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If you believe in Good and Evil = = Does that mean you believe in God ? !
An Open Letter to Atheists
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Revelation is an historic series of temporal, informational events, not a dogma. You're an idiot
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I could literally have the same response from a Hindu about the Vedas.
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There is no such thing as objective 'good' or 'evil' for the atheist . Any atheist promoting the reality of good or evil, as intrinsic truths, is a liar to his own belief system. Each individual atheist of course creates their own individual notions of what they believe to be 'good' or 'evil'
All subjective of course, and any atheist is free to dismiss another atheist's ideas related to good and evil. It is a sociologically chaotic world view
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Indeed, and that's where good ole common sense comes in. There is a world of difference related to the historicity between the vedas and the gospels . I recommend Fr John Hardon's books on comparative religion
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And, pray tell, what religion comes out on top for him?
Every single religion is going to say common sense is on their side.
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Anyway since some don't seem to know how the laws of physics come into the proofs I hope I will be forgiven for posting this on one of the proofs, from www.orwellianireland.com/proofs.pdf .
I. Proof from Motion (sometimes called ‘change’), or the Kinetological Argument
The ancient Greeks actually thought that everything had, at least in some sense, motion or energy. How they knew that about such obvious non-candidates as a lump of rock is a mystery to this observer, but they did, and, furthermore, they were right! Clearly everything that exists has molecules with atoms who in turn have electrons spinning around inside etc, in short everything has motion and a type of energy. And everything seems to be the result of motion or energy. If you like you could take anything in front of you and try to put it into a long sequence of moved and movers, or things that accepted and then imparted energy. So you have an iron lamp in from of you, for example, and we can say that it is there as a result of the energy or motion you imparted in bringing it to that spot at some point. It is also the result of motion and energy that were imparted to it in the foundry and in the foundry it was made from an iron bar which in turn was worked on .i.e. had energy and motion imparted to it etc etc.
If you take an interest in physics you will realise that this exercise is simply using the ‘law of conservation of energy,’ i.e. the idea that the energy cannot be created out of nothing, energy derives from some source which gets it from some other source etc. So in this proof that is all you are doing, you move up along the sequence of something that was hit by the energy or motion of something else, and that something else got its energy or motion from something else etc etc.
Lets imagine that sequence and think about it for a while. Is it the case that this is a circular type of motion or energy chain? Or are you moving backwards in time to a discreet point, to some original source of this energy or motion? Could there be at some point back in time an original ‘first mover’, from which we get all this motion and energy originally, or is it, as I say, a circular type of motion? Well to answer this question it might help to go back to the original source of this proof.
St Thomas Aquinas when he drew up these proofs was influenced by the works of some of the great thinkers in philosophy and science, one of which was Aristotle, a famous Greek philosopher, who, in fact, could justifiably be called the greatest philosopher in history. Furthermore this idea of a first mover was indeed Aristotle’s, and it might be helpful to read at this point what Aristotle says about it:
a) The first point he makes is that if you had some kind of machine like that then the type of motion would have to be ‘continuous’ as opposed to ‘consecutive’ (and I am simplifying his categories here). Imagine if you had a machine like that, a continuous motion machine, that would maybe look like the cogs and dials of a watch which goes on nearly forever. You see such a machine has a particular type of motion, it is all the one motion, if you like, and it is continuing over a finite space of time. Think about it for a minute, in that machine the cog wheel hits each gear which in turn hits something else which, in a very exact way, returns the motion to the beginning and starts the sequence again.
But what Aristotle reasoned was that the motion that you actually see in the universe today is ‘consecutive motion.’ He gave the example of a torch relay – which we see now in the Olympics, copying the ancient Greeks – to explain this idea of ‘consecutive motion.’ Another modern example could be the player hitting the balls on a billiard table, he hits one ball which hits another etc. But notice what happens to the motion in this latter example. The motion starts powerful in the beginning with the striking of the first ball and then it kind of ‘dribbles out’ after hitting all the other balls, that’s what we mean by ‘consecutive’ as opposed to the earlier ‘continuous’ type.
