Argument for God's existence from design..
 

There are a lot of people who strongly believe in the validity of the argument from design. Do any Christians here believe in God for this reason?

In case you don't know what it is, it is basically that humans are complex so they must have been designed by something/someone.

The more eloquent version goes like this:

Imagine you are walking along a beach, or a grassland, or a forest (whatever, it doesn't really matter). After walking along for a while you find a pocket watch lying there half embedded in the ground. You pick it up, and upon further inspection, you realize that it is quite complex and intricate and you start to wonder how this complex thing got to where it was. You come up with two hypotheses:

A) Over a huge span of time, erosion from wind and rain and whatever else just so happened to shape things into the form of a pocket watch.
B) The pocket watch was made by a watch maker, and then was dropped here.

So the logic of the argument goes like this:

1) A pocket watch is complex.
2) Pocket watches are designed by an entity.
3) Humans are like pocket watches, in that they are also complex.
L) Humans must have also been designed by an entity.
C) The entity that designed humans must be God.

What do you all think of this argument?

John Brown made life.....he is an entinty...

hallelujah holla back

that is actually my argument for a higher entity existing

The only logical argument I have seen for God is the incorruptibles (preserved bodies of saints that are centuries old but barely decomposed, though quite a few have been poorly preserved or revealed to the elements for quite a while without greater decomposition). The argument is stupid because the analogy itself is completely retarded. It is not like a pocket watch having a maker --- it's like a kitten having a mother. The universe was created by whatever irrational means. From the dust and gas of nebulae came planets. From the planets came life.

Most people wouldn't accept this because of how improbable it is. Someone once said something along the lines of evolution has the same chance of existing as a twister blowing through a junkyard and constructing a Boeing 747. Then what is the chance of a perfecting being able to create things at will having always existed? A tornado coming down from Pluto, winning four gold medals in the Olympics (but fucked up the long jump and the pole vault), then blowing through a junk yard, creating Pamela Anderson, doing the macarena, and taking a piss on Terumoto's pet goldfish.

The beginning argument is bullshit. Just because it is an improbability of something happening due to "random chance" doesn't mean that's not the reason. The appeal of the intelligent design argument is a warping of the scientific usage of "vernacular" terms. e.g., a scientific theory doesn't mean "a hunch" or "a guess," but most people think that's what it means, therefore people who support design can use this to call things like evolution into question.

With your five-step argument, you begged the question between 3 and L. That is to say, you took an assumption as fact without validating it at all. It's an argumentative fallacy and your argument is invalid because of it.

Crazy Hades's tornado analogy is stupid, though. I'd like to know more about these "incorruptibles," because I've never heard of this. The Shroud of Turin is also curious, but I'm betting that's because the Church won't allow anybody to analyze it.

Don't get me wrong, this is not my argument. The argument itself is a complete and utter cockfest of incorrectness. There are many ways you can rip it to shreds, but the easiest one is that the argument was written a long time ago, before science knew about natural selection. The chance of human beings appearing out of nowhere is next to nothing, but the chance significantly increases when you take natural selection into account.

Not to mention humans are NOT like watches. Well they are, but analogical arguments are usually crap because anything is like anything. A mushroom is like a chair, a mushroom is in fact incredibly similar to a chair. There are trillions upon trillions of things that are less like a chair than a mushroom and vice versa. They both are on the planet earth. They are both made of atoms. They are both solid. etc etc. So a pocket watch is like a human, yeah, but that has nothing to do with anything at all.

That's the point, as it shows the stupidity of introducing chance into the argument and the idiocy of the original analogy.

illogical conclusion. that conclusion is a giving up of the logical senses and saying "must be a being i can't fathom, therefore obviously some sort of mysterious god!" vs simply a higher life form.

also, the human body isn't a watch, its biological, it could purely be a result of evolution. hence the critical difference in your argument.

i believe we were created by a higher life, but just looking at your 'argument' objectively this is my observation.

The incorruptibles are pretty crazy. We don't have any current scientific explanation, really, besides sapofication (which doesn't really hold up). You usually get that kind of thing from bog preservances and things of the sort, not the type of caskets the saints and whatnot were buried in. I believe if there is indeed a God, he's making images out of these people --- ideas incarnate. Some people may not find it enough to believe in God and say it's scientific (and it may be true the Church found a way to specially embalm their treasured members), and others find this as another way to reassert their faith in God. Whatever works for 'em.

Word, I forget who it was who originated that argument, but he jumped the gun a bit. If you think this one is bad, you should see aquinas' arguments. He goes from basically nothing to "God exists." One of his arguments is this:

1) Events happen.
2) Events are caused by other events.
3) There can be no infinite chain of events.
L) There must be a first uncaused cause that began the chain of events.
C) God exists.

It's like whoa, slow down buddy. Not only are his premises crap, he skipped straight to god exists from some shitty thing.

things can be naturally complex without being "created" a pocketwatch isnt born its created and humans arent created their born...imagine how complex god must be if he exists how did he get here??? guess that means someone had to create him too if he's so complex...

it started off with a small one celled creature (i forget the name) but its the only living thing on earth that can be created by something that isnt living..which is when 2 gases are mixed together (i forget which gas) it creates this one celled organism..which is a pretty simplistic lifeform and as time went on certain things evolved from it till we are where we are today...we dont just get here, we start from the bottom and work our way up..lifeforms have just gotten more complex over the ages if we was created we'd be here in a snap of a finger.

wtf.. Two gasses mix together and create a single celled organism? To create life you need methane, ammonia, hydrogen, water and lightning or electricity. Even then, you're just creating amino acids and not an actual life form.

