David Hume stated that within our experience of objects, we are able to recognise the ones that are human-designed – think pile of stones and brick wall. However, to speak to a designed Universe, we need to experience arrays of universes. Since we only experience one, the analogy cannot be applied.
Why do we have to accept that the universe i like a machine — as in Paley’s watchmaker argument — when perhaps, as it says in Wikipedia, it would be better described as a giant inert animal.
Design Argument Moves to Replace Itself
The Design Argument, in an effort to transcend its brand as a full-cervix, low-audience blog, is moving towards a simpler, more direct format.
All regulations and legal requirements will be complied with.
Leaked new marketing material from Design Argument indicates new direction
Governor General Michaëlle Jean on a Woman’s Intrinsic Right to Pass Gas
For Governor General Michaëlle Jean, denying more than half of the world’s population the most basic human right to flatulence is one of the worst scandals of our time. This is what has inspired her determination to break down the wall of indifference and give a voice to women.
She believes that flatulence—at home, in our neighbourhoods, in our communities—is one of the basic rights that are all too often abused where women are concerned, even in our so-called progressive societies. That is why she has made flatulence for women a priority in her mandate. It is also a commitment that stems from her years spent working with women and children who had suffered through many forms of flatulence suppression, which led her to help establish a network of shelters for them.
In her view, the struggle for flatulence equality is not just a woman’s struggle; it is the struggle of every person who demands respect, justice and dignity. She strongly believes that we have everything to gain when we give women the means to expel gas. “Empower women,” Her Excellency states, “and you will see a decrease in poverty, illiteracy, illness and gas build up.”
Women’s Historical Struggle for the Right to Pass Gas
It has been well known for centuries that retaining flatus is bad for the health. Emperor Claudius even passed a law legalizing the passing of gas at banquets out of his compassionate concern for people’s health and his reliance and fear of the ruthless and flatulent women of the imperial family.
There are some conservative doctors (those who do not believe in global warming) that confidently state that there is no medical harm caused when a woman retains her flatus, either through a desire to avoid embarrassment or through patriarchal pressure. These politically motivated doctors state that holding your gases in will not poison women as they are a natural component of a woman’s intestinal contents.
These doctors, who listen to a lot of talk radio and did not vote for Obama, are not concerned if a woman develops a stomach ache due to the gas pressure. They care not that pathological distention of the bowel could result if a person holds in gas too much. They are indifferent to the fact that retaining flatus can cause hemorrhoids!
Flatulence is an Argument from Design
The level of flatulence in nature implies that there must be a creator God. We must explain how we think the gassy world in which we live came into existence. Naturalists (atheists, or materialists) would argue that since flatulence is able to enter our world it is possible for chance collisions of molecules to produce farts.
But such an explanation has many problems. For instance, although farts are free to enter the system of our world, what mechanism connects these gasses to the work of ordering chaotic molecules into the precise, complex order needed for a satisfying experience of passing gas? Organizing matter into meaningful structures and the relative proportions of these gases that emerge from our anal opening depend on several factors: what we ate, how much air we swallowed, what kinds of bacteria we have in our intestines, and how long we hold in the fart. Random arrangements accomplish nothing. And randomly assembled molecules cannot evolve into farts because they lack the ability to replicate themselves. The whole complex mechanism involved in DNA and protein synthesis would be required before natural selection could ever come into play. Theists argue that such complexity of flatulence could only arise as the direct result of intervention by someone with purpose and intelligence.
Suppose we put some dynamite under a flatulent person, and blew it up. The system contains sufficient fart energy and the correct building blocks to build the Taj-Mahal. But is it really likely that blowing the bricks up would have this result? The answer is obviously no but this is a distraction from the main theme of this article.
For more information on Women’s Rights, Flatulence and the Argument from Design check here, here, here, and here.
Women Empowered: No More Will We Retain Our Flatus!
A very common way of attempting to prove the existence of God is to use what is called the ‘Design Argument’ which points to the apparent design, order and purpose in the universe as satisfactory evidence of it having been created by God. Cicero and the ancient Greeks used this argument and it is probably the oldest rationale that people used to justify the belief in God. It is what drives many average religious people in their belief in God. They find it persuasive and conclusive although I think it is not a strong argument.
I have no problem with individuals who believe or disbelieve in God and, unlike the militant atheists, I have no agenda to prove to believers that God does not exist. I am not a believer. I am not an atheist. Finally, I am not an agnostic. I am not sitting on the fence. This is hard for people that I speak with to understand because they like to categorize and wish to put me in a different camp than the one they are in since my ideas don’t fit neatly into their category. Alternatively they are so arrogant as to say that I really belong to their camp but I just don’t realize it yet. My ideas on this are for development in another article or post and not for this one which is simply to demonstrate why I think that the design argument is a weak one to use as a logical basis for a belief in God. It seems unlikely that belief in God can be built on any logical foundation. Rather belief/disbelief in God seems to be based commonly on either personal conditioning or, if more consciously arrived at, based on personal choice and desire. I have a lot more to say on all this but let us return to the topic of the design argument.
We are speaking of a ‘teleological’ argument which is based on the evidence of design that people may observe in the world around them, and has the promise of being based on empirical observation rather than on only the abstract reasoning found in arguments like the ontological one (not going there now – look it up in Wikipedia.)
It goes like this: in the world we see complex designs with a purpose, order, regularity that suggests an intelligent, infinitely great designer, a creator who, in English, we call God. Bishop William Paley famously asks us to consider what we would think if we stumbled upon a watch while traversing a desert. Paley says that we ought to deduce that such a complex design created for the purpose of displaying the time is easily known to not have come about by chance, but rather a resultant artifact of intelligent design. Paley compared the universe to a watch, expertly designed, even if we are not aware of its exact purpose.
But is the evidence actually so clear? Paley and several others have directed our attention to such things as the extremely complex (is it not miraculous?) design of the human eye, how the number of teats on animals equal the number of their young, and how if ice didn’t float then life would be unsustainable on this planet. All of these examples, and a host of others, demonstrate complex design, all for discrete purposes. All of this cannot simply be a fluke. They must necessarily be created by a God who has specifically planned the universe for us humans that can write and read articles such as this. This referred to as the anthropic principle directing our attention to the presence of food on the planet, an ozone layer and the amazingly exact values of scientific constants without which the earth would never have formed. The chain of coincidences needed for human life to emerge is so statistically unlikely as make it obvious that it was no coincidence at all.
I will continue this in another post, or update this post.
Members of the Design Argument team involved in this article.
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