Intelligent Design? Myth or Fact

Sounds to me like you are as staunch an adherent of "scientism" as the venerable Professor Dawkins.

 

I don't consider myself such. I don't expect a whole lot from science in answering the big, ultimate questions like the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, fine tuning, etc., during my lifetime, although I'm always excited about new discoveries. I probably rely more on non-scientific evidence as a basis for my opinions on religion, politics, sex, etc., than Dawins probably would and am comfortable with that. Like the venerable professor, I do tend usually to be "left-brained" in my general orientation toward reality, but I don't think this is something I can justify by reason alone, and I do have my ecstatic moments. Rationality is a matter of temperment, and a policy choice to avoid what I consider chaotic alternatives, like believing in ghosts and Tarot cards--someting that I bet on while whistling past the graveyard. And I really get high on spirituality, including the Great Mystery "in whom we live and move and have our being" (one of those ecstatic moments), while recognizing the empirical limitations of my beliefs.

 

Indeed, and neither do I; my point was that Dawkins is no more an adherent of "scientism" than you are. Nothing you say in your set of epistemological rules is inconsistent with the outlook of Dawkins or Dennett. Personally I wouldn't use the word "faith" because of its unhelpful associations with religious belief - I wouldn't metaphorically employ the word "god" for the same reason. But "faith" defined as you are defining it, as "intuitive risk-taking", or giving the unknown your best guess in the full awareness that it's pragmatism and nothing more, is something all of us do all the time. Quite different from the general assumption of what we mean by "faith" in such contexts, which usually implies certainty about the supernatural .

I wouldn't use religious language in the contexts you are using it in order to try to avoid problems of communication - it sounds to me like you are using religious and spiritual language to mean something almost totally the opposite of what most people use those words to mean. That's fine, but you will need to spend a long time explaining yourself and defining terms in any conversation you have on the subject...

Hmm. A final unified theory of everything? No. Tantalising hints, great evidence on which to build and rebuild our pragmatic concepts of these ultimate questions? They come along all the time, and they're not generated by theology departments

 

I'll believe in TOE when I see It face to face, although I'll admit String/M theory is intriguing. So far, their achievements amount to what Davies calls "promissory triumphalism". Which will come first, TOE or Jesus?
My definition of faith is a bit secular, but it's the same as Martin Luther's "joyful bet".

 

That particular "joyful bet" I would characterise as an "absurd and childish mistake". I'm betting he lost his stake.

Your definition of faith is not "a bit secular", it actually has nothing whatsoever to do with the kind of faith Martin Luther was talking about... I would regard your kind of faith to be basically atheism: the complete absence of faith as commonly defined.

 

It is what it is no matter what you like, want, desire or wish it was.

This is the first rule of any intellectually honest discussion.

All I can say is that I don't know.
I wish it was one or another way, but what do I know?

Now, who knows? Who can state the case with absolute certainty?
If anyone has valid grounds, I wish to hear, but I have yet to hear.

 

Yes, liking something does not make it true or probable. I can only imagine that god-belief is a very strong instinct in some people, so much so that they have trouble abandoning it, even when it goes against everything their rational minds tell them about logic and the weight of available evidence.

Why do you want absolute certainty? We don't have absolute certainty about anything - only the faithful have it. The requirement for absolute certainty is epistemologically naive and has no place in a proper empirical evaluation of the nature of reality.

 

There's no way to know but we certainly can use logic and reason to estimate. The facts in the OP mean that either odds of life on a planet are 1 in millions if not billions OR God purposely invented life as a fragile existence to instill fear, respect and provoke denial and surreality that requires his imaginary existence.

We PROBABLY are not the only planet where life developed and there are PROBABLY millions or even billions of baron planets for every planet with life. This is a VERY simple and logical conclusion to the FACTS we've witnessed.

There is bacteria known to survive in 250 degree Celsius temperatures. Ever since the "cool down" began conditions across the earth vary from one place to the next. Sure it was "unfavorable" and 99.9% of simple life was probably eradicated a few times. When your talking trillions of single cell organisms, 99.9% is fuck all! Thats the exact shit evolution needs.

