People seem to need me to sumarise richard dawkins amazing argument because they cant be bothered to read the god delusion (its suprising how badly read most xians are) It goes like this
1.You sky daddy is complex
2.The explanation for something must always be simpler than the thing it is trying to explain
3.therefore your skydaddy doesnt exist.
3 comments:
let's break it down shall we?
"1.You sky daddy is complex"
Can you substantiate this premise? Christian theologians for millenia have been teaching that God, rather than being complex, is a remarkably simple entity. Sure, its ideas may be complex, but of course it does not embody the sort of complexity that would necessitate design (like the complexity of a machine or other designed product)
"2.The explanation for something must always be simpler than the thing it is trying to explain"
Why? Evolutionary theory is remarkably simple, and yet humans are remarkably complex biological machines. On your worldview, evolution is an explanation for the amazing complexity of humans and other motile animals
"3.therefore your skydaddy doesnt exist."
That's just a non-sequitur. Can you show how that follows from any of the premises?
"2.The explanation for something must always be simpler than the thing it is trying to explain"
Hey Mike I was thinking about an explanation for this blog. Someone said the best explaination for this blog was a human being. However I thought to myself "a human being is far more complex than the blog I am trying to explain". therefore I concluded that no-one designed this blog.
Thank you Mike.
I had found a summary last night on Wiki...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Boeing_747_gambit
1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.
3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a "crane" not a "skyhook," for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.
4. The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that – an illusion.
5. We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with.
6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.
Premise 3 fails since it presupposes a logically necessary being in order to refute a logically necessary being, but a logically necessary being would not need a creator, by definition.
johnny
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