Ch 16, A mad world (A mad world)

by hyjyljyj , Saturday, December 08, 2012, 15:52 (4156 days ago) @ David Turell

David: "Why not accept intelligent design if you really feel that way?"-Good point; there might be various degrees of "really feeling that way". There are several gradations of agnosticism, including atheistic agnosticism and theistic (aka deistic) agnosticism, the latter being loosely defined as not knowing for sure, but LEANING toward, or preferring to believe in, the existence of an intelligent designer/a deity, and the former being the opposite. -I basically conceptualize this as being on a linear continuum of belief, where the far left extreme is belief in zero possibility of a deity (atheism) and the far right extreme is 100% certainty of one (theism), with the hypothetical "pure" agnostic standing squarely on the center point of the line at 50%...so the theistic agnostic finds himself somewhere to the right of the center point, and the atheistic agnostic somewhere to the left of it. For me it fluctuates a little; right now I'm at about 75-80%. That number gets less in a hurry if I consider for too long that an "intelligent designer" should logically be expected to design intelligent beings. Looking at the world today there are not a whole lot of those in evidence. -We could literally destroy our own ability to live on this planet, or at least the desire of people to do so, if human madness is allowed to take its course. Even just the masses' having been utterly convinced in only a few short years by madmen in positions of global power of the utterly absurd notion that their very existing is destroying the environment (allegedly by breathing out CO2, which plants need to live)--such that they need to buy "carbon credits" to keep the oceans from rising 20 ft. and submerging all the world's coastal cities--doesn't do much to convince one of the intelligence of the designer's subjects. Sadly an endless succession of other examples could be used to illustrate the same point.