RE: The Watchmaker: my fav argument
March 10, 2021 at 8:27 am
(This post was last modified: March 10, 2021 at 8:37 am by Belacqua.)
(March 9, 2021 at 10:49 pm)Apollo Wrote: That’s what a typical place looks like in universe. Big cold with nothing happening.
If that’s some design then the designer flunked big time.
Why do you think that a universe like this is a design failure? I think you're making a number of assumptions on which to base your judgment.
Why is a big cold place a failure? Does something have to be useful for people to be a success? If it were full of shopping malls and theme parks would it be good? I think the ecology movement has taught us to move beyond the idea that only those things that can be exploited by people are good.
The argument seems like an economic one. That which is useful is good, that which can't be used is a waste. I think this is human-centric and narrow.
The universe is very big and lasts a long time. Humans, on the other hand, occupy only a tiny fraction of the universe in time and space. We know extremely little about the universe. We evolved for survival, not understanding. There is probably all kinds of stuff going on that people don't know about, and probably can't know about. Who's to say that the places not welcoming to us are "failures" in every sense? We don't have enough information to judge.
The God of the philosophers and the theologians is not like Plato's Demiurge. God as "Ground of Being" and "actualization of all potentials" underlies the existence of the universe, including all the "empty" places, with no effort whatsoever. Therefore it's not as if he had wasted time and money by building a house with rooms that people can't live in. The idea of God "wasting effort" is incoherent. Nor, according to theology, does God need or want anything. Therefore the idea of being "useful" to God is incoherent. God has no goals, therefore nothing is more useful to him than anything else.
So again, if you judge that the universe is a design failure you're just saying that you would have done it differently. But since none of us is omnipotent or omniscient, that's a matter of personal taste, not an argument.
