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Perhaps its non-existence wasnot positively established immediately, but removal of rationaljustification for belief in some entity can morph into a case fornon-existence as the evidence for a rival hypothesis increases overtime. Thus, e.g., whereas there was no need to appeal to caloric at someprior or deeper level, with design, according to various designadvocates, there is still an explanatory lacuna (or implicitpromissory note) requiring reference to design at some explanatorylevel prior to Darwinian evolution. Indeed, as some see it (and asPaley himself suggested), there are phenomena requiring explanation indesign terms which cannot be explained away at any prior explanatorylevel (short of the ultimate level). Either way, principle (6), or something like it, would be somethingwith which relevant design inferences would begin.
II. Contemporary resources A. Books
However, different objects can have similar properties for different reasons, such as stars and light bulbs. Proponents must therefore demonstrate that only design can cause orderly systems or the argument is invalid. Aristotle (c. 384–322 B.C.) also developed the idea of a creator of the cosmos, often referred to as the "Prime Mover" in his work Metaphysics. Aristotle's views have very strong aspects of a teleological argument, specifically that of a prime mover, who (so to speak) looks ahead in setting the cosmos into motion. Indeed, Aristotle argued that all nature reflects inherent purposiveness and direction.
2 Does Improbable Fine-Tuning Call for a Response?
The uniform measureitself, however, assigns zero probability to any finite interval. Bythis standard, the life-permitting range, if finite, trivially hasprobability zero, which would mean that life-friendly constants arehighly improbable whether or not fine-tuning in the sense of Section 1.1 is required for life. This conclusion seems counterintuitive, butKoperski (2005) argues that it is not as unacceptable for proponentsof the view that life-friendly conditions are improbable and require aresponse as it may initially seem.
Western Theistic Responses to the Problem of Evil
Gaps in nature would, again, suggestsupernatural agency, and some take science to operate under anobligatory exclusion of such. This prohibition—commonly known asmethodological naturalism—is often claimed (mistakenly,some argue) to be definitive of genuine science.[5] While such “established” limitations on science have beenoverturned in the past, the spotty track record of alleged gapsprovides at least a cautionary note. Purported gaps have been closedby new scientific theories postulating means of natural production ofphenomena previously thought to be beyond nature’s capabilities.The most obvious example of that is, of course, Darwin’sevolutionary theory and its descendants. But despite the variety of spirited critical attacks they haveelicited, design arguments have historically had and continue to havewidespread intuitive appeal—indeed, it is sometimes claimed thatdesign arguments are the most persuasive of all purely philosophicaltheistic arguments. Note that while design arguments havetraditionally been employed to support theism over metaphysicalnaturalism, some might also be relevant for panentheism, panpsychism,and other views involving irreducible teleology. Although enjoying some prominent defenders over the centuries, sucharguments have also attracted serious criticisms from major historicaland contemporary thinkers.
1 The Argument from Fine-Tuning for Design Using Probabilities
As Meyer rightly observes by way of example, “[a]rcheologists assume a mind produced the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone” (Meyer 2002, 94). Paley also contemplates instincts as an example of “relations” indicative of design. In so doing, he confronts what are now labeled as proximate versus ultimate causes (and, in a long-outdated dichotomy, “nature vs. nurture”). Citing examples of reproductive behaviors—the incubation of eggs by birds, the host specificity of egg laying by butterflies, the spawning journeys of salmon—he argues that many behaviors are neither learned nor simple reactions to stimuli but are hardwired by design. Very much of this reasoning is applicable to what has been called Comparative Anatomy. In their general economy, in the outlines of the plan, in the construction as well as offices of their principal parts, there exists between all large terrestrial animals a close resemblance.
4 Independently Motivating and Testing the Multiverse Hypothesis?
To explain the present state of the universe, even the best scientific theories require that the physical constants of nature and the beginning state of the Universe have extremely precise values. In fact then, Averroes treated the teleological argument as one of two "religious" arguments for the existence of God. Later Jewish and Christian philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas were aware of this debate, and generally took a position closer to Avicenna.
To Dance at Two Weddings: An Evolutionary Quest - Discovery Institute
To Dance at Two Weddings: An Evolutionary Quest.
