Proof of existence of God

[Neo-Scholastic]

But he missteps by slipping in the assumption that the human designer is not himself a natural process or the result of natural processes [i.e. evolution, rather than God].

Of course this raises all the associated issues related to philosophy of mind, i.e. that intelligence, self-awareness, and sentience are all part's of a physical causal. Well, beyond the scope of this thread, but something to ponder.

[Angrboda]

But he missteps by slipping in the assumption that the human designer is not himself a natural process or the result of natural processes [i.e. evolution, rather than God].

Of course this raises all the associated issues related to philosophy of mind, i.e. that intelligence, self-awareness, and sentience are all part's of a physical causal. Well, beyond the scope of this thread, but something to ponder.

Mayhaps, and indeed, philosophy of mind is a favorite subject of mine. Note however that agnosticism as to the nature of mind will not get Dembski to where he wants to go. That requires assuming that mind is not natural, which exceeds the evidence at hand, especially given that the facts which are explained by the hypothesis of non-natural origin of mind are plausibly explained by natural mechanisms via evolution. Dembski needs more than a stalemate here, or all is lost.

It occurred to me after posting that my criticism of Dembski's argument was also a more general criticism of Paley's argument and the argument from design as follows.

1) some artifacts appear to have a complexity and order that cannot arise by natural processes
2) humans posses a capacity or property which is not found in nature
A] Therefore, the origin of the artifacts in premise 1 is explained by premise 2

1) the natural world exhibits order and complexity similar to the artifacts which have a human origin
2) the natural world is not of human origin
B] Therefore, the complexity and order of the natural world requires a capacity or property not found in nature and which is not man, i.e. is supernatural.

The obvious difficulty here is premise 2 in the first syllogism [A]. Without it, the entire argument fails. Substituting "humans might possess" such capacities or properties will not lead to the desired conclusion.

Note that there are some subtleties here, the obvious one being the identity, number and characteristics of said designers. (Plantinga runs into similar problems with his modal argument for the existence of God — his argument implies that something necessarily exists, but it doesn't tell us just what that something that necessarily exists is. In particular, 'the universe' itself fits Plantinga's modal argument as well as God, particularly if 'non-existence' is not a real entity or property because outside the temporal existence of the universe, nothingness as such itself does not exist [existence requires both time, and some existent thing itself; nothingness itself can't be said to exist, at least not coherently]. This yields the required necessarily existing entity as the universe, as existence qua existence is no longer contingent, as there is no 'time' at which the existent universe did not exist.) Another subtle problem is concluding that the initial analog is true even if we conclude that our artifacts demonstrate supernatural abilities, as there is no way to determine that all our acts are not in fact caused by God (or some other supernatural force, such as Xenu of the Scientologists). Simply concluding human activity is supernatural, without demonstrating that this supernatural capacity resides in the human self, will, again, not get you to the goal line, as it essentially bankrupts the analogy. (I would suggest that Calvinism and Reformed Christianity, and any such religious framework that preaches predestination essentially meaningfully deprives human agency of any supernatural capacity which is not itself the result of a prior authorship of God. Note, predestination isn't unique to Christianty as off the top of my head I am aware of both Hindu and Buddhist philosophies which teach predestination.)


(My initial edit was clearer. I apologize if this is less than clear. My computer ate the first draft.)