Identity of the Designer: was:Re: [asa] Responding to Atheists, Agnostics & Apatheist

On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 11:38 AM, Nucacids <nucacids@wowway.com> wrote:

>
> Anyway, my point is that there is nothing arbitrary about the constraint of
> remaining agnostic when it comes to the identity of the designer in ID.
> It's the intellectually honest thing to do. If someone has a method for
> reverse-engineering the identity of a designer from the artifact, I am all
> ears (been so for years).
>

Mike,

Although I agree with you that it is intellectually honest not to
plump for an identity of the Designer, nonetheless I have a problem
with the answer that the Designer could, for example, be a
sufficiently advanced alien life form.

It seems to me that THIS identity, and not the "God" identity is the
one that falls foul of Richard Dawkins's argument of "Why God almost
certainly doesn't exist". The argument goes something like this:

(1) We are incredibly complex and hence very improbable.
(2) So if we argue that we are designed, then the Designer must be
even more complex than us, and hence even less probable.
(3) Hence postulating a Designer puts us in an inescapable infinite
regress, and proves nothing.

It seems to me this is a solid argument against the idea that aliens
designed us. How did the aliens come about?

Dawkins's argument fails miserably against the idea that God is the
designer, because it only applies to properties of the material
universe (Dawkins further argues that the only process that generates
complexity from simplicity is evolution). But if God is the
transcendent Creator and not part of the universe, the argument
doesn't apply.

It is interesting to note that in a spectator article on the
Dawkins-Lennox debate, that Melanie Phillips wrote:

"Even more jaw-droppingly, Dawkins told me that, rather than believing in God,
he was more receptive to the theory that life on earth had indeed been created
by a governing intelligence – but one which had resided on another planet."

If Dawkins really said this, then I would suggest that he is hoist
with his own petard. The "Governing Intelligence", by his own
argument, is necessarily more complex and hence more improbable than
we are.

Iain

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Received on Fri Oct 31 08:11:15 2008