@Ken: Now I think Hawkings thinking about our universe has

Comment on A “Christian Agnostic”? by Sean Pitman.

Now I think Hawkings thinking about our universe has evolved since he wrote Brief History of Time, because he is looking at turtles ( metaverses) a level or two upwards. However Grand Design implies grand designer doesn’t it. Can design ever be mindless?

Yes, Hawking has apparently evolved, or devolved if you prefer, from the position of agnosticism to atheism since he wrote A Brief History of Time.

As far as your question as to if a “design” can be “mindless”, the answer to that question is yes – depending upon what you mean by the term “design”. As far as we can tell, anyway, what appears to be “mindless nature” does in fact have certain creative powers (discussed further below).

Who or what created the matter for the first turtle? Ever seen a turtle appear out of nothing, ex nihilo?

This is exactly the reason why many scientists and philosophers have come to the conclusion that the “first cause”, whatever it may be, had to itself have been eternal. Of course there are those, like Hawking for instance, who argue that something can indeed come from nothing… but that belief certainly isn’t scientific in that it is not testable in a falsifiable manner and has no useful predictive power.

I told you I was intrigued by Intelligent Design and Deism didn’t I? And I still say that creation of the original matter for the original universe out of nothing is not a rational proposition. Why? Because science and mathematics can not explain infinity, first cause or infinite regress. And philosophy doesn’t seem to do much better (Munchhausen Trilemma).

Now you’re sounding like a creationist 😉

Can turlles read? For their sake I’ ll state it again: when the atheists, sceintists or philosphers rationally explain to me how ‘original’ matter and energy, that ultimately led to intelligent life, arose out of the mindless void, then I’ll become an atheist.

Me too! The only difference between you and I is that you are impressed with the unlikely appearance of original matter/energy out of nothing without a pre-existent eternal intelligence, while I am also impressed by the origin of the informational complexity needed to get otherwise random non-directed energy/matter to produce useful stuff. Consider that the origin of useful information is just as problematic for the atheistic mindset as is the origin of basic energy/matter itself (By the way, atoms and basic atomic particles are informationally rich, as are the fined-tuned fundamental constants of the universe).

If a faith construct ever satistifactority answers my questions then I’ll join that religion. (All come up relativistically short so far).

Science itself is a faith construct. You cannot make any conclusions as to the likely nature of empirical reality without taking a leap of faith, to one degree or another, beyond that which can be absolutely known.

This was Wesley Kime’s point in arguing that faith and science are forced to walk hand-in-hand. This is also the point of well-known philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn. You simply cannot avoid taking on a “faith construct” of some kind – no one can. The only choice any of us really has is which faith construct to take on…

Part of the problem is what we mean by mindless. Can a human mind know the mind of God?

Not in totality of course since we are finite and God, by definition, is infinite. However, we can known what God has given us to know about himself. In other words, we are capable of comprehending certain limited aspects of God.

What may appear as mindless nature may not be mindless at all if we figure out the Grand Design. I think both Einstein and Hawkings understood and understand this dilemma. In fairness and with great respect I think in what you and Dr. Kime in your own way are trying to do as well: marry faith to science for a more fuller and optimistic view of reality. Please note, especially my friend Wes, that I have stated that this is laudable. Not toying around here, I mean what I say.

Faith and science are already married since one cannot exist without the other. It is just that some fail to recognize when they are in fact taking leaps of faith.

Beyond this, you seem to be making the same point that the founders of modern chaos theory made. In short, randomness cannot be proven. What appears to be a random sequence from one perspective may actually be determined by a simple formula from another perspective. The same thing is true about what appears to be the result of a mindless mechanism. Ultimately, from a different perspective, the same phenomenon may have been known or produced by some deliberate purpose.

The problem, of course, is that our perspective is limited. We can only deal with the limited information that we currently understand. So, the best we can say is that certain phenomenon appear to be the result of apparently mindless mechanisms while other phenomena (like highly symmetrical polished granite cubes, or your automobile) much more clearly require the input of deliberate intelligence.

Might I be stretching the boundaries of agnosticim in saying that even though I cannot prove it – because ultimate creation ex nihilo and infinite regress makes no sense to me – the case for an ultimate grand designer/ force makes more rational, ‘likely’ sense?

You are definitely stretching the boundaries of agnosticism to argue for God’s “likely” existence. This is why I have been saying for some time now that you are not a true agnostic. You are a closet creationist to at least some degree. You present some of the very same arguments used by intelligent design advocates and even creationists in favor of the very likely existence of a God or God-like intelligence behind it all.