Now look around you as you examine the mover sequence in the universe. Say you are walking through a field and you look at a rock, of igneous type we will say. So you use the rock in this sequence of movers: we know that the rock is there because it was moved, it got its motion and energy from, a volcanic eruption, and the volcano got its motion from various chemical reactions etc deep under the crust of the earth. But look what happened to this motion when it threw up this rock, doesn’t it look like a kind of scattered ‘dribbling out’ type of motion, like the billiard balls? You see the rock is just thrown onto the ground beside you and then does nothing with its motion, the same as the billiard balls coming to rest. If it was some type of continuous motion machine, like the cogs of a watch, then we would expect the rock to rest on some kind of lever which would be attached to some gear which would return the motion, so to speak, to the volcano so that it could start this motion over again. But it just isn’t like that, the motion in the universe is not of that type. It seems rather to be a type of motion that points to a discreet beginning, like an inverted tree structure with some original motion that is dissipating itself around us.
b) The second point he makes is that even if you constructed a perfect circular motion machine, or if the sequence of moved and movers went on literally to infinity, you still need an original source of motion. Imagine if you did make that machine, the perpetual motion machine, the problem would be that you would need to start it somehow! It would just sit there until someone actually began motion to begin it, you still need a first mover. And as regards a huge infinite series of moved and movers you face the same problem, at some point you need to actually ‘create motion’. No matter how long the sequence is it needs to have a beginning where somebody actually starts the motion off, the long sequence of moved and movers would be just like the billiard balls hitting into one another, that only happens because the player started the sequence off by giving motion via his arm.
So Aristotle concluded that the universe needed some original outside source of motion or energy, this sequence of moved and movers couldn’t continue ad infinitum. Hence he said there must be an original being out there from whom we get this ‘first movement’ in the sequence of motion or energy that you see around you in the universe. He thought there must be something out there, some ‘X’ being that started all this motion and energy. Aristotle, although obviously not a Christian, in fact came to the explicit conclusion that this original source of movement must be God.
Notice too that we are referring here, as we are to the ‘beings’ thrown up by the two subsequent proofs, to some entity that exists before the universe existed. If you like then, this X is out there when nothing else is out there, naturally enough because we are talking about something that starts the whole energy or motion sequence of the universe in the first place. Consequently it isn’t limited in the area it occupies, it expands into infinity. Various complicated deductions have been made then that this X is a spirit, rather than a body as such, which I think is pretty intuitive, but also that it would occupy, in a way, all space that we can imagine, since it cannot have been limited in the space it occupies before the universe was created. I appreciate that sounds very complicated but it is well established in philosophy that a being in that type of environment must occupy a space that we would call infinity, it is then an infinite being.
We will analyse these ‘beings’, or ‘X’s, at the end of the proofs but hopefully at this stage you can see that there must be a ‘being’ like that out there, or at least must have been one at the beginning of the universe, and that it would be infinite.
I. Proof from Motion (sometimes called ‘change’), or the Kinetological Argument
The ancient Greeks actually thought that everything had, at least in some sense, motion or energy. How they knew that about such obvious non-candidates as a lump of rock is a mystery to this observer, but they did, and, furthermore, they were right! Clearly everything that exists has molecules with atoms who in turn have electrons spinning around inside etc, in short everything has motion and a type of energy. And everything seems to be the result of motion or energy. If you like you could take anything in front of you and try to put it into a long sequence of moved and movers, or things that accepted and then imparted energy. So you have an iron lamp in from of you, for example, and we can say that it is there as a result of the energy or motion you imparted in bringing it to that spot at some point. It is also the result of motion and energy that were imparted to it in the foundry and in the foundry it was made from an iron bar which in turn was worked on .i.e. had energy and motion imparted to it etc etc.
