PZ Myers. 2005 Jul 19. That ol' argument from imperfection. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/that_ol_argument_from_imperfection/>. Accessed 2008 Nov 20.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Tuesday, July 19, 2005
That ol' argument from imperfection
David Barash wrote an op-ed on imperfections in human design that I'll get to in a moment, but right now I'm most interested in this set of letters to the editor complaining about the piece. There are several false claims about the basis of intelligent design in evidence:
The modern ID movement simply points out ample evidence of design (vs. chance or randomness), not perfection (vs. imperfection).
…"intelligent design" - which specifically refers to the empirical evidence that points to the very high probability that a "mind" was at work sometime in the creation of life…The irreducible complexity of life, as is evidenced by the numerous interdependent molecules, cells and organ systems, each of which cannot function without the other (for this is the basis of medical science), points to the intelligent design of life and away from what is promoted by Barash, i.e., all life having come about exclusively by the random forces of nature.
None of this is true. There is no evidence for Design and no body of empirical support for the claims of the Discovery Institute; "irreducible complexity" had its brief moment of glory in the 1990s, was quickly found to be trivial, uninteresting, and wrong and was discarded from consideration on first reading of Behe's book by every competent scientist. Waving one's hands at big piles of complexity is not an argument against evolution, which is very, very good at accumulating messy contingencies. Nor is it an argument against randomness; there is a corner of my garage where we tossed the unsorted debris from our last house move that is extraordinarily intimidating in its complexity, which is why we haven't managed to make a dent in it yet in the last two years.
And please…nobody should be bringing up this bogus claim of "all life having come about exclusively by the random forces of nature". Evolution is not random, OK?
Barash brings up several suboptimal features of the human body—backaches, childbirth, urogenital plumbing, etc.—that are reasonably explained by our evolutionary history. How do these letter-writers explain it using Intelligent Design "theory"? There is the usual excuse of the Fall of Man—we're being punished for our Edenic naughtiness.
We know from biblical passages like Romans 8 that the entire creation is "groaning" for the time in the future when things will be set right (perfect) once again. The Bible never makes the claim that our present bodies would be free from pain or deterioration. But the biblical text does speak of "new bodies" that God will provide, which will be perfect.
There is the "testing" argument: God does it on purpose, giving us arthritis and cancer and crippling injuries to make us better people. I call this one the Sadistic Daddy theory of design.
Our bodies were designed to age and eventually to wear out. It is part of a loving creator's plan to place challenges and obstacles in our path and then to help us overcome them so that we may become stronger, wiser and better. It is also part of the plan that when we have completed our task here in this life we should then move on to the next step in our progression.
I thought this one was theologically interesting—the author wanders a bit off the religious reservation to suggest that God was a bit of a putterer. It's still a poor fit with evolution, though, because evolutionists do not argue that prior forms were failures.
Nor do we believe that the human body is perfect. It has been cobbled together. Like Thomas Edison or any great inventor, there were many trials and errors before there was success.
Don't assume that the last writer was a member of the nearly invisible rational-materialist wing of the ID movement who at least pay lip service to the idea that intelligent aliens did it, though: he starts his letter off this way:
It is evident from reading David Barash's column that he either does not understand what intelligent design theory is, or he is simply dogmatically opposed to it since it relies on the existence of God.
That's another interesting theme of these letters: they all babble out little dollops of Discovery Institute approvable pseudo-secularism, mentioning science or reason or evidence and trying to slap together some sort of rationale that doesn't require simple miracles, but at the same time all also fall back on God. These are religious people who are ultimately basing their adoption of Intelligent Design "theory" on the fact that it appears to provide a rational framework for religious and necessarily irrational beliefs. No one says it plainer than this one:
Intelligent design appeals to intelligent people who have a rational belief in God.
Intelligent people, maybe—but not quite intelligent enough to either a) discard the superstitions of their forefathers, or b) recognize that religious belief is not built upon empirical evidence, and cannot be verified by the tools that are extremely good at probing the material world.
