The Probabilty of there being an Intelligent Designer

by cantleave 140 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  zoiks

  Personally, I think that the idea of "non-overlapping magisteria" is intriguing. Many many religious people have no problem with science trying to explain our origins from a material standpoint. Many many scientists are religious or have no problem with religion addressing the "why" and questions about meaning.

  When they begin to step on each other's toes, there will be friction. Young-earth creationists insisting that Genesis be taken literally, or poplular science figures like Dawkins insisting that religion is evil, do not make for a successful cohabitation of ideas.

  Edit: I guess what I'm trying to get at is that religion shouldn't present itself as science, and science need not replace religion.
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  bohm

  DD: I am not trying to insult you or anything. The problem here is that it seems there is a project to 'proove' God by logical arguments, i am just applying the same level of rigor to those arguments as i would to any other mathematical statement. Mathematics is a pretty ruthless disipline, and one of the things you need to make 100% clear is the definitions and assumptions.
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  bohm

  Zoiks: I cant find the reference, but i read a study where some people measured if religious people was more happy or sad than others. Turned out they generally tended to be more happy (in the metric used in the study). Pretty funny stuff :-).
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  PSacramento

  PSacramento: After i began to post here, i have become more and more fond of that way of thinking about God and faith you describe -- but with regard to your last sentence. i think no scientist will tell you he can give a definite answer, just a more correct answer, in the sence it allow him to predict more about the universe.

  Thank you, that is a very nice thing to say.

  Yes, I agree that a scientist would say just that.
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  wobble

  Surely we are thinking as babes if we are going back in time and saying what was "before" God. God , if creator of our universe, must be "Outside" of our space-time continuum, so before is not a term you can use.

  When our universe did not exist, say 20 billion years ago, there was no"time ".

  I think the problem that this thread is encountering is that several disciplines are beginning to overlap. science,religion, and philosophy.These disciplines sometimes seem to contradict one another, but that does not mean the whole of either discipline is wrong.

  I think personally that the probability of an intelligent designer is quite high, but if that designer is a "person" or not I am open to suggestions, I prefer to say "Nature" does or did this or that,it is a safer neutral term in absence of firm evidence.

  Love

  Wobble
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  zoiks

  Wobble - I guess we have become sidetracked a bit! As to the original question, my current thought is that there may be an intelligent first cause. I don't know. But the history of life as we know it is very well described and accounted for by evolution primarily by means of natural selection - natural selection being one of several non-random mechanisms of evolution. Does that necessitate or invalidate an intelligent designer?

  I don't know.
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  nugget

  I think the problem that this thread is encountering is that several disciplines are beginning to overlap. science,religion, and philosophy.These disciplines sometimes seem to contradict one another, but that does not mean the whole of either discipline is wrong.

  Cantleave here on the Mrs computer.

  I think wobble has hit on a valid point here. When talking about the point before the singularity / the creator everything is hypothetical and speculation. A mathematical construct is no more valid than a philosophical idea until it has been tested and proven.

  So is this the point where even a scientific explanation requires FAITH?
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  bohm

  nugget, wobble: I am not really trying to disprove the idea of a creator, a god, whatever - i am just pointing out some obvious difficulties in the proofs/arguments FOR these things i have seen here.

  A scientific explanation should (in my oppinion & loosely stated) be judged based on its explanatory power and its beauty, not faith in the sence i understand the word.
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  PSacramento

  Bohm,

  Do you believe that Science has al the answers? and if not, do you beleive that it eventually will?
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  bohm

  PSacramento: Short answer: no. But we can get answers to things we do not expect. Let me give a long example:

  Around year 1900, there was a huge project in mathematics of figuring out a good (fundamental, simple, beautiful) formal system on which all of mathematics could be build. That is, you wanted to find some very simple objects and a few very simple rules (axioms), and then all of mathematics would be whatever new mathematical strings could be constructed from these rules and objects. In this way, all well-formed strings in the theory would be either true (if they could be constructed with the axioms) or false (if they could not). It was a *huge* undertaking, spearheaded by the mathematican Russell and Whitehead in their gigantic work principia mathematica (its one of those books that will suck out your soul if you open it on full-moon). To give you an example of the complexity of this task, this is how 1+1=2 looks like:

  So when you do that you are interested in two things: Is it possible to derive a contradiction from your basic list of axioms (ie. are they consistent). Notice that you might as well scrap your system if you can derive a contradiction: From a contradiction, everything can be proven to be true. Secondly, you want completeness: all well-formed strings in your system must either be proovable true or false.

  Along came a guy called Kurt Gödel. He proved that ANY formal system (that is, any kind of mathematics, logic, etc.) that is sufficiently expressive (basically you should be able to define something that behaves like the primes, etc.) will contain statements that are wellformed, but which cannot be allowed into the system because it will make it inconsistent - this is huge. It shows that in ANY kind of formal system of interest, let that be mathematical (any modification of current known mathematics!), philosophy, anything - there will be statements that are 100% TRUE but cannot be PROOVED. Think about it. How many statements? what if one of those statements was really usefull? this has HUGE implications.

  I doubt that if you had asked me in 1850 if it was possible to say something like that about the world and the limits of reasoning (of us, of anything?), i would have said that was even remotely possible. I am pretty sure i would have labeled that as something only God could really know.

  There is another moral of the story: Philosophers could have pondered that question for millinias and never come to a conclusion. Mathematics allowed it to be resolved in just 30 pages (if my memory serves).