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"Let me, however, conclude with our starting-point of agnosticism, and offer you two alternative forms of madness: 1) countless numbers of people, sums of money, buildings, institutions, wars, miseries, joys, works of art have been devoted to or have sprung from human worship of something that never existed; 2) the designer's creations are just beginning to understand, after centuries of conscious endeavour, how life functions, but they are still unable to design an organism like themselves that can spring from inanimate matter into living existence, reproduce itself, adapt to a changing environment, invent new mechanisms, and pass on its adaptations and innovations to the organisms it engenders. They believe, however, that if they ever can consciously and deliberately design such an organism, it will prove that they themselves were not designed. -Take your pick."-This is just absolutely brilliant, especially the italicized part.-BTW, is one still agnostic who has made a firm decision to side with the design camp over the random-chance camp? I'm more in favor of design also, but only because everything "appears" to me to have been designed. Things bear the hallmark of intentionality rather than haphazardness when, for example, a tiny animal is capable of constructing a perfectly symmetrical web of a material five times stronger than steel from inside its abdomen, then knows to sit and WAIT for a meal to fly into it rather than go hunt like most other animals. -Calmly not eating as a survival strategy? Amazing! Crocodiles may calmly wait a year between meals, all right, but they're slowly digesting and metabolizing, not merely waiting for the next wildebeest or tourist to jump into their jaws. Even Venus flytraps photosynthesize--the appetizer before their entreÃ©. -So comforting knowing we'll never know the truth until after we're dead...if at all. Mystery makes life more interesting than Catholic cannibalism does, in my opinion.

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hy: 
 They believe, however, that if they ever can consciously and deliberately design such an organism, it will prove that they themselves were not designed. 
 This is just absolutely brilliant, especially the italicized part.-Even if they conjure up an RNA world and make something alive, they cannot make that conclusion, for that invented life is an 'intellgent design' and even if it acts life-like that is no proof of how lfe really happened. we cannot truly know that bit of history, but the useless research sucks up lots of grant money. 60 years of such research and we only know what won't work. But each new 'advance' is cheered as if the answer is right around the corner. 
> 
> hy:BTW, is one still agnostic who has made a firm decision to side with the design camp over the random-chance camp? I'm more in favor of design also, but only because everything "appears" to me to have been designed. Things bear the hallmark of intentionality rather than haphazardness when, for example, a tiny animal is capable of constructing a perfectly symmetrical web of a material five times stronger than steel from inside its abdomen, then knows to sit and WAIT for a meal to fly into it rather than go hunt like most other animals. -Why not accept intelligent design if you really feel that way?-> 
> hy:So comforting knowing we'll never know the truth until after we're dead...if at all. Mystery makes life more interesting than Catholic cannibalism does, in my opinion.-Fair enough. But I think you and I will discuss it telpathically in the afterlife.

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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.

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hy: 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. -Unfortunately most people are herd animals and have the free will to follow the leader. But our freedom of thought permits 360 degrees of thinking. It appears that only some of us are willing to focus with a sharp degree of directionality.-I don't think that the universal intelligence (my term for God) designed one-direction mentality. We are all each on our own to sink or swim. And only some societies have developed enough maturity to allow strong thinkers with independent thought.-It sounds as if your rump is still caught on the picket fence, but your feet are reaching for the ground. A non-straddle position. It is design that got my attention 30 years ago.

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David: "It sounds as if your rump is still caught on the picket fence, but your feet are reaching for the ground. A non-straddle position. It is design that got my attention 30 years ago."-I envision straddling the fence as the 50% mark, so you're right, I'm in a non-straddle position. I guess I'm leaning on the top of it, with both feet planted on the design side of the ground, kind of resting there comfortably. I find Paine's Age of Reason a fairly convincing treatise on nature itself constituting sufficient evidence of intelligent design, to anyone with two good eyes, ears and a brain with which to perceive it; and when I want to be clubbed over the head with the evidence, drawn from a panoply of academic disciplines, my choice is Corey's Back to Darwin: The Scientific Case for Deistic Evolution.

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hy: and when I want to be clubbed over the head with the evidence, drawn from a panoply of academic disciplines, my choice is Corey's Back to Darwin: The Scientific Case for Deistic Evolution.-I looked up Michael Corey on Amazon. I don't know why he has been hidden from me. I have read an enormous amount of books, but never came across him and his rave notices before. Thank you.

