= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Polymeron comments on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (153)
IMO, it is perfectly reasonable to object with: "Who designed the Designer?".
The logic being objected to is: it takes a big complex thing to create another big complex thing. Observing that Darwinian evolution makes big complex things from scratch is the counter-example. The intuition that a complex thing (humans) requires another complex thing to create it (god) is wrong - and it does tend to lead towards an escalator of ever-more-complex creators.
Simplicity creating complexity needs to happen somewhere, to avoid an infinite regress - and if such a principle has to be invoked somewhere, then before the very first god is conjoured seems like a good place.
Checking with the "common sense atheism" link quite a few people are saying similar things in the comments.
Indeed.
Pointing out that setting a rule leads to infinite regress is not the same as requiring that everything being used to explain must also be explained. In fact, this is a flaw with Intelligent Design, not its critics.
Now, the theists have a loophole to answer the question ("only physical complex things require a designer" special pleading), but it does not render the question "who designed the designer" - which should be rephrased "why doesn't necessitating a designer lead to infinite regress" - meaningless under the rules of science.
Not the greatest example in this, Luke. Especially jarring since you just recently quoted Maitzen on the "so what" infinite regress argument against Ultimate Purpose.
Polymeron,
Which part of my example do you disagree with? Do you disagree with my claim that Hitchens' objection concerned the fact that the theistic explanation is subject to the why-regress? Do you disagree with my claim that all scientific explanations are also subject to the why-regress?
The discussion of Maitzen and Craig did not involve a why-regress of causal explanations. I'm not sure why you think that discussion is relevant here.
lukeprog,
I disagree with the claim that Hitchens' objection invokes the why-regress as it applies to science. It invokes an infinite regression that is a consequence of the Intelligent Design claim (things above a certain threshold necessitate a designer); much like Maitzen invoking an infinite regress that might be entailed by applying the "so what" question to every purpose statement.
To make this clearer: The problem with Intelligent Design is precisely that it demands an explanation exist, and that the explanation be a designer. Hitchens' objection is in-line with us not requiring an explanation for the fundamentals.
Science is not subject to the same infinite regress, because science does not set a rule that everything must have an explanation, and certainly not an explanation of a certain kind. Science may define a certain class of phenomena as having a certain explanation, but it never sets the explanation as necessarily requiring the same explanation to explain it. Hitchens points this flaw as a logical consequence of the ID claim.