Human intelligence, the human ability to design with purpose and extreme intelligence, arriving, after billions and billions of years of supposedly mindless and thoughtless, design-less, hopeless, processes, dwarfs into insignificance the strangeness of a naked genie appearing some morning after merely thousands of years of coffee making never revealing the possibility of a horny genie being as possible as a caffeine buzz.
Why? The processes involved actually needed the prior billions of years for reasons that are well understood.
If that were true we wouldn't have so many books, including
Freedom Evolves, attempting to make sense of what's already well-known.
Again, it looks at lot like you simply don't understand the process of evolution at all and are therefore just assuming that nobody else does either and that it must therefore be based on an assumption of no creator/designer.
To be clear, evolution can't rule out such a designer but it has no need for it and seems perfectly able to get along without one. It would also be an extremely odd way for a designer to go about things - certainly nothing like the way humans do so.
This thread, and the thread on
The Science of God, intended to propose scientific evidence for the existence and presence of God. But the evidence is such that it makes no sense so long as people don't fully appreciate what a tautological argument is versus what a true scientific argument is. For that reason I've spent no small amount of argumentation trying to establish the requirement (understanding the vapidness of tautologies) for understanding a true scientific argument.
For instance, if the assumption is that no extra or supernatural, design process led to, or were required for, the design characteristics of the human brain (and thus the thoughts that come out of one), then we can state, from that sound assumption, that nature naturally has a way to bring about the human brain without extra, or supernatural design processes helping her out.
Nevertheless, the belief that nature needed no outside help to create the human brain is part-wise an assumption based on the belief that there's no outside, extra, or supernatural, assistant to nature. And the belief that there's no extra or supernatural assistant to help nature is based on observations and argumentation based on the fact that we see no clear evidence of an extra or supernatural designer/assistant to nature.
Which is where the intractable problem comes in.
We can state fairly and accurately that we see no evidence of an extra, or supernatural design/assistant to nature. And yet a fair-minded scientist will concede that neither do we see evidence that nature contains thoughtful, purposeful, mindful, intentions, beyond the existence of seemingly mindful, thoughtful, intentions, in creatures created by nature.
So well-intentioned people who don't see evidence for an extra, or supernatural assistant to nature, make the fatal leap in logic that since they don't see evidence for the supernatural assistant to nature, they can be so sure that nature has a way to arrive at the thoughtfulness and mindfulness of the human brain, that no evidence of how it arose need occur since there's no evidence that it didn't occur naturally. They turn lack of evidence of an alternative to nature doing all the work, into evidence not just that, nature did, it but how.
That's the metaphysical problem that leads to thoughtless tautologies: assuming that a that is tantamount to a how.
We can admit that if we know that nature did it all alone, there has to be a how nature did it all alone. But to assume that the that, is good enough to accept as the how, is not really being fully faithful to our understanding of reality.
Even though we see no evidence for a supernatural assistant to nature, neither do we have evidence for how thoughtless, mindless, processes could arrive at something like the human brain, which is so stupendously designed that it is itself a world-class designer more powerful than nature's own ability to arrive at clear design mechanisms. And yet, through less than exacting thinking, people use the fact that we see no evidence for a supernatural assistant to nature to assume (and that's all it is) that that alone is evidence for how nature did it all alone.
But it's not. At best, the lack of evidence for a supernatural assistant to nature tells us nature did it alone. But even if that's true it doesn't tell us how nature did it.
Those who aren't interested in exacting thought are free to assume that the lack of a design assistant is evidence enough for them not only that nature did it alone, but how she did it. In exacting thought, the that, is not evidence for the how.
John
