Powerful evidence for Design?

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Gaber said:
Thanks.
Yes, relatively, same as science. But not absolutely.
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You mean that sometimes scientists are not doing their work purposefully?
I don’t think they would be very impressed by your opinion! 😉
 
rossum said:
Everything is designed, nothing is due to law or chance.
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Within an immensely complex system like the universe there are bound to be events which not directly purposeful or even dysteleological.
ID’s attempt to differentiate between the designed and the non-designed is doomed to failure, because there is no non-designed thing on which to test any proposed method.
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There are many things within the framework of Design which serve no useful purpose for the reason I have just given.
 
tonyrey said:
Within an immensely complex system like the universe there are bound to be events which not directly purposeful or even dysteleological.
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Are you saying that the designer is insufficiently powerful to control all aspects of the universe? If so then certain deities I could mention are disqualified.
There are many things within the framework of Design which serve no useful purpose for the reason I have just given.
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I was discussing the case in which the entire universe is designed. In that case there is no possibility of finding anything non-designed. If you admit that there are parts of the universe that are not designed, then there is indeed a possibility of testing ID’s methods.

rossum
 
rossum said:
Within an immensely complex system like the universe there are bound to be events which not directly purposeful or even dysteleological.
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It is not a question of insufficient power but of the need for consistency. If you create a universe with specific characteristics and purposes you are inevitably restricting your subsequent activity with regard to those characteristics. Even if gravitation, for example, leads to unwanted consequences they have to be accepted because gravitation is a necessary condition for life.
There are many things within the framework of Design which serve no useful purpose for the reason I have just given.
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I was discussing the case in which the entire universe is designed. In that case there is no possibility of finding anything non-designed. If you admit that there are parts of the universe that are not designed, then there is indeed a possibility of testing ID’s methods.
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The entire universe is designed but individual events within that design do not always contribute positively. It is not a question of all design or no design in an immensely complex system. It is like good and evil. Life is rarely as simple as that! How could a universe be positive in every respect, i.e. perfect?🙂
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tonyrey said:
It is not a question of insufficient power but of the need for consistency. If you create a universe with specific characteristics and purposes you are inevitably restricting your subsequent activity with regard to those characteristics. Even if gravitation, for example, leads to unwanted consequences they have to be accepted because gravitation is a necessary condition for life.
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Then your designer has insufficient power to have different rules of gravity at different places. Another non-omnipotent designer.
The entire universe is designed but individual events within that design do not always contribute positively. It is not a question of all design or no design in an immensely complex system. It is like good and evil. Life is rarely as simple as that! How could a universe be positive in every respect, i.e. perfect?🙂
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If the designer is omnipotent, then He/She/It/They have the power to create a perfect universe that cannot be made imperfect. That is the nature of omnipotence.

rossum
 
tonyrey said:
You mean that sometimes scientists are not doing their work purposefully?
I don’t think they would be very impressed by your opinion! 😉
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N, and they need not be, as it is a non issue. Scientists themselves know that the scope of their method is a protocol for dealing within a limited frame. And even if some might feel that there is nothing outside that frame, it is SO large that there is no danger of exhausting knowledege of what is in it. Science is necessary relative. It deals with differences. God is not relative, only thoughts about God are relative.
 
rossum said:
Then your designer has insufficient power to have different rules of gravity at different places. Another non-omnipotent designer.
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The dogmatic assertion that the universe could fulfil its purposes successfully with
different rules of gravity at different places presupposes insight into, and experience of, creating universes - in addition to being devoid of supporting evidence and rendering it impossible or extremely difficult for everyone including scientists to predict events according to the principle of induction. In other words it amounts to no more than an idle fantasy in a desperate attempt to salvage the preconceived conclusion that omnipotence is consistent with creating a disorderly universe which is intelligible in spite of an absence of uniformity.
If the designer is omnipotent, then He/She/It/They have the power to create a perfect universe that cannot be made imperfect.
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  1. That is another gratuitous assertion without a jot of supporting evidence.
  2. The claim to understand the scope of omnipotence implies omniscience!
  3. The principle of parsimony implies that there is only one Being who is perfect in every respect.
That is the nature of omnipotence.
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A categorical assertion which presupposes privileged insight into the nature of ultimate reality and does not even specify the precise meaning of the term.
 
Gaber said:
N, and they need not be, as it is a non issue. Scientists themselves know that the scope of their method is a protocol for dealing within a limited frame. And even if some might feel that there is nothing outside that frame, it is SO large that there is no danger of exhausting knowledege of what is in it. Science is necessary relative. It deals with differences. God is not relative, only thoughts about God are relative.
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There are scientists - and some members of this forum - who believe science doesn’t operate within a limited frame and propose a theory of everything!
 
tonyrey said:
There are scientists - and some members of this forum - who believe science doesn’t operate within a limited frame and propose a theory of everything!
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That’s fine, save it will be a discriptor, not the experience, which epereince can be had far more simply as ALL. I guess that is not properly everything, but is the substrate to it all and ought serve well enough.
 
