At UD, Eric Anderson has a new OP entitled
No-one Knows the Mind of God… Except the Committed Atheist
It’s the same argument we’ve heard so many times before. Here are a few excerpts:
Coyne’s thinks he finds “strong evidence for no God.” Yet his argument, when we cut through the clutter, is essentially as follows:
1. God, if He existed, would be like X.
2. Evidence shows God is not like X.
3. Therefore, God does not exist.
And:
This exchange highlights the fact that the anti-religious zealot so often approaches the matter with a very concrete God in mind, a concept of how they think God should be (if only there were such a being). Then when the facts don’t seem to align with that superficial and hypothetical image they have created in their own minds, they proclaim that God must not exist.
And:
No-one seems so cock-sure of exactly what God is like, exactly what God’s characteristics are, exactly how to understand God, than the anti-religious zealot. He is convinced he knows just how God is and how God should act in particular situations . . . if, of course, such a being existed.
None of this is correct, of course. As atheists, we don’t have any particular idea of what a nonexistent God must be like. Instead, we play Whack A Mole with whatever gods the theists come up with.
In his essay, Coyne was addressing the Abrahamic God worshipped by billions of people. You’ll hear this God described as omnipotent and perfectly loving, and Coyne, like many of us, sees belief in such a God as absurd. The world, and the Bible itself, are not compatible with such a view of God.
The problem is not with what atheists say about God. It’s what believers say about God that clashes with the evidence.
IDers, for all their bluster about “following the evidence where it leads”, are notoriously reluctant to do so when it comes to God.
Eric Anderson has swung and missed.
Perhaps the most important point is that no one knows what god(s) should or would be like, because we have no evidence for any, shall we say, Designers.
Any “science” that constantly falls back on the lack of knowledge of what a cause would do in order to save that “cause” as purportedly viable is no science at all. And of course saying that it would make things complex and functional is an absurd pretense at any supposed effects, especially when that complexity has the marks of evolution and not the leaps of thought expected (at times) with design.
So I’m afraid it’s no detour at all, unlike what Eric writes, for the problem of evidence for God is almost exactly the same problem as the (lack of) evidence for Design.
Glen Davidson
As usual, the ID advocates want it both ways: they want to deduce the characteristics of an abstract something called “design” by appealing to what we know about human designers, but disallow deduction of the possible characteristics of agents by appealing to what we know about human agents.
Then there’s pretending that the Capital-D-Designer is *not* necessarily the Christian god, while simultaneously huffing and puffing about how we couldn’t possibly be smart enough to understand the mind of the same Christian god.
The same issue comes up with their refutation of Bad Design arguments. Put it together with their certainty that there is no Junk DNA and you get a massive contradiction:
See, if someone says that there is Bad Design, they start talking about how no one can say what the objectives of the Designer are, so it isn’t right to use Bad Design arguments.
If someone says there is Junk DNA in the genome, they get very upset — they just know that there can’t be any junk DNA. Why? Well because their Designer wouldn’t do anything that bad.
The Designer apparently both enforces Good Design, and doesn’t, depending on the needs of the argument.
Unsurprisingly, I’m with Anderson on this point — most folks who reject a specific conception of God don’t realize that there are other conceptions of God to which their criticisms do not apply. Terry Eagleton’s review of Dawkins’ The God Delusion makes this perfectly clear.
Conversely, most people who do accept some specific conception of God don’t realize that their conception is philosophically and even theologically indefensible.
Now, if you want to say, “I don’t care about what sophisticated theologians have said about the concept of God; I’m only interested in criticizing the concept of God that most ordinary people have,” that’s not a terrible move to make. But it should be justified by saying that the underlying concern isn’t metaphysics but politics. I happen to think that the fundamental concern ought to be politics, and metaphysics (to some degree) answers to politics — that’s part of what it is to have a pragmatist conception of what metaphysics is for. But then let’s be clear that the sophisticated conceptions of God developed by theologians are only of interest to us insofar as they make a real difference, and they mostly don’t.
