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Brainwashed... And Lost!!!
ajani_mgo
Veteran
Alright, long long story. In short, it's all about a motivational course me and Argon had to attend in school called "Super-Teens" conducted by this doctorate in cognitive psychology called Ernest Wong.
Scary session. Touching session. Freakish session.
It's a really long story, but was a really inspiring course. But what I didn't like was Ernest using references to a Creator (he stressed that he was not preaching) and disproving the odds of Earth having accidental life. I didn't stand up to argue against him - this was supposed to be a motivational course. But I really, really didn't like how he asked all the atheists in class to pray along with the Christians in the Christian way. I just stood there, arms crossed, utilizing my willpower.
BUT! Scary thing... A few months ago I thought I was weird and a total loser for knowing stuff on human cogntion and quantum physics. THis guy Ernest just comes here and starts to talk about cognition and recommends everyone to go read up on Quantum Physics and everyone is like WOW! And dammit, I think I became normal? (Refer to Thread "The Lousiest Man In The World")
Either way, nowadays in my life, I have been more and more... persuaded by my own self that somehow or other, my life, had been planned for a purpose, and these factors are coming together to give me what I need to do this purpose.. Purpose here refers to the purpose I give myself - to unlock the secrets of the Universe, to make the someone dear to me happy, as well as to create AI.
But! Events that I would otherwise say, simply coincidences, are simply not, because they are not in my control. This course was compulsory - it taught me some stuff about myself and the way I look those around me. Stumbled across more and more Creationist essays and ideals all around - I'm starting to believe in it, skeptical as I am still. There are more examples - so it's either I DO HAVE A GIVEN PURPOSE or it's simply MURPHY'S LAW.
I had a talk with someone I treasure just now. Although she's a Christian, we both agreed that this Ernest guy simply should not use such methods (non-evangelical he claims, but evangelical to me) when the class is at its weakest, where our minds had been broken by his careful reasons, where our feelings had been twisted by his enlightening stories.
I also told her that although I never believe in a Creator, circumstances lead me more and more to believe in one. We are very open about our beliefs despite the fact that we hold very contrasting views. But I told her, this simply doesn't fit in my own head - maybe I need more time to think and change my ideas.
Of course, I know that Buddhism is my best fit still. But somehow or other, before the course, I had thought that my mind would be strong enough to not be changed - but now, my mind is very messed up. Personally I believe in God in being just a psychological reaction, but then that shrink simply have his way with words - he messed up my mind! Alright, not trying to be a dammass, I shall say that he is not evangelising - but very obviously my brain now cannot fight the absence of a Creator.
I could fight against all the views - but now I doubt even Science itself, because no one now can still explain how life started - how inanimate atoms suddenly became "alive". I simply cannot accept the existence of a Creator, because it violates the Cause-and-Effect Principle. Who Created the Creator?
I just wish to listen to everyone's views on this thing, and how you all view God. Faced with a situation like mine, how would you explain it, preferably resulting in a no-God conclusion?
Scary session. Touching session. Freakish session.
It's a really long story, but was a really inspiring course. But what I didn't like was Ernest using references to a Creator (he stressed that he was not preaching) and disproving the odds of Earth having accidental life. I didn't stand up to argue against him - this was supposed to be a motivational course. But I really, really didn't like how he asked all the atheists in class to pray along with the Christians in the Christian way. I just stood there, arms crossed, utilizing my willpower.
BUT! Scary thing... A few months ago I thought I was weird and a total loser for knowing stuff on human cogntion and quantum physics. THis guy Ernest just comes here and starts to talk about cognition and recommends everyone to go read up on Quantum Physics and everyone is like WOW! And dammit, I think I became normal? (Refer to Thread "The Lousiest Man In The World")
Either way, nowadays in my life, I have been more and more... persuaded by my own self that somehow or other, my life, had been planned for a purpose, and these factors are coming together to give me what I need to do this purpose.. Purpose here refers to the purpose I give myself - to unlock the secrets of the Universe, to make the someone dear to me happy, as well as to create AI.
