Kevin Levites wrote: ↑April 25th, 2019, 12:28 pm
Intelligent design has always been a touchy subject with me, as it leads to court battles, and arguments over what should and should not be taught in schools.
I simplify the matter by applying Occam's Razor in the following way (in conjunction with ideas from Issac Asimov and Carl Sagan):
If we assume that God (the intelligent designer) created the Universe, then we must ask who created God. If we decide that this is an unanswerable question, then why not simplify matters and assume the the creation of the Universe is an unanswerable question.
Or, if we decide that God has always existed, then we can skip a step and assume that the Universe (in one form or another) has always existed.
As for my take on it, if--indeed--despite this, we still ask who designed God, then we must ask who designed that which designed God, and so on for an infinite regression.
So, the simplest explaination is that there is no intelligent designer, and--therefore--no intelligent design.
Creationists like to hold up the watchmaker argument.
"A watch implies a watchmaker", and then they apply this argument to things like the bacterial flagellum (a kind of microscopic electric motor), and so on.
The problem with these arguments is--in my mind--a kind of "appeal to ignorance" fallacy. We don't know, therefore it must be divine.
It was Hippocrates (the founder of medicine) who said: "Men think eplilepsy divine. If men thought that everything that they didn't understand was divine, then there would be no end of divine things."
Truer words have rarely been spoken.