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David: Why not accept intelligent design if you really feel that way?-Hyjyljyj: 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'd just like to comment on your mention of "deistic". The word has changed its meaning over the centuries, and one form of deism is the belief that the creator God does not interfere in human and natural affairs. Whether this is a sign of total indifference, of viewing the spectacle as entertainment, or that he is waiting to pounce on us with some grand dÃ©nouement is open to interpretation. If I did believe in a creator god, I think this detached form of deism would fit nicely into the picture of random joy and random suffering that seems to characterize the way of the world.-David: Einstein ended up as an agnostic.-So did Darwin, and I suspect that he would have been appalled at the manner in which his name and his ideas have been corrupted by atheistic distortions.
 
Hyjylyjy: Right now I'm at about 75-80% [presumably theistic].-I've mentioned out-of-body and near-death-experiences and the question of an afterlife in an earlier post, and I would have thought these too would be important for you, as some of them have so far defied materialistic interpretation. However, I'm certainly not going to try and push you off my fence ... I already value your company far too much to do that! The leap still requires you to "really feel" as well as to accept rationally that there is a self-aware "being" which has deliberately created and manipulated Planet Earth, every black hole, every past and present planet, star, sun, constellation, galaxy, and yet has also deliberately created and manipulated globules of matter so tiny that they can't be seen by the naked eye, and has fashioned them into living mechanisms for the reproduction, adaptation and innovation necessary for evolution. And while you are expected to argue that our own self-awareness could only be the product of design, you must accept that this super-self-awareness was not designed but has simply existed forever. Can you believe it?

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dhw; you must accept that this super-self-awareness was not designed but has simply existed forever. Can you believe it?-You have agreed that something has to be eternal to start all we see and are.

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Hyjyljyj (referring to the concluding sentences of the "brief guide"]:
This is just absolutely brilliant, especially the italicized part.-Thank you for your praise. You are only the second person outside my personal circle of family and friends to have found something in the guide to praise! Matt (= xeno) was the first ... he liked the section on animals. It was, of course, savaged by atheist websites, whose members automatically assume that an attack on their Master, Dawkins, can only be Creationism in disguise. -Hyjyljyj: BTW, is one still agnostic who has made a firm decision to side with the design camp over the random-chance camp? I'm more in favor of design also, but only because everything "appears" to me to have been designed. Things bear the hallmark of intentionality rather than haphazardness when, for example, a tiny animal is capable of constructing a perfectly symmetrical web of a material five times stronger than steel from inside its abdomen, then knows to sit and WAIT for a meal to fly into it rather than go hunt like most other animals.-It's all a matter of definition. As I'm sure you know, T.H. Huxley coined the term agnosticism to mean the impossibility of knowing whether or not God exists. In epistemological terms, of course, no-one can "know" such a thing, which makes us all agnostics, and so in modern times ... to the disapproval of the purists - the term has increasingly been used to denote neither belief nor disbelief in a god or gods. It's purely negative. The next problem is what is meant by god(s). Most religions associate the term with a supreme being (or beings) that deliberately created the universe and life ... and the monotheistic religions add that this being is eternal. The key word for me is "deliberately", which means that this being must be self-aware. I will come back to this on the threads.....Chimp vs. human brain, and Panpsychism.-The spider example certainly illustrates intentionality, but this surely lies within the spider. The question you and I have to face is whether the mechanism that enabled the spider and every other living creature to devise and develop means for its survival was deliberately created by a self-aware supreme being or not. If your preference for design over chance leads you to genuinely believe in such a being, you are a theist. If you remain open-minded about its existence, you are an agnostic. In my own case, I find it as difficult to believe in such a being as I do to believe in chance, and so I neither believe nor disbelieve. Ergo, I'm an agnostic.

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> The spider example certainly illustrates intentionality, but this surely lies within the spider. The question you and I have to face is whether the mechanism that enabled the spider and every other living creature to devise and develop means for its survival was deliberately created by a self-aware supreme being or not. -The spider gets its instinct from coding in its DNA. But where did the information for that coding come from. Not thin air. thre must be intelligence with information to impart. That is the reasoning bridge you should cross.

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> The spider gets its instinct from coding in its DNA. But where did the information for that coding come from. Not thin air. thre must be intelligence with information to impart. That is the reasoning bridge you should cross.-A very recent paper describes changing the expression of zebra fish embryoes so that a fin starts to look like a leg.-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121210124521.htm-"We found that in the zebrafish, the mouse Hoxd13 control element was capable of driving gene expression in the distal fin rudiment. This result indicates that molecular machinery capable of activating this control element was also present in the last common ancestor of finned and legged animals and is proven by its remnants in zebrafish," says Dr. Casares."-Again ask yourself, where did this pre-plannng information come from?