But! Events that I would otherwise say, simply coincidences, are simply not, because they are not in my control. This course was compulsory - it taught me some stuff about myself and the way I look those around me. Stumbled across more and more Creationist essays and ideals all around - I'm starting to believe in it, skeptical as I am still. There are more examples - so it's either I DO HAVE A GIVEN PURPOSE or it's simply MURPHY'S LAW.
I had a talk with someone I treasure just now. Although she's a Christian, we both agreed that this Ernest guy simply should not use such methods (non-evangelical he claims, but evangelical to me) when the class is at its weakest, where our minds had been broken by his careful reasons, where our feelings had been twisted by his enlightening stories.
I also told her that although I never believe in a Creator, circumstances lead me more and more to believe in one. We are very open about our beliefs despite the fact that we hold very contrasting views. But I told her, this simply doesn't fit in my own head - maybe I need more time to think and change my ideas.
Of course, I know that Buddhism is my best fit still. But somehow or other, before the course, I had thought that my mind would be strong enough to not be changed - but now, my mind is very messed up. Personally I believe in God in being just a psychological reaction, but then that shrink simply have his way with words - he messed up my mind! Alright, not trying to be a dammass, I shall say that he is not evangelising - but very obviously my brain now cannot fight the absence of a Creator.
I could fight against all the views - but now I doubt even Science itself, because no one now can still explain how life started - how inanimate atoms suddenly became "alive". I simply cannot accept the existence of a Creator, because it violates the Cause-and-Effect Principle. Who Created the Creator?
I just wish to listen to everyone's views on this thing, and how you all view God. Faced with a situation like mine, how would you explain it, preferably resulting in a no-God conclusion?
0
Comments
This is how I view Buddha's teachings from what I know so far...
Is there a God? I don't know. And really, right now, what does it matter?
Not to be sacriligious(sp?) - but it really plays no import in my life at this moment. I view things that there may be a creator, there may not.
I also don't believe that many of Buddha's teachings are that far off from the teachings of Christ - using Christian teachings for an example.
All the "Right" actions Buddha taught in the Eightfold Path - the teachings of compassion for our fellow man - do not contradict the teachings of Christ. So, I don't believe that following the teachings of Buddha necessarily mean you're a heathen, reprobate or backslider regarding a Christian god.
If at some time a Creator (male or female) becomes known to us - I'll believe it. Until that time - I just don't know - so I don't worry about it.
To me it's like spending my time worrying if an asteroid is going to strike the Earth and kill every living thing on the face of the planet. I could spend time, effort and energy worrying about this - instead of living life - helping others - appreciating those that I love and care for.
I just feel that worrying about things like this is like having your car stuck in mud - but you still just continue to spin your tires and waste your gas.
But, if this is something that concerns "YOU" - you need to find a resolution that works for you. Regardless of what we tell you here.
Hope this makes sense...
-bf
Genesis states that God created Adam.
He then created Woman from Man.
Then they hooked up, got their freak on and had two sons Cain and Abel.
Cain slew Abel.
God put the "mark of the beast" on Cain and left him to wander.
Cain went into the Land of Nod and took up a wife.
Where the hell did SHE come from!?!?!?
If God created man/woman where did this wife come from all of a sudden?
I believed "she" came from Earth's natural evolution. I believed that their mating could be what happened to the "Missing Link".
-bf
Thank you, bf, for offering your opinion. So how am I supposed to reason this big word called "purpose"? I always had believed it was self-made, and self-fulfilled. But somehow now it seems like it's self-made, auto-fulfilled - something I hate, taking away the whole experience of life. Ask God to spend his love elsewhere.
But, Ajani...
What is success?
Where did this figure of 5% come from?
Was Mother Teresa a success? She surely didn't have many material possessions to prove that she was a success.
Is the Dali Lama a success? He doesn't even have a nice car!
Are parents who work hard, live as best as they can and raise their children to be honest, kind and compassionate unsuccessful?
I think success is coming to terms with what you do with yourself in life. Success is a point of view - the sum of what we've heard, what we've been taught, the opinions of teachers, parents, friends, enemies that we've accumulated throughout our entire life. Success can also be the delusions of what our Ego, Self, Desires, Cravings, etc. want.