Gregory’s taunts aside, I value curiosity over belief. For whatever reason, they do not seem to mix well. Except in people who can compartmentalize.
Or in people who recognize that different needs, interests and purposes are satisfied by different kinds of vocabularies. One person’s compartmentalization is another person’s pluralism, perhaps!
If it’s academic or for entertainment (in the broadest sense of the word) then there’s no problem. I would probably agree with keiths that when theism enters politics, it creates conflicts.
I have my own private mystical thoughts, with which I do not bother other people.
KN,
If that’s what Eagleton thinks, then he is making the same mistake as Anderson (and you). Dawkins doesn’t limit himself to a specific conception of God:
At UD, a couple of commenters defend the God of the Old Testament.
Optimus:
Barb:
That’s not true, of course. The Bible does condone atrocities, and it reports that God himself orders them.
Eric Anderson acknowledges this, to his credit:
However, he goes on to make excuses for God:
Here are some other questions you might want to ask, Eric: Does God exist at all? If he does, is he a good God? If you ‘follow the evidence where it leads’, you might arrive at some uncomfortable answers. Be brave.
I think it would be interesting to produce an edited version of the OT in which Satan drives humans out of the Garden (and the rest of the Fall) for a trivial offence, kills nearly everybody, including infants and fetuses and bunnies, for unspecified offences, Tricks an old man into agreeing to kill his son, orders a number of genocides, and so forth.
In the edited version, God would stand by attempting to mitigate these disasters.
I’d be curious to see how kids would react to the modified stories.
petrushka,
What’s interesting is that even adult believers are often shocked when they learn what the Bible actually says. A lot of them haven’t read the entire Bible, or if they have, they’ve glossed over the “bad” verses and focused on the “good” ones — the ones that get repeated by their pastors in church.
Dawkins tells a funny story about Randolph Churchill, son of Winston:
keiths,
Insofar as Dawkins conceives of God as a posited entity (“the God hypothesis”) which can be confirmed or disconfirmed by publicly available sensory evidence, his conception of God is exceedingly narrow and limited — regardless of how widely shared it is, or how unquestioned it is by many religious believers. This is obvious to anyone who has made a cursory study of theology. And this doesn’t even touch on the diversity of non-Christian conceptions of the divine. Dawkins writes as if the likes of Falwell or Robertson are the pinnacle of theological speculation. His clumsy dismissals of Augustine and Aquinas are laughable.
Joe, bring your lame junk DNA argument to UD where we can fairly pick it apart. How much junk DNA does your theory predict, and how much of it do we have to disprove before you move the goalposts again?Does evolution make bad designs are good ones? Which one is proof for evolution, a good design, a bad design or both? I think we all know how your side answers this one. Anything fits your rubber theory.
Well, here you are, let’s discuss right here!
So you agree or you don’t agree with my point: that ID advocates and creationists sometimes use Good Design arguments (when they argue against the presence of junk DNA) and sometimes reject Good Design arguments (when they encounter a Bad Design argument against a Designer).
They do both of these. And this is a self-contradiction, no?
phoodoo,
Joe is absolutely right. You can’t have it both ways.
If you say that nobody knows the mind of the Designer, but then you turn around and argue that the Designer would never create junk DNA, then you are contradicting yourself. If no one knows the mind of the Designer, how could you possibly know that the Designer would not create junk DNA?
It’s the same with the problem of evil. Christians will drone on and on about how God is good, and loving, and merciful, and just. When you ask about the evil in the world they are suddenly indignant, insisting that no one knows the mind of God. Well, if you don’t know the mind of God, how do you know that he’s good?
You can’t have it both ways.
Phoodoo, why don’t you ask Eric and the other shrinking violets at UD to come over here where we can have an open discussion, free of censorship? They won’t want to, of course, because they don’t do well in open debate, but you should ask them anyway, because it will be funny to see the lame excuses they come up with.