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> Again ask yourself, where did this pre-plannng information come from?-More evidence of pre-planning; archaea set up DNA just like we do but they don't have a nucleus:-"Our genetic material is packaged into chromatinâDNA wrapped around proteins called histones, then bound up in bundles called nucleosomes. This style of packaging has long been considered a hallmark of eukaryotes, a way of compressing our large genomes into manageable sizes and controlling the expression of our genes. But scientists from the University of Toronto have shown that archaeaâa separate domain of lifeâalso wrap their genomes around histones in a way that resembles eukaryotic chromatin.
 
"The conventional wisdom was that the purpose of chromatin was genome-packagingâfitting a 4-meter stretch of DNA into a 5-micrometer nucleus," said the University of Toronto's Corey Nislow, who led the new study. But archaea do not have a nucleus, and their small circular genomes are easier to package inside their cells. "If the primary role for chromatin is not packaging, it might instead be to regulate gene expression," Nislow said."-http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/33620/title/Conserved-Chromatin-/

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DAVID: A very recent paper describes changing the expression of zebra fish embryoes so that a fin starts to look like a leg.-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121210124521.htm-"We found that in the zebrafish, the mouse Hoxd13 control element was capable of driving gene expression in the distal fin rudiment. This result indicates that molecular machinery capable of activating this control element was also present in the last common ancestor of finned and legged animals and is proven by its remnants in zebrafish," says Dr. Casares."-Again ask yourself, where did this pre-planning information come from?-Are you suggesting that God pre-planned every single creature that had or has legs, or are you willing to stand by your earlier agreement that this happened "through the inventive intelligence" of the mechanisms for reproduction, heredity, adaptation and innovation "being brought into play when the environment allowed for such inventions"? You said then that "DNA is coded so complexly and carefully that all sorts of convergences are allowed to be tried". "Allowed to be tried" does not = pre-planning.-DAVID (quoting dhw: "you must accept that this super-self-awareness was not designed but has simply existed forever. Can you believe it?")-You have agreed that something has to be eternal to start all we see and are.-The full quote related to a requirement for believing in God: "And while you are expected to argue that our own self-awareness could only be the product of design, you must accept that this super-self-awareness was not designed but has simply existed forever. Can you believe it?"-The full quote was meant to underline the illogicality of the argument, but yes, I have always agreed that there has to be an eternal first cause. What I am unable to believe is that the first cause is self-aware, or has a low degree of awareness, or has no degree of awareness whatsoever. That is why I am neither a theist nor a panpsychist nor an atheist, but an uncommitted and ignorant agnostic.

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dhw: Are you suggesting that God pre-planned every single creature that had or has legs, or are you willing to stand by your earlier agreement that this happened "through the inventive intelligence" of the mechanisms for reproduction, heredity, adaptation and innovation "being brought into play when the environment allowed for such inventions"? You said then that "DNA is coded so complexly and carefully that all sorts of convergences are allowed to be tried". "Allowed to be tried" does not = pre-planning.-I've not been entirely clear it seems. Let me try again. What is pre-planned is the DNA structures, such as wrapping around histones is present in Archaea. What is being found and I believe will be entirely proven is that complex life structures besides the genome must have been present in the most ancient of living single-celled animals. Life was complex from the beginning. That is pre-planning. The complexity of the DNA genome, from the beginning allowed for the bush-like advance of evolution so that many advancing attempts could be made as natural events allowed the changes. Natural selection mediated the changes. God did not pre-plan each and every odd structure that arose. He arranged for an evolutionary process that allowed complexity to appear and become more complex, and we are the peak performance of that mechanism. Such planning in ancient life requires a self-aware intelligence because it shows teleolgic planning. All I am saying is God knew what He was doing when He started life. Your approach is a chancy God, and makes no sense at all. Pre-planning is from the beginning so that evolution flows on its own after that. I doubt any tweaking was ever needed. Of course, I am assuming a perfect planner makes a perfect plan with a perfect result.