As is common, these writers completely misunderstand the argument from imperfections that Barash presents; they treat it as an argument for atheism, rather than evolution. It isn't. It can be used as an extremely hypothetical argument about the nature of god, I suppose, which is how these writers treat it and as Barash briefly mentions (admitting that these observations could be accounted for by a god of "incompetence or sheer malevolence"), but as an argument for evolution, this is irrelevant. These imperfections are seen as relics of our past history, and indicate that we did have a complex history—we were not born as a species with no heritage from our forebears.
For example, I have a large scar on the lower right quadrant of my abdomen. An objective doctor could look at that and from its position and the degree of healing determine that I had an appendectomy many years ago. He could do tests to evaluate that inference about my history—open me up and see that I don't have an appendix, for instance—and all he would be doing is making a conclusion based on the actual physical evidence. Speculating that I had been born with the scar, that it was punishment for my father's sins or that it was done to test my faith, are not relevant to the material facts.
And that is the argument that Barash is making. Our backaches are a consequence of our posture and our anatomy, which show clear ties to the organization of our quadrupedal relatives. There's no judgment of punishment here—just signs of physical relationships that suggest historical events.
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Paul wrote:
Evolution is not random, OK?
I guess I should be used to this, having been a teacher for 33 years, but apparently not one single word I've said in the past 5 years has had any effect on you.
No, it's not OK, and repeating it over and over ad nauseum will not make it true. According to evolutionary theory, mutations are random and natural selection can only act on what is already present. The only non-random component of natural selection is that those organisms better adapted to their environment will have a greater chance of survival. But it only effects adaptations that already exist
Natural selection has no power to assemble, create organize or construct new processes, structures, adaptations and organisms.
WRT design, you're probably old enough to rememberr Volkswagen beetles and you seem like the kind of guy that might have driven one.
Dr. Porsche designed the car and he was one of the top automotive engineers of our time. However, there are some glaring defects in the engineering that makes one wonder what he was thinking. The window defrosters (such as they were) didn't hardly work at all. The heater boxes would rust out, making the car a veritable gas chamber during extended periods of submarine race watching in Brooklyn. And did you ever try to change a generator? They must have started with the generator and built the car around it.
The point is, the presence of imperfect design or design errors does not rule out intelligent input nor does it rule out an intelligent designer.#: Posted by charlie wagner on 07/19 at 10:10 AM - I enjoyed your example of the garage junkpile. In the past I have used the example of a large forest deadfall for the same purpose. A deadfall could be said to be IC if moving a branch would cause part of it to collapse, but no one assumes a deadfall was put in place by an intelligent purpose.
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Charlie,
I will leave it to PZ to handle your assertion that natural selection cannot produce anything new.
As for 'design', though: with the greatest possible respect for the engineering skills of the eminent Herr Prof. Dr. (soviel Zeit muss sein!) Porsche, surely the IDers would claim a greater degree of skill in their Designer? Though of course, if there were a Designer, her shoddy work on elephants (to cite only the one example that Ken Miller used) would suggest that much of her time was spent on return trips to the drawing board.#: Posted by Mrs Tilton on 07/19 at 10:26 AM -
Charlie, you are wrong. You are viewing only one level of natural selection and imagining it to be the whole thing. You are stuck in the usual bronze-age human problem of thinking only at your own level.
At the level of the biochemistry, where you seem to claim total unpredictable randomness, in reality (apparently all unbeknownst to you in your self-imposed ignorance) there is still natural selection going on. Some combinations are more resistant to mutation than others and this matters one way or another under different environments (physical and chemical). For a start, it's a plausible argument for getting to DNA when RNA would have done. It's also a plausible argument for the different genetic codes which exist and the different balances of bases and prevalences of coding options.#: Posted by on 07/19 at 10:39 AM -
I like the use of PZ's appendectomy scar to point out how science works with regards to history, given the topic of bad design. Was that intentional?
#: Posted by on 07/19 at 10:42 AM
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Mrs Tilton wrote:
I will leave it to PZ to handle your assertion that natural selection cannot produce anything new.
I'm not going to hold my breath waiting...
surely the IDers would claim a greater degree of skill in their Designer?
