I'll talk about the issue with you. It's hard to argue in favor intelligent design. Although I'm not a
proponent of intelligent design, I admire some of the arguments made on its behalf. I thought William Paley (the watchmaker guy) made some pretty good arguments for it. Well... good
for his time. The problem with the watchmaker argument is that Paley was philosophizing before we discovered evolution. Even though I think Paley made some interesting arguments, all of his questions have been answered by science. (We should cherish the occasions when that happens.) How a watch can reproduce itself was a GOOD question, but biologists have more or less explained many of those mysteries. We can still think about it though. ID has yet to be falsified. In fact, short of discovering the creator himself, it
cannot be falsified
.
You were right to post this in the philosophy section because the arguments for intelligent design are not scientific. No amount of data will ever prove ID because because the data has already furnished us with a model explaining stars, life, and many other complex things formed from a hot dense state. To a scientist, adding a creator in is superfluous.
But I still listen to the ID crowd when I think someone has an interesting argument. The arguments for ID we have nowadays are weak. (The fine tuning argument etc.) but they are not dead in the water like the watchmaker argument.
The likelihood that this has occurred by random chance is extremely slim.
Compared to what?
We have only observed our own universe. Without a comparison to something else, we have no grounds to say what a universe "ought" to look like if there were no creator.
It is at least conceivable that life can arise in a godless reality. It's a great big universe. We are an iiiiiiiiitty bitty patch of moss on some nondescript planet.
The likelihood is slim? Are you privy to some probability chart that shows how likely it is for life to arise in a godless universe? I wanna see the blazing sword at the gates of Eden. Then I'll be convinced.
The observer-participatory universe required observers to help create reality through observation. A closed loop. The observers fill their role as powerful creators of reality. Spawned from DNA and free to make choices, they become creators of possibility. Despite the objections raised by non-believers, random chance is ruled out because their are deeper levels of reality.
Yes, the universe is amazing!
Why is random chance ruled out because reality has depth to it? It seems any very complex reality would naturally have depth (once one started investigating it), whether it was created or not.
