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The design argument when it comes to the adaptations that organisms have stems from “These features look like something God would want to design and seem improbable under naturalism” to “God must have designed this”

The design argument when it comes to the origin of life stems from “The probability that life originated by natural unguided processes is extremely low and life is valuable to God” to “God must have designed this.”

The design argument when it comes to fine tuning stems from “these constants seem to fit within an extremely narrow range that would support life. God would have an incentive to support life.” To “God must have designed this”

In each and every case, there seems to be a presupposition not seen in regular design inferences. In regular design inferences, we have basically always in advance known about a) the existence of a designer (in this case humans) and b) potential incentives.

It seems that these design arguments, even if well argued, can account for b) not a). That is that even if one were to postulate the existence of a Being who wanted to say start life, there is no way to know whether or not a Being who wanted to do X would exist in the first place. Arguing for the probability of this being high seems meaningless.

What is the probability of a God who wanted life to happen existing and how would it be different from the probability of a God who wanted me to wake up at 3 am tomorrow existing? The notion of defining a probability of a being existing seems undefined. As such, is this an actual circularity or am I mistaken here?

thinkingman
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    "These features look like something God would want to design" That has never been a part of the argument. I told you that the last time you asked this question. – David Gudeman Mar 10 '23 at 09:13
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    If we encountered complex structures on an exoplanet we would speculate that aliens built them even without knowing in advance that aliens exist. The design itself may provide sufficient evidence for a), especially if we have other reasons to suspect existence of potential designers. And one does not need to use a design argument for God in isolation. They can give cosmological, etc., arguments, and then abduct that the entity from there is the best explanation for the design as well, making it another supporting evidence. – Conifold Mar 10 '23 at 09:16
  • @DavidGudeman Either way, the gist is that it’s too improbable under naturalism – thinkingman Mar 10 '23 at 14:14
  • @Conifold We have evidence that life exists on earth. So if aliens existed, it wouldn’t be as surprising as God existing – thinkingman Mar 10 '23 at 14:15
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    You cannot calculate these probabilities. I am not sure why you want to use probabilities to settle those questions either. What is the reason you think probabilities are a useful tool here? – Frank Mar 10 '23 at 14:52
  • @Frank -- Both Fine Tuning, and the need for a designer for a found watch, explicitly rely upon probabilistic arguments. Empiricism has probability embedded in it, as no possible explanations are ever categorically refuted, only probabilistically. Thinkingman's misunderstanding and misuse of probability is the issue, not his focus on it. – Dcleve Mar 10 '23 at 19:31
  • @Dcleve But in empirical methods in science, we do calculate meaningful probabilities: we observe an event happening a certain number of times and calculate a probability from that. But how are you going to do that in the case of god? But maybe you are right - probability is certainly misused here. – Frank Mar 10 '23 at 20:26
  • @Dcleve Where is the misunderstanding? Can you explain what the probability of God is and how one could arrive at any number? If not, there is no misunderstanding here it seems – thinkingman Mar 10 '23 at 20:30
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    @thinkingman -- when you have multiple questions being voted down, all of which rely upon an absolutist/rationalist approach to empiricism. And multiple posters have attempted to provide long explanations of how to think better about these subjects (which is pragmatic not absolutist/rationalist thinking), it is long past the time that you should be considering that you are confused in your approach to probabilities. – Dcleve Mar 10 '23 at 20:59
  • @Dcleve Only a few of my questions have been voted down. Secondly, that is irrelevant. You haven’t provided any argument to suggest that the probability of something like a God is calculable, if even meaningful. It doesn’t matter if there were 2 or 2000 downvotes. – thinkingman Mar 10 '23 at 21:09
  • @thinkingman -- probabilities need not be "calculable", IE have discrete values, to be useful and meaningful in pragmatism. – Dcleve Mar 10 '23 at 21:12
  • @Dcleve if they are not calculable in a discrete way, are they calculable in terms of a range? If not, can one atleast say that the probability of god is higher or lower than the probability of Satan? If not, then this notion of probability seems vacuous, useless, and seems to amount to nothing more than a feeling – thinkingman Mar 10 '23 at 21:30
  • @thinkingman -- your conviction that non-explicit probabilities are vacuous and useless is the problem. Note that in that sentence -- all the terms after the "your" are themselves not perfectly explicit, yet the sentence is neither vacuous nor useless. We operate with pragmatic approximations, relative degrees of confidence, and almost nothing of which we can be remotely certain. etc. This is the nature of our world, and your wishing it were different does not make it the way you want. – Dcleve Mar 10 '23 at 21:45
  • @thinkingman -- God and Satan hypotheses are testable. The most general tests of God hypotheses refute them, and have names like The Problem of Evil, and The Problem of Unclear Communication. Note these tests use design hypotheses in the refutation test. Satan hypotheses are similarly mostly refuted. See this answer: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/97561/is-the-god-of-a-monotheism-necessarily-omnipotent/97588#97588 – Dcleve Mar 10 '23 at 21:55
  • @Dcleve I didn’t say that imprecise probabilities are useless. I am saying that you can’t even define a probability of God in an imprecise way! For example, one could argue that it is more likely that the sun rises tomorrow than it is for a person to die in my house. We don’t know these exact probabilities but we do have prior data. What is the prior data that helps us decide between a hidden God sending me a sign by helping me pass the exam today vs. God deciding to punish me because my girlfriend broke up with me? What probabilities, even if imprecise, would you give these possibilities? – thinkingman Mar 10 '23 at 22:12
  • @thinkingman It is the nature of hypotheses that they are infinitely malleable/klugable. All theory is intrinsically underdetermined by facts. https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-science/Underdetermination This makes calculation of "probabilities" an act of judgement, rather than a closed/explicit process. – Dcleve Mar 10 '23 at 22:28
  • How do you show that your act of judgment is rational or not then? – thinkingman Mar 10 '23 at 22:57
  • @thinkingman. “Rational” is the wrong standard. Empiricism can never meet “rational”. See my answer on your more recent question for the better standard. – Dcleve Mar 12 '23 at 04:27