Why? We're not talking about GOD you know ;-:
And besides the level of skill needed to design and assemble living systems already far surpasses anything we humans can accomplish or even can imagine.#: Posted by charlie wagner on 07/19 at 10:57 AM -
Why? We're not talking about GOD you know ;-:
I know you're not. Sometimes, though, I suspect that some IDers may actually think God an even likelier candidate for Designer than those space aliens.
And besides the level of skill needed to design and assemble living systems already far surpasses anything we humans can accomplish or even can imagine.
Pish tosh. I am very far from an expert, but have myself participated in a cooperative endeavour that has produced not one but three living systems. And it didn't even require much conscious thought!#: Posted by Mrs Tilton on 07/19 at 11:14 AM -
And besides the level of skill needed to design and assemble living systems already far surpasses anything we humans can accomplish or even can imagine.
I can imagine it, think about what we're doing in medicine today compared to 20 years ago. 50 years ago. 100 years ago. I can imagine it, within the next 100 years. Seriously. I do not see anything "Impossible" for a human to accomplish.
Why? We're not talking about GOD you know ;-:
Who is your designer then? Thats one of my biggest things with ID. I like emperial evidence, and claiming theres an "Designer" but we don't know who, what, when, how, or why... its just an exuse really now. Unless either A) An alien arrived with far superior technology saying we created the first primitive microbe on earth (which still leaves the problem of trying to figure out how the aliens came about) or B) A god which appears, which science cannot explain appears, demonstrates to people how it can make little primitive microbes......
Pointing out flaws in evolutionary theory, does not make either of true#: Posted by on 07/19 at 11:18 AM -
Though of course, if there were a Designer, her shoddy work on elephants (to cite only the one example that Ken Miller used) would suggest that much of her time was spent on return trips to the drawing board.
I'm still waiting for the continent-wide groan of horror when the stealth fundies masquerading as ID proponents suddenly realize that all the best designers are gay.#: Posted by Chris Clarke on 07/19 at 11:25 AM -
Mrs Tilton wrote:
I am very far from an expert, but have myself participated in a cooperative endeavour that has produced not one but three living systems. And it didn't even require much conscious thought!
It didn't require much conscious thought on YOUR part, but someone, (or something) wrote the set of instructions in the developmental algorithm that you set in motion.#: Posted by charlie wagner on 07/19 at 11:35 AM -
Geral wrote:
Pointing out flaws in evolutionary theory, does not make either of true
No, but it makes evolutionary theory false. So we're back to square one: we just don't know.#: Posted by charlie wagner on 07/19 at 11:39 AM -
Chris Clarke quoted:
“[L]ook back to your childhood. I�ll bet a dollar to a doughnut that every one of your friends and acquaintances who was an asshole then, is a conservative today.” - Rack Jite
I'm the exception I guess. Looking back on my childhood, I was an asshole. But I've grown up to be a pretty decent liberal. But then again, almost every other kid I knew was an asshole too. I might have remained an asshole had it not been for my Jewish friends, who showed me that I could like classical music, I could go to college, I could read "Ulysses" and I could make a difference.#: Posted by charlie wagner on 07/19 at 11:52 AM -
I'm still trying to figure out what "intelligent designer" would have programmed the Photic Sneeze Reflex into 25% of us humans.
http://tinyurl.com/6ocwm
It makes perfect sense to me as a random mutation that wasn't actively harmful so it remained in the genetic code. It makes no sense as a "design flaw," since it doesn't seem to be connected to the workings of any particular system.#: Posted by on 07/19 at 12:22 PM -
We've already been over this, haven't we? I thought we decided that the intelligent designer was either incompetent or malicious. Which was it?
I am not sure whether we talked about whether the designer actually built its designs. In this world, most designers are not the builders. Maybe it was the dumbass builder who screwed up the intelligent designs.#: Posted by on 07/19 at 12:49 PM -
Intelligent design appeals to intelligent people who have a rational belief in God.
Well, this is true as far as it goes. It has an appeal to people, at first glance. That doesn't make ID true, but the writer's statement isn't exactly false.#: Posted by Constantine on 07/19 at 12:50 PM - What constitutes a "rational belief in God"?
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E.g, does Thomas Paine in "The Age of Reason" express a "rational belief in God"?