And there are many "successful" people who are miserable in this life.
-bf
I could be wrong, but it seems to me that (many times) dogmatic people are people who feel safest in the masses of those that believe the same thing as they do. Even though their beliefs do not answer all the questions they truly have.
They have committed themsevles to this "path" of theirs - and even though it's full of holes, confusion, questions and ignorance - and to appear anything less than "manic" in their beliefs will make them appear weak or lacking faith. Which, in their group of peers, is not acceptable or may even appear heretical.
I believe that you are right in your definition of "purpose". I believe we all have our own idea of what "purpose" is - but it's all relative, isn't it? "Purpose" is different from one person to the next.
I think it's things like "purpose" that cause us, as humans, to search like we do.
And you know what? I believe it's a definition you will look for until the day you die.
-bf
Again, I say...
There are many, many people who "as a result of pre-planned actions towards a good goal or something near that" who are not happy within their own skins.
-bf
Somehow or other - I feel, that what Buddhism teaches contradicts what the course teaches. One is relative, the other absolute. Could we be successful by being truly satisfied with whatever we would have? Does success come to the one who leaves positive impacts on others? Or does it come to the one who is focused and has a clear goal?
As I read you, it seems to me that you are getting stuck on a couple of points:
* Is there a God/Creator? If so, what is this God/Creator's nature and relation to creation?
* Does your life have a purpose? If so, what is yours?
It is my belief that both these questions are matters of opinion rather than of fact capable of being demonstrated. In an old English saying, "You pays your money and takes your choice."
Most God-believers tend towards membership of one of the many 'religions' in some sub-section or other. These organisations present a definition of 'God' which satisfies them to some extent whilst, at the same time, suppressing any further investigation into the exact nature of the Divinity. It is interesting to note that each one of this legion of self-perpetuating clubs appears to believe that it has the single correct understanding. To my knowledge, none has yet managed to produce adequate evidence for what they mean by the "existence of God".
That having been said, I am also of the opinion that the anti-theists have not proved their case either, it being simply a negation.
The question of a life purpose is more complex. Here, I think we need to distinguish between four different levels of purpose:
1. There is the 'religious' view that some higher power has set a target outside the individual and towards which that person must tend in order to fulfill the will of that power.
2. There are the expectations of family, friends and society where a child may be seen as carrying out some ambition which is instilled in them from the earliest age.
3. There is the biological imperative: reproduce! Perpetuate your genes!
4. Finally, and, to my mind, most importantly, there is the purpose that you discover for yourself, from within. On this, I have much more to say but enough for now.
Say it Simon! Say it!
I feel like I'm just providing Ajani with more confusion.
-bf
The evidences he put forward for Creationism suffer from logical fallacies and basically just more fallacies. I could refute that - but then, I guess that him using sympathy, sadness and determination, could very easily mask the fallacies. He fiercely advocated the purpose of life right on the first day - which I felt that, according to Simon's post, belonged to something outside the "religious" view.
However today I was disappointed to realize that he was focusing more on this "religious" view than the rest. He can perfectly well stir up emotions to make many believe in such higher purposes - me included. My logic tells me I can wonderfully destroy that, but my feelings tell me otherwise. Is our brain really so weak that it can be fooled just by pure feelings alone? Somehow or other, my brain now takes the "feelings" part as gospel. It's engrained deep into me through the session, and will be disturbing me for some long time...
Tomorrow's the third and last day of the course - Dr Wong will be handing the class over to his fellow colleagues. I hope that will destroy the strong feelings i have in me. Now I see God, in my perception, in my head. I will follow up tomorrow on the whole incident.
I once heard that success has little to do with the thickness of a man's wallet, but the compassion of his heart instead.
Ajani, you're young and alive, bright and inquisitive. That's great! Life is for those on a Quest. Those who have all the answers are too frozen to enjoy the show. They can't get out of the cab, but have to enjoy the whole journey through the barrier of the windows of their hermetically-sealed vehicle.
