The Hiddenness of God
The famous mathematician and atheist, Bertrand Russell (co-founder of analytic philosophy), was asked about what he would say if he had to stand before God one day to give account for his unbelief. His answer:
“Sir, why did you take such pains to hide yourself?”
In a survey of the top reasons that skeptics tend to reject God, in the top three, is the challenge embodied in Russell’s complaint:
“God, if you are there, why are you so hard to find?”
In theological or philosophical terms, this dilemma is called The Hiddenness of God.
Perhaps the most quoted of all skeptics, Friedrich Nietzsche, also fired salvos against Judaism and Christianity with similar attacks. He wrote there should be “a Duty of God to be truthful towards mankind and clear in the manner of his communications.” In other words, WHY isn’t God more clear, more obvious, more open in His dealings with mankind?
http://god-and-logic.blogspot.com/2010/03/hiddenness-of-god.html
This is really, imho, the reason Intelligent Design of God-made artifacts is rejected while human-made intelligent design is easily accepted. God doesn’t make His existence obvious. I wrote of the problem here:
I cringed when I heard an IDist say something to the effect, “we use forensic science all the time to infer design, and this same science demonstrates an Intelligence made life”. The problem is forensic science identifies designs made by humans (or something human like). People generally believe some designer made Stonehenge because they see humans making comparable designs all the time. Many IDists don’t seem to appreciate invoking a never-seen designer poses a challenge for accepting design in biology.
Even if God created life, because we don’t experience His presence in the same way we experience a human designers’ presence, many find it hard to accept the idea a Creator exists. If God exists, as far as every day human affairs, He appears absent, non-interactive, invisible, silent, hidden, indifferent, concealed etc. In human terms, then, like the tooth fairy, the concept of God in the modern day among the educated, seems irrelevant at best, false and harmful at worst.
For someone to accept God as creator, he must come to terms with the problem of God’s lack of obvious interaction in every day life. Why the silence, and concealment? Were it not for the Design argument, I’d almost be right there with the GNUs saying how stupid theism is.
Bill Dembski wrote:
Masters of stealth intent on concealing their actions may successfully evade the explanatory filter. But masters of self-promotion intent on making sure their intellectual property gets properly attributed find in the explanatory filter a ready friend.
Mere Creation
If the Christian God is the Designer of Life, He has chosen to use a lot of stealth.
If you saw God making miraculous appearances like those claimed in the book of Exodus, would you find ID in biology more believable? The major problem of believing ID in biology vs ID in man-made artifacts is either the Designer doesn’t exist or that he uses a lot of stealth to conceal His workings. We are relegated to making educated guesses about events that we cannot repeat in the lab or field.
Oh great, another religion thread.
So? Stealthy like the wind.
God is not a physical/material being. God is Spirit. So if you want to see God, you don’t look with your physical eyes.
#MungForBrailleBible
Oh shit. I copied and pasted.
Oh well,
Damn, I did it again.
Gaps?
Almost as bad as yet another “DNA is a code therefore the Christian God is the Designer” thread.
The real major problem is there is zero positive evidence for any external Intelligent Designer of biological life and lots of positive evidence that such an Intelligent Designer isn’t necessary. What you listed are the conclusions which can be drawn from that evidence.
Braille is a code, not a language. I am all for codes, but Braille is not the Language of God. Sorry.
lmao
La Place to Napoleon Bonaparte, I presume. 🙂
Sal:
If the Designer doesn’t exist, the apparent stealth makes a lot of sense.
Sometimes absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
The history of science is the history of finding regularities and replacing the god hypothesis with regular phenomena.
The history of theism is the history of shrinking gaps.
I read some book and god was around plenty. Appeared in the sky, gave out goodies. Punished a whole load of folk. Destroyed the world even. But then did a wainbow, so all was ok.
30+ personal one on one appearances of god in the bible too.
then went all a bit quiet like. And stayed quiet.
so what god is it that they are complaining about being missing? On average, they are doing quite well! Anything >0 is doing well, let’s face it!