5 Answers5

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  1. “The probability that life originated by natural unguided processes is extremely low and life is valuable to God” to “God must have designed this”.

The primary problem here is not circularity, but in the assumption that a god exists. Without evidence that a god exists, we can have no reason to expect that "life is valuable to God". Without evidence that a god exists, we have no insight into a god's motivations or capabilities, so "God must have designed this" is a non-sequitur.

  1. “The probability that life originated by natural unguided processes is extremely low and life is valuable to God”.

The universe in which we exist is a sample size of one. For all we know, life must have originated given the prevailing conditions. The claim that "life is valuable to God", is again to assume things about a god for which we have zero reliable evidence.

  1. “These constants seem to fit within an extremely narrow range that would support life. God would have an incentive to support life.” To “God must have designed this”.

This claim suffers from the same problems as 2. The fact that conditions exist which enabled the origin and sustenance of life says absolutely nothing about the existence of any supposed deity which is allegedly required to create such circumstances. We have evidence that life has arisen. We have no evidence that life was designed. And again, we have no evidence of an entity capable of such design, so why would we assume one exists?

The answers to this question likely lie in psychology, including evolutionary psychology. Many of us want a god to exist, because we have been brought up to believe that such an entity must exist. Without the existence of a god, for many of us, our upbringing has been largely guided by false belief, so we have a stake in finding ways to justify our belief. We are also prone to belief in god/s (as evidenced by the number of gods which 'exist' across time and cultures), likely because the existence of a god or gods has traditionally provided a way for us to answer many of the questions which confounded us, and because we are drawn to simple answers for complex problems. Gods provide very simple answers to many of our most profound questions. (There are of course many other reasons, but these are perhaps best answered by enquiries into anthropology, history, psychology, evolution and other fields).

