HOME | DD

Description
"The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."

So says Richard Dawkins, famed neo-Darwinist and New Atheist - that is to say, radical Antitheist. Yet he commits two fatal errors in this line of reasoning. One is what's known as Affirming the Consequent. The other is what might be called Selection Bias; namely, he concentrates only on the qualities of the universe, such as pain and suffering, that afform his conclusion that there is no God.

What this fails to account for is that the universe displays 1) remarkable order and care even in the midst of all that sorrow and death, and 2) a tendency of order to decay (when left to its own devices) into disorder. The reality is that this latter tendency - known broadly as entropy - should have dissolved any universe with "nothing but pitiless indifference" into total and uninhabitable chaos eons ago. Alternatively, if it were natural for order to spontaneously arise from disorder, as atheism demands it must have, we should expect to see order appearing and building on itself quite regularly. For example, swat a mosquito. What do you get? A mess of organic particles, cells still temporarily in working order, and maybe even a few intact organs clinging to life. A more desirable primordial soup could not be imagined. Yet you will never find that intact organic matter building upwards into something more alive and complex, at least not of its own volition. By the same token, those physically intact sardines you buy in a can will never spawn. Your stewed tomatoes, whether whole or pureed, will never grow into plants. Yet every year, scientists with tons of letters after their names wrack their brains trying to un-spontaneously form life out of even less intact chemical components. In the process they have to endlessly refine, select, and micro-manage these ingredients in ways an unguided, unintelligent environment, by definition, could never come close to doing. Even with all this, what have they managed? A handful of fragile amino acids incapable of self-replication. No functional genetic or even pre-genetic information. No intact organelles, let alone living cells. Not even any stable proteins to speak of. Yet logically, if life arose spontaneously, this effort shouldn't even be required. One should be able to just let nature take its course and create fully formed life from the basest of non-life.

All of this forces any critical thinker to ask, "If life emerged without intelligence, why does it take so much intelligence to fail to make it happen again?"

Created with Meme Generator

Description
"The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."

So says Richard Dawkins, famed neo-Darwinist and New Atheist - that is to say, radical Antitheist. Yet he commits two fatal errors in this line of reasoning. One is what's known as Affirming the Consequent. The other is what might be called Selection Bias; namely, he concentrates only on the qualities of the universe, such as pain and suffering, that afform his conclusion that there is no God.

What this fails to account for is that the universe displays 1) remarkable order and care even in the midst of all that sorrow and death, and 2) a tendency of order to decay (when left to its own devices) into disorder. The reality is that this latter tendency - known broadly as entropy - should have dissolved any universe with "nothing but pitiless indifference" into total and uninhabitable chaos eons ago. Alternatively, if it were natural for order to spontaneously arise from disorder, as atheism demands it must have, we should expect to see order appearing and building on itself quite regularly. For example, swat a mosquito. What do you get? A mess of organic particles, cells still temporarily in working order, and maybe even a few intact organs clinging to life. A more desirable primordial soup could not be imagined. Yet you will never find that intact organic matter building upwards into something more alive and complex, at least not of its own volition. By the same token, those physically intact sardines you buy in a can will never spawn. Your stewed tomatoes, whether whole or pureed, will never grow into plants. Yet every year, scientists with tons of letters after their names wrack their brains trying to un-spontaneously form life out of even less intact chemical components. In the process they have to endlessly refine, select, and micro-manage these ingredients in ways an unguided, unintelligent environment, by definition, could never come close to doing. Even with all this, what have they managed? A handful of fragile amino acids incapable of self-replication. No functional genetic or even pre-genetic information. No intact organelles, let alone living cells. Not even any stable proteins to speak of. Yet logically, if life arose spontaneously, this effort shouldn't even be required. One should be able to just let nature take its course and create fully formed life from the basest of non-life.

All of this forces any critical thinker to ask, "If life emerged without intelligence, why does it take so much intelligence to fail to make it happen again?"

Created with Meme Generator