Synaesthesia

Albert,
Since the topic at hand is the argument from design, I must admit that I am somewhat surprised by the claim that intelligence has not been referred to. The definition of Design is “To conceive or fashion in the mind; invent: design a good excuse for not attending the conference.” Please note the reference to “mind”. In fact, I would warrant it is that meaning that Ipetrich referred to when he expressed amazement that people persisted in employing the argument from design.

I recognize now that when you said “If by design you mean rational, then yes, I take the Argument from Design seriously.” you weren’t talking about design at all. You were simply talking about order. Still, you must understand that several other points you made suggested otherwise.

You yourself drew the following conclusion based upon the premise that the universe is orderly: “Ergo, to an omniscient God, everything is inevitable and Chaos is merely another false god we have set up before Him.”

I was also responding to your claim that :

Now “The Argument from Design” is an argument for the existence of an intentional creator. An intelligent one. The suggestion is naturally that you are contrasting “design” and “chaos” which is a false dichotomy. That may not have been what you intended but that is what you said. Please be understanding of my psychic impotence.

I certainly think that the universe is orderly. I daresay no one here disagrees.

How does moral inference work?


Datheron,
My point is that Zeno’s paradox illustrates how logic does not always apply the universe in ways we expect. To take existing knowledge and bringing it to it’s “logical conclusion” can often be deceptive. For example, that we understand the world in terms of cause and effect can make confusion such as the argument from causation very natural to the unwary philosopher.

[ December 24, 2001: Message edited by: Synaesthesia ]</p>

Datheron

Synaesthesia,

So lemme get this straight via paraphrase - logic doesn't always do what we expect it does, right? In other words, logic does not always concide with common sense, correct? I fully agree if that is indeed the proposition; it is why logic is held as a Universal system, whereas "common sense" and intuition still requires subjective perception and interpretation. Nevertheless, the process is still valuable, and its conclusions cannot be questioned (given that the procedures and reasoning are uncontested as well), for as mentioned it might as well be our objective system.

Ed

Merry Christmas to all my Homeys in the II Hood! No, I stand by my statement. Molecules and subatomic particles behaviors APPEAR to be random to us because we are ignorant of all the variables and therefore we can only predict the way the majority of them will behave. That does not mean that in actuality they are random. When I said they are random I was referring to how they appear to us.

Quote:

Ed:Well you are talking about two different things, first you talk about molecules then you change to subatomic particles. But anyway the fact that their behavior can be predicted statistically is because they operate according to rational laws. Dat:Then forgive my loose language, for it was quite obvious that I meant subatomic particles, for those are what QM deals with. Also remember that statistics is never a fully accurate prediction - you must know that any statistical prediction has a probability sign posted on the figure, and for good reason. The only "law" that exists for probability and statistics is a certain range, and even that is never truly accurate; we cannot guarantee that every particle obey those laws, only that as a whole they obey.

See above why statistics is never fully accurate.

Quote:

Ed:Because there is no evidence that they are outside the universe. Huh? I never said that we assume something transcends the universe until proven otherwise. That would be absurd. Dat:Indeed. And I quote, "And you have not shown that it is rational to throw out the LAWS OF LOGIC outside the universe given that we cannot learn anything without them!" -Ed Need I say more?

Please read my posts more carefully, notice I was referring to the LAWS OF LOGIC, NOT just anything.

Quote:

Ed:No, in order to be a diversity within a unity they would have to be united by essence. Each of the greek gods have a different essence. Dat:Says who? Are galaxies unified "by essence"? What of the diversity of animals, of human emotions, etc? What holds them together other than physical/designated groupings? Sheesh, such ad hoc definitions.

Says the greek mythologizers. Galaxies are unified by their structure and substance. Animals are unified by their all being contructed of cells. Human emotions are unified are unified by their all being from humans. It depends on the entity what holds them together.

Quote:

Ed ur essence is our humanity and God's essence is his divinity. Your last statement is irrelevant to this discussion. Dat:I think every statement that you have made here is quite irrelevant; they do not serve to actually answer to my queries, but add more fuel to the already blazing fire in which your argument happily dances in. The fact remains that you still have yet to show any stable, definable, or even consistent application of your "diversity within a unity" that cannot be explained by simple human psychology.

Without a unity within a diversity the theory of evolution would not have a leg to stand on. There would be no evidence of any type of ancestral relationships at all. I.e. if animals were not all made up of cells then you could not say they derived from an primordial one-celled organism.