Futilitarian
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    I agree, most questions from thinkingman seem to be questions in psychology. I also don't understand why thinkingman wants to use "probabilities" for questions where we can't even start to calculate probabilities in any meaningful way. – Frank Mar 10 '23 at 14:53
  • "Life is valuable to God" is not a premise of the design argument. Furthermore, your ad hominem argument, "people believe in God because they want to" can easily be reversed to "people don't believe in God because they don't want to". After all, the God that people want to believe in creates heavy duties that a lot of people don't want to be saddled with. Since the argument can be so trivially reversed, it's not a reasonable argument. Besides, the fact that I want to believe that I have a hundred dollar bill in my wallet is not an argument that I don't have a hundred dollar bill in my wallet. – David Gudeman Mar 10 '23 at 18:05
  • Most arguments for design, especially when it comes to the origin of life or fine tuning, are probabilistic. The very point that you are making, i.e. the point that probabilities seem to be undefined here, is the very point I am trying to make @Frank – thinkingman Mar 10 '23 at 20:33
  • Without the premise of life being valuable to God, there would be no reason to focus on life to posit a design argument @DavidGudeman. Why don't people infer the behavior of you waking up at 3 AM tomorrow, or the rock outside your house being in the particular shape that it is, or the tree trunk that is rotting in your yard as evidence for God's design? It is simply because those things are not seen as something God would want to create or send down as a sign to prove His existence – thinkingman Mar 10 '23 at 20:35
  • @Davidgudeman. Less _because_ we want to, more because we need to. Not an ad hominem at all. I'm pointing to cognitive ease as a phenomenon which for many of us explains belief. And I agree it heavily impacts non religious people too. This in no way detracts from it as an observation about religious people. But when a belief represents the most important belief we hold (EG: God) , we become even more invested in it. You'll also note I made no claim that a god doesn't exist. I agree with your hundred dollar bill example. My answer doesn't commit that fallacy either. – Futilitarian Mar 11 '23 at 03:48
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I don't think there is circularity. If an archaeologist uncovers something that looks like a tool or piece of art created by ancient people, he infers from the existence of the creation to the existence of the creator. The archaeologist also can only speculate as to the motivation of the creator, or in other words the motivation barely matters. Neither does where the people might have come from. The only thing the archaeologist can tell is that there were people there.

So, if from "we found a sharpened piece of rock that looks like a tool and would be improbable to exist by chance" we infer "some early human or animal created this tool", then too there is no circularity in using "it seems unlikely to impossible that life came about by chance" to infer "someone created life". In this argument, it is completely irrelevant what the motivation is, or who created the creator. The inferred result is "there is a creator" and nothing else.

The only reason to talk of motivation is because the people arguing for a design come from the background of believing that creator also revealed himself to his creation.

kutschkem
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  • This answer is incorrect about archeology. Nature produces all sorts of sharp stones. What leads to the inference of design, is the assumption of intention "this was made on purpose by humans", from which a methodology of production is inferred: "repeated strikes by a harder stone" generally, and then the predicted impact stress fractures are derived and checked for. If found, the stone is inferred to have been designed. Assumptions on intention and capability are key parts of this process. – Dcleve Mar 10 '23 at 18:43
  • I don't see how this analogy works given that we've observed human beings create tools. It is not as if an archaelogist is inferring the existence of a designer the kind of which we have never seen ebfore. – thinkingman Mar 10 '23 at 20:32
  • @thinkingman -- my description of the methods by which anthropology actually works was not an analogy. That anthropology (and SETI) searches for design by postulating intention is not an analogy. That science infers objects by postulation that we have not previously observed, is just simple reality. There is nothing unique about design hypotheses in that respect. – Dcleve Mar 10 '23 at 21:05
  • My response was to the comment above, not you @Dcleve – thinkingman Mar 10 '23 at 21:10
  • @thinkingman -- if you read past the first sentence, the rest of my comment did not reference my prior comment, and was entirely relevant to your point. – Dcleve Mar 10 '23 at 21:14
  • What is unique about the design argument in this respect is that it points to a kind of process and a kind of object that has not been observed before. The very idea of kinds is not objective, and this is where instincts and inductive evidence comes in. Postulating an unknown physical process to explain a mystery has greater backing than god. This is simply because god has never been a successful explanation for anything. You may argue that it is still possible for there to be a God who chooses not to reveal Himself. But it doesn’t mean it should be given the same weight as naturalism – thinkingman Mar 10 '23 at 21:27
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You do not understand design arguments, nor do you seem to understand circularity.

Short Answer

Design arguments are not circular. They do not assume their conclusion, but infer it.

Longer Answer

The argument for design of living things was that:

  • Living things are very complex
  • They are optimally, or near optimally adapted to doing their activities
  • Natural processes do not produce either of the above
  • The only things we know of that do the above, are designed objects
  • It is therefore reasonable to infer a designer for all life
  • Such a designer would have to be immensely powerful and knowledgeable, far beyond human capability
  • It is therefore reasonable to infer such a designer to be a God

This is Paley's Watch argument. It is not circular. It was a strong argument, until with Origin of the Species, Darwin showed that the third line is incorrect. Evolutionary processes can produce the first two features in life.

Subsequent evaluation of ID vs evolutionary predictions, shows that life has embedded design flaws, based on prior architecture choices in ancestor species that made sense for their evolutionary benefit, but then constrained subsequent architecture. Examples: mammalian eyes that have the nerves on the wrong side, human organs supported off the spine, not the rib cage, human loss of vitamin C self production. Insect eyes have volumetric inefficiency. All of these are non-optimizations that evolution would predict to persist, but ID would suggest an optimizing designer would not implement. ID is testable, and refuted vs the nature of evolved life.

