RE: The Human Eye: A Double Standard?
May 2, 2015 at 5:30 am
(This post was last modified: May 2, 2015 at 5:32 am by I_am_not_mafia.)
(April 28, 2015 at 9:58 am)Alex K Wrote:(April 28, 2015 at 9:01 am)Rhondazvous Wrote: If, as theists tell us, the human eye is so complex a structure that we are forced to provide ontological explanation for its design, is god so much more simple that he needs no designer?
God is magical
I'm coming to the conclusion that physicists research Quantum Mechanics are literally wizards working with magic.
Hear me out on this one.
I don't mean Arthur C Clarke's idea that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. When we think of magic in fantasy films and novels, magic is basically the very fabric of nature that wizards can work with but don't actually understand. The wizards in Harry Potter never actually understand why their potions work. They just follow recipes. JK Rowling even features a specific logic test at one point because Wizards never have to use logic. In the Discworld novels you have the colour of magic which is Octarine. Terry Pratchett even has the younger wizards working like scientists but they don't understand why things work the way they do. Nor is magic ever explained in the Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones. People just learn how to use the essence of reality to craft rings of power and such. It's the equivalent of us discovering electricity but not understanding that it's the movement of electrons between atoms.
Which is basically what physicists do with their calculations on quantum mechanics. No one ever explains why a random event occurs and it's not assumed by everyone that it's just a lack of understanding on our part. Logic doesn't work either (e.g. superposition with a particle existing in more than one state at the same time). Saying that a random event can happen and not being open to the possibility that we can understand and explain the cause is an anathema to the scientific method which assumes that absolutely everything can eventually be explained even if it is not practical for us to do so. Quantum physics is not science, it's magic.
We do not know that the electron or quark is indivisible and that we're just limited by our ability to measure at a smaller scale so we can't say for sure that what we are seeing isn't the result of emergent phenomena with a deterministic explanation. Isn't this why string theory exists? To provide an explanation? Although it does make one wonder at what point can you stop finding something smaller explaining the next level up and how that would work.
Assuming that the very nature of reality is stochastic and that things can just happen without a cause is not scientific in my view because it means that we're saying that it cannot ultimately be explained given a better means of measurement.