God is a necessary being. One does not need evidence for the existence of a necessary being.
If you want to go around claiming your special “necessary being” created everything you sure need evidence.
You have nonphysical eyes?
Tell me, how do you know whether you are “seeing god” or just a figment of your culturally primed imagination?
How do you know that?
It’s almost as bad as on UD 😛
The topics are the same, but I can still post here.
Mung said:
God is a necessary being.
Rumraket said:
How do you know that?
I say,
Because with out God it is impossible to know anything.
That is a hypothesis on my part of course. It is very hard to prove a negative. So far after many many tests the hypothesis stands.
peace
WLC define into existence special! 😉
fifth:
That’s mere assertion, but even if it were actually true, it wouldn’t show that God is a necessary being.
That would require logic, the foundations of which “The Skeptical Zone Skeptics” here also deny. I detect a trend.
Maybe ‘your’ foundations, not ‘the’ foundations.
‘Mung’ has ‘gone’ all ‘Gregory’ on ‘us’.
Why does God not simply show himself to us ?
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1422-why-does-god-not-simply-show-himself-to-us
Philosopher Michael Murray of Franklin & Marshall College makes the case that if God stays hidden to a degree, He gives people the free will to either respond to His tugging at their hearts or remain autonomous from Him. This is what happens in the narrative of the Garden of Eden. When Adam and Eve are tempted by the serpent, God’s immediate proximity to them is not evident. Perhaps character is what you do when you think nobody is looking.
What if, in the words of Blaise Pascal, God has only revealed Himself enough to give us the choice of whether or not to believe? Pascal says, “There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.”
if you prefer being an atheist, God values your free will more than His desires for you. If you are really after truth, then have an open mind and follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if you don’t like the conclusion.
Aha, it looks like life has evolved.
So you see, God’s plan for hiding design has worked. It’s so obvious now…
Glen Davidson
Mung,
The universe is a necessary place. One does not need evidence for the existence of a necessary place (especially since we can see it).
Only to those insisting to see it that way, that is if you mean something way beyond slight heritable variations to include all the features of life.
For starters, even UCAists (Universal Common Ancetry proponents) admit evolutionary theory does not solve the OOL problem. So no, OOL does not look like life evolved but rather sort of mysteriously popped up for no good reason in relation to the law of large numbers and ordinary expectation.
Eukaryotes do not look like they evolved from prokaryotes. Despite the similarities in coding regions, spliceosomal introns, differing Origin of Replication complexes, Shine Dalgarno vs. Kozak sequences, etc. I ask about the mechanical feasibility of such staggering re-tooling — evolutionists say they don’t know. They just believe despite the macro evolutionary barriers. How often do we expect such leaps of change to occur? Maybe once in a buzzillion trials if that. If that is the case, then as a matter of principle, it would be a very out-of-the-ordinary event.
How about the macro evolution from single celled creatures to multicellular animals?
A million fair coins would be approximately 50% heads. Someone would wrongly think the leap to 51% heads isn’t to hard to bridge by mindless process.
Evolutionist wrongly think that Darwinian selection avoids the difficulties posed by the law of large numbers, that ever more complex Rube Goldberg machines should be the inevitable outcome of Darwinian selection when in reality Darwinian selection demonstrably trashes complexity in favor of reproductive success.
The Designer’s stealth is not in His designs, it is in his unwillingness to give real time displays.
God uses stealth for the same reason a Stealth Bomber uses stealth, to ambush its enemies.
My answer to Russell and Nietche is that they wrongly presume Omni-benevolence toward humanity, when in fact it seems apparent there is cruel malice being crafted.
God intelligently designed horrible plagues and predatory and harmful creatures against humanity.
Darwin would sneak up stealthily on birds before shooting his gun. He was so excited at blowing them away, he would hardly control his hands to reload his gun.
My answer to Russell and Nietche, the Designer uses stealth for the same reason a stealth aircraft or hunter uses stealth, to conceal an inevitable ambush.
It looks to me that life is designed and that malevolent intent toward humanity is also in evidence.