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David: Life was complex from the beginning. That is pre-planning....-This is a great point about complexity that is difficult for anyone with a scientific underpinning to discount, whether they agree that the complexity necessarily implies pre-planning or not. The scientifically trained mind is able to perceive unbridled and ever-increasing complexity the deeper they delve into the structure and function of living systems and inorganic molecular interactions; moreover, it is unable NOT to perceive it. You get slapped across the face with it on first glance into a microscope. Atheists love to apply a weird new definition to the word "complex" in order to state that life was not at all complex at the beginning and, in fact, isn't very impressive today. They remain singularly bored by the majestic magnificence of even a spider or amoeba, much less the unearthly marvel that is the human brain, seeing in it no evidence of intelligent design whatsoever. The brain that can design a wristwatch or rocket ship is so simple that it required no designer itself. It defies reason and common sense, IMHO, but there it is. -Such planning in ancient life requires a self-aware intelligence because it shows teleolgic planning. All I am saying is God knew what He was doing when He started life. Your approach is a chancy God, and makes no sense at all. Pre-planning is from the beginning so that evolution flows on its own after that. I doubt any tweaking was ever needed. Of course, I am assuming a perfect planner makes a perfect plan with a perfect result.-This is a good capsule summary of the underlying tenet of deistic evolution. It's especially attractive to deists because it removes the mythic "caring, personal, all-loving father" anthropomorphization, which so inflames the tissues in the logic, reason and common-sense areas of their brains. Things certainly do tidy up nicely once the simplest brushstroke is applied to the canvas, i.e., an infinte (eternal), primary causal intelligence is posited to exist, which had the foresight (pre-planning) to imbue the first living matter with enough primal intelligence/consciousness to start the chain of events leading to evolution of species according to natural selection, as Darwin expounded. The other side will of course step in and say you've presumed the truth of the premise by taking as a given that the designer is perfect, so of course anything he designs must therefore also be. I wouldn't know what to say in reply but, "Yeah? So? That's the hypothesis: everything is in the perfect order we observe in the universe, order which is in almost inconceivably flagrant violation of what we should expect given the law of entropy, because it was intelligently designed, and the designer of that universe and its laws is perfect."

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David: Life was complex from the beginning. That is pre-planning....
> 
> Hy: This is a great point about complexity that is difficult for anyone with a scientific underpinning to discount, whether they agree that the complexity necessarily implies pre-planning or not. -The level of complexity that is unfolding, with the latest techniques to follow what individual molecules do, reveals an intricate dance that belies belief. Darwin's knowledge was simplistic, so he cannot be blamed for a theory that is sputtering.-
> DAvid: Such planning in ancient life requires a self-aware intelligence because it shows teleolgic planning. All I am saying is God knew what He was doing when He started life. Your approach is a chancy God, and makes no sense at all. Pre-planning is from the beginning so that evolution flows on its own after that. I doubt any tweaking was ever needed. Of course, I am assuming a perfect planner makes a perfect plan with a perfect result.
> 
> Hy: This is a good capsule summary of the underlying tenet of deistic evolution. It's especially attractive to deists because it removes the mythic "caring, personal, all-loving father" anthropomorphization, which so inflames the tissues in the logic, reason and common-sense areas of their brains.-My thinking exactly. In the past on this site I have said that I cannot know God's personality. He should not be anthropomorphized. This is where Dawkins pokes fun. I take him on at the science level and he doesn't have an answer. I am an panentheist, with a deist viewpoint. Based on science, God must have pre-existed this universe and contains the universe, thus being both in and outside of it.

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David: Based on science, God must have pre-existed this universe and contains the universe, thus being both in and outside of it.-The concept of something pre-existing everything or being both inside and outside of the universe (or of anything else for that matter) is one of the mental cul-de-sacs which I feel was made just for the adjective agnostic. My brain literally can't know of something that can be in both places at once like that and still remain the exact same substance. -If there is a God, and if his plan for some reason (or no reason) is that we not know of him in any specific, concrete, generally agreeable way, well, mission accomplished. And then some. :^D

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> hy: The concept of something pre-existing everything or being both inside and outside of the universe (or of anything else for that matter) is one of the mental cul-de-sacs which I feel was made just for the adjective agnostic.-You have to conceive of the spookiness at a distance. We are talking at the quantum level where things can be in two places at the same time. I conceive of God as at the quantum level of uncertainty, where He remains hidden. But QM is the basis of all reality, so why not? There HAS to be a first cause, something eternal. dhw and I agree on that. And it has to be energy. Matter is just the other form. So quantum energy is a partial identification for/of God.

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