Interesting: phoodoo wants to relocate the discussion to Uncommon Descent, and his explicitly stated reason for this change of venue is that UD is a place where the argument at hand can be “fairly pick[ed] apart”. If that is indeed why phoodoo wants to move the argument, one must ask: What, exactly, makes phoodoo think that TSZ is not a place where the argument at hand can be “fairly pick[ed] apart”?
For the sake of argument, I will concede, right off the bat, that the theory of evolution is a complete washout—in the particular context of this discussion, that evolution doesn’t have anything to say about junk DNA, and that anybody who disagrees is at least wrong, if not deluded.
So, arguendo, evolution is Teh Suxxors; all those facts of biology that evolution was supposed to explain, they’re all as-yet-unexplained mysteries, and they all want explanations.
How does ID explain all those as-yet-unexplained mysteries, phoodoo? The questions you ask of evolution are fair game for ID, I think, so: How much junk DNA does ID predict? Does ID make bad designs or good ones? Which one is proof for ID: A good design, a bad design, or both?
KN,
Here’s how he actually puts it:
KN:
Dawkins aimed his book where he thought it would do the most good — at the conception of God held by the vast majority of believers. To complain that he didn’t address the views of a tiny sliver of the believing population is to miss the point of the book entirely. Had he focused on modern theologians’ views, his book wouldn’t have had a tenth of the impact it did.
However, if you think you know of a theology that makes sense and can withstand critical scrutiny, please do an OP on it. I’d be very interested in hearing about it, and I’ll bet others would too.
Joe Felsenstein,
Lizzie and Alan have already shown that they are incapable of being impartial moderators on this forum. Alan in particular has moved posts of mine that had the EXACT wording of posts from other people , whose posts weren’t censored (and continued to refuse to acknowledge the duplicitousness of his actions).
I think the people here are simply too tied to their religious beliefs to objectively view reality.
At long as posts are civil, people are free to discuss at UD. I suspect you are well aware of this, and why you choose to stay in places that provide cover for statements such as the one you just made-refusing to admit that the contradictions you claim are contradictions for evolutionists.
All your comments are still visible and you are free to post here (as is anyone with one notable exception). The rules are clear and not onerous though only applied with limited skill. 🙂 Most participants here are banned from posting at UD.
But why not cross-post or link?
Ha, phoodoo is back and is already crying persecution! The cycle is short this time.
You have continually refused to acknowledge the hypocrisy of moving my posts and not moving others who said the exact same thing. Even stating that all comments are still visible is highly misleading, when some comments are moved to places that they no longer are seen in the subject they were written, but put into exile.
It is your prolonged refusal to admit the double standard of your own moderating, that makes posting a discussion here impossible.
Well then, I humbly beg your Christian forgiveness. Can we move on now?
That is demonstrably untrue. Lizzie herself has been banned at UD and I defy you to find one uncivil comment she made there. Numerous others have also been banned for nothing more than making intelligent design creationism proponents look bad. Visit the forums at the Panda’s Thumb for more examples.
Indeed, I was banned at UD because I had the audacity to inquire why so many people had been banned. Phoodoo is either making disingenuous claims or is just plain old delusional.
Oh, my motives for posting here are so evil …
Reading that last statement, it is perilously close to phoodoo admitting that the contradictions I “claim” are in fact contradictions. Does phoodoo acknowledge that both rejecting Good/Bad Design arguments, and in other cases using them, is a contradiciton?
I reject the assertion that evolution is an infinitely flexible hypothesis. But it is hard to see how both accepting and rejecting Good/Bad Design can be anything but a self-contradiction.
The whole premise of ID is to attempt to construct “models” of what a designer would or could have done to produce extant biodiversity. Particularly gruesome examples is when Sal Cordova speculated that the designer operates according to a “minimal effort principle” and lets most of his designs evolve. Or that the designer makes his designs look like an evolutionary process produced them. Another noteworthy example was when he suggested the designer first created a sort of “common ancestor”-like template for primates, then independently derived orangutans from it, then derived another common ancestor from the first one, then from that 2nd ancestor derived gorillas, then derived a 3rd common ancestor from the 2nd one, then finally derived chimpanzees, bonobos and humans from the 3rd. That’s why it looks like we share common descent and evolution happened.