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_paine/age_of_reason/index.shtml -
Let's face it: there is no rational belief in god. All beliefs in god are based on tradition (my family raised me in the church, and I live in a christian nation, therefore christianity is true), hope (I don't want death to be the end of me or my loved ones) or ignorance (I don't see how all this could have come into being or mean anything without a god). All justifications for such beliefs are rationalization, not reason.
#: Posted by on 07/19 at 02:52 PM
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"And besides the level of skill needed to design and assemble living systems already far surpasses anything we humans can accomplish or even can imagine."
This is true of natural languages, and so far as I know, no one still asserts that some Designer invented grammars and lexicons. Native speakers are typically incapable of explaining grammatical structures they routinely use without error. Example for the English speakers here: expalin the semantic difference(s)between:
I eat an apple.
I am eating an apple.
Natural languages continually evolve. Comparisons of documents in languages at different points in their histories attest to this. Where's the Designer?#: Posted by on 07/19 at 03:40 PM -
Charlie says:
"Why? We're not talking about GOD you know ;-:
And besides the level of skill needed to design and assemble living systems already far surpasses anything we humans can accomplish or even can imagine."
I think this is St Anselm's ontological proof of god, is it not. As I have always said, ID is nothing but a religous belief.
When you have evidence of the actions of the designer let me know.#: Posted by on 07/19 at 05:04 PM -
"That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
Christopher Hitchens (quite possibly muttered to a bartender attempting to collect on a tab)
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The "rational belief" in God is the same as the "reasonable doubt" in OJ's murder trial.
#: Posted by on 07/19 at 06:26 PM
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So, charlie wagner has been a teacher for 33 years (!), and, does not seem to understand that the whole point of Darwin's theory(ies) of evolution is to explain the development of complex structures/organisms using natural mechanisms. If "new" structures, processes, and organisms could not logically or empirically result from evolution, the theory would have gotten nowhere. Cw's assertion does not refute the vast amount of evidence confirming the "theory." See talkorigins.org, they explain it better than I can.
#: Posted by on 07/19 at 06:34 PM
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This is true of natural languages, and so far as I know, no one still asserts that some Designer invented grammars and lexicons.
Well, there are people out there who think the story of the Tower of Babel is literally true and the reason why we have different languages.
They're incredibly deluded or stupid people with zero knowledge of linguistics, but they do exist.#: Posted by on 07/19 at 06:41 PM -
Since Charlie knows that "Natural selection has no power to assemble, create organize or construct new processes, structures, adaptations and organisms," he shouldn't have any trouble showing that the parasitism (and hyper-parasitism and hyper-hyper-parasitism) that emerges in artificial life environments like Tierra MUST be processes that were designed into the original instruction set.
What about Alife systems?
How is it that a simple, well-defined instruction set (completely understood, unlike bio-chemistry) combined with a simple, well-defined selection mechanism, and a simple, well-defined process of pseudo-random modification, can result in escalating levels of complexity of behaviour?
Read a little more about emergence, Charlie. You're missing a number of clues. -
Intelligent Design is simply too easily dismantled. A greater challange may await, however, when it one day returns, new and improved, as Artistic Design.
#: Posted by eponymagain on 07/19 at 08:28 PM
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charlie:
You are playing a wordgame. Mutations are not adaptations until they are selected. Evolution is not random, OK?
Eventual flaws in evolution theory, which we know must be small since the theory is known to be the correct one, doesn't make it false. (That is not circular; no other scientific theory fits the observation of evolution.)
Geral:
I think Charlie doesn't describe 'intelligence' but he states that aliens did it. (Without evidence, of course.) I think he is the one that asked how he avoids an unfalsifiable infinite chain of 'aliens did it', will against facts state that the Universe is infinite old.
If he is that guy he is a crackpot. That is, he talks against known facts. In fact he talks against the observation of evolution ('no new adaptations'), the long established theory of evolution, a realistic origin of life, and the established age of the Universe. The guy, possibly a strawman in this case, who fits that description is a severe crackpot...
Constantine:
A belief in a god can't be rational since we can't observe gods. Belief has other grounds.#: Posted by on 07/19 at 08:49 PM -
eponymagain wrote:
A greater challange may await, however, when it one day returns, new and improved, as Artistic Design.
