The Watchmaker: my fav argument

[John 6IX Breezy]

One moment atheists say gods are primitive, simple, stone-age explanations for the universe. The next that gods are very new, complex, and incomprehensibly difficult explanations lol.

[The Grand Nudger]

I mean, if you want to insist that god botherers are primitives/and or new age cretins, be my guest?

You do realize that you've been fucking yourself since the word go...right? Just straight sucking your own dick..if that's a problem, to you.

: shrugs :

[John 6IX Breezy]

I'm watching Justice League while reading a paper on the aberrant salience hypothesis for a class. I'm not in your bad mood lol.

[The Grand Nudger]

Who said anything about a bad mood? Makes me giggle when guys bend over double to suck their own dick. How you livin in christ?

[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.

[The Grand Nudger]

That's the problem with design nutters. So much noise about purpose..but none of them want to talk about what this world actually does. If it was deigned, it was designed to kill us. There's their god at work.

[Mister Agenda]

In which case, we always take the easiest.

It doesn't get much easier than "God did it." It consolidates all of nature's problems into a single locus. (Not that nature actually cares what your brain finds easy or convinient anyway.)

It would be more accurate to say that in science we go for the simplest (without any elements not required) explanation that accounts for all the observations. Saying God did it is functionally equivalent to saying 'magic did it' and doesn't actually explain anything.

[polymath257]

In which case, we always take the easiest.

It doesn't get much easier than "God did it." It consolidates all of nature's problems into a single locus. (Not that nature actually cares what your brain finds easy or convinient anyway.)

But it isn't an explanation at all. Since it fits with any possible scenario, evidence cannot change the probability of it being correct. Which means it isn't dependent on evidence. Which means it is untestable nonsense.

[John 6IX Breezy]

It would be more accurate to say that in science we go for the simplest (without any elements not required) explanation that accounts for all the observations. Saying God did it is functionally equivalent to saying 'magic did it' and doesn't actually explain anything.

I don't know how true that is of science. Yes, ideally you want a particular model to be as economic as possible. But you never choose between models based on simplicity. (At least that hasn't been the case in the cognitive sciences; our theories seem to get more complex over time.) Theories are tools for scientists, so perhaps in that sense they might opt for the lightest hammer. But simplicity isn't a replacement for experimentation. And I'd be interested to see an example where simplicity actually did what you say it does.

Edit: And if I may add: Given that you have no access to reality, except by your theories, you have no contrast by which to measure simplicity. In other words, you are unjustifiably deciding that a given level of simplicity is correct. But the more complex theory could be the simplest, and the one you've chosen an oversimplification. Simplicity is an unjustified preference, that reflects the limits of our brains, rather than the nature of reality.

---

But it isn't an explanation at all. Since it fits with any possible scenario, evidence cannot change the probability of it being correct. Which means it isn't dependent on evidence. Which means it is untestable nonsense.

You have to be more clear on what you want to argue. Either design has no observable differences with naturalism (meaning they both explain and predict the same thing). Or they do in fact have many differences (design doesn't explain anything, etc). So start substantiating your premises: Don't arbitrarily dictate what design does or doesn't do without showing it. It's clear that you're arguing against an idea of design that isn't one I presented.

[Angrboda]

It would be more accurate to say that in science we go for the simplest (without any elements not required) explanation that accounts for all the observations. Saying God did it is functionally equivalent to saying 'magic did it' and doesn't actually explain anything.

I don't know how true that is of science. Yes, ideally you want a particular model to be as economic as possible. But you never choose between models based on simplicity. (At least that hasn't been the case in the cognitive sciences; our theories seem to get more complex over time.)

Theories are tools for scientists, so perhaps in that sense they might opt for the lightest hammer. But simplicity isn't a replacement for experimentation. And I'd be interested to see an example where simplicity actually did what you say it does.

Edit: And if I may add: Given that you have no access to reality, except by your theories, you have no contrast by which to measure simplicity. In other words, you are unjustifiably deciding that a given level of simplicity is correct. But the more complex theory could be the simplest, and the one you've chosen an oversimplification. Simplicity is an unjustified preference, that reflects the limits of our brains, rather than the nature of reality.

I think you may be talking past each other. As I pointed out earlier, simplicity is only preferred if the simpler explanation accounts for all the facts. I think this is more of a heuristic than an infallible guide. However, I will point out that a more complex explanation has more parts, by definition, and more parts means more terms added to the probability equation that have to be correct for the explanations particulars to be true. That doesn't necessarily mean that adding those terms lowers the overall probability below that of the alternative, but in the general case it does. This goes double if the terms employ the principle of sufficient reason. As a result, most times the simpler explanation will be more probable simply because of its lack of complexity. That doesn't mean it is necessarily the case that the simpler explanation is correct, but if a man proportions his belief according to the evidence, it is generally not rational to prefer the complex explanation.