Has Science done away with a need for God?

[Aoi Magi]

The belief that there is complexity in the universe thus it must have been designed is quite contradictory when you consider that the "designer" of the universe is not created yet he himself is supposed to be the most complex thing in existence.

[Iroscato]

Oh hai Irreducible Complexity, I haven't seen you for a while. Have you gotten past the hurdles of 1) Presenting an example of anything in existence that can be explained ONLY by design and 2) Providing a decent answer to the question "who created the creator, the most complex being of them all?" that doesn't rely on a pathetic cop-out to justify? No?
Fuck off then.

I will answer your questions Iroscato.

First we must define what we mean by "design".  I can accept this definition: purpose, planning, or intention that exists or is thought to exist behind an action, fact, or material object.

Given this definition I want to ask you a question as well.  If I write a letter to you that states "Iroscato is an intelligent person." Can you explain to me the semiotics of those words purely on the basis of the physics and chemistry of the ink and paper?  When we see word, language the only explanation is top down not bottom up.

As for the second question.  I have also given great thought to this because replacing one mystery with another is not a helpful way forward.  If you ask this question it shows immediately that you categorize God as created.  So you are talking about a created God.  If Richard Dawkins book was entitled, "A Created God's Delusion", I don't think many people would have bought it because I don't need him to tell me that created Gods are a delusion, we usually call them idols.  Your question because it rules out the explanation that is most likely to be true.  The question does not even apply to the definition of God, that is eternal supreme being, creator of space, time and all things.  The only way you can get anything out of it then in the negative sense is to assume that everything is in the category of being created which leads to positing in infinite series of causes.  

You say that "who created God" is a legitimate question, I don't think it is.  But let's assume that is.  You believe the universe created you, so who created your creator?

In other words, the old chestnut 'God wasn't created/has always existed/is outside of natue' bullshit dressed up a little differently. Yawn. Boring. Moving on.

[downbeatplumb]

My definition of "god" is "a figment of your imagination."

God a handy thing to blame your prejudices on. As in "I don't hate gays, its my religious dogma".
Also useful for explaining difficult concepts that otherwise might require some investigation.

[Simon Moon]

You are assuming that the internal combustion engine (or any humanly designed artifact) is relevantly analogous to the universe.  You haven't even begun to justify that leap.

What I am showing is that we see something with complexity, function and purpose and we immediately assume a mind behind it.  Do you not look at something as simple as a letter and assume someone with a mind produced it?  

I find it fascinating how we can take something simple as the internal combustion engine and assume there was a mind behind it, but see something infinitely more complex as the universe and say its pure chance with no need for an intelligence behind it?  I don't find that logic very convincing.

We do not detect things that are designed by their complexity, we determine design by contrasting it with things that occur naturally.

[Whateverist]

Of course for a creationist what we call naturally is what they call goddidit. Any chance of getting beyond a difference in how the terms are to be understood? If not, this conversation is thwarted at the most basic level.

[Esquilax]

First we must define what we mean by "design".  I can accept this definition: purpose, planning, or intention that exists or is thought to exist behind an action, fact, or material object.

Given this definition I want to ask you a question as well.  If I write a letter to you that states "Iroscato is an intelligent person." Can you explain to me the semiotics of those words purely on the basis of the physics and chemistry of the ink and paper?  When we see word, language the only explanation is top down not bottom up.

I can have a computer write that sentence; there are programs around that will select for intelligible words amongst randomly generated sentence strings. If I give it sufficient time- and I assure you that the billions of years that the universe has been around for will be more than enough- then I could easily extract that sentence, most likely many times, from a totally random generator. As has been told to you before, complexity is not an indicator of design, and it's certainly not an indicator of intent. You accept a definition of design that refers to planning and intention, and yet when you come to your example you merely assume intention based on complexity, a trait that is not in any way correlated with intention. If I leave a random number generator on overnight I could have a string of millions of digits by the time I wake up, an incredibly complex number, that arose completely without design. If I leave an aquarium out in the rain and then analyze its contents in terms of molecules and the motions therein, I again have a very complex sample size that arose entirely by chance. Your continued insistence that complexity equals design is entirely false.