Free will
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Free will is the philosophical doctrine that holds that we have the power to choose our own deeds. As typically used, the phrase has both objective and subjective connotations, in the former case indicating the performance of an action by an agent that is unconditioned by any antecedent factors, and in the latter case the agent's perception that the action was incepted under his own volition. The principle has religious, ethical, psychological and scientific implications. In the religious realm, free will implies that an omnipotent divinity does not assert its power over our will. In ethics, the implication is that we can be held morally accountable for our actions; in psychology, that the mind controls the actions of the body. In the scientific realm, free will implies that the actions of the body, including the brain, are not wholly determined by physical causality. Several logically independent questions may be asked about free will, and they are considered below.
Contents[hide]· 1 Determinism versus indeterminism· 2 Moral responsibility· 3 Compatibilist theories and the could-have-done-otherwise principle· 4 The science of free will o 4.1 Neurology and psychiatryo 4.2 Determinism and emergent behaviour· 5 In theology o 5.1 In Christian thought § 5.1.1 In Calvinism§ 5.1.2 In Catholicism§ 5.1.3 In Mormonismo 5.2 In Jewish thought· 6 See also· 7 External links
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Determinism versus indeterminism
Determinism holds that each state of affairs is entirely necessitated (determined) by the states of affairs that preceded it, an extension of cause and effect, as well as the laws of nature that govern it. Indeterminism holds this proposition to be incorrect, and that there are events which are not entirely determined by previous states of affairs. The idea of determinism is sometimes illustrated by the story of Laplace's demon, who knows all the facts about the past and present and all the natural laws that govern our world, and uses this knowledge to foresee the future, down to every detail.
Baron d'Holbach
Some philosophers hold that determinism is at odds with free will. This is the doctrine of incompatibilism. Incompatibilists generally claim that a person acts freely (has free will) only in cases where the person is the sole originating cause of the act and the person genuinely could have done otherwise. This kind of free will is (allegedly) incompatible with determinism since, if determinism is true and all states of affairs are fully determined by the past (including events that preceded our births), then every choice we make would ultimately be determined by prior events that were not under our control. In the case that the past conditions (but does not determine) our potential responses, this creates problems with the stipulation that the agent be the sole originating cause of the free act. Our choices would be just one outcome amongst multiple possibilities, all of which are ultimate determined by the past; even if the agent arguably exerts the will freely in choosing amongst the available options, they are not the sole originating cause of the action.
"Hard determinists", such as d'Holbach, are those incompatibilists who accept determinism and reject free will. "Libertarians", such as Thomas Reid, Peter van Inwagen, and Robert Kane are those incompatibilists who accept free will, deny determinism, and instead believe that indeterminism is true. (This kind of libertarianism should not be confused with the political position of the same name, and is thus sometimes known as voluntarism for this very reason.)
Other philosophers hold that determinism is compatible with free will. These "compatibilists", such as Hobbes, generally claim that a person acts freely only in the case where the person willed the act and the person could (hypothetically) have done otherwise if the person had decided to. In articulating this crucial proviso, Hume writes, "this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains". Compatibilists often point to clearcut cases of someone's free will being denied — rape, murder, theft, and so on. The key to these cases is not that the past is determining the future, but that the aggressor is overriding the victim's desires and preferences about his or her own actions. The aggressor is coercing the victim and, according to compatibilists, this is what nullifies free will. In other words, determinism does not matter; what matters is that our choices are the results of our own desires and preferences, and are not overridden by some external (or even internal) force. To be a compatibilist, one need not endorse any particular conception of free will (one need only deny that determinism is at odds with free will), but the positions canvassed here are typical of compatibilism.