If you take an interest in physics you will realise that this exercise is simply using the ‘law of conservation of energy,’ i.e. the idea that the energy cannot be created out of nothing, energy derives from some source which gets it from some other source etc. So in this proof that is all you are doing, you move up along the sequence of something that was hit by the energy or motion of something else, and that something else got its energy or motion from something else etc etc.
Lets imagine that sequence and think about it for a while. Is it the case that this is a circular type of motion or energy chain? Or are you moving backwards in time to a discreet point, to some original source of this energy or motion? Could there be at some point back in time an original ‘first mover’, from which we get all this motion and energy originally, or is it, as I say, a circular type of motion? Well to answer this question it might help to go back to the original source of this proof.
St Thomas Aquinas when he drew up these proofs was influenced by the works of some of the great thinkers in philosophy and science, one of which was Aristotle, a famous Greek philosopher, who, in fact, could justifiably be called the greatest philosopher in history. Furthermore this idea of a first mover was indeed Aristotle’s, and it might be helpful to read at this point what Aristotle says about it:
Aristotle in fact stated that there are a number of reasons why we say that there has to be an original discreet ‘first mover,’ and not that that the sequence of moved and movers can go on ad infinitum i.e. in a kind of circle of continuous motion, like some kind of perpetual movement machine.
a) The first point he makes is that if you had some kind of machine like that then the type of motion would have to be ‘continuous’ as opposed to ‘consecutive’ (and I am simplifying his categories here). Imagine if you had a machine like that, a continuous motion machine, that would maybe look like the cogs and dials of a watch which goes on nearly forever. You see such a machine has a particular type of motion, it is all the one motion, if you like, and it is continuing over a finite space of time. Think about it for a minute, in that machine the cog wheel hits each gear which in turn hits something else which, in a very exact way, returns the motion to the beginning and starts the sequence again.
But what Aristotle reasoned was that the motion that you actually see in the universe today is ‘consecutive motion.’ He gave the example of a torch relay – which we see now in the Olympics, copying the ancient Greeks – to explain this idea of ‘consecutive motion.’ Another modern example could be the player hitting the balls on a billiard table, he hits one ball which hits another etc. But notice what happens to the motion in this latter example. The motion starts powerful in the beginning with the striking of the first ball and then it kind of ‘dribbles out’ after hitting all the other balls, that’s what we mean by ‘consecutive’ as opposed to the earlier ‘continuous’ type.
Now look around you as you examine the mover sequence in the universe. Say you are walking through a field and you look at a rock, of igneous type we will say. So you use the rock in this sequence of movers: we know that the rock is there because it was moved, it got its motion and energy from, a volcanic eruption, and the volcano got its motion from various chemical reactions etc deep under the crust of the earth. But look what happened to this motion when it threw up this rock, doesn’t it look like a kind of scattered ‘dribbling out’ type of motion, like the billiard balls? You see the rock is just thrown onto the ground beside you and then does nothing with its motion, the same as the billiard balls coming to rest. If it was some type of continuous motion machine, like the cogs of a watch, then we would expect the rock to rest on some kind of lever which would be attached to some gear which would return the motion, so to speak, to the volcano so that it could start this motion over again. But it just isn’t like that, the motion in the universe is not of that type. It seems rather to be a type of motion that points to a discreet beginning, like an inverted tree structure with some original motion that is dissipating itself around us.
b) The second point he makes is that even if you constructed a perfect circular motion machine, or if the sequence of moved and movers went on literally to infinity, you still need an original source of motion. Imagine if you did make that machine, the perpetual motion machine, the problem would be that you would need to start it somehow! It would just sit there until someone actually began motion to begin it, you still need a first mover. And as regards a huge infinite series of moved and movers you face the same problem, at some point you need to actually ‘create motion’. No matter how long the sequence is it needs to have a beginning where somebody actually starts the motion off, the long sequence of moved and movers would be just like the billiard balls hitting into one another, that only happens because the player started the sequence off by giving motion via his arm.