Fine Tuning of the universe is a problem for naturalism. Assume what we know of the Standard Model, and one would predict our universe should have no life. Instead, we are in a wildly improbable range of the possible SM values, which is only explainable naturalistically if we postulate a Multiverse plus Anthropic Principle.

One can postulate other explanations, and the one that has most explanatory power is Godly design. If one postulates a God that wants life in the universe, and that this God can set the properties of the SM, then we end up with a partial explanation for our universe.

As with ID, one can test this hypothesis. Our universe is remarkably tuned, but also remarkably far OFF optimum to support life. 95% of matter cannot support life at all, and of the rest, only a tiny fraction has the chemical complexity to do so (that expelled from early supernovas). And for is first 4 or so billion years, the universe therefore could not support ANY life. This "near but not optimal" tuning, is MORE consistent with the multiverse/anthropic process than with directed design.

One can tweak the design hypothesis, and postulate a poor design by a baby God, or design by a dysfunctional committee, that ended up with life, but with other compromises as well, etc., but these are much more complex than simple monotheism, and less predictively powerful. Note, however, that a Multiverse plus anthropic principle is ALSO immensely complex, and predictively nearly useless, so we are looking at two POOR theories, rather than one obviously superior one, like with evolution.

For abiogenesis, the experiments to date have not yet found how this could have happened naturally. This is not definitive DISproof of natural abiogenesis, but is instead an accumulating pile of minor evidences that suggest one should be open to alternatives. The only alternatives I know of are panspermia, where abiogenesis is pushed back to "somewhere else, under different circumstances", which is hard to investigate, and special creation of the first protocell -- which is even harder to investigate. Biologists have, due to the difficulty with investigating the alternatives, been continuing with the mostly non-productive abiogenesis theory to date.

Panspermia research would likely pick up if the SETI program finds evidence of life. Special creation research may someday be initiated, if other evidences point toward Godly interventions. With lack of these evidence sets, abiogenesis will likely remain the primary research path for origin of life.

The SETI program is a very useful reference point to show how you are confused over design hypotheses. We don't need to know aliens exist, prior to searching for the evidences that they do. AND that search relies exclusively upon postulating intentional activity creating designed objects then looking for the signals of the designs we then postulated.

Dcleve
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    "Assume what we know of the Standard Model, and one would predict our universe should have no life." There is no standard model in physics that tells you what the possibilities of those fine tuned parameters are. That is an assumption on your part, the assumption being that this universe could have been any other way – thinkingman Mar 10 '23 at 20:37
  • @thinkingman -- that is incorrect. The SM holds that the values of most of the constants in the universe could have been wildly different, and the model was created just listing what they happen to be. The relative strengths of the strong, weak, EM, and gravity forces could all have been different. As with the masses of the particles, expansion rate of the universe, etc. – Dcleve Mar 10 '23 at 20:54
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    How do you know that they could have all been different? I am not a physicist but just the fact that this is even debated is an indication that it is not part of a consensus. From what I know, some are hoping for a theory of everything that may explain why the parameters are the way they are. – thinkingman Mar 10 '23 at 21:13
  • @thinkingman -- I have an undergraduate degree in physics -- which for this question means basically "I'm not a physicist either" given the complexity of the physics. However, I am close enough to being a physicist that I can follow popular science explanations of this question. The best single source I can offer is from a multiverse advocate. Here is my review: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3JVQDAK1408BR/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B000SEOB2Q – Dcleve Mar 10 '23 at 21:35
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First a bit of terminology: We can divide processes into two categories: accidental processes which happen mechanically, naturally with no purpose guiding them, and teleological processes which have a purpose guiding them. A teleological argument is an argument from the existence of apparent purpose in an object. It's basic framework is this:

A. There is an object x. The structure of x is functional; it is suitable to serve a purpose.

B. There is no accidental process which could have caused the observed functional structure of x.

C. There is a teleological process which could have caused the observed functional structure of x.

D. Therefore, the structure of x came about by a teleological process.

ID, or Intelligent Design is a collection of teleological arguments and supporting arguments about the origin of the universe and of life. The universe argument argues for a teleological process in creating the universe; the life argument argues for a teleological process in creating life. Neither argument is specifically an argument for the Judeo-Christian God, but they can be used as supporting arguments.

The question misconstrues the two primary ID arguments in the following ways:

  • The arguments are not probability arguments. Probability only comes afterward, to counter counter arguments.