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This, on some views, isessentially what happened with traditional design arguments. Sucharguments were the most reasonable available until Darwinian evolutionprovided a plausible (or better) alternative the details andlikelihood of which were not previously anticipatable. We should notethat the problem of unconsidered hypotheses is an issue for alllikelihood arguments, not merely those involving design.
How can we account for the ordering, built upon many different elements such as causation, contingency, motion, and change, that we experience within our reality? The primary focus of cosmological arguments will be on proving a logically necessary first cause to explain the order observed. As discussed in earlier sections, for millennia, peoples have equated the idea of a first mover or cause with the divine that exists in another realm. This section will discuss a variety of arguments for the existence of God as well as how philosophers have reconciled God's existence with the presence of evil in the world. In measure theoreticterms, almost all real numbers are irrational, where“almost all” means all but a set of zero measure.
6: Argument from Design (Noah Levin)
Countless people throughout the ages have shared the basic intuition behind this argument - that the amazing design in our universe implies a designer. To help ground this intuition, many philosophers, theologians, and scientists have worked on formulating it as an argument. Such attempts go way back to ancient Greek thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, and later to thinkers in the Middle Ages from different religious backgrounds like Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologians. In the above sections, the problem of evil was centered in a conception of a god as all-powerful, all-loving, and all-knowing. Evil, from this perspective, reflects a god doing evil (we might say reflecting the moral agency of a god) and thus results in the aforementioned problem—how could a “good” god do evil or perhaps allow evil to happen?
David Hume raised arguments not only against the traditional arguments for the existence of God but against most of the foundational ideas of philosophy. Hume, the great skeptic, starts by proposing that if God knows about the suffering and would stop it but cannot stop it, God is not omnipotent. If God is able to stop the suffering and would want to but does not know about it, then God is not omniscient.
Kepler, for example, thought that the face we see when we look at the moon requires explanation in terms of Intelligent Design. Returning to the present issue, design argument advocates will ofcourse reject the claim that design, teleology, agency and the likehave been explained away either by science generally or by Darwinianevolution in particular. What proponents of design arguments for God’s existence, however, have not noticed is that each one of these indubitably legitimate uses occurs in a context in which we are already justified in thinking that intelligent beings with the right motivations and abilities exist. In every context in which design inferences are routinely made by scientists, they already have conclusive independent reason for believing there exist intelligent agents with the right abilities and motivations to bring about the apparent instance of design. Accordingly, even if we knew that the prospect that the precursor-subspecies would survive was “vanishingly small,” as Behe believes, we would not be justified in inferring a design explanation on probabilistic grounds. To infer that the design explanation is more probable than an explanation of vanishingly small probability, we need some reason to think that the probability of the design explanation is not vanishingly small.
Biological fine-tuning has a long tradition of being regarded asevidence for divine design (Paley 1802), but modern biology regards itas the product of Darwinian evolution, notably as driven by naturaland sexual selection. Relatively recently, some researchers haveclaimed that some specific “fine-tuned” features oforganisms cannot possibly be the outcomes of Darwinian evolutionarydevelopment alone and that interventions by some designer must beinvoked to account for them. For example, Michael Behe (1996) claimsthat the so-called flagellum, a bacterial organ that enablesmotion, is irreducibly complex in the sense that it cannot bethe outcome of consecutive small-scale individual evolutionary steps,as they are allowed by standard, Darwinian, evolutionary theory. In asimilar vein, William Dembski (1998) argues that some evolutionarysteps hypothesized by Darwinian are so improbable that one would notrationally expect them to occur even once in a volume the size of thevisible universe.
The problem with any version of the Argument from Design is that it destroys its own first premisse. The first premisse is, "We can distinguish between designed objects and non-designed objects." The conclusion is, "Therefore, the entire Universe is designed." But if everything is designed, then the original premisse is false. But you are right that an intelligent God could create an infinite number of ordered, structured, complex universes. I believe that if the designer was intelligent enough to do what He did, He likely has good reason for designing those factors which I see as poor design. Also, you are confusing a determined mathematical constant (pi) with fundamental physical constants which are completely undetermined but are rather set by the choice of an intelligent agent.
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