No shit, he really said that.
Also, what’s all this crap about god? Wasn’t ID all about science? LOL.
Maybe you could stop whining about moderation and dispassionately discuss the subject of the thread?
I guess now Eric ought to rebut the rebuttal with a post titled “KeithS and the tired old “God wouldn’t do it that way”.
Which, by the way was the you know actual point of his post. You (pl) seem compelled to reply to any God argument. If God is such a non-starter, what’s the point of replying in any way, shape or form.
I guess everyone is a closet theist at some point. Like a nagging cough you can’t shake.
From a design standpoint, jDNA is easily explained. jDNA is the residue of countless repairs. The confusion probably arises because jDNA is deposited in areas where functional DNA is. Figuring out which is which can be tedious, but there it is. Maybe we can as fDNA to stand up and be counted.
Contrast that with the blind, purposeless version of evolution, which just so happens to be oblivious to the ‘idea’ of repair. So uDNA (DNA of unknown function) must be classified as jDNA. But as science progresses the smaller the uDNA pile gets, the smaller the jDNA pile. Not good for a secular version of evolution.
That’s why evolution is better explained by design. Evolution can’t work without ideas already in place; the idea of reproduction, the idea of repair, the idea of interlocking systems, the idea of living.
Steve,
You apparently missed the entire point of my OP. We don’t argue that “God wouldn’t do it that way”. For example, the world with all its imperfections is quite compatible with an impotent God, or a God who doesn’t care very much about suffering. The problem is with the omnipotent, perfectly loving God that most theists believe in.
As I explained in the OP:
Steve:
Because the world would be better off if people would think rationally instead of subscribing to outdated, nonsensical superstitions.
You don’t have to believe in God to think belief in God is a bad idea.
Steve,
How do you know? I thought you agreed with Eric that no one knows the mind of God. Where did you get your inside information about God’s policies on junk DNA?
Joe Felsenstein,
But Joe, ITS IS YOU who maintains that there exists both good designs and bad designs in the world, NOT ME. So how is that a contradiction for me? Why would I have to defend your contention. So again, if YOU believe there are both good designs and bad designs in nature, which does evolution create?
Secondly, I have given you a very specific reason why this is a poor environment for discussion, YOU have given no reason why UD is not a good environment for you to throw out your illogical arguments-other than you know they will be dissected, where here they won’t be.
phoodoo, to Joe:
Phoodoo,
I know of only one person who was banned here at TSZ, and that was for linking to porn.
Let me know when you’ve finished counting the number of bannings at UD, even in this incomplete list.
How many people have been banned at UD? How many people have been banned here?
How many comments have been removed from UD? How many comments have been removed here?
How many comments have been modified by people other than the author at UD? How many comments have been modified here?
The administrators of UD have absolutely no respect for nor interest in honest, open discussion. If you don’t want to debate here, that says far more about you than it does about this forum.
Oops, you just dissected my arguments, which shows that they will and can be dissected here.
It is me who maintains that there is good and bad design? And not ID proponents or creationists?
I was pointing out that ID proponents and creationists argue that there is no way we can discern the intentions of the Designer, so that discussion in terms of good and bad design is not relevant. But then when junk DNA is mentioned, they are firm in insisting that junk DNA does not exist. Why? Because they don’t think the Designer would engage in bad design like that.
So it is they who are contradicting themselves — arguing that we should not discuss adaptations in terms of good and bad design … but then invoking good and bad design themselves when junk DNA comes up.
Why don’t you see this as a contradiction on their part?
To discuss the contradiction we don’t have to argue that there is Good or Bad Design, just note that creationists and ID proponents both reject its relevance, and argue for its relevance.
To the extent that we can talk of evolution as creating designs (and if we do, that is anthropomorphizing evolution), evolution creates “designs” that are pretty good but not perfect, not necessarily optimal, and very dependent on their evolution from previous phenotypes. Thus there might well be a way to design a human that could fly at 500 miles per hour, then dive to bore rapidly through solid rock, all the while composing magnificent sonatas. But this being would be genetically different enough from us that it is not likely to evolve.