So Aristotle concluded that the universe needed some original outside source of motion or energy, this sequence of moved and movers couldn’t continue ad infinitum. Hence he said there must be an original being out there from whom we get this ‘first movement’ in the sequence of motion or energy that you see around you in the universe. He thought there must be something out there, some ‘X’ being that started all this motion and energy. Aristotle, although obviously not a Christian, in fact came to the explicit conclusion that this original source of movement must be God.
Notice too that we are referring here, as we are to the ‘beings’ thrown up by the two subsequent proofs, to some entity that exists before the universe existed. If you like then, this X is out there when nothing else is out there, naturally enough because we are talking about something that starts the whole energy or motion sequence of the universe in the first place. Consequently it isn’t limited in the area it occupies, it expands into infinity. Various complicated deductions have been made then that this X is a spirit, rather than a body as such, which I think is pretty intuitive, but also that it would occupy, in a way, all space that we can imagine, since it cannot have been limited in the space it occupies before the universe was created. I appreciate that sounds very complicated but it is well established in philosophy that a being in that type of environment must occupy a space that we would call infinity, it is then an infinite being.
We will analyse these ‘beings’, or ‘X’s, at the end of the proofs but hopefully at this stage you can see that there must be a ‘being’ like that out there, or at least must have been one at the beginning of the universe, and that it would be infinite.
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- There are pumpkins in the world.
- For every pumpkin that we observe, there exists the possibility that there is another pumpkin bigger than it.
- This cannot be true of every pumpkin, however, since that would lead to an infinite regression of pumpkins.
- Therefore, there must be one pumpkin that is bigger than any other pumpkin could ever possibly be.
- Everybody understands this to be the Great Pumpkin
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Aristotle wrote 8 famous books on physics, and then some on 'meta physics which brings us into theological territory.
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Kangal
"There are pumpkins in the world.
For every pumpkin that we observe, there exists the possibility that there is another pumpkin bigger than it.
This cannot be true of every pumpkin, however, since that would lead to an infinite regression of pumpkins.
Therefore, there must be one pumpkin that is bigger than any other pumpkin could ever possibly be.
Everybody understands this to be the Great Pumpkin
Therefore the Great Pumpkin exists."
That is a garbled and sneered at version of what is known as the Ontological proof of God's Existence. Aquinas rejected that so it isn't part of his five 'ways'.
But of course you knew that, because you are all experts on the proofs, because obviously ye wouldn't be the kind of people who would sneer at Catholics without actually knowing of what you are talking about, of course not!
"There are pumpkins in the world.
For every pumpkin that we observe, there exists the possibility that there is another pumpkin bigger than it.
This cannot be true of every pumpkin, however, since that would lead to an infinite regression of pumpkins.
Therefore, there must be one pumpkin that is bigger than any other pumpkin could ever possibly be.
Everybody understands this to be the Great Pumpkin
Therefore the Great Pumpkin exists."
That is a garbled and sneered at version of what is known as the Ontological proof of God's Existence. Aquinas rejected that so it isn't part of his five 'ways'.
But of course you knew that, because you are all experts on the proofs, because obviously ye wouldn't be the kind of people who would sneer at Catholics without actually knowing of what you are talking about, of course not!
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Your wasting your time with Kangal and Dawson. Both are hyper classic examples of what is called - The Gamma male, as described under the rules of SSH - socio sexual hierarchy . You can't change the mind of a gamma. The levels of dissonance and delusion are pathological in nature
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A classic gamma male tale here. Remember, the Gamma is never wrong, even when he is. That is one of the defining traits:
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Dawson and Kangal are secret Kings, ruling over an empire of nonsense. Does anyone have a single example of them admitting they were wrong on any issue?
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Cool thread.
Keeps the pair of psychotic weirdos who spend their time whinging about me to the moderators together and busy.