Hell, in this case you haven't even bothered to justify your assertion that complexity equals design, you just stated that you'd decide it was designed based on that, while ignoring the real reason, which is contrast with the natural. You know that words generally have a writer because you know they do not arise naturally, you know that they are a language of symbols derived by a designer, something that you do not have for the natural world or the universe. In fact, given your particular views, you have no point of contrast at all, as you believe that all of reality was designed, so in your example, you are looking at a designed letter, on designed paper, on a designed table, on top of a designed earth, in a designed cosmos; how is it that you can look at the letter and say that it, in particular, is designed, given this?

Is there any particular reason you seem to be avoiding my rebuttals to your points, by the way? Because I keep telling you these things, and you keep ignoring them in favor of repeating something I've already proven wrong posts ago.

As for the second question.  I have also given great thought to this because replacing one mystery with another is not a helpful way forward.  If you ask this question it shows immediately that you categorize God as created.  So you are talking about a created God.  If Richard Dawkins book was entitled, "A Created God's Delusion", I don't think many people would have bought it because I don't need him to tell me that created Gods are a delusion, we usually call them idols.  Your question is not valid because it rules out the explanation that is most likely to be true.  The question does not even apply to the definition of God, that is eternal supreme being, creator of space, time and all things.  The only way you can get anything out of it then in the negative sense is to assume that everything is in the category of being created which leads to positing in infinite series of causes.  

You say that "who created God" is a legitimate question, I don't think it is.  But let's assume that is.  You believe the universe created you, so who created your creator?

Why do you think that special pleading is a good course of argument? You can't just demand that the thing you're arguing for be exempt from all the rules you wish to impose on everything else because you said so: how on earth do you think that's a compelling statement?

[Esquilax]

I'd also like to add that this "complexity equals design!" argument fails to take into account emergent complexity; that is, complexity that results over time due to an expansion or collection of simple things. It assumes that the universe was always complex, which we know was not the case, given that prior to the big bang all we had was a dense point of spacetime. The universe gained its complexity over an extremely large span of time via the interactions of very simple things. All that we see now simply was not present at the beginning of the expansionary universe, it formed over time; we didn't even have heavy elements in the early universe.

So even if your argument is that complexity is an indicator of design, I simply have to point out that this complexity is demonstrably an emergent property that was not present at the time that our current universal state came into being. Even if the argument stands, which it doesn't, it's still wrong. There is literally no sense in which the OP's position is even a little bit correct.

[bennyboy]

I don't think science has solved the questions that God is meant to solve. It doesn't explain cosmogony well, or why consciousness exists rather than not. At best, it gives for things things a narrative not more rooted in observable fact than religious narratives.


HOWEVER, I think the main role of science in the loss of interest/belief in religion is the shrinking of the world due to communication. When you mingle the Christian mythology with that of Muslims, Jews, Egyptians, ancient Romans and Greeks, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. it no longer becomes a choice of God/no God. It becomes a choice of a million-and-one mythologies vs. just giving up and saying, "I'm to busy to deal with this. Let's just do some science." So science has made each religion ridiculous by bringing each religious person face-to-face with other religions, which IT considers ridiculous, and then giving it a mirror, and saying, "Are you so sure? Really?"

[Esquilax]

I don't think science has solved the questions that God is meant to solve.  It doesn't explain cosmogony well, or why consciousness exists rather than not.  At best, it gives for things things a narrative not more rooted in observable fact than religious narratives.

Bolding mine.

I feel like consciousness is a pretty aptly demonstrated survival advantage for those that possess it. We are the dominant species on the planet because of ours, after all.

[ignoramus]

Would we even be entertaining the silly concept on an abstract  intelligent mysterious being if it wasn't for a stupid fairy tale? Why don't we put the same effort of proving that the fsm created everything?
Does one god have more validity than another?

Why even entertain the god hypothesis as an alternative possible answer?