Furthermore, it is often held that the phrase "free will" is, as Hobbes put it, "absurd speech", because freedom is a power defined in terms of the will, which is a thing—and so the will is not the sort of thing that could be free or unfree. John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding stated that to call will "free" is to commit oneself to a category mistake:
Whether man's will be free or no? [T]he question itself is altogether improper; and it is as insignificant to ask whether man's will be free, as to ask whether his sleep be swift, or his virtue square: liberty being as little applicable to the will, as swiftness of motion is to sleep, or squareness to virtue. Every one would laugh at the absurdity of such a question as either of these: because it is obvious that the modifications of motion belong not to sleep, nor the difference of figure to virtue; and when one well considers it, I think he will as plainly perceive that liberty, which is but a power, belongs only to agents, and cannot be an attribute or modification of the will, which is also but a power. (Chapter XXI, Paragraph 14}
Locke states that when one declares the will to be free it is assumed that "freedom" is an adjective that may be ascribed to a power - "will" - when it is a power itself, and thus may only be properly ascribed to an agent. Thus, freedom is one power, and will another, "For, who is it that sees not that powers belong only to agents, and are attributes only of substances, and not of powers themselves?" (Chapter XXI, Paragraph 16). Therefore, the will may not, according to Locke, be called free, unless it is demonstrated that the will might be a substance or an agent.
The question also arises whether any caused act may be free or whether any uncaused act may be willed, leaving free will as oxymoronic. Some compatibilists argue that this alleged lack of grounding for the concept of "free will" is at least partly responsible for the perception of a contradiction between determinism and liberty. Also, from a compatibilist point of view the use of "free will" in an incompatibilist sense may be regarded as loaded language.
An interesting way out of this dilemma was proposed by Friedrich Schiller (in his Aesthetic Education of Man) and elaborated by Rudolf Steiner (in his Philosophy of Freedom. Both of these philosophers suggest that our will is initially unfree, and is so whether we act on the basis of ethical or moral principles (wholly rationally) or as we are driven by the force of our natural desires and drives (wholly naturally). Schiller suggests that the solution is found in a playful balance between these two extremes of rational principle and bodily desires. When we can playfully move between various motives or impulses we are free to discover what Steiner calls moral imaginations, or situation-dependent realizations of our higher intentions. Freedom is thus not a natural state, but it can be attained through the activity of self-reflective yet playful consciousness.
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Moral responsibility
We generally hold people responsible for their actions, and will say that they deserve praise or blame for what they do. However, many believe moral responsibility to require free will, in other words, the ability to do otherwise. Thus, another important issue is whether we are ever morally responsible, and if so, in what sense.
Incompatibilists tend to think that determinism is at odds with moral responsibility. After all, how can one hold someone responsible for an action that could be predicted from the beginning of time? Hard determinists say "So much the worse for moral responsibility!" and discard the concept — Clarence Darrow famously used this argument to defend the murderers Leopold and Loeb — while, conversely, libertarians say "So much the worse for determinism!" This issue appears to be the heart of the dispute between hard determinists and compatibilists; hard determinists are forced to accept that we often have "free will" in the compatibilist sense, but they deny that this sense of free will truly matters — that it can ground moral responsibility. Just because an agent's choices are uncoerced, hard determinists claim, does not change the fact that determinism robs the agent of responsibility.
Compatibilists often argue that, on the contrary, determinism is a prerequisite for moral responsibility — you can't hold someone responsible unless his actions were determined by something (this argument can be traced to Hume and was also used by the anarchist William Godwin). After all, if indeterminism is true, then those events that are not determined are random. How can one blame or praise someone for performing an action that just spontaneously popped into his nervous system? Instead, they argue, one needs to show how the action stemmed from the person's desires and preferences — the person's character — before one starts holding the person morally responsible. Libertarians sometimes reply that undetermined actions are not random at all, and that they result from a substantive will whose decisions are undetermined. This argument is widely considered unsatisfactory, for it just pushes the problem back a step, and further, it involves some very mysterious metaphysics. See Ex nihilo nihil fit
St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans addresses the question of moral responsibility as follows: "Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?" (Romans 9:21). In this view, we can still be dishonoured for our acts even though they were ultimately completely determined by God.
A similar view has it that our moral culpability lies in our character. That is, a person with the character of a murderer has no choice other than murder, but can still be punished because it is right to punish those of bad character.
A business venture can be incorporated or given the legal fiction of personhood. This model may be an apt analogy for the individual person, who can also be seen as a legal fiction. There is no stable core elements that do not undergo changes over time yet the whole, the person, is considered the same from birth to death. Thus Stanley Williams age 52 was executed for a crime committed by Stanley Williams age 28. Thus the corporate self can be rewarded and punished legally, whether it be a business or a living being. The question of free will need not enter into this, as the issue is not freedom, but the impact upon other agents. A corporation makes decisions based on the decisions of the people who make up the corporation, a human being makes its decisions based on the decision processes of groups of cells.