Quote:

Ed:Alright I will try to sound like a biologist. The fossil record shows systematic gaps between phyla, classes, and families. And the late comer theory called punctuated equilibrium is the desperate attempt to explain those gaps. Dat:That's a good start. Now, explain why 1) these gaps are so few in number, if evolution does not make sense and 2) why you think punctuated equilibrium is ridiculous.

I don't know if I would call the gaps so few in number, there is a pretty large number of classes and families. But I don't deny that microevolution occurs the problem is with macroevolution. PE is just an ad hoc attempt to explain away lack of evidence for Darwinian evolution in the fossil record. It basically is an attempt to make evolution unfalsifiable.

Quote:

Ed:No, see my posts to Rimstalker above about the effect not being a mirror image of the cause. Dat:But what of the law of sufficient cause? God must have some tinge of evil in him to create evil; if he is not evil, then by law he cannot create evil. And if you still argue against it, then there's nothing stopping "persons" from being produced from "non-personal" means, the point brought home by your contradictory stance above.

Initially yes you could conclude that he may have evil in him but once you investigate that the only creator that is a diversity within a unity is the christian God then you look at his communication to us and find out how evil entered the universe. Theoretically persons could be produced from impersonal forces but logically it is not possible.

Quote:

Ed:You need pre-existing stars in the gaseous clouds to produce new stars. And you need stars to have galaxies. If the gravity was greater or lesser our earth's atmosphere would not support life. What step by step analysis? Dat:No - you do not. If you have read up on the BB theory, you would know that the first gas clouds were formed by large masses of the first few elements of the periodic table - hydrogen and helium being the most abundant. They were, naturally, attracted into a cloud by mutual gravity, so it's definitely not miraculous in any way.

That is the extrapolative theory, but all the empirical observations of stars being born at present require other stars gravity interacting with gases released from supernovae.

Quote:

Dat:As for earth, note that earth itself is nothing special. If life didn't begin here, whoop-dee-do. It probably would have began somewhere else, and probably did begin somewhere else; nothing on this planet even comes close to suggesting that our particular location in the Universe is anything special. For more explanation, I suggest you take a quick read on the Anthropic Principle.

Actually the AP demonstrates the very point I am trying to make!

[b] That is what I have been doing!

Datheron

Ed,

.......

But anyhoo, Merry Christmas indeed!

Ed, when we say that randomness is a fundamental property of the Universe, it refers to our laws, created by humans as an approximation to the nature of reality. There is no way for us to know the exact position and velocity of any particle - that cannot be changed. Hence, we cannot formulate any law to predict the quantum behavior to molecules. Is there some underlying structure to it? Perhaps - but we don't even understand the observable structures without some analogous means, so it's meaningless to speak of such a "law".

I believe I already agreed to that.

But you give us no reason to discern between the laws of logic, the laws of physics, or anything else for that matter. It is only by your word that the laws of logic transcend our space-time; and that, of course, is only because it makes your theory plausible. Circular argument, wouldn't you say?

No - your designations are made are designations which hinge on a commality between the objects - animals by cells, stars by chemical components. I don't see why I can't designate the Greek Gods by that very same description - i.e. they were Greek, and thus unified. That's the problem with your argument, really; the wide range of allowed connections makes it really simple to start creating ridiculous propositions.

That is not "diversity within a unity" - that is what is commonly known as "grouping common terms", which as I said is a well documented psychological behavior in human thought. We tend to group things together when we find something in common with them; whether such groupings are actually meaningful is unknown. I'm not challenging the prospect that many things have similar and common properties; I'm challenging your proposition that such commonality is somehow derived from a higher being with this property.

Not with what I read on it. A quick search on Google brought up a few articles on the subject; the main point was that it fit well with the data given, that there were periods of no evolution followed by periods of rapid evolution. I do not see how this is ad hoc; science does not work by dishing out theories and then finding data to make them right, but by finding data and formulating theories from them.

Ah - now you're caught in a pickle. Spare all the dramatics, please - this is a logical contradiction, plain and simple. If it is not logically feasible, then it cannot be theoretically possible either. If we apply the Law of Sufficient Cause to God, we conclude that he must have some part of evil in him, no matter how much we examine him. Take away the Trinity, take away his communication, and you still have the unresolved question of where evil would come from, if God indeed created everything. See, Ed, sometimes it's not good to make tons of assertions at once, especially when they don't agree with each other.