Consider seeing a therapist?
Me: Ebola looks intelligently designed, so does malaria and pretty much every parasite.
Dr. Therapist: I suggest you take some pills to make you forget the harsh realties. Or how about some inspiring reading material like Darwin and Dawkins, like say, A Devil’s Chaplain. Bwahaha!
So now in light of this Darwinian therapy, don’t you feel so much more happy about life like the Happy Atheist PZ Myers?
Like Judge Judy says, if it don’t make sense it’s not true.
stcordova,
Yes they do. They have been diverging for c2 billion years, but retain sufficient commonality for us to even be able to identify the archaeal and bacterial groups from which the merger arose.
We would expect an average one 1-in-a-billion-year event per billion years without troubling the probability gods one iota. It would be half as likely that such an event would not occur in that period.
Of course we don’t know how many times it happened and the lineage fizzled out. But there are secondary, tertiary and even quaternary endosymbioses, Russian doll style. There is a market in plastids. There are potentially incipient endosymbioses, with externally-contacting symbionts trading ATP for nutrient.
This is not restricted to mitochondria, and has happened numerous times, though not with quite the resonance of Eukaryota, mainly due to their multicellular noticeability. We exhibit a certain amount of clade-chauvinism too – it’s all about us, of course. Go Team Opisthokont!
The “evidence” you offer is based on circular reasoning that similarity necessarily implies common descent. If there were no Designer, then of course you’d have to assume that, but just because it seems less miraculous to evolve a bacteria to a eukaryote than a eukaryote from scratch doesn’t mean a prokaryote evolved into a eukaryote.
No question there is a hierarchical pattern. Evolutionists attribute this to common descent, but to do this they have to totally dismiss the mechanical barriers, not to mention, the hierarchical pattern actually argues against transitionals ( a prokaryote gives rise to other prokaryotes, never a eukaryote). So the hierarchical pattern can be used to argue against common physical descent, even though superficially the similarities might suggest common descent at first. At best it leaves an unspecified common ancestor that doesn’t seem to really make any sort of physical sense. As even Nick Matzke and others pointed out, all you have a sister groups, no one sister can unambiguously be argued to be simultaneously the ancestor of all other sisters.
Re-doing the ORCs, insertion of spliceosomal introns (which requires the simultaneous splicing machines like spliceosomes!), changing of the Shine Dalgarno sequences to Kozak sequences, creation of histones, histone codes, differing epigenetic marking systems — this divergence can’t happen gradually as a matter of principle. The fact we expect a prokaryote to stay a prokaryote and not re-wire itself into a far more complex form like a eukaryote is showing in principle this would have to be an exceptional event.
Why, from the perspective of Natural Selection, would a eukaryote evolve when a prokaryote by most measures is more efficient at replication. Same problem of multicellularity. The fact we see multicellular creatures being eliminated faster from the planet than unicellular prokaryotes is evidence Natural Selection selects AGAINST multicellular eukaryotes, it doesn’t evolve them. If Darwin entitled his book, “Elimination of Species by Means of Natural Selection”, I’d be in full agreement.
Speaking of Archaea, the carbon linkage of lipids id Ether unlike the Ester linkage in Eukarya and Bacteria. The Phosphate backbone is Glycerl-1-phospate vs. Glycero-3-phosphate in Bacteria and Eukarya. Eukarya have organelles, nucleus and teleomeres.
I respect the fact you think this stuff can happen, but from my perspective, to evolve such things looks not too different from a miracle. One needs an exceptional event for some of this to happen, and at what point is an exceptional event indistinguishable from a miracle?
stcordova,
That’s not circular reasoning. Common descent is an obvious reason for sequence similarity. We recognise it in genetic typing within and between species; where does it stop being applicable? Would you try and evade a paternity suit by saying it’s based on circular reasoning?
There is no reason other than the ad hoc to suppose that we would share commonality with a specific archaeal group and a specific proteobacterial group by any mechanism that does not predict sequence commonality as a matter of course.
