(June 3, 2018 at 7:47 am)Jörmungandr Wrote: I don't think that's an entirely fair characterization. I don't think he's necessarily the sharpest tool in the shed, but to assign the blame as you have done is to ignore the natural seductiveness and appeal of the design hypothesis given certain assumptions about the world, and once ensnared in its web, to be unable to dispel its glamour. Heck, even I find the design hypothesis appealing and cogent, even in spite of having rather in depth knowledge of some of its failings.
It's easy to think that design is the simplest explanation because it comes to us so naturally. It's far easier for us to design something than it is to mentally envisage a population of solutions, evaluate each one, rank them all in order of success and breed the fittest to create a new population and to then repeat the whole process several hundred or thousand times.
But given the questions of how does the brain design something and how does a species evolve, the latter is a lot simpler to explain and easier to simulate on a computer. Indeed, we still have very little idea about the former.
Yet to a religionist brought up to think that the world works by magic, they don't even attempt to consider the process of how something is designed or evolved so go with what they can do more easily themselves. Look at Drich's thread about the brain being a receiver of consciousness and memories. Because he doesn't even attempt at trying to understand what consciousness and memory could be, it doesn't occur to him that even if these functions were offloaded somewhere else, it doesn't tell us anything about how they could work. The religionist mindset is to pick the easiest option and to avoid explaining how things could work by saying that they are supernatural and therefore cannot be explained.
