William Paley and the Watchmaker Argument for God's Existence.
Coming back to AFL for the third time feels similar to when I audited an Animal Sciences class after I already graduated and had my diploma in Agriculture. I had taken the same class as part of my curriculum for my diploma program. When I returned to college, after graduation, to take another course that I had missed earlier, I found time to sit in on the Animal Sciences class. Somehow I was able to just sit and take in the material without needing to have answers for an exam that would soon follow. I might have even learned more the second time around because I was more focused on educating myself than memorizing the material so I could regurgitate it on an exam.
It seems that I have a different approach this time taking Atheism for Lent. Maybe I still don't know the end of the book, but I've read the next chapter of the story. So coming back to a previous chapter seems like I don't have to feel like I am being convinced of something as much as I am reminiscing about when I was being convinced about before. Now I can just enjoy the story without the added test anxiety.
The whole Watchmaker Argument pales now because of one book I got my hands on and started reading. Dr Abby Hafer's "The Not-so-Intelligent Designer". The idea of having something start the cosmos isn't in question as much as the idea of an "Intelligent Designer". Either can share the label of "God", but how would you identify that "God" based on the criteria provided. Limiting "God" to intelligence seems exactly that... limiting. Just because humans figured out how to make a watch, there is an assumption that whatever is responsible for making humans needs to have the same capacity of intelligence. I doubt that. There are humans all over this globe making children that far surpass them in intelligence. Procreation takes one small moment in time... No intelligence required, just active reproductive organs.
I am still thinking that religion is mostly accountable for the need to even have an argument. Somehow, being freed up to just exist in the universe as is also negates the need to participate in arguing "God's" existence. But if you have a religion you are either trying to preserve or prevent, then you need to preserve or prevent it at all costs.
I think I will end today's post with the Charles Darwin quote that Pete included in his reflection.
"The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws." Charles Darwin
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