It’s not just that we share commonality with prokaryotes in the general case, but with two very specific groups of prokaryotes. It would take a special kind of pleading to simply waft away the common descent hypothesis by some vague ‘ain’t necessarily so’ argument. Ain’t necessarily so that the earth is round, but that’s what you go with on the evidence. Likewise with common descent. You give no reason to dismiss this known cause of sequence preservation, other than that you dislike the idea.
stcordova,
Like I said:
1) it is not rewiring, but the merger of 2 genomes
2) exceptional is not impossible. Just because something does not happen every day … you did follow the ‘1-in-a-billion-year’ argument, didn’t you? Endosymbiosis happens a lot.
stcordova,
I know. Why is that a problem?
stcordova,
You simply declare cladogenesis impossible, then? Maintenance of diversity is a dynamic process. There is more than just extinction.
Like I responded (one change to what I wrote, as indicated) to something at UD the other day–quote from UD first:
In the real world we look for evidence of mechanisms, not worrying about faeries mucking around when there’s evidence neither for faeries nor for anything else undetected mucking about.
With ID there’s always the attempt to demand that we allow that magic operates undetectably (except via probabilities or some such thing) and that we have to “prove” that the mechanism for which we have evidence in fact can do every last thing without, you know, allowing us to use the evidence that actually indicates that it did. It’s complete nonsense.
Glen Davidson
The necessity of rewiring is very evident when we genetically engineer transgenic bacteria with human DNA such as the case with experimental insulin for diabetic patients.
To get something like E. Coli to express human insulin we have to strip out the introns and replace human Origin of Replication Complexes with E. Coli ORCs and it doesn’t hurt to add codon biases. That’s just “rewiring” the DNA coding message.
Now what about the reverse direction of a would-be prokaryote becoming a eukaryote? The DNAs in that prokaryote would (for no good reason) pop out spliceosomal introns in random places and (for no good reason) have spliceosome proteins and splicing machinery already in place so the poor critter doesn’t die instantly or at best start expressing nonsense amino acid chains.
Here is a visual depiction of exons scattered in between introns, given a ratio of about 30 intron bases to 1 exon bases (from http://www.bioinfo.de/isb/2004040032/), it looks like this ( I = intron, e= exon) for a eukaryote:
whereas for the more compact prokaryote (e = corresponding bases prokaryote found in eukaryote)
Let’s not pretend the differences are minimal, neither in the DNA nor in the mechanisms that read different grammars — I neglected to add the different ORCs and the Shine Dalgarno vs Kozak sequences. What about the different families of Polymerases between Eukaryotes and Prokaryotes? Did those other polymerases just pop out? What about the histones and eukaryotic chromosome architecture? The fact that prokaryotes use one class of polymerases and eukaryotes another, is evidence that the transition of prokaryotic polymerases to eukaryotic polymerases must be through an exceptional event as a matter of principle.
That’s just a faction of the rewiring going on. Furthermore, that would-be evolving eukaryote would have to be nicely isolated for a long time while it developed all this machinery before diversifying into all the Eukaryotes we are familiar with today, but even then Plant Eukaryotes are different from Animal prokaryotes starting with the cell types and mechanisms of epigenetic markings.
At some point the evolutionary story looks indistinguishable from a series of multiple miracles along the way.
PS
For the reader’s benefit:
That’s what I meant by rewiring.
We get it Sal. You personally don’t understand how evolution works therefore it’s impossible and your Christian God did it.
I’m sure you see why that isn’t persuasive.
It’s why he studied physics instead of biology. He already understood everything there was to understand about biology!
I could do worse than to emulate Gregory in some things. Speaking truths that make other people uncomfortable, for example.
What truths are those?
And I bet you see no difference in when you say it and when judge judy says it.
Sal: Eukaryotes do not look like they evolved from prokaryotes.
Allan: Yes they do.
No they don’t. Prokaryotes look like they evolved from Eukaryotes.
Mung:
walto:
Do tell, Mung.
I said emulate, not copy-cat. 😉