A little thought..

I don’t often make OPs, but here goes…

Principle: The order that obviously exists in the universe couldn’t exist without a creator, a designer of some sort. Order cannot arise out of chaos.

Counter-Examples:

  1. Take language. Language exhibits what we would call order. We have to use certain words in certain ways. We can’t switch words between sentences and preserve meaning. Think about the origins of language: can anybody defend the claim that languages have, as they have developed, been guided towards their present state by a designer? On the contrary, have languages not arisen out of chaos? Languages evolve organically, with the current speakers non-consciously helping them to progress. There is no, or little, conscious design or sculpting going on.

  2. Formal disciplines such as Mathematics. Mathematicians are still arguing about the foundations of their subject. Nobody ever sat down and decided to start the discipline upon such-and-such a set of principles. Mathematics has, like language, evolved organically. Yet it displays obvious order. Rather than this order being designed by us, put into the discipline by us, Mathematicians actually have to ‘discover’ the order in their subject.

  3. ‘The structure of human thought as a whole’: This contains a fair amount of order, in that certain principles are more fundamental than others, and we deduce lesser principles from higher ones, or infer in an inductive manner. Yet nobody has ever created a set of rules for us to use, we have created the rules in a non-conscious manner. Yet again, order from chaos.

I realise that the above demonstrates that order doesn’t require an external designer rather than order arises from actual chaos, but the former principle is what theists often use in arguments from design.

Thoughts?

‘Order’ is the delusion that we are in control of something. Humans are quite good at deluding oursevlves in this way–I am no exception.

Nice premise. Only thing is, it’s crap. You’re saying that the Universe exhibits some sort of order but you don’t clearly delineate what exactly order means. Is it ontology or teleology? If so, those things are equivocal; subjectivity renders any and all percieved ‘order’ to be nothing more than the convoluted conclusions of the individual, not an indicator to the existence of God.

By order do you mean pattern? If pattern is everywhere, then why would it be anything else? Just because you need consciousness to percieve the world doesn’t mean you need consciousness to create it.

Agreed, my friend. I thought you were a theist at first, my apologies.

I personally think that what we consider consciousness is simply systems. Mathematically speaking, systems are extremely complex plots of input-output functions. You know, y=mx+b, 0=ax^2+bx+c, etc. When the input is visual/audio feedback as well as additional senses, sometimes the output is motor-nueronal activity. That is an organism. The degree by which that motor-neuronal activity is complex is proportional to the general level of thought formation, and thus consciousness. We are fleshy input-output robots.

Well, thats nice.

Oh I completely agree. I think humans are such that we can’t fail to perceive order. Rather like the puddle in your signature. I’d leave it up to the theists to specify exactly what they mean by order; at any rate, all I am contending is that, whatever order is, if we ascribe it to the universe we can also ascribe it to my examples.

I’m not going to speculate on the nature of consciousness, because I, firstly, know nothing about it, and secondly, I’m pretty sure nobody else does really either. To re-iterate, my view on the ‘order’ that exists in the universe is just that we understand the world in terms of concepts (our visual experience is heavily informed by our concepts etc) and because what we think of as our ‘picture of the world’ is really a projection, its hardly surprising we find order, because we have, in a sense, created the world, as we understand it.

I concur. I do think that consciousness isn’t as complex as people like to believe. It’s simple data-crunching, computation at its best. The problem is, it is computation with limited perceptive abilities. It can only compute so much because of a.) hard drive space and b.) limited perspective. When a computer is so constrained and finite in its capabilities of understanding the infinity of the Universe, it thereafter uploads illusion programs to make up for a lack of knowledge. We know neither what precedes our existences nor what excedes it; we thus compute assumptive hypotheses. Religious and animistic descriptions of the world were our first theories. As our devices and instruments of observation become more accurate and objective, we become more scientific and sensible in these assumptions.

As soon as we truly understand infinity, we become infinity.

You should start more threads. Nice job.

Provalone: For some reason I never read your signature before. I really like the quote, though to be fair I don’t think it applies to everything that we conventionally call religion.

i liked the thread…

as for a response all i can say is that “a designer argument” on this site is usually met with extremes…

religous people feel it concerns them, and athiests are offended by them…

all i can say… :-$ :-&

well there’s not much to say about your op xD, I agree entirely…one question though, we become more organized when angry, does anybody know if it applies to any other emotions as well?

Ok, I’m not going to argue is / is not, let’s just theorize.

God’s there, or something like it, some first cause was based on order of some sort, on something like intelligence.

What is God? Let’s say it was perhaps the very first form of life, in a sort of pre-reality. It existed in an ocean of unlimited energy, or pre-energy, and had infinite time to evolve. Eventually as it evolved intelligence and grew, it came out of its pre-realm in some ways to either directly or indirectly, just like how the macro comes from out of the primordial. As we know, life comes from other forms of life, so, from this first life-from, allot of other sub-life started to grow out of it, aswel as dead parts and half-dead parts becoming the non-living parts of the universe. I think a universal / cosmic lifeforce has already been prooven by Riech, but they often call it lifeforce instead of living energy. Some of the energy in the universe, who knows what really the percent is like, but, a percent of the entire universe’s energy is alive. When these slow moving blueish waves touch matter, they cause tiny living particles to form which eventaully are taken into material microbiological life, a sort of organic particle which is used to build life up from the sub-atomic aetheric into the macro-material. Let’s suppose that this cosmic mega-lifeform “God” entity naturally radiates or caused the living waves which thus caused the generation of particle/material life through a priori of waveform live data. Just like a tree gives off automatic helpful oxygen that we benifite from, so too does this God thing release a sort of living wave that we use or need.

