DaveC426913 said:
No, I am not religious, nor do I buy into any of that crap. I’m just tired of people taking cheap shots. It gives rational people a bad rap. I think you have a responsibility to take more care in being the scientifically-minded, rational person you suppose you are.
Conehead said:
It seems to me that with a little personal detachment most of us can admit that there isn't an answer. Evidence swings both ways and we still have no proof either way. And though we know that ID can't ever be proven we also know there isn't anything to disprove it either. So, where is the battle ground here?
I for one really appreciate the balanced and fair assessments Dave and Conehead are offering. I’ve complained many times here that the same sort of dogmatism I saw growing up in a fundamentalist family I often find amongst science “believers.” I don’t see how dogmatism is made any better just because its done with more facts.
I don’t think Psi 5 framed his question clearly since it seems he is talking about the general idea of intelligence being involved in creation, yet he also talks about ID as it relates to Christianity. Christian ID is often trying to make the facts of evolution fit the Bible somehow. Anyone who studies the history of the development of the Bible knows there is a huge problem in claiming it is all the inspired word of God, and therefore the “truth.” But that’s another debate.
And then, isn’t it a bit illogical to be totally against religion, yet to accept popular religious beliefs as the conceptual basis of God? Why should we assume religious authorities know/have known anything about God (if there is one)? If I were a Christian (I am not, nor of any religion) the only person I’d consider an authority would be Jesus, and he said very little that would tell us how God came to be, or how God creates.
The issue should be set up so that we can consider it as neutrally as possible. For example, is “something more” than physicalness needed to explain, or helpful in explaining, anything that exists in this universe? I have more to say about this idea of a neutral “something more” below; but before that, let me reassert why I still don’t accept that physicalist theory is capable
as yet of explaining everything.
Something I’ve argued here for years is that physicalness by itself doesn’t demonstrate it can self-organize with the quality it takes to lead to a living system (e.g., a cell). The type of answer physicalists give are the Miller-Urey experiment, crystals, autocatalytic reactions, and other examples of the few-step self-organization that matter is capable of. They say, okay then, the self-organization that led to life is explained! Let’s move on.
Now, I am not committed to physicalism or to theism, I just want to know the truth; I am open to it being however it is. So I can look at the same evidence they are looking at and be ready, willing, and able to say, “yes, the quality of self-organization in the examples you cited does indicate matter can self-organize into a cell.”
But I don’t see it. I see a few steps of self-organization and then it either stops, or the same exact self-organization repeats. Nothing shows it can continue self-organizing into ever-higher levels of order, and not just order but a with quality of organization that can create a self-sustaining, reproducing, adaptive system.
That quality of self-organization has never been demonstrated. Yes, chemistry can be made to impressively
organize, but to reach a system-level of organization requires human consciousness to step in and make it happen. One can’t assume chemistry can organize itself just because it can be extensively organized.
There is a similar problem with Darwinist theory, as I recently posted in another thread in response to selfAdjoint’s claim that all the evidence we need now exists to believe natural selection and genetic variation alone can produced an entire organism [edited for clarity]:
“If you look at the evidence, what you see is something like 3.5 billion of years of bacteria and algae, and nothing but. Then a huge eruption of forms develop 550 MY ago. There is no logical explanation and no evidence to explain why that would happen, especially since we apparently have the necessary conditions today and it doesn't happen.
“We also don’t see genetic variation today in existing species that would allow us to believe in the sort of variation needed to produce the burst of organ/organism development during the Cambrian era.
“Eldredge documents ‘punctuated’ development and then seems to act as if that is merely how evolution works. Why would one automatically assume a colossal anomaly in the typically uncreative march of natural selection/genetic variation we observe today is a ‘normal’ aspect of evolution unless one is already committed to explaining everything Darwinistically?
Based strictly on the evidence of what we have observed happening in nature, the natural selection-genetic variation team is only known to result in superficial changes. That alone doesn’t account for either the speed of changes that occurred during the Cambrian era, or the
quality of changes which resulted in organs and organisms; and it certainly doesn’t explain why it isn’t happening now.
“One might cite the genetic record, and it does show most all of life seems related. But what it doesn’t show is what
caused the genetic changes. Devoted physicalists don’t get to claim natural selection and accidental genetic variation is responsible for that until they can prove it since there might be another influence involved [affecting genetic change].”
Getting back to the “something more,” what is wrong with contemplating the idea that the universe may be conscious in some way? And if we do, why bring all the logically unsupportable religious concepts into this contemplation (e.g., omnipotence, omniscience, supernatural etc.)?
Why not instead be inductively conservative and say, based on what seems to be unexplained by physicalness alone, possibly there may be a
natural something that acts as an organizational force and was involved in the development of creation. In other words, let’s contemplate the idea of universal consciousness (or whatever we call it) by inductively modeling what it would have to be like to contribute naturally to what we find in creation.
We might imagine it is conscious or not, but one reason to consider that it is conscious is because on this planet, the only force we can observe exhibiting such a high quality of organization is human consciousness. Might the consciousness found in biology be a direct manifestation of a more general force?
To me, this is an intelligent and objective way of contemplating intelligent design. We don’t assume physicalist theory is true since it isn’t proven, and we don’t assume universal consciousness is true either. At this stage the exercise is to open-mindedly discuss possibilities.
(BTW, there is experiential evidence of universal consciousness in the form of consistent reports by union/samadhi meditators over a 3000 year period. Why isn’t that evidence allowed? Only because physicalists think they are in charge of what gets to be considered evidence.
Such arrogance isn’t going to impress those thinking people who aren’t already committed to physicalism, but who instead are looking for opinions formed from the fair and objective evaluation of ALL relevant evidence.)