 

That's undeniable.

First, what is your definition of God in the context?

There were Olympian Gods, prior to that there were other Gods and Dieties, Egyptians had their own Gods, so did Persians before Zaratustra and after, so did Sumerians and all the rest as far as we know human history, and all with sometimes extremely varying charactefristics, intentions , wills and etc..
Currently we have major religions that have their own concepts of God, like related to each other yet rivaling Judaeo-Christian and Islamic God.
We have Buddhists, who are also religious people, but who don't have antropomorhic image of God, or of a God who intervenes directly in affairs of world, not kind of God as understood in Western Civilization, rather their Religion is one of rational interaction of particulars in the whole closely interrelated system, and it is a Religion, with their own peculiar way of explanaining the cause-effect as some karmic event with roots going all the way back to infinity, to infinite number of prior lives and existences (totally, absolutely irrational claim, yet one necessiated by the very concept they created), and it's a belief with very strong instinct in some people even though it is not a belief in God or Gods as we know it.

Besides the God/Gods and major Religions mentioned, there are also countless numbers of beliefs among pre-historic type of people (like aborigens of Australia, for instance), who also have their own system of beliefs and strong instincts guiding those beliefs.

And ,as if this wasn't enough, nowdays you also have nuclear physicsts and Medical Doctors and atsrophysicsts, all supposedly relying on emprical data, yet each interpreting what they can't rationalize in a specific way, coming to conclusions and theories that can not be proven or verified [as of yet] in emprical way, which therefore only reflects their own personal beliefs, emotions, desires and etc....

Eisnstein was talking of God, for instance, and so did Bohr, but the concept of "God" they had in mind not only differed from each other but had nothing to do with what is commonly understood as "God" by absolute majority of people.
Former had almost religious belief in rationality of Universe and willing to invalidate empirical data in favor of such belief, latter was saying there is empirical evidence contradicting the belief of former in rationality of Universe, and both men to the last days were unable to give any explanation beyond what they theorised .


Or take the now passed away[d.2008] astrophysicist and professor at Colgate University, one of the most brilliant contemporary thinkers , Victor Mansfield, he also dedicated his entire life studying various phenomena in astrophysics, quantum physics and Jungian psychology, and trying to make a sense of it all in rational terms, in terms of modern scientific knowledge, yet if you take a very close look at his reflections you see a man who was very fascinated with Buddhism and in the final analysis projected his own beliefs or strong instincts , or impressions of what he thought world was or should be into the emprical data he was reading , which neither he nor anyone else could explain rationally.

So, to put your statement into meaningful context, you would first need to clarify as to what your definition of God is, what you mean when you use the word God and what particular beliefs you are talking about when speaking of "god-belief".

The point of "having trouble abandoning any belief when it goes against everuthing the rational mind tells" is the valid one.

Very often people will refuse to change their views if they have lifelong stakes in it, no matter what evidence you present them.
It is like biological survival mechanism, akin to fear.

Be it due to childish fear of uncertain reality, or stubbornness or mental laziness or plain lack of deeper insight , the end result is the same: rejection of logic and the weight of available evidence in favor of ones' individual projection.

It is not that I want an absolute certainty for the sake of wanting such certainty.

In fact I said repeatedly that it is what it is and if there are things that I don't know or can't be certain of, then so be it.
Since this Universe is out of my control I can either accept it as is and try to live with it or hide my head in a sand.

I simply confirm the lack of certainty instead of inventing reality that does not correspond to empirical evidence.

And I totally agree with you when you say "The requirement for absolute certainty is epistemologically naive and has no place in a proper empirical evaluation of the nature of reality".