Although something tells me these pair are the same screwball, wouldn't be the first time we seen that here.
Great stuff.
Keeps the pair of psychotic weirdos who spend their time whinging about me to the moderators together and busy.
Although something tells me these pair are the same screwball, wouldn't be the first time we seen that here.
Great stuff.
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He's just trolling you into an off topic conversation with the aim of getting you banned. That's his whole MO.
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^^^^^
This chap isn't well.
Having multiple accounts banned from multiple threads must be a new record for Jimbo/Wank the 'tard.
Spends his whole life roaring and shouting at multiple different posters on multiple different political websites and truly believes he's making a difference to the world.
Multiple!!!
This chap isn't well.
Having multiple accounts banned from multiple threads must be a new record for Jimbo/Wank the 'tard.
Spends his whole life roaring and shouting at multiple different posters on multiple different political websites and truly believes he's making a difference to the world.
Multiple!!!
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To be fair, he's mentally ill so his carer just allows him spend his waking hours running around after us on sites like this to keep him busy.
It's cheaper and easier than sedation.
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This degeneracy is the direct fruit of secular material atheism:
View: https://t.me/RealGavinMcInnes/4582
View: https://t.me/RealGavinMcInnes/4582
what you say is interesting as is fishalts comments.
to reply ----.
i am god -- you are god -- god is within you to the very same extent he is in me .
he is precisely in the same amount within the most fervent atheist you or i will ever meet.
i met god once for about 40 seconds --
he was me i discovered later when i found out i did not go mad.
and this experience is common worldwide as children attain adulthood where like me they spend their lives trying to experience that 40 seconds again .
god is our consciousness which is within as Christ said but the church does not fully agree/support GOD IS WITHIN YOU ==Jesus Christ .
his teachings have been hijacked by every crook and chancer imaginable including and especially the catholic church and many other organized religions .
the same truth is in the 10 principle Upanishads translated by WB Yeats and Shree Pruehout Swami -- these texts are said by some to be in excess of 18,000 years old and their source or author is unknown .
when accepting his Nobel prize WB said "" i have fed off the Upanishads all my life "".
don't doubt the wonder of god and it is a private thing and the greatest reward is increased knowledge of god -- nothing else --that is as good as it gets there are no other riches in the garden of Eden .
in our tradition evil chancers took the garden of Eden containing the tree of knowledge which is mankind's greatest prize and turned it into a garden of evil where gods evil assistant seduced Eve who in turn seduced Adam to fling us all from divinity and the forever enjoyment of Eden to earth where we experience much pain and are now mortal for a brief moment .
this is referred to as original sin and when you explore this you find its technical name which is unbelievably ""HEREDITARY DEPRAVITY "" no less .
and you also find we have a propensity to sin also .
if the bastards left us alone we would be fine --but the world is a very evil place .
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Anyway by popular demand [not!], I thought I might post about one of the other proofs, or 'ways' of Aquinas:
"V. Proof from Final Causes, or the Teleological Argument, often known as Intelligent Design
Not a few of the highly respected philosophers and scientists of history and the present day felt, and feel, that the world as we know it, nature as it were, shows signs of a strange order or purposefulness, as opposed to randomness or pure chance, and this, it is felt, proves the existence of some being responsible for arranging this order. Predictably enough (!) I will try to explain this using an analogy but, mercifully, I will spare you any reference to watches or clocks! It is in fact one of the most peculiar aspects of the historiography of this question that virtually all the great thinkers start talking about watches and clocks when seeking to explain this proof. It really is very remarkable, it starts all the way from Cicero, and he was only talking about sundials!, to Robert Boyle, who talked about the Strasbourg town clock, to Voltaire, to William Paley – a Church of England rector who wrote one of the most influential books in history on this subject: ‘Natural Theology,’ published in 1802 – who famously talked about a watch found on a heath etc etc. Instead, by way of something different, I will begin with our hero marooned on a romantic desert island, trudging through the forest on his lonely atoll and suddenly coming across a trap, an elaborate Indiana-Jones-type large animal trap:
Naturally you move to examine it and find that it has a rope net which is designed to capture any large animal that falls into the corresponding hole that the trap maker has dug. The hole is just a large rectangular job and the rope, which is wide and sturdy, is just made from slashing together vines that abound in this forest. Of course you look at this trap and you immediately say “there is somebody out there, we are not alone!”, and no, you are not referring to aliens! This then is the basic idea of this proof, we see the same type of organised purposeful design in nature and we conclude that we are not alone, there must be a designer behind this design.
