Hi Sâmkhya,
It is surprising how many philosophical or religious ideas started out like this. What if when…? Sometimes you get the idea that it would be perfectly unacceptable to think things out in this way. It seems that only when we are explaining things to children dare we ‘lapse’ into such comparisons.
I believe quite firmly that it is by intelligent deduction that the ancients came across the concept of the Ultimate Being, the Presence, the Mystery or any of a thousand other names that try to describe the indescribable. It is precisely when they recognised that nature contained everything they needed, that they began to ask why? Why was everything so suited to life? Why does everything seem so much a composition, why do words like architecture, arrangement, balance, beauty, combination, concord, configuration, consonance, design, distribution, form, harmony, layout, proportion, relation, rhythm, spacing, style or symmetry come to mind when we observe the diversity of nature?
Even the contrasting aspects of life and nature leave us in awe of it’s ability to underline those principles we discover that give meaning and depth to life. We need this contradiction … but that is another thread.
Shalom
Bob
I like the subject…what do you want from this thread?
S
Nice post. Nature is awe inspiring. I’ve come to learn that everything is connected as a continues flow of effects. The laws of nature are so designed that nature keeps adapting in the quest for balance which results in the cycles of nature including the cycles of man within nature.
I’ve also read organic life on earth described as a clock with the moon being the weight on the clock. It is the movement of the moon that maintains the movements of organic life much like it is the pendulum movement of the weight that keeps the mechanism of the clock in operation.
I don’t know exactly what I want. Do as Bob and Nick_A, say what the text means for you, what it tells you, how you view the argument.
I think the argument works pretty well, except that it appeals to an intuition that isn’t universal. It says that it would only be natural to assume that a watch had a maker, and that is true. It is, perhaps, an interesting question why not everybody thinks that way about a galaxy, but the fact is not everybody does. To argue why people ought to treat the two cases similarly, he would have to argue for why the instinct about the watch is valid, and an atheists lack of instinct about a galaxy is not.
I think what the arguement succeeds in doing is pointing out that people that do intuit that the universe was designed have a consistant model that others relate to, and are justified in following the conclusions their intuitions lead to.
Michael Behe argues that what the watch and some features of living organisms have in common is that they are irreducibly complex. And this analogy points to an analogy of causes, therefore living organisms are designed.
It is what Darwin’s Black Box is about.
S
It makes sense to me that diverse living organisms are irreducibly complex. It the purpose of each is the transformation of a particular quality of materiality and each different organism is doing the same, the circulation of the life force is maintained in all its material manifestations assuring the continuation of its collective cosmic purpose.