Intelligent Design is Self-refuting

[o_mlly]

So He rests when He’s in time. But not outside it.

Because He is intelligent, He knew that after He designed you He needed some time to rest.

 

[buffalo]

If my argument is correct, then the basic premise of ID is false. A transcendent intelligent designer/creator is not itself designed, so contradicting the ID premise.

There is no requirement for a transcendent being to be designed.

 

[buffalo]

A being in time cannot create time.

This seems to be the issue for some. We live in a certain frame of reference. God is outside this frame. God created and designed the frame.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

The basic premise of Intelligent Design is that certain complex things require design. In particular, things that are specified and complex (as per Dr. Dembski) require design; they cannot arise through natural processes.

First, you should note that word “complex”. You seem to be taking that word to mean “having a lot going on” or “being extremely complicated to understand or describe”. ID proponents would say, I expect, that it means “having parts”. The Christian God, if He exists, has no parts. Thus, He is incapable of being fabricated or created, given our own empirical notions of creation: putting parts together.

The Intelligent Designer is intelligent, obviously. We have also the requirement that intelligence at that level requires design. Hence, the Intelligent Designer itself requires design to give the required level of intelligence. This requires a meta-designer to design the designer.

It helps to go back to the Paley analogy of a watch on the beach here. If your criticism applies in the ID case, then it applies in the watch case as well. But it’s clearly a GOOD hypothesis in the watch case that “some intelligent being designed this watch”, even if we have the further problem of “who designed the intelligent being that designed this watch?” So you haven’t removed the key question for opponents of ID: what accounts for the existence of these intricate mammals all around us?

There are some interesting answers to that question. But I would suggest that your argument only works if it is combined with some other answer to the question. If not, it would be a perfectly adequate answer to say, “This watch just randomly came together of its own accord.”

 

[Prodigal_Son]

A being in time cannot create time.

I’m not sure what it could possibly mean to create time. Such an action would have to “take place” and actions take place at a time. So, given the hypothesis that someone creates time, we find that time must already have existed.

I don’t think my argument above really matters for anything, but I do think my argument makes sense.

 

[o_mlly]

I’m not sure what it could possibly mean to create time. Such an action would have to “take place” and actions take place at a time. So, given the hypothesis that someone creates time, we find that time must already have existed.

I don’t think my argument above really matters for anything, but I do think my argument makes sense.

The idea is worthy of discussion. But another thread please. We await the “Rossum Rebuttal” on his argument.

Your argument makes an assertion that ID does not. You assign complexity as a property not just to the effect but also to the cause. Your assertion needs an argument to back it up.

 

[LateCatholic]

It was Christianity that gave the world view that allowed Science as we know it to flourish.

This is ridiculously untrue. It can be argued that Christianity promoted the arts, perhaps. But to say it supported science is laughingly untrue. Start with the scientists that were jailed or even killed. You do realize that it was not until 1992 that the Vatican even acknowledged that the earth revolves around the sun? 1992. How many people here still disagree with evolution because it subverts the basis for the atonement and the creation story?

 

[Wesrock]

Perhaps, but God transcends all other reality. One could say he’s “more real” than anything else. If you include the dreamer and the dream in ATE, God is like the dreamer who is not in the dream itself.

 

[Wesrock]

Gorgias:

Bradskii:

So like a director who makes a film allowing all his actors to ad lib (free will). He has seen the final cut but we are just living the part.

So He knows exactly what each of us will do and act and where we will end up.

Interesting take! I hadn’t considered that analogy!

It does mean that you can adlib all you want but God knows what happens to you in the final reel.

You feel like you are playing a part which can end up in so many ways. But the film is in the can. You can’t edit it.

Yes… and no. You’re pulling God into creation and anthropomorphizing him as a director (having a human perspective on a completed film).

 

[Wesrock]

Gorgias:

That’s not how Christians define God. He’s distinct from His creation. And, although you can attempt to draw a boundary, you’re missing the point that God isn’t created.

God exists. Creation exists. In the sense of existence He is not distinct from creation. He is distinct in many things, such as knowledge and lifetime, but He is not distinct in the sense of existence. The set of “things that exist” contains God and creation.

God’s manner of existence is so transcendant from ours that some theologians are hesitant to even say the words “God exists” for fear of implying limits on him from the perspective of the created. They only affirm that he doesn’t not exist.

Francis4:

It was Christianity that gave the world view that allowed Science as we know it to flourish.

This is ridiculously untrue. It can be argued that Christianity promoted the arts, perhaps. But to say it supported science is laughingly untrue. Start with the scientists that were jailed or even killed. You do realize that it was not until 1992 that the Vatican even acknowledged that the earth revolves around the sun? 1992. How many people here still disagree with evolution because it subverts the basis for the atonement and the creation story?

This really misses the mark considering the Church’s support of universities and the sciences through the Middle Ages. You’re pulling a couple of examples and using that to color the whole history.

 

[clmowry]

The second option also contradicts the basic premise of ID, stated in the first paragraph: specified complex intelligence, superior to human intelligence, has arisen without requiring design.

Isn’t this just one of the arguments used against the First Cause Argument?

There is a self-contradiction in the argument, for one of the premises is that everything needs a cause, but the conclusion is that there is something (God) which does not need a cause.

But the argument does not use the premise that “everything” needs a cause, but instead that everything that is “dependent” needs a cause.

Wouldn’t it be the same here?

Chuck

 

[Wesrock]

rossum:

The second option also contradicts the basic premise of ID, stated in the first paragraph: specified complex intelligence, superior to human intelligence, has arisen without requiring design.

