agnostic — Sapientia

I'm agnostic.

Glad - satisfied sounds mild - you should be ecstatic - the benefits would be more. You should be screaming from the rooftop - I am lucky. We would all laugh at you - but - you would be happier.
— Thinker

I find that naive for a few reasons. There isn't an on-and-off switch, and there are other important things besides happiness. I'd rather be a little less happy than be a gullible, crazy fool that's the butt of everyone's jokes. — Sapientia

I think you take me a little too literally about "screaming from the rooftop". That was a joke. However, the engineering your attitude in life to maximize happiness and productivity is not a joke. Each individual is free to design their own attitude towards their life. All I am saying is that some attitudes are more beneficial than others. Attitude is everything.


Attitude

By Charles Swindall

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company…a church…a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We can not change our past…we can not change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We can not change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you…we are in charge of our Attitudes!

We are endowed with this powerful thinking tool that can contemplate almost anything, chaos being one of them. So, the issue of whether the concept of order is innate or acquired is moot because we can imagine the antithesis of order. — TheMadFool

This is a very fine thought.

I feel stupid.

As I was working on a response to your last post, there were some things I was puzzled about and obviously you've been puzzled by some of what I was writing recently. I started to worry that we were losing the thread of the argument. So I decided to go back through everything and I realized there was something about your position that I had fundamentally misunderstood.

A long time ago, you admitted that the argument from design is not deductive but inductive. I had been assuming that the issue, since then, was how to make that induction work, and I've gotten caught up in the details of that. I now realize that, as far as you were concerned, the inductive argument was actually complete at that moment, as soon as you agreed that it was an inductive argument. From your point of view, the conclusion of the argument, that order is always attributable to conscious agency, was established a long time ago. That the universe, being ordered, must be the work of a conscious agency, is just an application.

There are two peculiarities about this. One I should have understood, because it's pretty fundamental to the way the argument from design works. The other is interesting.

At first, a lot of us reached for examples from nature of things that are ordered, apparently without any conscious agency taking a hand--crystals, normal distributions, complexity, etc. None of this was relevant, as it turns out, because of the way the argument works.

It's an induction. You throw every ordered thing you can find into a box, then take them out one-by-one and check to see if they are the result of conscious agency. There's trillions upon trillions of human artifacts in the box--the usual watches, tidy rooms, and 747s--and then there's the universe. The whole universe. A single object that is ordered, like one of the billions of watches in the box. Although a typical scientist might see what humans have done as an unimaginably small dataset compared to all she could conceivably learn from looking at the vastly hugely mind-blowingly big universe, here the tables are turned: the entire universe is just one more ordered thing, just another wristwatch. Of course, that's how the argument from design works, and I feel stupid for having forgotten that.

But here's where it gets interesting. Say you have a hypothesis that all ravens are black. You put every raven you can find into a box, then take them out one-by-one and check to see if they're black. Suppose among all those ravens--black, black, black, black--there's one that somehow is indeterminate in color. From one direction it looks blackish, from another kinda grey, from another nearly brown. You could stop, and decide that the induction fails because here's a raven that is not definitely black. Who knows how many more of these there are? Doesn't matter anyway, one's enough to scuttle the project. Or you could decide, weird raven, let's set it aside for now and check the rest. You go through the whole box, find nothing but black, and conclude that the induction is still pretty strong. Now what about that indeterminate-color raven? Having finished your work, can you now say, my inductive argument shows it must be black? Er, no. It's still indeterminate in color, despite the strength of the induction. It's not even probably black.

Now suppose that the one indeterminate-color raven is, for some reason, kept, unexamined, in a separate box, and you go through the entire box of black ones first. Then you can conclude, without even opening the box containing the last one, that so long as there's a raven in there, the inductive argument shows that it's black.

So that's exactly what happened here. Every possible instance of order in nature was lumped together as one single data point, the universe, and then that data-point isn't even examined. It's held back until we've gone through all the watches and tidy rooms and 747s, the conclusion is established, and then we apply our inference to the universe--it's ordered, must have been ordered by someone.

Well, that's cheating. It's not supposed to matter what order you examine your data points in. If you reach an instance of order that isn't clearly the work of a person--maybe it's the first one you pulled out of the box, maybe it's the 587th--you're done. Even if you decide this is just an outlier and set it aside, once you're done you don't get to go back and say the induction showed that the universe must be the work of a person. It's still an outlier, induction or no induction.

The argument cheats. It compresses almost all of the data available into a speck, and then it even hides that speck to make sure we don't look at it and wonder why it's not obviously like everything else.

Side notes:
(1) "Science is just as bad." I had forgotten that this was your real point. Well, no. After the raven study, a scientist will report that very nearly every raven is black, but there's at least one outlier, and conclude that we'll just have to learn more about the process of raven pigmentation.
(2) "It still makes it likely that the universe, being ordered, is the work of a conscious agency." True enough, if you treat every doodled smiley face as a datapoint equal to the entirety of universe, oh yeah the odds are going to be on your side. If, instead, you actually look at nature instance by instance, you'll find overwhelming evidence of self-organization at every level can you think of, all of it happening without any sign of a conscious agent behind it all.
(3) "It's no less likely that the universe is the work of a conscious agency." Could be, but I'd spend a lot of time in point number 2 before reaching a conclusion.