To get back to our Robinson Crusoe hero here, obviously he reached the natural conclusion anybody would reach having seen that elaborately designed trap. But why, exactly? How do you know there is somebody else on the island now that you have seen this trap? There are other holes in the forest of course, made randomly around the place by rabbits and other animals and by trees falling over etc, maybe the hole you were looking at arose that way? Sometimes the vines that you see hanging down from the trees intertwine a bit, so is that how the rope was made? We will say that you pause and consider this question, was this trap created by random forces like rabbits and the wind creating the rope by winding the vines together like that? And therefore there might not be anybody out there, it could be just natural forces and not the result of an intelligent designer, because what you had thought at first was that there must be some intelligent resourceful guy on this island, seeing as somebody like that had to have built such a crafty trap. But could it have come about then by these natural sources? Well, as you think about it, indeed the parts used in the trap were all natural, they were all around each other in the forest, so yes in theory the wind and rabbits etc could have created the trap.
But no, now that you give it more thought it couldn’t have happened like that because the trap was too structured or ordered. For example you are looking at the hole and you see it has four pretty sharp sides, as in a rectangle, and how could you have rabbits creating a large perfect rectangular hole like that? In theory they could have of course, you could have ten rabbits lined up together who start digging in unison etc etc, I mean it could happen, in theory? There is no law states that rabbits cannot form a line? But in reality we know that didn’t happen, and the reason is that we know that things cannot form that ordered or structured pattern by chance or randomness alone. What you could do is calculate the odds in your mind. You could picture the day you watched a few rabbits eating in a field and you could guess the odds of two rabbits lined up in perfect unison and then calculate the odds of 10 rabbits lined up like that. As you calculate the odds you rapidly realise that it just couldn’t happen and what you are doing in your head is the classic, and indeed only, way of distinguishing the two states of randomness and design. Basically you have design, i.e. somebody, a human or some being with intelligence, deliberately bringing about this state, taking over from randomness and chance, i.e. the outcome of natural undirected forces in nature, like wind or rain or something, as the only possible explanation when you find these huge odds stacking up, like the odds of rabbits coming together like that. Remember you never find that there is zero odds, there is always some chance that ten rabbits could line up in unison like that, because as I said there is no law against it, but when the odds start to get astronomical then you know it was design.
I will come back to that question of probabilities in a minute but lets look at some other aspects of the trap. You see you also have to consider that the wind would have to have arranged the vines in a rope or net structure at just the right time and place to coincide with the hole, and what are the odds of that? The point then is that when we see a kind of purposeful interlocking structure – I say purposeful because obviously the designer had put the hole in front of the net like that ‘on purpose,’ and you can note with interest that purposefulness – then the probabilities of it happening by chance, again, rise astronomically.
The other thing to remark on about the trap is that it doesn’t have to be perfect to show intelligent design. Say for the sake of argument that in one corner of the rectangular hole there is a small collapse in the earthwork. Hence it isn’t actually a perfect rectangular chasm, but still we can see that enough of the design of the whole remains that will show us that it couldn’t have come about by chance. So, in short, even though it isn’t actually a perfect rectangle nonetheless its close enough to rule out the rabbit theory. This is an important point because when we come to talking about DNA etc in a minute you will hear some people say that the intelligent design in nature is actually not perfectly designed – because after all we have cancer cells that use the DNA structure for example – to support life, but I would say it doesn’t have to be, as long as enough of it remains that does show the design.
