RE: FallentoReason 2.0
November 21, 2012 at 11:13 am
(This post was last modified: November 21, 2012 at 1:04 pm by Kirbmarc.)
Quote:When I see a tv or a guitar I presuppose that there was a designer, but maybe this isn't true of things in nature.
The problem is that we, as humans, tend to project human features (like intentionality or emotions) on the world. We do it all the time. We get angry at our TV when it doesn't work, even though the TV doesn't have the intention to work or not, so getting angry at it is (logically speaking) pointless. We said the our car "died on us", even though cars can't die (they're not alive). We have feelings for inanimate objects (a favorite pen, or dress, etc.) that obviously can't reciprocate. We get depressed in a rainy day, and we call it "horrible weather" even though it's only horrible for us. If we were toads, we'd probably love rain with Spanish passion.
My point is that the feeling of design is an emotional response, not a rational one. Is it possible that the universe was designed for us? Maybe. But evidence suggests that we were designed by the universe and for the universe, through evolution and selection.
We're like a sentient puddle, that marvels at how carefully constructed the ground is, just with the right hole that fits her perfectly, when it's the puddle that adapted to the hole.
Quote:Maybe it's just my cognitive functions toying with me and leading me to rationally believe there is a Creator.
It's an emotional response, it's common to every human being and we do it all time. We just have to be careful not to confuse our good emotional response to what goes well in the universe (and conversely, our bad emotional response for what doesn't go so well) with a rational need for an intelligent or orderly creator.
Quote:Do I believe there is a higher order of natural processes which are currently beyond the our understanding? Yes, I do.
The "order" we find in the nature is our attempt to understand processes in a rational way. We construct rules that explain phenomena, but those rules are bound to be changed when we encounter new phenomena. The universe actually doesn't follow an "order" external to it, it just has some features from which the "order" arises. Science is a tentative descriptions of those features.
Sure, we can discover new phenomena, and maybe there are some phenomena that we'll never be able to fully describe, but this do'esnt tell us much about the universe. It tells a lot about our cognitive limits. Anyway, we're good enough to understand how most features of the parts of universe that we usually experience, so even if there's something elusive and impossible to understand, it doesn't interact with our existance too frequently.