  • Neither argument relies on a prior probability or assumption of God's existence.

  • God's motives or purposes are no part of either argument. That is, there are no premises of the arguments that say God wanted the universe to exist or that he finds life valuable.

  • The arguments do not crucially rely on a prior knowledge that things like the designer exist.

The teleological argument schema is used in many places. Here are a few examples:

  1. A security guard finds a door unlocked that was locked the last time he made his rounds. There is no accidental process that could unlock the door, so it must have been unlocked by a person.

  2. A paleontologist finds that a rock contains a structure like a leg bone. No accidental process would produce that structure within the rock, therefore the leg bone structure came about through a biological (teleological) process and was later incorporated into the rock by an accidental process.

  3. An archeologist finds a stone that is shaped like a hand axe. There is no natural process that would lead to that shape and also lead to the stone being where it was found (if the stone had been found in a river bed, the argument would be a lot less plausible). Therefore the stone was crafted by tool makers.

  4. A SETI researcher detects a signal which contains a sequence of the first seventeen prime numbers. There is no astronomical process which would produce this signal, so the signal must have been produced by an intelligent signaler living in another solar system.

None of these arguments relies on a prior knowledge of the existence of the agent who made the artifact. In fact, they may all be used as evidence for the existence of someone or something that was not previously known to have existed: an intruder in 1, a new species in 2, tool makers earlier than any previously known in 3, and extraterrestrial life in 4. It is the same with ID. The ID arguments may be used as arguments for the existence of an agent capable of creating the universe and of life. This argument is not circular in ID any more than the SETI argument is circular.

An opponent may attack a teleological argument in one of several ways. First, he may attack premise A by arguing that the supposed functionality is not functional at all. I don't think this attack is relevant to the ID arguments.

Second, an opponent can attack premise B by proposing an accidental process that could explain the existence of x. For the ID arguments the primary counterarguments of this sort are Darwinism, the accidental universe, and the multiverse. By "accidental universe", I mean the position that we don't know what sort of universes are possible, so it may be that the only possible universe is one that happens to support life. This is where probability comes into the universe argument. The fine tuning argument (the argument that a life-supporting universe is highly improbable) is properly viewed as a counter counter argument to the argument that a single accidental universe would support life.

In the biological argument, probability comes in to oppose Darwinism. For example, ID proponents have calculated that by current biological knowledge, even a single major structural change (say, from single body segment to multiple body segments) is astronomically unlikely, even given impossibly generous assumptions about the number of chances for such a mutation. If they are right then Darwinism is not a viable theory.

Note that in neither case is probability used to support the existence of God; it is only used to counter the position that there is an accidental explanation for x.

A third way to attack a teleological argument is by denying C--denying that there is a teleological process that could have led to the existence of x. In the case of the ID arguments, this argument takes a specialized form: that there is no teleological agent that could have made the universe or made life.

I said earlier that it is common for teleological arguments to conclude the existence of previously unknown entities, but opponents of the ID arguments do have a better case here. In other teleological arguments, the previously unknown agents are agents of a type that are previously known to exist. We know that there are people with keys or lockpicking tools, we know that there are animals with legs even if not exactly that kind of leg, and we know that there are toolmakers, even if we did not know there were any at that time and place. Even in the case of extraterrestrials, we know of natural living organisms, and can reasonably extrapolate that there might be some of them elsewhere in the universe.

By contrast, God is not of any type that is otherwise known to exist except in the general sense that he is a being with a mind. But to have created the universe, God would have to have some rather extraordinary properties. To create life he would have to have some rather less extraordinary properties. Speculating that (a) there is some other sort of life other than organic, (b) that evolution for this sort of life is far more probable than biological evolution, and that (c) this life evolved and created life on earth strikes me as not much more extraordinary than the SETI speculation.

Still, in defense of the ID arguments, keep in mind that what they are discussing are rather extraordinary objects (the universe and the biosphere) and it would be expected that the origins of these objects would be extraordinary whether they were the result of accidental processes or teleological processes. Though we have no independent proof of the existence of any being that could have created life on earth (whether natural or supernatural), neither do we have any idea what sort of chemical process might have led to the first life or led to the major changes in body structure that would have been needed for life to have evolved. And neither do we have any idea what sort of accidental processes might have led to the Big Bang or any other origin of the universe--especially given that we don't even know how processes could have existed before. In the environment of such lack of knowledge, postulating the existence of an unknown designer does not seem particularly more ambitious than postulating the existence of unknown chemical processes or unknowable physical processes.