???? Obviously, the BB and the first formulation of stars did not happen in the present, so what bearing do present observations have on previous events?

Are you sure? The scientific AP says that the reason we are here is because if the conditions were not perfect, then there'd be no way for us to be here, therefore it is meaningless to say "what if things were different..." It's a refutation of the Fine Tuning Argument, and it goes against any notion that these were special conditions in the first place.

I beg to differ; you still are not clarifying w/o my explicit request, and I still see blatant assumptions/declarations without much backup to them.

lpetrich

Albert Cipriani:
2) We know that the universe functions rationally (i.e. carries the fingerprint of Design).

LP:
What do you mean by "rationally"?

Because it has certain regularities does not mean that it was "designed".

And if the Universe had been designed, then it has the strong appearance of design by committee.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Synaesthesia,
Thank you for your levelheaded response. Before we move onto moral inference, let's tie up a few loose ends about the Intelligent Designer.

I believe in God the Creator as opposed to the Intelligent Designer because intelligence and design could not be what He used to create. Indeed, nothing could be used whereby He created this universe ex nihilo. God is all that is, even till this very day.

Ergo, the stuff of creation is ultimately really Him, not Him in His essence but Him in His expression. For example, that face looking back at you in the mirror is one facet of the expression of you. What you write is another expression. How you act is another.

The difference between creatures and their Creator is that when you peal back all the onion skins that comprise the expressions of us creatures we arrive at a core of nothing. When you do the same with God, you arrive at the core essence of unadulterated Being, Yahweh God, the Triune procession that Catholic theology calls the Beatific Vision, which the Blessed perceive in heaven. That reality is the central reality from which all other realities derive.

The reason God cannot be intelligent, does not design, and knows nothing (God, let's hope I'm right about this or I'll never get out of Purgatory for having bad-mouthed Him! <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> ) is that all these things require time and require God to have attributes.

God's domain is eternal, and so He cannot do anything that requires time, for example, learn what He knows, design a universe, or be intelligent. Merely being intelligent requires time, for being intelligent is the capacity to think rationally and rational thought is sequential thought and time is sequential.

You ask,

This is a sloppy formulation of what I think you mean to ask which is, what’s morality. It’s action that expresses what is moral; and what is moral is what is good is what is real. Ergo, moral inference is any idea that suggests morality, that is, how to act real.

For example, if matter itself acts rationally, then the fabric of reality is rational... so shouldn't we be, too? In short, the so-called argument from Intelligent Design is more properly seen as a moral argument for rationality. Being reasonable is being as the universe was designed to be and in that sense being as God is. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Ed

Go ahead I am all ears.

Quote:

Ed:Animal behaviorists learn about animal minds by studying their behaviors. More complex and original behaviors usually mean higher reasoning skills while simple behaviors and complex but repetitive behaviors usually mean less reasoning abilities and more instinctive brain activity. Dat:True - but how do you know? What constitutes as "complex" vs. "simple"? What is the borderline between behavior that suggests reasoning skills, vs. behavior that suggests normal purely reactive behavior? Such details cannot be ignored - nor can we truly define these with any true meaning, for we are too primitive to do so. In any case, you are still arbitarily declaring intelligence to be a human-only assert, which is still unfounded.

My last animal behavior course was almost 20 years ago so I am afraid you are going to have to go to your local library. There are some excellent books that can answer your questions about animal behavior and which behaviors represent certain kinds of mental abilities. I never said that intelligence was only a human asset, I said abstract reasoning is only a human characteristic. There are some animals that are fairly intelligent but humans are a magnitude greater than even the most intelligent animals.

Quote:

Ed:See above about the study of behaviors. Actually we can sometimes determine what dogs think up to a point. Dogs do not have a true language, of course they can communicate but not linguistically. All zoologists agree on this fact. Dat:Argument from authority and ignorance. Zoologists agree to the point that all we know at the moment is that dogs don't have a complex language, but that says very little about the dog. Until we can actually discover the neurons that fire to make up the dog's thoughts, we can only make somewhat informed guesses on the dog's intelligence, which is in no way conclusive of the matter.

Given that complex language requires abstract reasoning, I think it is a rational assumption to rule out such thinking for dogs. I am not saying we know exactly what is going on a dog's head but we can safely assume that their minds are much more limited than human minds.

