Sam Harris

An excerpt from a post on another forum I participate in:
[quote author="PM"]Regarding the claim that most creationists argue from incredulity, which theory is more believable to you? That some unknown origin erupted into chemicals which somehow turned into organic material which somehow turned into life? Or that everything appears by design? Can an explosion in a printing factory create a dictionary? The odds of that are greater than the existence of life by chance.

That just makes me happy!

Byron

I don’t think you can argue intelligent design from that example. I think the problem is that we tend to assume that the universe has to function like we do. We’re “intelligent” and we look for order; undoubtedly because of evolutionary advantages we have because we think this way. We notice that there are definite periods during the year (and who defined what a year is?) when things grow, that this happens regularly, so we learn to plant things when they’re likely to grow and consider stuff like this “intelligent design.” We have “years” because of the relationship of the earth to the sun, good for us for observing that, and think about the zillion ways we’ve interpreted this during our history.

As for how the universe really works, the honest answer is: We don’t know yet. This is the kind of question we can very probably eventually answer correctly because the answer depends on accumulating enough scientific knowledge. I suspect that “intelligent design” is a dubious possibility because it sounds to me like we’re just projecting our own all too human image on nature again.

[quote author=“SkepticX”]An excerpt from a post on another forum I participate in:
[quote author=“PM”]Regarding the claim that most creationists argue from incredulity, which theory is more believable to you? That some unknown origin erupted into chemicals which somehow turned into organic material which somehow turned into life? Or that everything appears by design? Can an explosion in a printing factory create a dictionary? The odds of that are greater than the existence of life by chance.

That just makes me happy!

Thanks for sharing. This is pretty amusing.

Here is what I say to people who try to make this argument. The probability of you winning the lottery is infinitessimal, but it makes no sense to deny it once it happens, just because it was prohibitively improbable. It only has to go your way one time.

Besides, as far as we know, there have already been trillions of unsuccessful big bangs (where we define “success” as the generation of life). If you play the lottery enough times, the probability of winning at least once approaches 100%.

- Bulldog

I just thought it was rather amusing that the guy used a very simple, textbook version of an argument from incredulity to defend his position against the charge that it uses arguments from incredulity.

Byron

I caught that.

I was just throwing in my two-cents on the subject.

- Bulldog