Gaber said:
Not sure how you get that. Explain, please?
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I may have misinterpreted you but you stated:
I guess that is not properly everything, but is the substrate to it all and ought serve well enough.
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It depends what “that” refers to because “the substrate to it all” gives the impression that science is our most reliable guide to reality.
 
tonyrey said:
I may have misinterpreted you but you stated:
I guess that is not properly everything, but is the substrate to it all and ought serve well enough.
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I see why you might read it the way you did. I ought have capitalized “(T)hat,” as my reference was to the allness of God.

Neither science nor religion is in any way adequate guide to reality. Science, at least, deals in terms of repeatability. Had institutional religion such a device, there would not be the proliferation of faiths and schisms within them. The repeatable protocols of science do not depend on one’s bacground, culture, or time. Water has always sought it’s own level, and maths always get the same result.

The closest thing to repeatability in the realm of “spiritual” endeavor is the Way of exhausting the mind by inquiry-- in Catholicism, prayer or contemplation, which serves nearly as well,—to reach the point of discoveriing the substrate of what we beleive to be the “normal” way of seeing the world. Ask anyone who has got there. The world changes completely in an instant, and is yet the world. Once that stage is reached, a deeper spiritual life can begin, even if in the guise of a religion. But the technique and the “grace” is common to all. Given, as I’ve said, that we are all made in the image and likeness of God, that shouldn’t be much of a surprise, right?
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Gaber said:
I see why you might read it the way you did. I ought have capitalized “(T)hat,” as my reference was to the allness of God.

Neither science nor religion is in any way adequate guide to reality. Science, at least, deals in terms of repeatability. Had institutional religion such a device, there would not be the proliferation of faiths and schisms within them. The repeatable protocols of science do not depend on one’s bacground, culture, or time. Water has always sought it’s own level, and maths always get the same result.

The closest thing to repeatability in the realm of “spiritual” endeavor is the Way of exhausting the mind by inquiry-- in Catholicism, prayer or contemplation, which serves nearly as well,—to reach the point of discoveriing the substrate of what we beleive to be the “normal” way of seeing the world. Ask anyone who has got there. The world changes completely in an instant, and is yet the world. Once that stage is reached, a deeper spiritual life can begin, even if in the guise of a religion. But the technique and the “grace” is common to all. Given, as I’ve said, that we are all made in the image and likeness of God, that shouldn’t be much of a surprise, right?
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Your view is diametrically opposed to what I thought it was! Thank goodness for that. 😉
 
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him, the universe knows nothing of this.
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All our dignity then, consists in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavour then, to think well; this is the principle of morality.
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Pascal - Pensees 347

These words were written almost five hundred years ago by Blaise Pascal, a great mathematician and scientist who died at the age of thirty-nine. They are as true now as they were then in direct contradiction of David Hume’s view that thought is no more than “this little agitation of the brain”. Even contemporary atheists like Thomas Nagel are sceptical that reasoning has emerged as a result of natural selection.

In a recent post on this forum it was declared:

“Rationality is simply the ability to perceive and reason from causes to effects.”

This simplistic view is the inevitable consequence of rejecting Design in favour of blind processes. In effect persons are reduced to biological computers which are programmed to survive and nothing more. Yet it is evident that rationality consists of far more than the ability to “perceive and reason from causes to effects”. It entails creativity as well as mechanical activity, intuition as well as intelligence, induction as well as deduction, synthesis as well as analysis, insight as well as hindsight and lateral thinking as well as logical thinking. As another contributor to this forum pointed out:
**Anselm33 **There are many rational endeavours–philosophy, aesthetics, music (consider Mozart and Bach)–that don’t operate by the rules of science, i.e. don’t require repeated observation/experimental evidence to falsify or confirm mathematically phrased theories linked to other more basic theories (see works by Popper and Lakatos).
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The fatal flaw in the reduction of reason to mechanical computation is its elimination of insight and understanding. How on earth can anyone **know **anything if all mental activity is electrical activity? If one thing is certain it is that the electrical cells in the brain have no purpose or awareness of what they are doing, either individually or collectively.

The success of science is not due to purposeless activity but to the fact that
Thought constitutes the greatness of man
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Pascal - Pensees 346

That fact must be taken into account in any reasonable interpretation of reality. 🙂
 
To say that
Thought constitutes the greatness of man
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is to make the same mistake that Descartes did with his “Cogito ergo sum.” It might be better stated: I AM, therefore there is the Ground that allows thought to appear. As one man said: “Consciousness is the Light to the awareness of ideas and thoughts.” So we might also say that the greatness of man is in that he can penetrate thought and perceive its source. But so few do that that possibiliy is usually discarded as fiction or relagated to the mysitcs and contemplatives as too esoteric for ordiinary folks. And yet, all those who were mystics and contemplative were pretty much ordinary folks. Difference is, they persited. They didn’t argue with God or each other; they just kept looking at their looking.
 
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