In any case hopefully at this stage you get the general idea, the way to distinguish design from chance, that is two competing possibilities if you like, opposed to one another, is to check the probabilities. If the probabilities become astronomically high – but they never hit zero remember, when we are trying to distinguish randomness from design – then it is design, and that is what our hero did instinctively when he first saw the trap, he knew that some intelligent being had to have designed it.
You see this is what any intelligent person does on an ongoing basis. Say you were playing cards and your opponent got three aces dealt into him. Well it happens and you will congratulate him on his luck. Then it happens again on the next hand. That is certainly a talking point and everybody will be remarking on how lucky the guy was but I guess these things happen. But by the time it happens on the third hand you are going to react differently. Now you know it isn’t luck and you will be quietly fixing an eagle eye on your opponent’s sleeve! So what is happening here? You are calculating the odds of it happening by chance in your head. It could happen once, sure, happen twice, yes but very rare, but happen three times in a row? Now you have calculated that last probability in your head and you can see that those odds are ridiculous and you move to the design option, you know somebody has done that deliberately, you know that because the odds of it happening by chance have become astronomical. Remember the odds of it happening three times in a row are not zero, they never are under this type of analysis, but once they hit very big numbers then you know it is design – your opponent somehow did this deliberately, purposefully – and not by chance – it was not the mere random shuffling of the cards.
"V. Proof from Final Causes, or the Teleological Argument, often known as Intelligent Design
Not a few of the highly respected philosophers and scientists of history and the present day felt, and feel, that the world as we know it, nature as it were, shows signs of a strange order or purposefulness, as opposed to randomness or pure chance, and this, it is felt, proves the existence of some being responsible for arranging this order. Predictably enough (!) I will try to explain this using an analogy but, mercifully, I will spare you any reference to watches or clocks! It is in fact one of the most peculiar aspects of the historiography of this question that virtually all the great thinkers start talking about watches and clocks when seeking to explain this proof. It really is very remarkable, it starts all the way from Cicero, and he was only talking about sundials!, to Robert Boyle, who talked about the Strasbourg town clock, to Voltaire, to William Paley – a Church of England rector who wrote one of the most influential books in history on this subject: ‘Natural Theology,’ published in 1802 – who famously talked about a watch found on a heath etc etc. Instead, by way of something different, I will begin with our hero marooned on a romantic desert island, trudging through the forest on his lonely atoll and suddenly coming across a trap, an elaborate Indiana-Jones-type large animal trap:
Naturally you move to examine it and find that it has a rope net which is designed to capture any large animal that falls into the corresponding hole that the trap maker has dug. The hole is just a large rectangular job and the rope, which is wide and sturdy, is just made from slashing together vines that abound in this forest. Of course you look at this trap and you immediately say “there is somebody out there, we are not alone!”, and no, you are not referring to aliens! This then is the basic idea of this proof, we see the same type of organised purposeful design in nature and we conclude that we are not alone, there must be a designer behind this design.
To get back to our Robinson Crusoe hero here, obviously he reached the natural conclusion anybody would reach having seen that elaborately designed trap. But why, exactly? How do you know there is somebody else on the island now that you have seen this trap? There are other holes in the forest of course, made randomly around the place by rabbits and other animals and by trees falling over etc, maybe the hole you were looking at arose that way? Sometimes the vines that you see hanging down from the trees intertwine a bit, so is that how the rope was made? We will say that you pause and consider this question, was this trap created by random forces like rabbits and the wind creating the rope by winding the vines together like that? And therefore there might not be anybody out there, it could be just natural forces and not the result of an intelligent designer, because what you had thought at first was that there must be some intelligent resourceful guy on this island, seeing as somebody like that had to have built such a crafty trap. But could it have come about then by these natural sources? Well, as you think about it, indeed the parts used in the trap were all natural, they were all around each other in the forest, so yes in theory the wind and rabbits etc could have created the trap.