David Gudeman
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  • Great answer honestly. I was initially going to challenge that 1. And 3. are examples of postulations that involve the existence of designers that we already know of but you did expand on that later suggesting so. With that being said, postulating the existence of unknown physical processes has better inductive evidence than postulating an unknown designer, especially one that is infinitely complex in each attribute. We don’t seem to live in some sort of a Harry Potter world where needlessly complex agents are required to explain things. Every mystery ever solved was solved through naturalism – thinkingman Mar 10 '23 at 21:20
  • I noticed that you didn’t respond here. Why is an unknown physical or natural process explaining the universe just as likely as an all powerful, all knowing creator? It seems that you’re committing the fallacy of ignoring priors which suggest that naturalism has explained every mystery on earth – thinkingman Jul 09 '23 at 12:01
  • @thinkingman, first, no fundamental mysteries have ever been solved by naturalism. People have learned to more effectively exploit the patterns in the universe by identifying and refining the patterns, but we don't know why the patterns exist. We don't even know what causality is or even whether it truly explains anything or is just our human way of thinking about patterns. Second, the points I brought up do not imply a supernatural explanation for life, and logically the explanation of the universe itself must be supernatural. – David Gudeman Jul 09 '23 at 15:58
  • You’re misconstruing naturalism. If the cause to a mystery is explainable through natural means, then it was solved through naturalism. Lastly, the explanation of the universe does not have to be supernatural. – thinkingman Jul 09 '23 at 16:17
  • @thinkingman, my point is that when you stop your investigation at the cause, you are being unphilosophically selective about what you consider the mystery to be, and that this selectivity about the question restricts the possible answers. Second, since the explanation of the universe is the explanation for nature, yes, the explanation has to be supernatural unless you are going to posit that the universe is in some sense self-explaining--and that position itself calls for a supernatural explanation. – David Gudeman Jul 09 '23 at 16:31
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You cannot assign a probability for the existence of a god. It is not a statistical phenomenon, we have no data for calculating any probabilities, no knowledge about the mechanism that determines whether there will be a god or not.

The only circularity about the design argument is the unanswered question:

Who designed the designer?

Pertti Ruismäki
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  • "Who designed the designer" is not an unanswered question. It has been answered in great detail by thousands of writers over hundreds of years. – David Gudeman Mar 10 '23 at 18:06
  • So, who is it then? – Pertti Ruismäki Mar 11 '23 at 06:14
  • No one. Whatever caused the universe, whether it had a beginning or goes back endlessly in time, must be atemporal, existing outside of time. Being atemporal, this cause of the universe did not come into being, and therefor was not designed. – David Gudeman Mar 11 '23 at 08:27
  • An atemporal designer has a design and therefore must have a designer. Remember that we are discussing the assumption that nothing can evolve randomly without a designer. – Pertti Ruismäki Mar 11 '23 at 12:17
  • You are failing to grasp the implications of atemporality. Atemporal beings do not evolve at all. Furthermore, the assumption that an atemporal designer must have a design is unjustified, and no one has made the assumption that nothing can evolve randomly without a designer. – David Gudeman Mar 11 '23 at 18:03
  • Atemporal beings don't evolve, they have to be designed. An atemporal being is a certain configuration of atemporal matter and energy that has to be designed somehow. If random design is out of the question, then deliberate design is the only option. The whole argument for design is the assumption that nothing is configured randomly, everything is configured by design. – Pertti Ruismäki Mar 12 '23 at 05:30
  • If something was designed, then there was a time before it existed, so it's not atemporal. There is no atemporal matter or energy. Matter is something that persists through time and energy is something that causes change. Neither is consistent with the notion of being atemporal. You clearly have simply not grasped the concept of being atemporal and what it's implications are. – David Gudeman Mar 12 '23 at 06:54
  • The whole idea of atemporal beings is neither science nor philosophy. It is pure speculative fiction. Only the author knows what it means. – Pertti Ruismäki Mar 12 '23 at 08:15
  • I think this topic is just too difficult for you at your current level of understanding. I encourage you to do some study on your own. – David Gudeman Mar 12 '23 at 13:15
  • There is no evidence that atemporal beings exist. How does this atemporal being make decisions? Decisions involve time. If this being is all powerful, then he can intervene in the world in any way he likes. How does he do that if the world exists within time? Either way, he has somewhat of a point. It’s completely speculative. – thinkingman Jul 09 '23 at 12:02