 

Yes, interesting question. My definition of god in this context is a very far-reaching one in light of the discussion in prior pages. People find the belief so hard to abandon that they end up shoe-horning the god concept into all sorts of non-traditional forms, such as 'panentheism', the belief that some divine consciousness pervades the universe. The feature shared by all these redefinitions of "god" is that they all contain some aspect of personhood - whether it's the invisible sky daddy of that exceptionally naive old-time view, or the more fuzzy idea of a 'universal consciousness'. These two notions of god share an important feature: they project versions of consciousness, thought processes, and intentionality seemingly indistinguishable from these facets of human experience. They are flagged up instantly to the inquiring, sceptical mind for this reason - it's too convenient. Explanations never look like that. They are very obviously artefacts of our innate mechanisms for attributing agency and personhood to aspects of the external world, which we do for good evolutionary reasons. This key feature of the god concept is also shared by the other kinds of religion you mention - ancestor worship is another version of this cognitive error of projecting an assumption of personhood onto the external world.

I would draw the line at those definitions of god which include no concept of personhood - this is how Einstein used the term. If the word is being used as pure metaphor for randomness or the principles of physical reality, then it has lost all relationship to "god-belief" as I am defining it here.

 

Ok, I now understand what you mean.

 

And here we have the crux of the problem. I agree with Lithium that we don't have absolute certainty about anything, not even that! What we have is ambiguity that we have to make sense of. Sometimes we think we're close; TOE or Jesus is just around the corner, but so far they always keep eluding me. My problem is that I'm torn between two sides--the rational/logical/scientific/left-brained perspective and the intuitive/religious/right-brained view. For example, take people. I made a statement awhile back that just going to WalMart and looking at the people confirms my faith in God. I realize that WalMart doesn't do that for everybody, and some of those people are pretty scruffy.So what do I mean? Let me share with you the two faces of Okie.

As Lithium has noted, I have a rational side that believes those folks in WalMart are simply the products of millenia of human evolution by process of natural selection. These folks wear clothes, but underneath they may simply be "naked apes", to use Desmond's charming phrase. I believe in Darwin because I've read books by Christian Darwinist scientists like Kenneth Miller (star witness against ID at the Dover, Pa., textbook trial) and Francis Collins (head of the genome project) who convinced me that this is the way it probably happened. On the other hand, particularly as a result of a "religious experience" I had several years ago, I'm convinced that these folks are too amazing to be just that. They seem to me to be walking miracles made in the image and likeness of God. I sense God in the beauty of the world around me, in the Anthropic Principle, in consciousness, and particularly in people (yes, I know, there's a lot of cruelty, nastiness, suffering, misery and injustice out there, as well; Hitler, Stalin, Manson, etc.) I can't look at a person without seeing God ( even though some of those WalMart shoppers probably beat their wives and have sex with their kids).

How to explain this? Lithium's explanation is that "god-belief is a very strong instinct in some people, so much so that they have trouble abandoning it, even when it goes against everything their rational minds tell them about logic and the weight of available evidence." I can't dispute that. I had a religious upbrining, and that religious experience I had can be explained entirely in naturalistic terms: a phrase in Genesis took on special meaning to me and led me to view the world in a different way (for Francis Collins, it was a waterfall). Nothing necessarily supernatural about that. And I live in a part of the country where these ways of explaining things are commonplace. Or maybe I'm just crazy.

On the other hand, what if I'm not. What if strong intuition is making something apparent to me that logic and the weight of available evidence haven't caught up with yet? So that's my dilemma, that I'm compulsivley trying to resolve by endless posts on Hip Forums. If either I or God would quit going to WalMart, I might be able to get over this.

 

The Religiousness of Science

You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds
without a peculiar religious feeling of his own. But it is different from
the religion of the naive man. For the latter God is a being from whose care
one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a
feeling similar to that of a child for its father, a being to whom one
stands to some extent in a personal relation, however deeply it may be
tinged with awe.

But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The
future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There
is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair. His religious
feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural
law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with
it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly
insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life
and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of
selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has
possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.