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

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Sean Pitman Also Commented

A “Christian Agnostic”?
@ken:

Effective atheist, closet creationist, close to classic IDist or creationist?

Are you sure it is my agnosticism that is changing rather than your opinion of what I am?

I didn’t say that you were effectively an atheist. What I said was that your arguments for agnosticism were effectively atheistic. There’s a difference. Your arguments for God’s likely existence are obviously the opposite of atheistic – certainly not agnostic either.

After all, someone who claims to believe that the existence of God is “likely”, because of ultimate origin arguments, doesn’t match most people’s concept of an “agnostic”.

So, please do forgive me if I am still way off base regarding your true position…

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

A “Christian Agnostic”?
@Ken:

You have transported me from an atheist to a closet creationist in the width of a thread my friend. 🙂 I wonder what you will create me as next?

What have I done? – besides point out that someone who claims that God’s existence is “likely”, based on arguments for ultimate causation requiring a God-like intelligence and creative power, isn’t what most people would call an “agnostic”?

In short, your “agnostic” arguments are the very same ones used by atheists like Dawkins and Hawking and your “God likely exists” arguments are essentially the same ones used by IDists and creationists. How then can I be faulted for suggesting that you’re not really an agnostic or an atheist? While you’re not a classic creationist or IDist by any means, you seem to me to be, at least for now, far closer to such than to pure agnosticism… which is a very hard position to hold, in its pure form, for very long I would think. Certainly Hawking couldn’t do it for long. Eventually one decides, like you, to try to figure out which way the turtles seem to be going…

Of course, you could end up falsifying my hypothesis… 😉

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

A “Christian Agnostic”?
@Ken:

I’m afraid you are getting stuck in defintions of your own making if you cannot dististiguish agnostics into atheists, my friend.

I don’t think you’re a real agnostic my friend. Real agnostics don’t go around saying that God’s existence is “likely”. They go around saying that they don’t know if God’s existence is or is not likely…

As has been pointed out to you you are stuck in an empirical paradigm when it comes to understanding God soley by evidence. Logically God can exist without any ability of humans to detect God whatsoever.

Exactly… just like garden fairies.

That may be the case if the creative force for our universe exists outside our universe and the physical laws of nature have governed everything from the big bang.

Indeed… and the same could be said of some non-intelligent creative force. Why then do you propose that an intelligent God “likely” exists over the possibility of a non-intelligent creative force as the ultimate origin of everything?

Yes I think that a God, a grand design, a first cause, the meaning for everything is logically and philosophically likely because of the lack of any explantion or understanding of how it all came about.

How does a lack of an explanation, by itself, make the existence of an intelligent God more likely than a non-intelligent creative force?

Not enough to say oh well we don’t know how it all started so it just must have spontaneously occurred.

I agree, but how it this enough to conclude that an intelligent God is therefore more likely to have been responsible?

Is there a design to life, this universe, the collective metaverse, or is it all a random crapshoot we will never understand? Don’t know, but It seems plausible to me, as I duck the flying spaghetti and look into the causal soup, that there is an ultimate answer that would make sense of it all.

Again, saying that something is possible or “plausible” isn’t the same thing as saying that something is “likely”. One could also argue that it is just as plausible that a mindless mechanism was ultimately responsible for everything… which is the argument of Dawkins and Hawking. Upon what basis do you suggest that the existence of an intelligent creative power or “God” is more likely to have been ultimately responsible? – not just a potential existence, but a likely existence?

“How does an atheist explain first cause, infinity or infinite regress on a rational basis?”

Based on what I like to call the “Turtles all the way down” argument (from on a story in Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time and the title of my own little book on intelligent design and ultimate origins). In short, the argument is that if something that is known to exist can be explained by some mindless mechanism, and that mechanism can itself be explained by some underlying mindless mechanism, and so on as far as one has so far been able to search, then, most likely, as far as one is able to tell given the information that is currently in hand, the same sort of result will continue “all the way down” even if one has yet to reach the “bottom turtle” – so to speak.

Of course, the same argument can be turned around to suggest that if certain features cannot be explained without the input of an outside source of higher level information, and that source cannot itself be explained without an even higher level source of outside information, and so on as far as one is able to investigate, then, logically, it stands to reason that ultimately it is “Turtles all the way up”. In other words, the ultimate source of everything, the “top turtle” so to speak, likely has access to infinitely great informational complexity, intelligence, and creative power.

In short, if you can’t tell which way the turtles are going at all, there is no rational way to say what kind of turtle is at the end of the line (an intelligent one or a mindless one).