The Watchmaker: my fav argument

[polymath257]

It's not wisdom it's psychology. People are not unfiltered perceivers of information―they latch emotional and moral coloring to propositions. Ad hominems exist because people perceive this coloring and interpret information through it: "You're wrong because you're bad; God doesn't exist because he's evil."

God's existence is independent of his goodness; and yet Hell creates more atheists than science. Hence why a thread about design keeps wanting to become a thread about morality. My hypothesis: If we gather data from this forum we'll find a significant correlation between atheists and the "God is evil" narrative (perhaps stronger among ex-Christians) than theists, which believe "God is love."

Humans also attribute agency to things automatically, whether they are really agents or not. My mother likes to name her cars and says they have personalities.

That doesn't mean that they do.

This is relevant because people like to attribute aspects of the universe to agency when there is no actual evidence of agency there. So they tend to default to the concept of a God in a way similar to how we default to seeing faces in clouds.

In claiming the existence of a God, I assume you primarily mean a designer. In that, the question becomes how to distinguish a universe with a designer from one without a designer. More relevantly, how does one distinguish a universe without a designer, but *with* natural laws from one with a designer?

I have yet to see anything that manages to distinguish these possibilities. Complexity certainly does not. Having local environments that are far from the norm does not. Since we don't know how or even whether the basic constants of physics can change, the specific values detected does not.

I am an atheist. I don't believe in a creator of the universe, whether good or evil. I also do not believe in the concept of a supernatural: I think it is ultimately incoherent.

Now, I don't consider the concept of a creator for certain aspects of the universe to be incoherent. For example, it may be that there is a race of high dimensional beings that have learned how to make universes as part of their technology and ours is the result of a high school assignment that was subsequently forgotten.

That is a coherent concept, but I still do not believe it. There is simply no evidence to suggest it is the case.