Einstein

 

http://rael.org/e107_plugins/raeltv_menu/view.php

 

While that is very interesting I would like to make the point that as of yet no documented human clone has been created. How are we to know if that clone would have intelligence, ingenuity, or even character? There are certain traits that make humans human. And it is as of yet unknown if these traits are found in genes. Personally I do not believe they are. I feel as tho something special created us not just cloned us. Of course once someone finally clones a human my theory will either be proved or disproved. As to this Rael movement it is nothing short of another Alien creation cult. The guy is like a modern Jesus. Eventually the holes in his philosophy will be found and discredited. Or perhaps I'm wrong. But somehow I don't see his theories as having any real credence.

 

The guy is like a modern Jesus. Eventually the holes in his philosophy will be found and discredited. Or perhaps I'm wrong. But somehow I don't see his theories as having any real credence.

Yep, sort of like the Jesus of old

 

Jesus will be the Jesus for the animals when He frustrates mankind's progress in depression and war.

Just the O.P.'s remark.

 

Need to do some more reading there, bubba. It's obvious from patterns of heredity that personality, intelligence and many other features of mind and behaviour are very strongly influenced by our DNA. A lot of work has been done on abnormal psychology like linguistic impairment, autism and schizophrenia which have all been found to be hereditary - passed on in our genes. Behavioural geneticists have even identified specific genes implicated in certain aspects of personality and behaviour. Some of the headline examples are the genes FOXP2 (language), LIM-kinase1 (spatial cognition), IGF2R (intelligence), D4DR (thrill-seeking), [SIZE=+1][SIZE=-2]5-HTTLPR (neuroticism)[/SIZE][/SIZE].

Plenty of mammalian clones have been created, including another primate, Tetra the rhesus macaque. There's nothing to suggest that these animals are not as "animal like" as their naturally born cousins. Why would it not be the same for humans? Cloning happens all the time in nature by asexual reproduction. Identical human twins are genetic clones. Do identical twins lack "intelligence, ingenuity, or character"?

Interesting link about behavioural genetics from the human genome project:
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/behavior.shtml

 

None of those points prove intelligent design in the least bit. Sure these conditions are necessary to support life as we know it, but in no way show that they were created by an intelligent designer.
Out of the infinite cycles that the universe/existence has gone through, life is bound to spring as we know it. Maybe the big bang (for arguement's sake) happened 1 billion times before what we know as the current universe. Out of those billion times maybe only 100 of them sprung even the least complex forms of life. Maybe only 5 of them made complex life (in whatever form). Maybe in those possibilities the dominant lifeform was spineless floating octopi because there was very little gravity on the planet. Maybe the top predators feed off of microscopic bacteria that get their energy from methane instead of photosynthesis. It may sound like a wacked out example, but you gotta really ponder on it. What we see as "the only way life could of happened" is only that way to most people because we only see life within our context. Within the context of infinity every possibility is made to happen, although we only get to experience the tiniest sliver of one of those possibilties. Maybe 100000 billion cycles ago life existed in the universe exactly as we know it, human civilization too, except marijuana was legal ^^.
Now kind of along what intelligent design is, is the idea of increasing complexity. From the most simple thing (energy) allows matter to form various dynamics. Elements combine and form different substances. From cells come tissues, which evolve into organs, and so on. It's simply adaptation, the goal of all life to evolve to try to eventually reach whatever it wants. Complexity comes from simplicity. Understand the that fact, combined with the infinite number of existence cycles and time duration, and it's easy to see how such complex life can exist without an "intelligent man" guiding it.
I think with the intelligent design theory, the people dont' truly understand the word "infinite". Ponder on that word.

 

The operative word is "prove". What do you mean by that? What level of proof are you talking about? We require different levels for different purposes: probable cause, substantial evidence, clear and convincing evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt, etc. And what quality of evidence? Only experimental? Anecdotal? Will hearsay do? Does intuition count for anything? I agree, I don't think there's "proof" in any sense of the word; only judgments about which of several alternative explanations strikes us, or more accurately the particular person making the judgment, as the most plausible. And cosmological considerations are only part of the picture. That's why in the final analysis, it's a gamble, a matter of intuitive risk-taking, even if the decision is to make no bet at all and hold out for "proof".