RE: The Watchmaker: my fav argument
March 19, 2021 at 2:35 am
(This post was last modified: March 19, 2021 at 2:38 am by Fake Messiah.)
Let's put it this way: the average length of time a species survives after its first appearance is around 2 million years. Two million years of existence, and then extinction. For insects, it is like 3,5 million years.
In simple terms, this designer just can't get it right the first time. Nothing he designs is able to make it over the long term.
Not even those famous so-called living fossils are exceptions to this rule.
So the advocates of intelligent design are faced with a logical contradiction. They would like to claim that the perfection of the design seen in living organisms cannot possibly have been achieved by blind process like evolution, and that an intelligent agent is required to account for such perfection. But when one looks at the record, the products of this intelligent design consistently fail to survive.
I would not give our hypothetical intelligent designer an award for a design for a world in which 99 percent of his creations have become extinct, and certainly not for designing new life forms that consistently look like jerry-rigged modifications of his last creations. You might think the guy had no sense of originality. Worse yet, you might even think that evolution was going on.
In simple terms, this designer just can't get it right the first time. Nothing he designs is able to make it over the long term.
Not even those famous so-called living fossils are exceptions to this rule.
So the advocates of intelligent design are faced with a logical contradiction. They would like to claim that the perfection of the design seen in living organisms cannot possibly have been achieved by blind process like evolution, and that an intelligent agent is required to account for such perfection. But when one looks at the record, the products of this intelligent design consistently fail to survive.
I would not give our hypothetical intelligent designer an award for a design for a world in which 99 percent of his creations have become extinct, and certainly not for designing new life forms that consistently look like jerry-rigged modifications of his last creations. You might think the guy had no sense of originality. Worse yet, you might even think that evolution was going on.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