But no, now that you give it more thought it couldn’t have happened like that because the trap was too structured or ordered. For example you are looking at the hole and you see it has four pretty sharp sides, as in a rectangle, and how could you have rabbits creating a large perfect rectangular hole like that? In theory they could have of course, you could have ten rabbits lined up together who start digging in unison etc etc, I mean it could happen, in theory? There is no law states that rabbits cannot form a line? But in reality we know that didn’t happen, and the reason is that we know that things cannot form that ordered or structured pattern by chance or randomness alone. What you could do is calculate the odds in your mind. You could picture the day you watched a few rabbits eating in a field and you could guess the odds of two rabbits lined up in perfect unison and then calculate the odds of 10 rabbits lined up like that. As you calculate the odds you rapidly realise that it just couldn’t happen and what you are doing in your head is the classic, and indeed only, way of distinguishing the two states of randomness and design. Basically you have design, i.e. somebody, a human or some being with intelligence, deliberately bringing about this state, taking over from randomness and chance, i.e. the outcome of natural undirected forces in nature, like wind or rain or something, as the only possible explanation when you find these huge odds stacking up, like the odds of rabbits coming together like that. Remember you never find that there is zero odds, there is always some chance that ten rabbits could line up in unison like that, because as I said there is no law against it, but when the odds start to get astronomical then you know it was design.
I will come back to that question of probabilities in a minute but lets look at some other aspects of the trap. You see you also have to consider that the wind would have to have arranged the vines in a rope or net structure at just the right time and place to coincide with the hole, and what are the odds of that? The point then is that when we see a kind of purposeful interlocking structure – I say purposeful because obviously the designer had put the hole in front of the net like that ‘on purpose,’ and you can note with interest that purposefulness – then the probabilities of it happening by chance, again, rise astronomically.
The other thing to remark on about the trap is that it doesn’t have to be perfect to show intelligent design. Say for the sake of argument that in one corner of the rectangular hole there is a small collapse in the earthwork. Hence it isn’t actually a perfect rectangular chasm, but still we can see that enough of the design of the whole remains that will show us that it couldn’t have come about by chance. So, in short, even though it isn’t actually a perfect rectangle nonetheless its close enough to rule out the rabbit theory. This is an important point because when we come to talking about DNA etc in a minute you will hear some people say that the intelligent design in nature is actually not perfectly designed – because after all we have cancer cells that use the DNA structure for example – to support life, but I would say it doesn’t have to be, as long as enough of it remains that does show the design.
In any case hopefully at this stage you get the general idea, the way to distinguish design from chance, that is two competing possibilities if you like, opposed to one another, is to check the probabilities. If the probabilities become astronomically high – but they never hit zero remember, when we are trying to distinguish randomness from design – then it is design, and that is what our hero did instinctively when he first saw the trap, he knew that some intelligent being had to have designed it.
You see this is what any intelligent person does on an ongoing basis. Say you were playing cards and your opponent got three aces dealt into him. Well it happens and you will congratulate him on his luck. Then it happens again on the next hand. That is certainly a talking point and everybody will be remarking on how lucky the guy was but I guess these things happen. But by the time it happens on the third hand you are going to react differently. Now you know it isn’t luck and you will be quietly fixing an eagle eye on your opponent’s sleeve! So what is happening here? You are calculating the odds of it happening by chance in your head. It could happen once, sure, happen twice, yes but very rare, but happen three times in a row? Now you have calculated that last probability in your head and you can see that those odds are ridiculous and you move to the design option, you know somebody has done that deliberately, you know that because the odds of it happening by chance have become astronomical. Remember the odds of it happening three times in a row are not zero, they never are under this type of analysis, but once they hit very big numbers then you know it is design – your opponent somehow did this deliberately, purposefully – and not by chance – it was not the mere random shuffling of the cards.
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