A curious synchronicity. I was just reading an O Henry short story An Adjustment of Nature in which his first paragraph refers to "unquenchable belief in the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature". (A fun story but with no real bearing on the discussion.) -
A belief in a god can't be rational since we can't observe gods. Belief has other grounds.
The part of the clause I was referring was that Intelligent Design has an appeal to those people, not whether that belief in God is rational or not, or what a rational belief in God would be.#: Posted by Constantine on 07/19 at 09:01 PM -
Constantine, my apologies for the misunderstanding!
#: Posted by on 07/19 at 09:21 PM
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I myself like particularly the way the Intelligent Designer designed the coastlines of South America and Africa to fit together so perfectly. The odds against that happening by accident are staggering, I'm sure, which proves it was planned.
#: Posted by on 07/20 at 12:27 AM
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I have to quibble. I see a couple of claims above to the effect that there is no rational belief in God. I'm not a theist, but I still have to disagree with that statement. On the one hand, I think its quite correct to say that there is no rational inference from empirical fact to belief in the existence of God. In other words, no rational person can rightly believe that belief in God is supported by the evidence. God has historically been invoked to explain phenomena when no better explanations existed. But these days we have a host of other explanatory devices that really outperform God (boy, he must be pissed!). Hence, its not rational to continue to appeal to God as an explanation for phenomena, because we already have better explanations on the shelf. And lo, experts at spade-labelling that we are, we know how to call that one out.
A slightly different empirical claim might run, "None of the belief in God that exists is rational." That might nearly be true- in spite of what I'll say below about how belief in God could be rational. As Mark Paris says, it seems most believers inherit their beliefs or fall on God-explanations because, as it were, they don't know any better. But I'm still going to quibble with the "there is no rational belief in God" comment, construed as, "no belief in God could be rational."
Two examples came to mind as to how one could rationally come to posit God's existence. First, God could still conceivably hold a place for some rational folk in purely speculative metaphysics. Consider the question that Leibniz famously posed: Why are there things at all rather than nothing? You might rationally think this is a silly question- it is, after all, asking for an explanation of the universe as a whole (everything that is)- and logically the explanation can't be couched in terms of anything that is - or at least anything that is in the world. But rational people have answered the question of why there are beings at all by the only conceivable answer, "Well, maybe somebody/thing put them there." If you follow it out logically, you have to posit the existence of a being who is the cause of the world but lies outside of it. That's quite different from the Christian God. The scheme is far-fetched of course, but it doesn't seem to me to be immediately irrational to try to answer the Big Cosmological Question- or even irrational to give it the most obvious answer.
People have also had practical and meta-ethical notions for positing God's existence. If you believe, e.g. that there are objective moral facts, there is a big question about what makes it the case that certain actions are morally right and others wrong. One of the more elegant explanations for why it is, e.g. wrong to kick your dog, is that, well, God said so. I know that may not sound particularly compelling, but you should read the alternatives! (*ahem*Kant*ahem*) In any case, if you believe in objective moral facts, positing the existence of God is probably as rational an explanation of those facts as any. Of course, the existence of moral facts is always in dispute. But its certainly not irrational to think that there are moral facts (in fact, it might be really irrational to think that there aren't!). Given that moral facts are particularly nasty things to explain, it also doesn't seem irrational to suppose that they might owe their existence to the dictates of a higher being.
Are either of those reasonings likely to be correct? I think not. But the point is you don't need to be crazy to think that they are. In fact, the very fact of my being able to roughly (albeit somewhat condescendingly) trace out the reasonings suggests that in either case, belief in God would be rational, in a broad sense. Not incredibly compelling, sure, but rational.
But that's a quibble. You're free to continue to claim that "there is no rational belief in God": it packs way more rhetorical punch.
#: Posted by on 07/20 at 01:41 AM -
Errgh. I pared down that response a lot. But I must have accidentally submitted the long version before edits. Sorry for the excessive verbosity, all!
#: Posted by on 07/20 at 01:46 AM
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"I think this is St Anselm's ontological proof of god, is it not".