The eventual result is a universe which is partially alive and based on structure [not based on random crap]. As anyone could see after sufficienty study of physics, the universe is based on structure, everything must have its structure, its exact order which was perhaps literally built by something that was neither random nor 100% intelligent. There still exists defects in nature, aswel as inefficiency, but, none-the-less, there is much exact and irreducably complex structure in every inch of reality.

It was not hard for the darwinists to imagine proteans coming together in the water to make the first cell. But then it also should not be too hard to imagine particles of some kind of force coming together in a universal ocean of energy, having far more space, variety and time in order for life to possibly emerge from.

Even if it all started as one single, infinitely simple element that everything real was made of, after there was life and reaction, there came a sort of structural diversity.

“Life” is a strange word to define this process. For example, a virus can reproduce and spread, but inside of it there is no mind, and it’s more like a little strip of information than a living breathing thing. It’s very inanimate, but, through interaction, it can still mutate, evolve and reproduce. Maybe “life” is not the right word at all for this first theoretical structural cause, but it was something which was self-organizing and “growing”.

Now, theoretically, this giant protolifeform is far too large to understand or talk with. Therefor personal relationships with it, in one sort of way, are impossible, whilst in another way, we may each be a part of its own body. This God and greatest omega, is made of and based on literal substances and real energy. But as you know, the skin cells on a living body have a dead layer. Same with this God, in some areas or perhaps in many areas, it is no-longer alive, whilst in another area there is its own little set of parasites and symbiotes, and in another place there is its own literal organs. It’s too big to imagine, so perhaps galaxies are its cells/DNA? Galaxies have a sort of helix shape, and an exact cycle which effects everything else in the whole cosmic process of activity. Though old stars burn out, new ones form, like a sort of replecation.

I think order has been proven. You can take a clock and keep a steady cycle of time recorded. You can measure how much a planet weighs, and it has a sort of gravity which doesn’t suddenly or randomly change. You’ve got exact structure and behavior for all sorts of atomic elements and energies. That’s a proof enough of order. Now, that does not explain what a god is or is not, but, it does show reality as being structural. In reality, life causes changes in the unliving parts, and unliving parts cause the life, also. So as far as a higher lifeform having a big influence over creation and cosmic events, that’s a given, it is something I can obviously be sure of, but it’s not really monastic either, it’s too complex to be reduced to familiar simple ideologies. The whole process of living and dead structures on higher and lower levels cannot be yet known or explained much at all. Proof and disproof of allot of things, is still impossible.

If I travel at the speed of light, time slows down. If I observe the world in 5 dimensions, I experience every moment of my life all at once. Order and even certainty are completely contingent upon perspective. Even probability is possibility times locality. It is extremely improbable that gravity fluctuates within the confines of this local Universe, but is possible on a long enough timescale, on a big enough plane that gravity fluctuates. Some controversial particle physics theories speculate that gravity in fact does fluctuate to explain dark matter and dark energy.

I’d like to stop and ask you, would you rather argue with me on the basis of order or your God-theory? Either way, I’d be happy to dedicate a new thread to it. I must admit, God-arguments are getting old but order is a rather interesting concept.

It wasn’t guided but it had a designer operating on non-chaotic rules. Natural selection selects traits which make organisms survive more then other ones, thats not chaotic, its a form of really really precise selection. As with human brains as well, theres so much order/precision that its mindblowing.

Why do you say that? We’ve no idea what proceeded the Big Bang, God (designer) or no God (spontaneous creation)–making it the greatest enigma we can conceive of. From it, all there is has sprung, in this universe at least,.

But it did. At the first instant of the universe, the singularity, there was complete chaos. Even quarks and general relativity didn’t exist, much less the Periodic Table of matter, galaxies, and life, yea even we quasi-intelligent life forms which arose from it. We can’t say whether order arose naturally from it by design, or just happenstance, only that there is no evidence against rational, objective nature from then till now. The subjectivists will want to disagree I’m sure, but unless they’re willing to stipulate that everything is a figment of my imagination, including you, I don’t see how. (Be careful, I might imagine you out of existence. :sunglasses: )

Neither, it’s physics. Metaphysics (another word for the supernatural) is the speculation on the design and designer of the universe if any, for which we have to look on the far side of the Big Bang. And from that we speculate on our ultimate purpose–for which I have an excellent model, but that’d be for another thread.

Is it too much to expect people to actually read entire posts?

Thats an interesting point that probably deserves study by somebody who knows something about human consciousness. Sadly thats not me.

define creator?

…define creation? can we say that anything is created… i would say that all things are ‘made’ from what was there before, hence there is only construction. with creation we have nothing before then something is made from nothing which is imposible. that is why you will not be able to cite an example of something that is created.

if we are to say that the universe was created, then we have an infinity before and after it = a paradoxical state. an infinity can only be entire. god would have been sat around twidling his thumbs for some time indeed before his creating would be effectuated.