You mean Rumraket, and Olegt and Hotshoe and Thorton,etc …have never been banned at skepticalzone?
Thank you so much for eloquently making my point about the moderation here.
Joe, see you at UD when you have polished your arguments well enough to withstand some scrutiny!
Haha. Phoodoo stumbles into yet another contradiction.
First he complains that there’s too much censorship here, and now he’s complaining that there isn’t enough.
I’ll bet you fit right in at UD, phoodoo.
P.S. Tell us about junk DNA, phoodoo. Expected or not under ID? Or is Eric right that no one knows the mind of the Designer?
Who is wrong, the IDers or the IDers? 🙂
In which case he would be taking the gold medal for irony.
It’s not that the subject is god, it’s that ID proponents allow themselves infinite flexibility with respect to their ad-hoc speculations about what their designer wanted and was trying to achieve. ID literally cannot be tested or falsified when ID proponents are desperate to interpret any concievable observation as “what the designer wanted”. It’s always ad-hoc and after the fact. First they let evolutionary biologists do the hard lab work and observe, then they sit back and come up with excuses for what the designer wanted to achieve. There’s never any actual meanignful predictions.
Ahh, the good old “it’s not that you don’t believe-you just hate god”-delusion.
Why should I be banned? I’m discussing the subject matter, I’m leaving the whine about moderation digressions to you. In fact the only reason I’m even responding to your points about moderation, is because it’s patently obvious you’re erecting the complaint as an excuse to avoid discussing the actual subject of the thread.
So you WANT people to be banned? Do you even know what you’re arguing here at this junction?
Why don’t you simply scrutinize them here, now? You’re still not banned, plenty of people are here who want to have that discussion with you. I’m among them. Get your ID friends over here too. If you can refrain from posting porn, I don’t see the problem.
Just out of curiosity, I tried adding a trackback to Anderson’s post but I suspect UD has trackbacks disabled.
And you, and KF, and Barry, and Sal, and William, and Steve, and…
By the way, phoodoo, you may be interested in an article by Larry Moran critiquing Jonathan Wells’ book “The Myth of Junk DNA”. You might check the link out before demanding Professor Felstenstein reinvent the wheel.
That would be the “S” in CSI, FSCI, DFSCI and so forth.
How can it be otherwise?
The folks at UD are free to take any Larry Moran blog post dealing with junk DNA or with population genetics, and dissect it.
But wait. They already have. As I recall, scordova conceded that the math of population genetics is correct, and VJT pretty much conceded.
Now if you concede there are 22 million mutational differences between humans and chimps (divergences from a common ancestor) you have conceded there are 22 million spots on the genome where copy errors make no functional difference.
Even if the differences were lovingly designed, they still make no difference. They don’t break any function.
keiths,
Er, belief in God is outrageously successful. Like the old saying goes: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
With this in mind, belief in God is an imminently rational, let alone reasonable approach to living.
The alternatives to God aren’t pretty. So…… no curtain call for God just yet.
Steve,
Successful at what?
That was obviously a presumption on your part.
Hmm, I don’t think designers work with design ‘policies’. But I’m sure you meant design parameters…you know like putting fDNA is the same box as jDNA is OK because we’ve got this nice, little detection widget that tags them so hey let them mingle at their leisure.
I guess you get more mileage out of the caricature of God as a bungling administrator, rather than an awesome techie.
Freedom, baby.
Steve,
In my field they’re called ‘design rules’, but it’s the same thing.
I notice that you didn’t answer my question:
What’s your answer? Who do you think is right, you or Eric?
Actually, the mileage I get is out of watching you ID types contradict yourselves.
Barry bans anyone who won’t parrot his version of the LNC, yet you guys violate it all the time without even realizing it. What delicious irony.
keiths,
your painting with this massive fan brush but what’s new.