Quote:

Ed:Because all of human experience tells us that reasoning has never come from non-reasoning. And communication has never come from non-communication. Dat:Because they are merely tautologies that do not tell us anything! As I have shown above, the instant I ask to you start defining each term as to make the tautology meaningful, you stumble, trip, and make baseless assumptions.

They may not explain how these things occur, nevertheless they are true statements that you have not refuted. Check any dictionary for their meaning.

Quote:

Ed:As I stated before, we cannot directly verify that the laws of physics and the laws of logic were valid in prehistory. Yet we assume they were. You have not demonstrated that because we cannot verify their validity in some situations we should therefore throw out the laws of logic. Some cosmologists have claimed to apply mathmatics(a form of logic) to make the claim that there are multiple universes outside ours. So many cosmologists would disagree with you. Dat:Because we can directly test their results; I have posted this before. If the laws of logic and physics did not function as they do now, then the results that we receive from the past should be significantly different and definitely contradict all logical and physical laws today; the fact that they do not, that they comform to what we have modelled, suggests that they are consistent within our Universe.

Please explain how we can DIRECTLY test events of the past.

Quote:

Dat:And as I have also posted many times, we cannot make this claim about anything outside our Universe! There are no results to test, no data to fit to test whether these laws were valid. Therefore, how can you say anything about it? You're still operating on an ad ignoratum throne; just because it is impossible to prove or disprove the claim, you automatically assume that you are correct. Being a scholar of Aristotlian logic, I don't have to tell you the fallacy in that.

Huh? We do have a result, ie the universe.

Quote:

Dat:As for the cosmologists, note that they are merely claims. They realize as much as I do that there would be no way to show that their claims would be true; they would realize that there is no answer to my query of "how do you know that mathematics operates outside our Universe?" If you do know of a few cosmologists, do ask them this question and my follow-up, and see whether they can explain this blatant unfounded assumption.

They believe they are making a rational assumption(although I dont agree) but my assumption is definitely rational. The multiple universe theory has some other problems with it. But it is definitely rational to assume that all effects have causes including the universe.


[b] The problem is how do you know what the limits of science are? By arbitrarily saying that logic does not apply outside our universe could kill any knowledge we may be able to learn about what is outside our universe. You are doing what theists are accused of doing to science. How do you know that in certain arenas science is invalid?

Datheron

Ed,

Alright; from our discussion alone, I can tell you that you're making assumptions on the beginning of stellar evolution, the different properties of the laws of logic vs. the laws of physics (and where they would apply), the theories of quantum mechanics, and neurology. Furthermore, a lot of your answers are woefully short and inadaquete for the level of discussion; they serve as mere placeholders so that you may ignore most of the paragraph and ask for clarification on some trivial point, which you usually then respond in that mono-lineal fashion.

I am not asking questions out of ignorance - those were meant to be rhetorical questions! I'm asking you how you come to know so much about animal thoughts when even the top zoologists do not claim such a detailed knowledge of the animal brain; you make a lot of ad ignoratum assumptions, as I have said many times, and you don't even try to respond to those accusations. Almost in every discussion, you manage to end on a completely baseless and unsupported claim, which warrants reasons on my part to disprove...this is being rather tedious and boring. So, unless you have sources to back up your outrageous assertions, I will promptly ignore them from now on.

You do not know dogs do not process abstract reasoning. You cannot prove it. You cannot safely assume anything.

Exactly how am I to refute a tautology? I am refuting the idea that you are trying to make some meaning from this...that "persons must come from the personal" is obvious - that the implication that persons are the only abstract thinkers in the Universe, and that abstract thinking must come from more abstract thinking is highly debatable. The statement itself is true, but not with the definitions, meanings, and hidden implications that you have tacked onto it.

What is a result, Ed? It's the causal aftermath of an event. Therefore, we can test for their existence in verification of their legitimacy. For example, we can test whether the Big Bang actually occurred by testing for whether the expected residual radiation exists - it does, therefore such evidence suggests that the BB did happen.

Do you even have a clue on what we're talking about? I was telling you that it is impossible to test anything outside our Universe. "Anything outside our Universe" does not result in our Universe.

How is it rational? Reason dictates that any assumption be based on some prior evidence, some trend that we may extrapolate upon to give the assumption some sense of validity. Our Universe is a good example of how that operates - we may assume, with reason from the evidence gathered, that the laws of physics operate within its domain. By definition, we cannot gather anything from beyond the Universe; therefore, it is not rational to assume anything of it.

