At 11/4/09 12:13 PM, MultiCanimefan wrote:
At 11/4/09 12:07 PM, ArmouredGRIFFON wrote:
This should be in the philosophy club!
This is NOT politics.
I'll be waiting :3.
Hello there! =3
... Well it does
At the moment I'm going to take my stance on the Creationism side of the arguement (not the God faction), but only because it has the inference to the best explanation. This arguement dates back for centurys, but is marked by the time in history known as the period of enlightenment.
There is an old, old arguement, between William Paley, and David Hume.
AHEM; some essay copypasta from my old Philosophy course work.
William Paley, was a British philosopher; in his years he was renowned for his analogy which aimed to confirm God's existence. Paley was the first to present the analogy of design, the analogy that all life was designed by a being of 'higher intelligence', strictly speaking of God. His work was some of the most influential in all of Britain in the early 19th century, when he published his book Natural Theology in 1802; although there was a counter argument, which was ill received due to the religious complexities of the era, people simply were unwilling to accept evidence speaking against the nature of God.
Paley was once "in crossing a heath", and states that he pitched his foot against a stone, wondering how it came to be there. It could have been there forever, but Paley explores the idea, what if he found a watch upon the ground and at this moment on Paley had an epiphany, a realisation which reformed his logical thinking, and lead him to a theological argument for the existence of god. Paley states that, "Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature". In an explanatory form Paley states that the watch has been so clearly designed, tailored to systematic machinery, and to it's users perfection. Each small entity co-exists with one another, and even the smallest parts are so imperative, that the functionality of the watch is dependent on each piece working in proper order.
This lead Paley to the concept of design; he presented the analogy that if the watch has been so perfectly designed, so are human beings. Surely if a watch has been designed, something so much more complex like the human being has been designed also? The sheer intracity of the human body is so precise, we have only recently, (circa 200 years after Paley's analogy) come to understand how life is formed through medical science, so logically Paley argues that in the beginning of time that there must have been an "artificer or artificers who formed it", a being of divine intervention that comprehended humanities construction and designed it's use; after all Paley assumes that the chances of such explicit life being formed by a series of random, or conditional events is by far to minute for us to comprehend.
All existence is fundamentally subject to clockwork, this systematic frame of mind leads to Paley's perception that all life, and nature co-exists with one another, and thus without all the critically functioning parts, the world would not operate in an harmonious regime - life would have fallen into chaos and ended long ago.
David Hume, '1711' - '1776', was a philosopher who examined Paley's work. During his lifetime he objected to Paley's analogy, and often used the idea of observation to criticize it. Objectively he stood against the idea of design in the theory of God's existence but, contrary to popular belief he was not necessary an atheist, although he was seen as an atheist because of his atheistic arguments, his true religious beliefs remains unknown. Hume plays the role of 'Philo' in David Hume's "Natural History of Religion", and uses the character to personify an argument against 'Paley', or as known in the novel 'Cleanthes'. Philo dictates; "that a stone will fall, that fire will burn, that the earth has solidity we have observed a thousand thousand times; and when any new instance of this is presented we draw the accustomed inference... But whenever you diminish, in the least, from the similarity of the cases, you diminish proportionally the evidence." In this statement 'David Hume' is counterbalancing Paley's analogy, and providing his own argument, that when the earth and it's processes were analysed, people had come to accept the inference that God has been subject to it's creation, therefore we never look past this, and criticism to God's existence, is never openly accepted.
As a matter of fact 'David Hume' is arguing the philosophy of predetermination, for example; if we were to drop the stone that Paley had come across, we can predetermine the falling stone, we can assume accurately, where it will land judging by it's designated trajectory which forms a specific movement pattern, the simple matter of fact that gravity pushes it down. However whenever a new instance of this trajectory is introduced to the stones pattern of movement, our predetermination becomes weaker, and more distant, it is harder to then fully justify where the stone will land. Likewise Paley's analogy becomes weaker, for every complication we have to consider. With every new instance, all analogy's are liable to error and uncertainty. The only way to fully eliminate the perplexity of any untested information is to conduct a new experiment, and with these new experiments, we will be able to unravel the uncertainty's so that they can be better understood, producing reliable data. Therefore, logically, all knowledge is subject to observation; we cannot compare the design of a watch, to a possible 'design of the universe', because the complications of the universe, are on such a high degree, that they are ultimately more baffling and misunderstood, than the simple and manufacturable design of a watch. For us to infer that the universe has been designed, we first must understand how it has been designed so that we may prove it.
Comprehensively, Hume's criticism is the most trustworthy in between the two arguments. Although Paley does raise an interesting point in creationism.
TLDR; And this is what I make of it.
There does not need to be an analogy, to support the principle of design. Whether it was from a being of a higher plain or not, all laws must be designed in one way or another, new laws can never be created without an intelligence. Otherwise if there were no designed laws, the creator of the natures law hence, 'God' would have never existed because there would be no laws which define his existence.
If Laws were not created by an intelligence there would be no predesignated logical function in terms of any micro organism, element, or matter; cells would be the spawn of random matter, with no initial objective; Ohms law would not exist, therefore electricity could flow freely, with no relationship between current, voltage, or control.
If we take this into relativity with the Big Bang, the laws of science define what happens when temperature rises, what happens when elements combine, what happens when electricity flows through a circuit, but there must have been a law which gives the particles such characteristics that they would be able to react in the very first instance. Lady's and Gentlemen, this is Griffon's Theory.
Essentially if the world was not designed it would be lawless, there would be no order, and every moving particle would be utterly controlled by chaos theory, but chaos theory is written on the reciprocal of objective, randomness, which provides its own branch of mathematics.
Only a being of higher intellectual property could ever designate the rules which construct the very basis of reality itself. Snapping fingers and suddenly their was life is extremly flawed and arrogent, but to also suggest that the world had come together because of probability means that there had to be an original energy which had been transferred throughout the universe.
So I ask you newgrounds. Where did that energy come from?
