How? When? By whom? Why? Where?
I guess that was a theological statement, wasn’t it, and maybe ontological as well.
It does [suit me]. Shall we talk about epistemology.
Not dogmatic at all. haha. You can have the last word if you want. ID is a dying movement that grows less interesting to me every day.
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Jay, it’s the final word on the matter. For a start. Globally it will thrive as fundamentalist religions Discover it… Seriously mate, why are you gas lighting reality? Quote mining science for non-science?
Sigh. Rhetorical I’m sure.
Your list (I wonder how you searched wiki for it?). Most are against, don’t mention Christianity at all, a significant number are Jewish, many are hermeneuticians and not just of Biblical texts if at all. So my dogmatism stands, as does yours and theirs.
The development of philosophy from the Enlightenment is increasingly, overwhelmingly against. That’s where religion is in philosophy. Aging out rapidly.
I want to believe. I want to take Kierkegaard’s irrational leap of faith. Because of Jesus. The philosophy of science, which utterly precludes design, is otherwise unassailable.
Good gosh. This is like Godfather 3.
Not gaslighting you or your interpretation of reality. You read too much into my comments. Not everything in nature appears to be designed. Nathan Lents wrote a whole book about Human Errors. My point from the beginning was that Intelligent Design theorists haven’t taken the extra step to demonstrate that the appearance of design in some aspects of nature implies a designer. You’re beating your own hobby horse to death here. Design is an actual thing. Biologists have employed the concept to understand aspects of nature. That doesn’t imply anything more than it says.
It’s a simple search for Timeline of Western Philosophers to refresh my memory. If I was in error on anyone in specific, cross them off the list. It doesn’t matter. I said nothing more than that philosophy has concerned itself with questions of God and religion from the beginning. Many philosophers since the Enlightenment have addressed the question, explicitly or implicitly. I could look up and name many less prominent names, if it would satisfy you.
Philosophy is not like science, where consensus actually matters. My statement wasn’t that philosophy since the Enlightenment has verified the existence of God. I simply said that philosophy was the proper place to discuss questions of God, and the conversation that began with the Greeks has continued from the Enlightenment to the present day. The arguments must still be weighed on their merits by every individual, and certainty isn’t possible. Leave at least a little wiggle room in your dogmatism. You may feel certain of your conclusion, but there’s enough room for doubt to leave the rest of us space to exist and think otherwise.
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Most are against.
I said philosophy was “concerned with” questions of God, not that they affirmed in the positive. -
Don’t mention Christianity at all.
Some of the philosophers I cited don’t specifically address Christianity, but their overall thrust is in reaction to overall thrust of the Christian culture in which they were immersed.
Pretty much everyone who addresses metaphysics addresses the existence of God. Take Wittgenstein, for example. We know from his notebooks that he was thinking about God and the meaning of existence when he wrote these words:
6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists–and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case.’
And Heidegger, when he invokes dasein, the essence or ground of being, surely is thinking of the essence of God when he tries to describe it. To philosophize about the metaphysical in Western culture is to invoke the name of God. Disagree if you will.
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A significant number are Jewish.
And they believe in YHWH. Again, you read too much into my words. Jewish writers obviously can address questions of God and religion with affirming the Christian religion. Jewish writers may even disagree with their own traditions. Imagine that. -
Many are hermeneuticians.
Hermeneuticians in the Western tradition always have biblical interpretation in the back of their minds. It’s absorbed through the culture. If the Bible is true, in what sense is it true? Even if the thought wasn’t in their minds, any philosopher who writes about the interpretation of texts has an impact on Christian thought. (Derrida would qualify, on those grounds.) If you’re interested in a lengthy dissertation on the subject, I recommend:
The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description with Special Reference to Heidegger, Bultmann, Gadamer, and Wittgenstein
Then do. As far as I can tell, you have, so why the angst?
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Because you’re still pushing design as something in nature. The thing that designers do. There is no design without one. Engineering uses it. And there is no engineering without an engineer. No reality without a realiser. See how it goes? Nature as designer as engineer is only metaphor. You’re trying to blur it in to reality. And ooh! You know this, therefore as nature is not a designer and there is design, there is a designer! That’s the game being played here. Distraction, the shell game. Using design principles to study DNA will inevitably show design. It’s purely an observer effect. Linguistic. Looking for design using scientific principles is an entirely different matter. Not that there is any warrant for doing so whatsoever.
OK, OK, am I interpolating too much here?
So far so good.
This. Is that the hypothesis? Because if it is then it would be better put in one sentence:
(i) ‘The hypothesis is that nature shows evidence of design and can be scientifically demonstrated.’
Being Aspy it screams
(ii) ‘The hypothesis is that nature shows evidence of design.’ period.
‘This hypothesis can be scientifically demonstrated.’
to me.
If you meant (i), fine. I’ve gone off alarming (London patois) and I unreservedly apologize.
However what follows reinforces (ii) for me.
