RE: The Watchmaker: my fav argument
March 13, 2021 at 2:06 am
(This post was last modified: March 13, 2021 at 2:06 am by Belacqua.)
(March 12, 2021 at 10:18 pm)Angrboda Wrote: You realize Ambrose Bierce is a satirist, I hope. You've misrepresented the quote, as well. Ambrose Bierce didn't say anything about design but rather about the puzzling idea that the world was created just for man, about which his observation is dead on.
Yes, everybody knows Bierce was a satirist.
In the epithet I quoted he is mocking the idea that the earth was made for people. His reasoning is that if it were really made for people, not so much of it would be ocean. Because, lacking gills, people can't live comfortably in the ocean.
It is about design, because it's about the structure which, supposedly, God gave the world. Bierce thinks a world that really was designed for people would have less ocean, or people would be designed with gills.
I brought up Bierce's satire because the poster on this forum called Apollo used a similar argument about the whole universe. He said that if God designed the universe the design is a failure, because so much of it is unusable or uninteresting to people. I have explained at length why I think that is a bad argument. For one thing, it is completely human-centered. Theists who think that God cannot be understood by people wouldn't judge the design of the universe on how comfortable it is for people.