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Compatibilist theories and the could-have-done-otherwise principle
Many claim that, in order for a choice to be free in any sense that matters, it must be true that the agent could have done otherwise. They take this principle — van Inwagen calls it the "principle of alternate possibilities" — to be a necessary condition for freedom. The philosopher of ideas Isaiah Berlin made much the same point.
The claim is that, for example, if a criminal puts a machine in Bob's brain that makes him kill a stranger, his action was not free, for Bob couldn't have done otherwise. Incompatibilists often appeal to this principle to show that determinism cannot be reconciled with free will. "If a decision is completely determined by the past," they ask, "how could the agent have decided to do something else?" Compatibilists often reply that what's important is not simply that the agent could have done otherwise, but that the agent could have done otherwise if he or she had wanted to. Moreover, some compatibilists, such as Harry Frankfurt or Daniel Dennett, argue that there are stark cases where, even though the agent couldn't have done otherwise, the agent's choice was still free: what if Bob really wanted to kill the stranger and the machine in Bob's brain would only kick in if Bob lost his nerve? If Bob went through with it on his own, surely the act would be free. Incompatibilists claim that the problem with this idea is that what Bob "wanted" was determined before Bob was conceived. In Elbow Room, Dennett presents an argument for a compatibilist theory of free will. He elaborated further in the 2003 book Freedom Evolves. The basic reasoning is that, if we do not consider God (or an infinitely powerful demon) or time travel, then through chaos and pseudo-randomness or quantum randomness, the future is ill-defined for all finite beings. The only well-defined concepts are "expectations". Thus, the ability to do "otherwise" only makes sense when dealing with expectations, and not with some unknown and unknowable future. Since we certainly have the ability to do differently from what anyone expects, free will can exist.
The philosopher John Locke also took the view that determinism was irrelevant. He believed, however, the defining feature of free will to be that we are free so long as we have the ability to postpone a decision long enough to reflect upon the consequences of a choice.
More sophisticated analyses of compatibilist free will have been offered, as have other critiques.
William James, both philosopher and psychologist, gave the label soft determinism to the position nowadays known as compatibilism, and complained that soft determinist formulations were "a quagmire of evasion under which the real issue of fact has been entirely smothered." But James' own views were somewhat ambivalent. While he believed in free will on "ethical grounds," he believed there was no evidence for it on scientific or psychological grounds.
Moreover, he didn't believe in incompatibilism as formulated above, i.e. he didn't believe that the indeterminism of human actions was a requirement of moral responsibility. In his classic work Pragmatism, (1907) he wrote that, "Instinct and utility between them can safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment and praise" regardless of metaphysical theories. But he did believe that indeterminism is important as a "doctrine of relief" -- it allows for the view that, although the world may be in many respects a bad place, it may through our actions become a better one. Determinism, he argued, undermines that meliorism.
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The science of free will
Throughout the history of science, attempts have been made to answer the question of free will using scientific principles. Early scientific thought often pictured the universe as deterministic, and some thinkers believed that it was simply a matter of gathering sufficient information to be able to predict future events with perfect accuracy. This encourages us to see free will as an illusion. Modern science is a mixture of deterministic and stochastic theories. For example, radioactive decay occurs with predictable probability, but it is not possible even in theory to tell when a particular nucleus will decay. Quantum mechanics only predicts observations in terms of probabilities.
The leading contemporary philosopher who has capitalized on the success of quantum mechanics and chaos theory in order to defend incompatibilist freedom is Robert Kane, in The Significance of Free Will and several other writings.
