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Texts carry with them essential marks ofmind, and indeed in understanding a text we see at least partway intothe mind(s) involved. Various alien artifacts (if any)—of whichwe have had no prior experience whatever—could fall into thiscategory as well. Similarly, it has been held that we sometimesimmediately recognize that order of the requisite sort justis a sign of mind and intent. However, principle (6) (that the relevant design-like properties arenot producible by unguided natural means) will be more problematic inevolutionary biology. It can of course be said that any form in which the universe might be is statistically enormously improbable as it is only one of a virtual infinity of possible forms. But its actual form is no more improbable, in this sense, than innumerable others.
Part V. Thomas Aquinas, "The Argument from Design"
Subjective values are those beliefs that guide and drive behaviors deemed permissible as determined by either an individual or an individual’s culture. Objective values govern morally permissible and desired outcomes that apply to all moral agents. Moral arguments for the existence of God depend upon the existence of objective values. Perception and appreciation of the incredible intricacy and the beautyof things in nature—whether biological or cosmic—hascertainly inclined many toward thoughts of purpose and design innature, and has constituted important moments of affirmation for thosewho already accept design positions. Regardless of what one thinks ofthe arguments at this point, so long as nature has the power to moveus (as even Kant admitted that the ‘starry heavens above’did), design convictions and arguments are unlikely to disappearquietly. It’s conceivable that life could exist in a universe withparameter values that we do not typically believe are life-permitting.In other words, there may be exotic forms of life that could survivein a very different sort of universe.
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If God knows about the suffering and is able to stop it but does not wish to assuage the pain, God is not omnibenevolent. At the very least, Hume argues, the existence of evil does not justify a belief in a caring Creator. An ontological argument for God was proposed by the Italian philosopher, monk, and Archbishop of Canterbury Anselm (1033–1109). He, as a person and as a prior of an abbey, had experienced and witnessed doubt.
In humans
The argument was propounded by medieval Christian thinkers, especially St. Thomas Aquinas, and was developed in great detail in the 17th and 18th centuries by writers such as Samuel Clarke (1675–1729) and William Paley. It was powerfully criticized by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. In the late 20th century the argument was revived as the doctrine of intelligent design.
Themind in question is typically taken to be supernatural.Philosophically inclined thinkers have both historically and atpresent labored to shape the relevant intuition into a more formal,logically rigorous inference. The resultant theistic arguments, intheir various logical forms, share a focus on plan, purpose,intention, and design, and are thus classified as teleologicalarguments (or, frequently, as arguments from or to design). Patil writes that, in this view, it is not the complexity of the world from which one can infer the existence of a creator, but the fact that "the world is made up of parts". Later, variants on the argument from design were produced in Western philosophy and by Christian fundamentalism. The design claim is often challenged as an argument from ignorance, since it is often unexplained or unsupported, or explained by unscientific conjecture. Supporters of design assume that natural objects and man-made objects have similar properties, therefore both must be designed.
Evolutionary theory provides a means of exploring the origin of complex adaptations using a variety of analytical approaches (e.g., fossil record, genetics, comparative anatomy and physiology, phylogenetics, developmental biology), rather than drawing a conclusion based on the observation of complexity alone. Evolutionary theory, which includes more than adaptive mechanisms, also provides a straightforward explanation for suboptimality, vestigial traits, and wastefulness, including excessive complexity and redundancy where simpler solutions could easily be envisioned. One of the most obstinate misconceptions about evolutionary theory is that it hypothesizes that eyes and other complex organs arise “by chance.” Even under the most charitable assessment, such a view of adaptive evolution must be considered deeply misguided. Whereas genetic mutation is both integral to the process and indeed is random with respect to its effects, natural selection is, by definition, the nonrandom survival and reproduction of individuals. Variation is generated at random, but whether or not it is preserved depends on its effects on survival and reproduction within a given environmentFootnote 11 (for reviews, see Gregory 2008, 2009). No serious evolutionary biologist of the past 150 years has suggested that the emergence of complex organs is merely the result of chance.
The Argument from Design for the Existence of God
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. Swinburne also sees the complexity in the universe and cannot put it down to mere chance – stating that the most likely explanation would be that God is the creator. Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354–430) presented a classic teleological perspective in his work City of God. He describes the "city of man" and essentially posits that God's plan is to replace the city of man with the city of God (at some as-yet-unknown point in the future). Whether this is to happen gradually or suddenly is not made clear in Augustine's work.
Atheist: Why ID Is Not “God of the Gaps” - Discovery Institute
Atheist: Why ID Is Not “God of the Gaps”.
Posted: Tue, 20 Feb 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Although level shifting of specific explanatory factors seems to workless easily within purely physical explanations, relocation attemptsinvolving broad physical principles can sometimes avoid suchdifficulties. For instance, for centuries determinism was a basicbackground component of scientific explanations (apparently stochasticprocesses being explained away epistemically). Then, early in the 20thcentury physics was largely converted to a quantum mechanical pictureof nature as involving an irreducible indeterminism at a fundamentallevel—apparently deterministic phenomena now being what wasexplained away.
Specific examples
Harmonize Evolution and Design? Check the Data - Discovery Institute
Harmonize Evolution and Design? Check the Data.
Posted: Thu, 09 Nov 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. We have already considered relation, and under different views; but it was the relation of parts to parts, of the parts of an animal to other parts of the same animal, or of another individual of the same species.
It is immediately tempting to think that the probability of a fine-tuned universe is so small that intelligent design simply must be the more probable explanation. The supposition that it is a matter of chance that so many things could be exactly what they need to be for life to exist in the universe just seems implausibly improbable. Since, on this intuition, the only two explanations for the highly improbable appearance of fine-tuning are chance and an intelligent agent who deliberately designed the universe to be hospitable to life, the latter simply has to be the better explanation. Pre-biotic natural selection and chemical necessity cannot, as a logical matter, explain the origin of biological information.
As remarked in Section 2.3, string theory has an enormous number of lowest energy states (vacua),which would manifest themselves at the level of observations andexperiments in terms of different higher level physical laws andvalues of the constants. This so-called landscape multiversequalifies as a concrete multiverse scenario in the sense of theargument from fine-tuning for the multiverse. A necessary condition isof course that the collection of island universes that are part of thelandscape multiverse includes, as is widely believed to be the case,at least one universe with the same effective (higher-level) laws andconstants as our own. Our best current theories of fundamental physics are the StandardModel of elementary particle physics and the theory of generalrelativity. The Standard Model accounts for three of the known fourfundamental forces of nature—the strong, the weak, and theelectromagnetic force—while general relativity accounts for thefourth—gravity.
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