Debunk the Teleological Argument for God

[Coito ergo sum]

And I've seen no evidence that having a classical education produces clearer thinking.

I've seen evidence of it right here.

[Svartalf]

Well, in WHOSE or WHAT's image was Dog made?

[Svartalf]

I dunno, why not go for the bleedin obvious.
When did a watch ever give birth?
I know what made me. My parents.
You see a watch, you know someone made it. You see a human, you know that they are the result of sexual reproduction.
Comparing watches to humans is therefore stupid. That also applies to the Universe.
Everything has a previous history.
You can look, and tell that a watch had a maker. Man made things are mostly pretty obvious.
But complex things daily grow from simple ingredients naturally. You can look at anything else, and work out where it came from. Rocks, trees, moons, stars, all understood and explained by previous history.

The big bang is the only thing so far unexplained by previous history.
So it's the god of the gaps. No explanation, chuck in god.

I thought Thomas Aquinas was supposed to be a thinker. But of course, he came before Darwin, so you can't be too hard on him.

Well, I see rock, I know what made them... they are volcano shit, or aggregated sand and animal and plant parts possibly altered by extended periods of high heat and pressure... there ain't no 'rockmaker'

[Xamonas Chegwé]

... there ain't no 'rockmaker'

First Lie! There's Motorhead!

[Svartalf]

When motorhead produces granite, we'll talk about it.

Now, if you want me to dye you Deep Purple on the Black Sabbath to vent my Rage Against the Machine, I'll throw you into a Metallica IronMaiden in Rammstein castle as a bonus.

[Coito ergo sum]

I think the best rebuttal is that we've never really seen anything "created." So, we have no idea whether things that have been designed MUST have a designer.

We can certainly conclude that some things that appear to be designed MAY have a designer, like watches. However, making a watch is more like molding clay than "creating" something. We can make a flower pot out of clay, but we haven't "created" anything, we've merely changed the form of already existing things.

However, things change in form all the time, sometimes forming complex structures which have no evident intelligence behind them. Like, oh, say, a planet or a solar system, water molecules and methane molecules - nucleotides and such, as well.

So, what is the logical conclusion?

(a) we have no evidence that anything was ever created or even "came into existence" out of nothing. As far as we know, all the stuff that makes up the universe was always around in some form or another. It may not have been. Maybe it did come into being. But, nobody knows.

(b) Of the stuff that is here, we have only seen it changed in form. It has been changed in form from atoms to molecules, to polymers, to nucleotides, etc., and even to rocks, boulders, sand, glass, water, beaches, mountains, watches and cars. Most of the stuff we see in the universe became that without any intelligent involvement of which we have any evidence. Some stuff, notably watches and cars, were manipulated into that shape by the only intelligence we know of in the universe.

therefore,

(c) The universe is made up of stuff which we don't know whether was created or always existed in some form. Some of that stuff became and becomes other stuff without any evidence intelligence involved, and other of that stuff becomes other stuff because humans or other animals manipulate it to take the form of that other stuff.

[mistermack]

People bang on about Thomas Aquinas, as if he achieved something. What they ignore is that he had NONE of our advantages, and did well in trying to make sense of things. He was a hugely clever man.

But that is exactly why, if he had been born in 1950 like me, he wouldn't be pushing the same stuff that he did back then.
He would have had the benefit of reading Darwin, and learning of geology, astronomy, cosmology, and biology etc.

Today he would almost certainly have been a convinced atheist.

That's what's so daft about the fundies quoting him all the time.

[Svartalf]

Just applied a mind generally regarded as colossal at the time (not sure about late appreciations of him, since most of those come from the religious with an agenda to make big things of him and his intellectualized belief), to trying to explain away the truth in a 'fact' that should have been questioned, and rejected for lack of evidence, or overabundance of evidence against at the start.

Basically, his summa ought to have fit inside a single in quarto volume.

[rasetsu]

You can tell people who are ignorant about Socrates, Plato and Aristotle by the ignorant things they say about Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. I'm more interested in the pre-Socratics and the major schools, but that's not to pretend they aren't important. (I've got a juicy quote in which Godel is dishing dirt on Bertrand Russell for his dismissal of Platonism. Of course, you're welcome to claim that you know better what's relevant than Kurt Godel and Bertrand Russell, just as I'm welcome to laugh at you for doing so.) Anyway, I would agree that many philosophy people are rank idiots. A lawyer friend I bunked with once made the comment that she indulged in philosophy classes until she could no longer restrain herself from wanting to ask, "Were you born an idiot, or did you have to work to get that way?" (She was very bright, and very conservative. We hated each other.) There's a fellow on this very forum who has educated himself in philosophy, yet, to my mind, philosophically couldn't find his ass with both hands even if someone held the flashlight for him. (Actually, two have claimed credentials, but only one credibly so.) Being interested in philosophy, or being schooled in philosophy, is no evidence of actual philosophical skill. But then, I suppose this is rather ordinary; there are few fields that aren't to some extent inundated by mediocrity and incompetence.

Anyway, I'm getting dragged off message. Yes, no one has created ex nihilo, but I don't think that's a persuasive argument. We all know that we have the capacity of re-arranging matter in useful ways which a rock or a tree or a hill cannot do, so they have a fair point. However, there are at least two major problems with the argument:

1) Operationalizing what it means for something to "appear designed". William Dembski tried his heart out and failed miserably, likely due to incompetence, but even his failure illustrated the difficulties in fashioning a sieve for design that isn't highly vulnerable to false positives (and especially one that is abstractly generalizable to apply equally well to biological organisms, watches, and stars; which points to a problem I just now noticed — according to the theists, God created more than biological life forms, everything was designed by God. So what do we use as a control? A test for design should always return positive if the Christians are right, regardless of whether it's a watch or a comet.)

Anyway, moving on,
2) The biggest problem with the design argument is that we don't in fact identify design by complexity or dissimilarity from non-designed objects, but by similarity to objects or marks of manufacture that we know are the product of design. Archeologists have repeatedly made this point to no avail. We recognize a Clovis point because we recognize the artifact of human stone working from other artifacts, and those from others, in a chain up to the present. If we were to find what looked like a glob of molten metal, composed of several metals, we'd have no way of knowing that blob was designed by aliens living in the Oort cloud unless we already knew that these aliens made artifacts that resembled this. Complexity isn't the hallmark of design. Similarity is. And notice how closely ID proponents analogize God to a human designer. Why? Well part is justified by their theology, but if you postulated a God who engineered things by principles totally unlike ours, we would have no idea what to look for to sort the created from the uncreated. ID proponents seldom envision God as an organic chemist who brewed up a slime and set it loose on the waters.

[Svartalf]

Never got any opportunity to study the pre socratics, despise aristotle, and despise Plato who is to Socrates what Derleth was to Lovecraft... may have the merit of having preserved the man's work and making it known, but still is the moron understudy who didn't understand a thing and then tried to put his own crap in the Master's mouth.

[JimC]

I like the position Dawkins takes on this, which was that it was the most reasonable and serious argument in favour of a creator god...

Until Darwin...