I think you take me a little too literally about "screaming from the rooftop". That was a joke. However, the engineering your attitude in life to maximize happiness and productivity is not a joke. — Thinker

Sure, maximise in proportion to other considerations, not unconditionally.

If, instead, you actually look at nature instance by instance, you'll find overwhelming evidence of self-organization at every level can you think of, all of it happening without any sign of a conscious agent behind it all. — Srap Tasmaner

First, hank you for you interest in my argument.

However, as you directed me to point 2 of your post, note that the issue is whether the universe is designed or not. You can't say (I'm quoting you) "you'll find overwhelming evidence of self-organization at every level can you think of, all of it happening without any sign of a conscious agent behind it all.". Wouldn't that be begging the question?

The design argument infers the connection that order-->person through observation (perhaps falsely perceiving an absence of order in what hasn't been touched by a human). Nevertheless, man-made order has that unique quality that suffices to make the distinction man-made vs. natural. It's comparatively very recent, through science, that we've discovered that natural laws determine all the goings on in the physical realm. To add to this mounting evidence we only need to understand that man-made order is bound within the limits set by natural laws. From this we can infer a higher power, a greater being, whose laws are, to us, unbreakable.

the issue is whether the universe is designed or not. — TheMadFool

At this point, I'm not even sure there's a coherent question here. I'll try to get back to you on that. I am convinced that the approach taken by the argument from design is worse than useless, and I'm not giving it any more of time. (I learned some stuff arguing with you, so it's all good.)

I remember telling you a while back that you were looking at the universe through the wrong end of the telescope. At the time, I wasn't really sure why I said that. Now it makes sense.

I'll try to get back to you on that — Srap Tasmaner

Thanks...please share your insights

I’d like to critique your argument, specifically your use of the analogy of a tidy room to demonstrate the idea that God is responsible for the order present in the universe. I'm inclined to like this analogy, but I think it could be refined a bit.

To illustrate this analogy, you say, “Imagine yourself entering a room and finding it clean, well arranged and tidy. You're then asked to infer something from this information. What will be your thoughts? I wouldn't be wrong in saying the first thing to cross your mind would be someone has been in this room, cleaned and put it in order.” You’re correct: that was my first thought (since rooms don’t, unfortunately, clean themselves). However, I then was struck by this point: the very existence of a room and its contents implies intervention. In keeping with your analogy, somebody built the room, and the furniture, and then arranged the contents of the room. The existence of the room demonstrates some creator: without it, there would be no room and no contents to be tidied, and I wonder if that might be another avenue for this analogy, because it could be extended via metaphor to the complex universe. The fact that the room is well arranged is not the only thing that suggests intervention. I do, however, understand that your metaphor of the organized room is analogous to the perfectly arranged, life-conducive universe, which suggests the intervention of a creator (God). You state, “The argument from design for the existence of god is simply another instance of the above argument. There's order in the universe. Conscious agencies are known to create order. So, the all so evident order in our universe implies the existence of a conscious agency - God. Why is this version of the same argument difficult for atheists to swallow?” This would be stronger if you elaborated on the existence of order in the universe, maybe adding some specific examples of ways that the universe has been perfectly designed. Further, you say that the “evident order in our universe implies the existence of a conscious agency - God.” This makes me wonder about the roles of chaos or random events. Do you consider those to be present? If so, are they also the creation of God, or do they pose a problem to the idea of order implying God’s existence?

The existence of the room demonstrates some creator: without it, there would be no room and no contents to be tidied, and I wonder if that might be another avenue for this analogy, because it could be extended via metaphor to the complex universe. The fact that the room is well arranged is not the only thing that suggests intervention. — Julianne Carter

Well, I was working from the premise that what's key to the inference of god is order which, many have argued, is a sign of intelligence. The room here represents the universe and had it been chaotic, the room itself, the universe itself, wouldn't give us sufficient warrant to conclude the involvement of intelligence.

I do, however, understand that your metaphor of the organized room is analogous to the perfectly arranged, life-conducive universe, which suggests the intervention of a creator (God). You state, “The argument from design for the existence of god is simply another instance of the above argument. — Julianne Carter

My intention isn't exactly to prove the existence of god but to reveal what I feel is an inconsistency, an inconsistency that has to do with our common sense, the faculty that we employ in our daily lives and it goes like this: Most people, when they see a well-ordered room immediately infer the existence of a person who was the cause of the order and no one objects to such logic because it, as we all know from our personal experiences, turns out to be true. Contrast this reasoning - this common sense logical inference that serves us well and almost 100% of the time to boot - to the objections raised by opponents of the argument from order (in the universe) for god. Those who disagree with this particular variety of theistic argument are, in essence, rejecting a form of reasoning that's being validated, right now, at this very moment, in one way or another in some part of the globe. What gives?