ... and so it supports agnosticism, not theism.
 
I think you and Matt misunderstood my earlier comment about atheists sharing our wonderment at the "miracle" of life. Of course some of them do, and I actually gave Dawkins as an example, just as you have quoted Shermer and Raymo. I agree that with or without God, life has a purpose of its own, and is all the more precious for that. I was simply expressing my bewilderment at the fact that although atheists may appreciate the miraculous complexity of it all, they are still able to dismiss the idea of design.