What gives?
Richard Dawkins believes in intelligent design?
by slimboyfat 78 Replies latest jw friends
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Pika_Chu
Oh, please...
Dawkins said "you might find some sort of signature of design." First of all, he said "might." In the beginning, he said the notion that God created the universe and life is a possibility anyway, this statement only repeats that thought. Furthermore, design implies a designer, sure, but this designer need not necessarily be God, or any INTELLIGENT designer. We could just say the universe was DESIGNED by nature. So, I don't see your point. But, I do find debate very interesting, SlimBoyFat, so if you'd like to clarify the point you are trying to make with this video, perhaps I could give a more useful comment.
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slimboyfat
My point is that Dawkins undermines his own case. He allows that vastly superior aliens may have created life on earth, he simply objects to them being called God.
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Pika_Chu
I'm thinking he doesn't exactly reject the idea that god created life on earth any more than he rejects the idea that aliens created us. He says its possilbe, but very unlikely that god made us, but more likely that aliens did it. It makes sense if you don't believe in god, trust me. I know.
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PSacramento
If I recall correctly, Richard once said that IF there is a God, it isn't the God of the bible.
I don't think Richard is a 100% atheist in the sense that he leaves no room open for "god", I think he doesn't believe that the God of the bible exists.
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unshackled
Dawkins wrote about Expelled on his own site and explains all...here it is.
This is the specific excerpt where he addresses the hypothetical that Stein asked him to speculate on:
"Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God, this is SCIENCE") and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario.
Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists' whole point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can ultimately come into being. Organized complexity -- and that includes everything capable of designing anything intelligently -- comes LATE into the universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and again in my writings."
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PSacramento
And in one fell swoop, Richard reminds us why atheisim carries a black eye in the hearts of so many:
Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist.
Seriously Richard?
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slimboyfat
Sounds like Dawkins got caught out by his own logic and doesn't like it.
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cofty
LeavingWT has provided the answer straight from the horse's mouth in the video clip "Lying for Jesus".
"And that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence would have had to have come about by some explicable or ultimately explicable process" (2:03)
The point is that the explanation for life will ultimately be one of gradually increasing complexity. All life shares a common origin with a "Last Universal Comon Ancestor - LUCA" It is not impossible that life on earth originated from a source beyond earth - panspermia is a hypothesis but it only removes the question to another place and time. What we cannot do, what makes absolutely no sense at all, is to posit an entity of maximum complexity that just happens to have always existed. That is just a theological placeholder - a god of the gap - that will have to retreat sooner or later. It doesn't answer the dilemma of how complexity arose it just makes the problem even bigger and leads to infinite regress. The solution will lie in the path from simple to complex - bottom-up rather than top-down.
So no Dawkins does not undermine his case at all, he simply makes a concession that abiogenesis may or may not have happened only on earth.
What a horrible deceitful man Stein is!