No it isn't. Anselm's argument goes roughly as follows.
1.The meaning of "God" is "The greatest thing conceivable";
2.Existence is "greater" than non-existence;
3.Hence, by definition, God exists. QED.
Now clearly there is a lot of room for argument here ("What do we mean by "greater", isn't "there exists" a quantifier rather than a predicate etc. etc. ).
It is well known that Goedel refined this argument somewhat within formal modal logic and I find his "proof" rather convinving.
However..
1. It seems that Goedel himself, despite being a Theist of the Platonist stripe thought that believing in God solely on the basis of his proof was inadvisible; &
2. There is no reason to suppose that the "God" whose existence is allegedly proved thereby resembles the primitive entity apparently worshipped by various fundamentalists.#: Posted by on 07/20 at 03:03 AM -
But rational people have answered the question of why there are beings at all by the only conceivable answer, "Well, maybe somebody/thing put them there."
They/you might like to imagine they are rational but in going down that route they've failed to be rational because being rational is about thinking things through. That alleged "answer" is merely the turtles all the way down foolishness. Anyone who doesn't pretty quickly notice the problem (though obviously not necessarily label it with turtles!) is a poor or incomplete thinker - however eminent someone else may say they are when trying to claim them as an authority. That one is far too easy for a genuinely rational person to miss. Even if this condemnation of some people's pretence to rationality seems harsh to you, by my reckoning very few people are rational for much of the time.
Your second point about morality mostly fails at the level of observation. If people haven't bothered to check the morals of different cultures (including those of other animals than humans) then they haven't got the basis for any rational thought on the matter - and failure to notice this, while not as serious/obvious as the previous omission, is nonetheless partly a failure to be rational.
What this comes down to is that I hold the standard of being rational to be a lot higher than merely being not crazy (which is where you suggest the dividing line is).#: Posted by on 07/20 at 03:09 AM -
"I hold the standard of being rational to be a lot higher than merely being not crazy (which is where you suggest the dividing line is)."
On the contrary "not crazy" is if anything a proper subset of "rational". Have you met any mathematicians?#: Posted by on 07/20 at 03:35 AM -
"Have you met any mathematicians?"
Of course. To some extent I am one. However, the possibility of being crazy is neither a subset nor entirely mutually exclusive of being rational since these behaviours have a time component too. Being rational is an option which some life-forms don't appear to have in any significant degree and many humans don't seem to exercise very often. Being crazy (assuming you don't mean merely the pretence of it) is non-optional but may still not be a permanent state.#: Posted by on 07/20 at 04:14 AM -
It didn't require much conscious thought on YOUR part, but someone, (or something) wrote the set of instructions in the developmental algorithm that you set in motion.
Charlie, this is your usual argument - there is a designer, because I say so. And it's not convincing us. Come back when you have some actual scientific evidence.#: Posted by on 07/20 at 05:32 AM -
"A curious synchronicity", Virge. Another singular coincidence is that we were discussing here today probability waves and variable densities of coincidences that may traverse the Universe. Curious? Meaningless? "Kull' men Allah!" Everything is from Allah.
#: Posted by on 07/20 at 08:35 AM
- Whether or not it is rational to believe in God depends on what properties you ascribe to God. For example, if one was a monist, so everything is made of God-substance, it could very well be true, with God-substance == superstrings. However, if said monist ascribed consciousness to God-substance, then superstrings won't do it.
- Conservatism: The fear that someone, somewhere, is having sex.
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nanovirus: A sensual corollary: How do you freak out a conservative male? Hold his hand.
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btw: "Crazy" is a relative term. I do believe that rational thought's greatest challenge may be to try and understand the "irrational" function. If anyone here missed an earlier thread (God & Sea Monkeys?) regarding god/not god I must recommend (redundantly, but what can I do?) Alan Watts and his thoughts on "The Porcelain Model" of the Universe. The language of god-talk was high-jacked long ago by people who could not see past what their eyes showed them. The reifications of mythologies continue to dominate the core of what passes for metaphysical conversations well past their usefulness.
