Asking of the Designer what we would of any other designer (The atheist delusion)

by dhw, Thursday, July 28, 2011, 16:55 (4649 days ago) @ whateverist

whateverist: What stretches the imagination is to imagine a designer with no beginning, no apprenticeship, no history of any kind.
Yet that is where we end up if we are skeptical about the powers of chance. Of course chance only enters into it once DNA, the machinery of evolution, is in place. From there adaptive/reproductive advantage of the rare chance mutation over eons of time makes perfect sense. But where'd that DNA come from?-May I join David in welcoming you to the forum. Your post sums up the agnostic dilemma. The quote with which you began ("something cannot have been designed if we cannot explain the existence of the designer") was my paraphrase of Dawkins' argument: "A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right." (p. 109 The God Delusion). Let me explain my objection to the Dawkins line. You will find that David Turell's posts in particular have drawn our attention to the immense complexity of DNA and the whole machinery that underlies evolution ... so complex that with our enormous intelligence we are still struggling to unravel it. And the more we discover, the more mysterious it all becomes. This is a problem in itself. Can you or can you not believe that this machinery assembled itself by accident? I can't. The alternative is, as you say, to believe in a designer who has been there for ever or who likewise assembled himself by accident. This too I find impossible to believe. The Dawkins line is to link the two problems as if the second automatically dealt with the first: if you can't believe in God, you can't believe in design. My line is that you can remain open-minded: you can acknowledge the unlikelihood of chance assembling these complexities, and you can acknowledge the unlikelihood of some supernatural, eternal intelligence. Dawkins' argument leads by extension to belief in chance. My line is that you are not compelled to believe in chance or in design ... hence agnosticism.-It appears from your post that you ARE prepared to believe in the chance assembly of the machinery. No-one can object to that, so long as you are aware that such belief is an act of faith akin to believing in a designer god. But you will not often find an atheist prepared to concede that his/her atheism is based on faith!-Once more, welcome to the group.