Isn’t this just one of the arguments used against the First Cause Argument?

There is a self-contradiction in the argument, for one of the premises is that everything needs a cause, but the conclusion is that there is something (God) which does not need a cause.

But the argument does not use the premise that “everything” needs a cause, but instead that everything that is “dependent” needs a cause.

Wouldn’t it be the same here?

Chuck

He’s assuming the “superior intelligence” is more complex in addition to that.

 

[niceatheist]

Invoking “is dependent” is little more than handwaving. There are a least notions in cosmology that the amount of energy and matter in the universe is zero (taking in things like matter, anti-matter, positive charge, negative charge, color charges, etc.) In that scenario, the Universe is essentially the product of some quantum fluctuation or instability that lead from nothing to everything (of course, the flipside is that in certain scenarios of the distant future, that instability could resolve itself, leading to nothing again).

The real problem for both theists (and by extension deists and pantheists) and for atheists is that the human brain is pretty ill-equipped to ponder notions like infinity and nothingness. Certainly, the universe that we live in is causal in nature, but no modern cosmological theory, or really even any system of metaphysics, asserts that the Universe always was at it is now (I’d say infinite universe models are rather unpopular at the moment, though I think theories like M-theory are just another variant of “turtles all the way down”).

It’s always my problem, my stumbling block if you will. Unless one buys into Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” as the basis of any physical or metaphysical explanation, you run up against the problem “Is God necessary”? It’s my stumbling block. I won’t pretend my view is scientific, as it most certainly is not. We have no tools to probe the moment of the Big Bang, let alone what came before (if that even has any meaning), and while maybe, just maybe, a unification of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics might give us new insights into the very instant of Creation, or if there was even an instant of Creation, I have my doubts. I think fundamentally it’s an unanswerable question, and even if we find an answer, it will be like M-theory, which simply pushes the problem back.

 

[Bradskii]

Bradskii:

So He rests when He’s in time. But not outside it.

Because He is intelligent, He knew that after He designed you He needed some time to rest.

He needed to rest? That sounds like a change.

 

[Wesrock]

Bradskii:

So He rests when He’s in time. But not outside it.

Because He is intelligent, He knew that after He designed you He needed some time to rest.

I don’t follow what you mean here, either.

 

[Bradskii]

Bradskii:

Gorgias:

Bradskii:

So like a director who makes a film allowing all his actors to ad lib (free will). He has seen the final cut but we are just living the part.

So He knows exactly what each of us will do and act and where we will end up.

Interesting take! I hadn’t considered that analogy!

It does mean that you can adlib all you want but God knows what happens to you in the final reel.

You feel like you are playing a part which can end up in so many ways. But the film is in the can. You can’t edit it.

Yes… and no. You’re pulling God into creation and anthropomorphizing him as a director (having a human perspective on a completed film).

What else can we do but use metaphors? If you can get your head around time and eternity being separate and a being (three in one no less) existing in one and appearing in another (as one of the three), allowing us free will but knowing what we have/are/will choose and our ultimate fate being known, then you’re a better man than I am.

Incidentally, is hell in eternity? In which case, as far as God is concerned, I was there even before I was born. That’s a bad deal if ever I heard one.

 

[o_mlly]

He needed to rest? That sounds like a change.

I don’t follow what you mean here, either.

OK. I stretched it out in a vain attempt to somehow relate this off-topic to be on-topic. The post was my third plea to “strart another thread!” There won’t be another.

 

[mhmtas63]

Agreed. Those who are against evolution for religious reasons either have a small God, one who cannot encompass evolution to His purpose, or an overly literal interpretation of Genesis. Evolution is not contrary to the wider conception of God.

There is no evolution. Non of species come into being from scratch. Instead every alive born from a present germ. And there is no evolution between species. Otherwise embryo or any organ could has evolution. Nothing can come into being by random evolution. Natural laws are manifestation of God’s power and will. And as you mean there is nothing in universe which conflict with conception of God.

 

[Bradskii]

rossum:

Agreed. Those who are against evolution for religious reasons either have a small God, one who cannot encompass evolution to His purpose, or an overly literal interpretation of Genesis. Evolution is not contrary to the wider conception of God.

There is no evolution. Non of species come into being from scratch. Instead every alive born from a present germ. And there is no evolution between species. Otherwise embryo or any organ could has evolution. Nothing can come into being by random evolution. Natural laws are manifestation of God’s power and will. And as you mean there is nothing in universe which conflict with conception of God.

In order:

Wrong.
Correct.
Unsure of the statement.
Correct.
Unsure of the statement.
Personal opinion.
Correct (it’s not random).
Personal opinion.
See above.

 

[o_mlly]

So, for this piece I will assume that human level or higher intelligence requires design. If this assumption is incorrect, then human intelligence does not require design.

I argued that both this assumption is false and the consequent above does not follow from that falsity.

An intelligence higher than human intelligence is not necessarily as, or even, more complicated. We can look to one kind of human knowledge as evidence.

Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without proof, evidence, or conscious reasoning, or without understanding how the knowledge was acquired.

Without intuition, philosophers would argue less and scientists would experiment less. Why would one take the time to design and execute an experiment without some probability of success or construct an argument not likely to persuade others? Intuition is the answer.

Human intuition is of course fallible but it is a source of knowledge that is entirely uncomplicated. It’s why I still hesitate to eat blue food.
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

Does your intuition tell you ID is false?