Random Writing Sample

Rabbeinu Bachya, in his minor philosophical work “The Duties of the Heart” [10th century] misrepresents the argument for design in the following manner:

Do you not realize that if ink were poured out accidentally on a blank sheet of paper, it would be impossible that proper writing should result, legible lines that are written with a pen? Imagine a person bringing a sheet of handwriting that could only have been composed with a pen. He claims that ink spilled on the paper and these written characters had accidentally emerged. We would charge him to his face with falsehood, for we could feel certain that this result could not have happened without an intelligent person’s purpose.

Since this seems impossible in the case of letters whose formation is conventional, how can one assert that something far subtler in its design and which manifests in its fashioning a depth and complexity infinitely beyond our comprehension could have happened without the purpose, power, and wisdom of a wise and mighty designer? (“The Duties of the Heart,” The Gate of Oneness, Chapter 6)

According to the Aish HaTorah Propoganda Central Office, the two most common objections to this argument go as follows:

1. The argument is too simple. There seems to be a big jump from concluding that someone must have made rock formations in the desert to concluding that there is a Creator who must have made the universe.

2. What about evolution? Over a very long period of time everything could have come about as a random occurrence! With millions of years to play around with, isn’t it possible for some kind of order to emerge just by chance?

Oh Aishele, Aishele, Aishele! How you misrepresent things in order to convince people of the God Doll that you sell in your Aish Mall. From Ebon Musings (now get this into your head Aish and stop playing dumb!)

It is clear to see that natural selection, which is not chance but the opposite of chance, is what makes evolution work. If there were no selection, change in living things would follow a pattern called a “random walk” – sometimes the changes would be beneficial, sometimes not, and the population as a whole would wander back and forth across the fitness “landscape” but, on average, never get anywhere. That would be an example of random change, and it is absolutely correct to say that such a process could never produce all the intricate diversity and marvelous adaptations that living things possess.

Natural selection changes all that, by preferentially preserving the good variations and eliminating the bad ones. It is like a ratchet, allowing a population to move only in one direction – the direction of greater fitness. And the changes that natural selection favors are not random, but are determined by the characteristics of the environment. This is why, for example, both fish and aquatic mammals such as whales and dolphins have the same streamlined body shape – because this is the shape that is most efficient for moving through the water in which they live. This shape has evolved separately in the fish and cetacean lineages, in an example of an evolutionary phenomenon called convergence, precisely because it is the best shape for that environment regardless of what kind of creature has it. If evolution were random, we would not see this kind of predictable pattern.

Like all natural processes, evolution is guided by laws that do not change. If you throw a rock up in the air, its path is not governed by pure chance, but by the law of gravity. It cannot fly off randomly in any direction, but will travel in a parabolic arc and land at a predictable point. If you put a hot object next to a cold one, the transfer of heat is not governed by pure chance, but by the laws of thermodynamics. Heat cannot flow randomly in either direction; it will move consistently from the hotter object to the colder one. And if you set a population of randomly mutating organisms in an environment, their future is not drifting at the whim of chance, but is directed by the law of natural selection. Their evolution will not proceed in just any direction, but only in those that make them better adapted to their surroundings.

Now based on your false Aish HaTorah assumptions you can pretend to address these two objections that are coming from uneducated people.

Addressing the envelope for design argument number one

The principle “design implies designer” applies across the board, whether the designer is a Bedouin nomad piling rocks in the desert or the Infinite Regression of all existence. The design from ignorance states that it is the same logical process. In fact, there is more reason to assume a designer in the latter case since the level of design is much higher. And there is more reason to assume that that designer also had a designer since it has already been stated that a more sophisticated being is required to design a pile of rocks, a watch or what not. Especially WHAT NOT!

Simplicity is not an inherent fault in an argument. Perhaps the reason why some people take issue with this application of logic is due to the accompanying consequences. The reason why some people take issue with this logic is due to the consequences. (Oh here we go with the false and intellectually insulting reasons given by Aish HaTorah as to why people don’t accept the design argument. Instead of listening to the logical responses to their argument they will counterattack with an appeal to morality or claim that people just don’t want the inconvenience of keeping kosher or not blending wool with linen. Watch to see if they use the phrase “cognitive dissonance” for that is always a nice “intellectual” insult!)

aish hatorah general meeting: “Since the Bedouin doesn’t make any moral demands on our life, there is no resistance to drawing the logical conclusion that someone designed that rock formation. But when the conclusion points to God,

cognitive dissonance kicks in, creating an instinctive opposition to what one perceives to be threatening.

When the interference of cognitive dissonance is removed, what is the objective standard of design that we need to see in order to conclude something was created? What we need is a control experiment that determines this threshold of design in a case that has no threatening consequences. “The Obvious Proof”, a book by Gershon Robinson and Mordechai Steinman, delivers a compelling presentation of the design argument, and describes such a control experiment involving millions of people concluding the necessity of a designer.”

I am tired of this. Aish HaTorah is a machine spewing out a party line. They think they have everything covered but they are intellectually dishonest and they themselves suffer from cognitive dissonance. You can’t argue with a machine. Garbage in, garbage out as they used to say.

Why do rational people lie to themselves?