Innovation (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, May 19, 2013, 18:01 (4005 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Dhw: ...not believing in chance is not a reason for believing in God, any more than not believing in God is a reason for believing in chance. There is a comfy cushion awaiting you right next to me on my fence.-TONY: Unfortunately, your fence is an illusion. If you do not believe in a God, you believe in chance, even if it was only the chance that energy became matter that became intelligent with everything after being the product of design, you are still counting on chance. I would even be willing to go so far as to say that even IF you believe in God, you still believe in chance, because otherwise you get into the sticky questions about the origin of God that are no different in kind than the origin of DHW's panpsychism.-Even if blind chance, my panpsychist hypothesis, and your God hypothesis can all be reduced to chance, I'm afraid you still can't tell me I believe in any of them. This is a fundamental misconception of my brand of agnosticism, which finds all the hypotheses equally impossible to believe.-TONY: However, from my own rocking chair(which is much more comfortable to me than that darned imaginary fence), I find that using Occam's Razor and applying it to pansychism (energy > matter > multiple intelligence > harmonious design) brings me back to God(energy>singular intelligence>design) as it would have a much higher probability of actually occurring.
 
In your God formula you have left out matter (which should perhaps come after singular intelligence). I do not begrudge you your comfortable rocking chair, but have absolutely no idea how you can calculate that your God hypothesis has "a much higher degree of probability". By what criteria? If I use Ockham, I can twist the razor any way I like. Blind chance seems to me the most economical, as it requires only one inexplicable miracle with no further ramifications, but of course economy is not a valid criterion for probability, let alone truth.-DHW: The bushiness of the bush therefore proves nothing, though I'd say the fact that it heads off in so many different directions suggests the absence of any single purpose, apart perhaps from bushiness.-TONY: That is like judging a puzzle by pouring the box out on the table and saying, "Look, it's a pile of pieces that make no sense." A closer examination shows that in fact the pile of pieces only exists because you haven't taken the time to sort them out and put them in the proper order. [...] You see a bush because they have told you that it all grew up in a hodge-podge willy nilly fashion, with no rhyme or reason to it. You don't look for purpose because you have been told all your life that there is no purpose.-I was brought up to believe in God and purpose, then became an atheist, read Darwin's Origin and was "converted" to agnosticism! You're right that we depend too much on so-called experts, but I do not accept any pronouncement that takes materialism for granted, and as regards evolution, I do not accept Darwin's gradualism or reliance on random mutations. However, despite your scepticism (beautifully expressed, and I wish there was room to repeat it all here), I do find common descent far more convincing than the idea of an unknown superintelligence separately creating dinosaurs and dodos (which die out), flycatchers, ants, elephants, sparrows etc., by whatever method (telekinesis, individual surgery, magic?). I retain an open mind as to how life and the mechanisms for reproduction, adaptation and innovation could have come into being. My panpsychist hypothesis leaves room for God. So I think it's a little unfair to tell me that my scepticism is based on what others have told me. It applies just as much to the blind chance hypothesis as to the other two.-TONY: The worst part, the absolute worst part, to me is that you can ignore your own observations because of the words of others. [...] You live in a finely tuned universe, on a finely tuned planet, in a finely tuned ecosystem, and have a finely tuned body. You see creatures of every type that are functionally PERFECT. You see entire biospheres that work in a symbiotic fashion, each piece playing its part in the cycle, and you still call it a Higgly-piggly BUSH!!-The higgledy-piggledy bush image applies to the vast variety of living forms. If I believed in your God, this would indicate to me that his intention might have been to create a mechanism that would come up with a vast variety of living forms! The greater the variety, the more fascinating the entertainment, which might be his overall purpose. The atheistic version (there is also a theistic version) of my panpsychist hypothesis would also account for the fine tuning of everything that is fine tuned ... universe, planet, ecosystem, body. This has nothing to do with believing the bushy theories of others, and let me stress yet again that I am describing hypotheses and not beliefs, other than my belief (neither theistic nor atheistic) that all forms of life are descended from earlier forms, going back to the very first.