No one can say definitively anything about something that is beyond the senses: if one cannot see it or touch it or taste it or hear it than how can one say anything about it? To me, the whole thing (the Universe) is a terrific mystery, and every single one of us is the answer.
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Conservatism: The fear that someone, somewhere, is having sex.
I got this linked off of that same sight, its so..wow, amazing to read. From a newspaper from 1925. Plus read the advertisements, hillarious though... that was 80 year ago too.
http://www.theonion.com/lib/pdf.php?type=ia&cat=The+Onion+In+History&img_id=2923#: Posted by on 07/20 at 12:18 PM -
^ Hold on, I posted that in a hurry...trying to figure out if its real or not. They had a segment where they interviewed an 'ape from the future' and they said they'll be talking about this until the year 2000... Dangit, I think I might of been had.
#: Posted by on 07/20 at 12:27 PM
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And besides the level of skill needed to design and assemble living systems already far surpasses anything we humans can accomplish or even can imagine.
And genetic algorithms are quite capable of designing and assembling systems already far surpassing anything we humans can accomplish or even can imagine. That statement is based on the results of computer experiments.#: Posted by on 07/20 at 12:32 PM -
FYI, I use the word 'crazy' very loosely as the opposite of rational. I think there have been quite a few very rational people who were also quite insane, and irrational people who were not insane, and like. I use "crazy" in the loose, perjorative sense of, "Boy, you'd have to be crazy to think that!"
"They/you might like to imagine they are rational but in going down that route they've failed to be rational because being rational is about thinking things through."
We can define rationality in both a weak and a strong sense. In the weaker (and therefore broader sense) rationality can be roughly defined as the capacity and tendency to be moved by increasingly compelling evidence to belief and/or action. A good test of whether someone is rational or not, for this definition, is whether you can follow the train of reasonings that motivate some person to accept a particular conclusion. I think that both of my examples satisfy this condition on (weak) rationality. Arguably, both the cosmological and metaethical arguments are motivated by reasons- as shown by the fact that I can supply those reasons. The cosmological argument is searching for the causal explanation of the total causal sequence we observe in nature, and the metaethical argument is searching for the explanation of objective moral facts (if there are any).
We can also talk about rationality in a more restrictive sense, as the tendency to be motivated to belief only by the best reasons available. The best reasons could be variously defined as those that produce the fewest contradictions, that are maximally supported by the empirical evidence, etc. And it might turn out that the examples of rationales for belief in God I've supplied don't satisfy *this* requirement, and therefore fail the test of (strong) rationality. So, there's ample opportunity here for terminological dispute. But notice I said, "it might turn out" that the rationales I've supplied weren't the best. I don't think we can conclusively say that yet. A few observations follow.
If the contradiction you are alluding to in the cosmological argument for the existence of God (namely, as an answer to the question, why are there things at all rather than nothing?), then perhaps its worth pointing out that I was unfair to this argument in the first post. I claimed it seemed silly to ask for an explanation of the entire universe or the total causal sequence, because the entire universe is generally thought to be everything there is. But that's a loaded assumption. It's an assumption I tend to make, but it need not be the case. One need only imagine that the noumenal (or actual) world outstrips the phenomenal world, and suddenly you have all the license you need to posit the existence of a being responsible for bringing everything that appears to be into being. As before, would such an entity look like the Christian God? Heck no, as I pointed out- it would be a God who, quoting Wittgenstein, "does not reveal himself in the world." That is, not a God we have any evidence for or interaction with, but whose existence we can nevertheless postulate for explanatory benefit.
I mean, one might want to say that whatever answers the question, "Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?" just is what we mean by "God." This is all speculative metaphysics of course, but I'm not sure its speculative metaphysics that can be knocked down on sight. Of course that doesn't mean that consideration of the question, "why are there beings at all instead of nothing?" should instantly compel one to postulate the existence of some God-being. You can still reject the question just fine. But I don't think postulating the existence of a first cause, as it were, is immediately loaded with contradiction, or outrun by some better postulation. The real competition it has is with the suggestion that there is no explanation for why the totality of observable being is. If the competition is right, though, then it strikes me that the problem with the God postulators is not a lack of rationality, but an excess of it.