I think if it were that easy to create living organisms then biotechnology would have progressed a lot further than it has.

Why are non believers ALWAYS on a campaign to disprove religion

Does it really kill you to see somebody have something to believe in?

Just keep it moving

Religion started it by trying to prove God's existence. And I do believe in God, I just don't think of him as a sentient being. What's so wrong about ripping apart a shitty argument that attempts to prove God's existence? It doesn't affect what you believe in, does it? If it does you aren't a christian.

Excuse us for actually arguing and trying to pick the right answer. I suppose you would rather have us close our eyes and pick with inny-minny-minnie-mo?

im not talking about the occasional thing where somebody comes around and says "this argument sucks"

i mean in general

non believers are ALWAYS trying to pick apart EVERY religion, its like people have nothing else to live for, besides try and make people seem like idiots




You can follow science, which will be different in a few months, maybe years, or historical documents..

Although the bible is really corrupt from the romans, its still historical. In 50 years, those same things happened.

and apart from that, im not even saying youre wrong for trying to find the truth, but why are you gonna sit around trying to prove one group of people wrong all the time? How does it affect you if you dont believe in any sort of higher being? and after this all youre gonna be is worm food.

Your argument is based off the assumption I sit around and try to prove one group of people wrong, and that's it.

Non-believers in what? I believe in almost every (legitimate) religion, including christianity, that doesn't mean I can't pick apart peoples idiotic ideas of what their religion is. If anything, destroying somebody's beliefs is a way to help them get closer to the truth, people don't usually do it just for the sake of being a jerk. And there are a lot of different understandings and doctrines within the same "religion" for example the different sects of Buddhism or different Christian groups. Obviously religions change and develop over time, people add their understandings and discoveries to the religions to try and help people, or in a lot of cases to selfishly try and help themselves.

So it is a great thing to do to point a finger at something that sounds fishy, pick it apart and completely ruin it. It's like a process of elimination, the more people rule things out, the closer everybody will get to finding the right beliefs for them. The choices will be narrower, it will be easier to see what appeals to you.

In most cases if someone is protective of their religion and doesn't want someone trying to rule their beliefs out, they get upset instead of rationally defending their beliefs. Often it becomes a matter of "well what do you know" or "arguing doesn't prove anything" or "you're going to hell anyway it doesn't matter." Even unexplainable things can at least be referred to. If a Christian says to me "I believe in God because of some experiences I have had that I think are miraculous," I will say well what are these, and if there is no good explanation for them then that's great. All that's left for them to do is develop their perceptions and beliefs and fill in the gaps.

Once all the gaps are filled in, it becomes clear that what you have constructed is the outline of an unfillable gap, and then it clicks.

But to praise and defend a doctrine just because you believe in it isn't a good thing to do. One thing you have to be careful of is religions, they are fucked up and full of misinformation and corruption.

You have it backwards, Smash'Alot. People who don't believe in God are traditionally not responsible for persecuting religious people, icons like Dawkins aside. Religious people are usually the ones attacking people who aren't religious on the grounds that we are attacking religious people, which we are not.

How it generally goes is X asks me what I think, I tell X, and then I am oppressing X with my thoughts because I don't believe in whatever. This is not my personal experience, this is the experience of the atheistic movement as a whole, if you can call it that. Someone will express an opinion, and then suddenly all non-believers are suppressing belief in God and if you don't send your money now, Satan will surely triumph.

Why is this so? Because atheists don't actually care about converting people (except for, as I said earlier, Dawkins and his sycophants, who are reactionaries), whereas Christians and Muslims do. Major religions have an interest in painting the other side as the enemy because they want converts for whatever reason. Atheists have no agenda that would make them want to get people on their side that badly. I leave Judaism out here because the Jews aren't really interested in converting people unless they have some Jewish heritage already, and even so, there isn't a massive "get the Jews back!" campaign being waged.

Your "you can follow science, which will be different in a few months" argument is also ridiculous. Do you think that religion doesn't evolve? It does; the way you interpret documents evolves. They're religion's evidence. It just so happens that science's evidence is the natural world. The way you interpret things will always be based upon history, whether you agree or disagree with what was written in the past. Non-religious science is just as founded upon history as religious thought is.

In summary, you're an idiot.

P.S.: No, I'm not calling all Christians idiots. I'm calling you an idiot. You who post on RapVerse as Sir Smash'Alot. You are an idiot.

what still happened? if its corrupt, how do you know any of it happened? there's no historical documents to prove any of it. just wide spread word of mouth. add to that the fact that you don't know where the truth ends and the lies begins.

now some people choose to believe that, and some choose to question it

lol yeah man, his logic is basically "i don't understand it, therefore god exists"

im just telling u what i learned in my science class back in 9th grade

You must have had a bad teacher lol.

rofl haha I'ma steal that line..

to fully understand something you gotta break it down first...

that pretty sums up T's arguement...