Because we are given a solid definition of what science is!

(from <a href="http://www.dictionary.com)" target="_blank">www.dictionary.com)</a>

Science
- The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.
- Such activities restricted to a class of natural phenomena.
- Such activities applied to an object of inquiry or study.

In regards to something beyond our Universe, science is ruled out because no observation is possible to make any assumption. There is a world of difference between attempting to discover something within the operating sphere of a given system, and blindly fitting the above system into any situation. As such, it's a very clear case here that science makes no sense beyond its established perimeter. Appealing to emotions, propter hoc and non-sequitur fallacies don't help your case any.

Albert Cipriani

Datheron attempts to bludgeon Ed with:


Not according to the September 22 edition of Science News:


Not according to Burt A. Ovrut of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia:


But according to our resident wannabe scientist Datheron, <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> "anything outside our Universe does not result in our Universe."

We're just supposed to swallow Datheron's erroneous pontifications along with his chaser that consists of a concoction of trash talk regarding Theistic arguments as "tautologies, ad ignoratum assumptions, and outrageous assertions." No Thanks, Disgusted, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Ed

No need for the condescending attitude. I know you are superior just as all atheists are.

Quote:

Ed:No, the trinity is an implied doctrine derived from the scriptures Rim: NO, you derive the Trinity from the scriptures and call it implied. Others do, and have, dissagreed with you. The Jehovah's Witnesses will argue that the Trinity is entirely unBiblical.

It plainly is implied and has been derived for the last 1600 years by the majority of biblical scholars that accept the authority of the scriptures. The JWs use a erroneously modified bible, ie their own made up version. Ask any biblical scholar liberal or conservative and they will tell you the JW translation is incorrect.

Quote:

Rim:Isaac Newton studied the Bible furiously and came to the conclusion that the Trinity was antithetical to Christ's teachings. What were they doing wrong?

Thats because he erroneously believed that it would be impossible for God to become human, but since we don't have exhaustive knowledge of God there is no real reason it is impossible. And also Newton had a very large ego. See above about the JWs.

Quote:

Rim:Why is it that, if your god is a "diversity within a unity" (hereafter abreviated as DinU), why was it not explicitly stated? Why did it take hundreds of years for the doctrine to be formalized by fallible, uninspired humans?

Actually it was already understood by most believers prior to it being formalized by Athanasius. And this became clear after he returned from his exile in Gaul. But anyway some of God's truth is revealed progressively. This has always been true even in biblical times. We don't know why He didn't explicitly teach the trinity from the beginning. He decided to reveal it to us progressively. That is what is expected if he is the real God, he doesn't do things the way we would expect him to. He can't be tamed.

Quote:

Ed: which was understood in an early form in the middle of the 1st century but was formalized in greater detail in the 4th century by the biblical scholar Athanasius. Rim:After 400 years. It was "understood" by a few parts of the church since the first century, others dissagreed. Now, I'll admit that I don't know everything about the development of Christianity, but the fact that it took four centuries of theological debate to actually come up with the Trinity seems a bit suspicious. Your whole argument is resting on the idea of a DinU god, that Xianity supposedly represents. Why was it not explicitly stated in the Gospels, by Jesus? Wouldn't he know more about the Xian god than anyone? Why didn't he clue his followers in? Note that this is all argumentitive, due to the doubt about Jesus' actual existance...

See above.

Quote:

Ed: What do you mean supposed? Jesus' existence is better documented than Caesar's Gallic wars. Rim:Bullshit. This is the hoary old argument that the Gospels have more copies than the accounts of the Gaelic wars. It's totally meaningless, for the following reasons: -Ceaser's conquests were documented by the people he conquered

Yes, and Jesus' life was documented by his enemies.

Quote:

Rim:-Caeser left evidence behind on the battlefields, and in the form of Rome's actual occupation of Gaul

Jesus left behind followers that documented his teachings and lived according to them.

Quote:

Rim:-The descriptions of his war do no appeal to the supernatural. And if there are any claims that Jupiter hurled lightning on the Gauls, or that Minerva or Castor and Pollux arrived on the battlefield to help Caeser out, they are taken with a grain of salt by historians.

Unless you are omniscient you cannot rule out the veracity of a document for the sole reason that it reports supernatural events.

[b] See above, there is similar evidence for Christ.

This is the end of Part I of my response.

[ December 26, 2001: Message edited by: Ed ]</p>