I.e. Scientifically demonstrate the hypothesis that can be scientifically demonstrated.
None of that last paragraph makes sense without the conclusion being design. I must be wrong. So what is the conclusion?
And how does a logical conclusion obviate scientific proof? Design is real but only in theory? That is no more philosophy, logic than it is science. There are rational deductions beyond the empirical, ID isn’t one of them.
Where am I going wrong Jay?
The timeline of philosophy shows the rapid aging out of any religious premiss over 400 years. Alongside the rise of science. Platinga has better manners than William Lane Craig. That’s it.
Design is a thing in biology. It can be studied scientifically. The existence of design doesn’t require a designer. No, it isn’t a shell game, and I’m not making this stuff up. More examples:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrm2460
Building the cell: design principles of cellular architecture
Self-organizing processes combined with simple physical constraints seem to have key roles in controlling organelle size, number, shape and position, and these factors then combine to produce the overall cell architecture. By examining how these parameters are controlled in specific cell biological examples we can identify a handful of simple design principles that seem to underlie cellular architecture and assembly.
Notice that the “simple design principles” that underlie cell architecture and assembly are the result of “self-organizing processes combined with simple physical constraints.” No designer required.
The book aims to introduce the reader to the emerging field of Evolutionary Systems Biology, which approaches classical systems biology questions within an evolutionary framework. An evolutionary approach might allow understanding the significance of observed diversity, uncover “evolutionary design principles” and extend predictions made in model organisms to others.
The “evolutionary design principles” are the result of evolutionary processes, not an “intelligent designer.”
If you don’t like how I originally stated the hypothesis and conclusion, that’s fine. I wasn’t attempting a formal statement. Let’s try this. I’m simply saying that design in nature can be studied scientifically. Biologists are already doing it. But none of the ID theorists, to my knowledge, have attempted it. The ID conclusion that design must be due to an Intelligent Designer – rather than natural “self-organizing processes and simple physical constraints” – is not scientific. The proper realm for that type of “conclusion” is philosophy.
Hope that makes sense now. I’m running out of ways to restate it.
Not a fan of William Lane Craig either.
As long as it is emphasized that “self-organizing processes and simple physical constraints” (sounds like biofeedback cybernetics) stretches the definition of design to include designerless design or autonomous design or self design. Not, never, ever to “intelligent” design. Happy for words to evolve rationally.
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You’re a good man Jay. Thanks. I’m cool with self design, as I am with self tuning of dimensionless universal physical constants.
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This is the overarching question that ID, if I were in charge of it, should focus upon. They need to demonstrate not that bits and pieces here and there demonstrate design, but that the overall process fits an empirical definition of design. Instead they try to prove a negative.
Maybe the researchers should use a different word, or coin a new word for “designerless design.” I think I’m a fairly good communicator, but some of these concepts are too easy for people to misunderstand despite best efforts.
My standard answer: Don’t take a vote on it.
Forgot to reply to this. Instead of debating the point, I want to share something I was just reading from Wittgenstein’s notebooks that he kept during his service in WWI. You see the final form of these thoughts in the Tractatus:
What do I know about God and the purpose of life?
I know that this world exists.
That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.
That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.
That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it.
That life is the world.
That my will penetrates the world.
That my will is good or evil.
Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.
The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.
And connect this with the comparison of God to a father.
To pray is to think about the meaning of life.
I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely powerless.
I can only make myself independent of the world – and so in a certain sense master it – by renouncing any influence on happenings.
To believe in a God means to understand the meaning of life.
To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.
To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.
The world is given me, i.e. my will enters the world completely from the outside as into something that is already there.
(As for what my will is, I don’t know yet.)
However this may be, at any rate we are in a certain sense dependent, and what we are dependent on we can call God.
In this sense God would simply be fate, or, what is the same thing: The world – which is independent of our will.
I can make myself independent of fate.
There are two godheads: the world and my independent I.
… When my conscience upsets my equilibrium, then I am not in agreement with Something. But what is this? Is it the world?
Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.
Me again. Don’t know if this is any help, but it was on my mind. Listen to your conscience, brother. God speaks to the heart, not the reason. Follow your heart and you won’t go wrong.
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Absolutely sublime @Jay313. This echoes with my… heart currently. Can I have my cake and eat it? Can faith and rationality; strong, fierce, ruthless, unstinting, blind, paring, unsparing rationality, the lathe of heaven, coexist? Be in superposition?
It echoes my heart remarkably actually, as I said to another here, only last night, who insists that Christian metaphor is literal, God is my amniotic fluid on out, as He is for each of the infinity of His creations. Transcendently immanent.
God tells us to invoke Him as Father as that will work. I have to agree.
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Hearts are notoriously fickle, though, and untrustworthy, and consciences can be seared, so we still need to engage our minds.
“Which commandment is the first of all?”
Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
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Using my mind is not a problem. Or enough.
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But love is not just feelings of the heart. It very definitely involves the mind, and actions as well.
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