Unfortunately, the counter-argument against the metaethical rationale is in worse shape:
"Your second point about morality mostly fails at the level of observation. If people haven't bothered to check the morals of different cultures (including those of other animals than humans) then they haven't got the basis for any rational thought on the matter - and failure to notice this, while not as serious/obvious as the previous omission, is nonetheless partly a failure to be rational."
I'm afraid this won't do. The fact that different cultures uphold different codes of morals doesn't prove that there are no facts of the matter about morality, or that there isn't some higher being responsible for those facts-- because of course, for all we know, some cultures could have gotten those facts wrong. For that matter, so might we! As far as animals are concerned- you're straining belief if you think that they act on codes of morals. I'm not above thinking that animals have greater capacity for thought (of some form) than previously supposed- but can they act out of a concept of law as we do in acting morally? I really doubt it.
A better counterargument against the existence of moral facts rests on some analysis of what is involved in moral perception and action. If all human morality is based on sentiment or primitive fear of punishment or something like that, then there really might not be need of any further explanation for why certain actions seem wrong and others right. On the other hand, if you do believe that some actions just are wrong, you've got to give an account of why that's so. As it happens, postulating a God as law-giver is at least simpler than the other explanations we have on hand (although a skeptic like myself find it less convincing).
Sorry again for the uber-long post. I need to work on that.#: Posted by on 07/20 at 01:56 PM -
As far as animals are concerned- you're straining belief if you think that they act on codes of morals. I'm not above thinking that animals have greater capacity for thought (of some form) than previously supposed- but can they act out of a concept of law as we do in acting morally? I really doubt it.
Before we start this discussion, we really are going to have to define our terms, then--because it's been shown that chimps and capuchin monkeys can determine when they consider their treatment unfair, compared to others--so would a "sense of fairness" meet your criterion? I think it might, but if you disagree, then we're going to get bogged down really fast in terms--so can you first specify what your criteria for judging "animal morality" would be? -
That indication of morality from other primates was certainly one of the things I was including. Also if one considers things like faithfulness and loyalty to be some form of morality (certainly the early indications of it in an evolutionary sense) then dogs would qualify too, as would further animals in lesser degree. That continuum effect is what I would expect someone to observe if they bothered to look and thus to make them realise the falseness of a special external imposition of a morality on humans.
On the other factor, the disagreements over the details of morality between cultures (NB the things which aren't shared with other primates either), any authority worth considering as a singular authority ought to be capable of making sure they all got the same message even if they didn't abide by it. Why would people want to go worshipping an incompetent deity (other than through fear)? Especially when its incompetence means they can't then be sure they themselves are doing whatever that homicidal nutter actually wants. They should insist on decent error correction (and authentication) on the communications system before accepting any orders as valid.#: Posted by on 07/20 at 03:24 PM -
TW:
It is certainly a point worth analysing, and the discussion is interesting.
You seem to use philosophy. That will not give an answer that I can trust.
Arun considers that the rationality is relative to the god concept. Your own argument distinguishes between weak and strong rationality.
I would complement that with that weak rationality is also relative, as your own arguments exemplify. In that sense one could for example say that it's rational to believe in a god for a person raised to do so.
When I said that belief in a god is not rational I used the informed strong sense. That it is the strongest argument so it's most useful in constraining our options already as a philosophical argument.
But of course since if a concept can not be falsified, like a supernatural phenomena, is it a not useful theory and should be rejected anyway, since only science can deal with facts and trustful theories on facts.
"In not a god I trust."
On morality I would like to clarify that it is relative, which I think is that SEF says.
To all examples of animal moral behaviour I would like to add shame, because that is an apparent emotion in dogs.
BC:
You are making what I think is an extraordinary claim on the capability of todays genetic algorithms. Do you have any references, preferable extraordinary ones?#: Posted by on 07/20 at 08:11 PM -
T.W.McKinney:
Your arguments that belief in God is or may be rational all seem to begin with some form of "If you believe X, then..." where X is some assumption. How are these assumptions justified by reason? If they're not, how is belief in God rational? How is the assumption that there are moral facts justified by reason, for example?#: Posted by on 07/20 at 08:30 PM