(July 27, 2015 at 12:38 pm)Esquilax Wrote:(July 27, 2015 at 12:29 pm)lkingpinl Wrote: I always found it fascinating when people bring up Voltaire and how his argument from design would not stand against today's modern scientific achievements but quite often people either forget and completely ignore modern atheists arguing and admitting the argument from design still stands. Do we forget the most notorious atheist of the 20th century conversion to Deism, Antony Flew when he said:
You are aware that arguments from authority are fallacious, aren't you?
Quote:‘almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together. It’s the enormous complexity of the number of elements and the enormous subtlety of the ways they work together. The meeting of these two parts at the right time by chance is simply minute. It is all a matter of the enormous complexity by which the results were achieved, which looked to me like the work of intelligence’ (p. 75)
...And it all turns out to be an argument from ignorance anyway: "I can't imagine how this could happen without design, therefore design." Oh well.
And so it goes . . . same as it ever was. I don't understand the mentality that finds such arguments persuasive or even remotely satisfying. I suppose it's an emotional need to have an answer -- any answer -- rather than simply admit ignorance.
