(November 20, 2019 at 2:00 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: Can we get some nuts and bolts info on how a god created the solar system or life, btw?
What's the Mechanism of Intelligent Design?
A intelligent designer creates through power, information input ( words ), wisdom, and will. But how exactly does this work ?
We don't know how exactly a mind might can act in the world to cause change. Your mind, mediated by your brain, sends signals to your arm , hand and fingers, and writes a text through the keyboard of the computer I sit here typing. I cannot explain to you how exactly this process functions, but we know, it happens. Consciusness can interact with the physical world and cause change. But how exactly that happens, we don't know. Why then should we expect to know how God created the universe ? The theory of intelligent design proposes a intelligent mental cause as origin of the physical world. Nothing else.
W.L.Craig :
First, in order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn't have an explanation of the explanation. This is an elementary point concerning inference to the best explanation as practiced in the philosophy of science. If archaeologists digging in the earth were to discover things looking like arrowheads and hatchet heads and pottery shards, they would be justified in inferring that these artifacts are not the chance result of sedimentation and metamorphosis, but products of some unknown group of people, even though they had no explanation of who these people were or where they came from. Similarly, if astronauts were to come upon a pile of machinery on the back side of the moon, they would be justified in inferring that it was the product of intelligent, extra-terrestrial agents, even if they had no idea whatsoever who these extra-terrestrial agents were or how they got there. In order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn't be able to explain the explanation. In fact, so requiring would lead to an infinite regress of explanations, so that nothing could ever be explained and science would be destroyed. So in the case at hand, in order to recognize that intelligent design is the best explanation of the appearance of design in the universe, one needn't be able to explain the designer.
The best explanation of the origin and life and biodiversity is: intelligence. Conscious activity. The deliberate choice of a rational agent. Indeed, we have abundant experience in the present of intelligent agents generating specified information. Our experience of the causal powers of intelligent agents -- of "conscious activity" as "a cause now in operation"-- provides a basis for making inferences about the best explanation of the origin of biological organisms in the past. In other words, our experience of the cause-and-effect structure of the world -- specifically the cause known to produce large amounts of specified information in the present -- provides a basis for understanding what likely caused large increases in specified information in living systems in the past. It is precisely my reliance on such experience that makes possible an understanding of the type of causes at work in the history of life.