Like physicists, biologists have also frequently addressed the question of free will. One of the most heated debates of biology is that of "nature versus nurture". How important are genetics and biology in human behaviour compared to culture and environment? Genetic studies have identified many specific genetic factors that affect the personality of the individual, from obvious cases such as Down syndrome to more subtle effects such as a statistical predisposition towards schizophrenia. However, it is not certain that environmental determination is less threatening to free will than genetic determination. The latest analysis of the human genome shows it to have only about 20,000 genes. These genes, and the reconsidered intron genetic material, and the newly-described MiRNA allow a level of molecular complexity analogous to the complexity of human behavior. Desmond Morris and other evolutionary anthropologists have studied the relationship between behavior and natural selection in humans and other primates. The synthesis of these two fields of inquiry is that human genetics may be sufficiently complex to explain behavioral tendencies, and that (evolutionarily advantageous) environmental factors such as parental behavior and cultural standards modulate these genetic factors. Neither of these phenomena, genetic complexity nor advantageous cultural behaviors, require free will to explain human behavior.
It has also become possible to study the living brain and researchers can now watch the decision-making "machinery" at work. A seminal experiment in this field was conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, wherein he asked subjects to choose a random moment to flick their wrist while he watched the associated activity in their brains. Libet found that the unconscious brain activity leading up to the conscious decision by the subject to flick his or her wrist began approximately half a second before the subject consciously decided to move. This build up of electrical charge has come to be called readiness potential. Libet's findings suggest that decisions made by a subject are actually first being made on a subconscious level and only afterward being translated into a "conscious decision", and that the subject's belief that it occurred at the behest of their will was only due to their retrospective perspective on the event. However, Libet still finds room in his model for free will, in the notion of the power of veto: according to this model, unconscious impulses to perform a volitional act are open to suppression by the conscious efforts of the subject. It should be noted that this does not mean that Libet believes unconsciously impelled actions require the ratification of consciousness, but rather that consciousness retains the power to, as it were, deny the actualisation of unconscious impulses.
A related experiment performed later by Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone involved asking subjects to choose at random which of their hands to move. He found that by stimulating different hemispheres of the brain using magnetic fields it was possible to strongly influence which hand the subject picked. Normally right-handed people would choose to move their right hand 60% of the time, for example, but when the right hemisphere was stimulated they would instead choose their left hand 80% of the time (recall that the right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for the left side of the body, and the left hemisphere for the right). Despite the external influence on their decision-making, the subjects continued to report that they believed their choice of hand had been made freely. Libet himself (e.g. Libet, 2003: 'Can Conscious Experience affect brain Activity? ', Journal of Consciousness Studies 10, nr. 12, pp 24 - 28), however, does not interpret his experiment as evidence of the inefficacy of conscious free will — he points out that although the tendency to press a button may be building up for 500 milliseconds, the conscious will retains a right to veto that action in the last few milliseconds. A comparison is made with a golfer, who may swing the club several times before striking the ball. In this view, the action simply gets, as it were, a rubber stamp of approval at the last millisecond. Also, for planning tomorrow's activities or those in an hour millisecond offsets are insignificant.
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Neurology and psychiatry
There are several brain-related disorders that might be termed free will disorders: In obsessive-compulsive disorder a patient may feel an overwhelming urge, e.g., to wash his hands many times a day, and he will recognize the desire as his desire although out of his control. In Tourette's and related syndromes patients will involuntarily make movements (tics) and utterances. In alien hand syndrome (also called Dr. Strangelove syndrome, after the popular film) the patient's limb will make meaningful acts without the intention of the subject.
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Determinism and emergent behaviour
In emergentist or generative philosophy of cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, free will is the generation of infinite behaviour from the interaction of finite-deterministic set of rules and parameters. Thus the unpredictability of the emerging behaviour from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, though free will as an ontological entity does not exist.
As an illustration, the strategy board-games chess and more so Go are rigorously deterministic in their rules and parameters, expressed in terms of the positions of the pieces or entities in relation to other entities on the board. Yet, chess and Go with their strict rigour and rules, generate more moves and unpredictable behaviour than any other games in existence. By analogy, emergentists or generativists suggest that the experience of free will emerges from the interaction of finite rules and deterministic parameters that generate infinite and unpredictable behaviour.
Dynamical-evolutionary psychology, cellular automata and the generative sciences, model emergent processes of social behaviour on this philosophy, showing the perception of free will being external to causality as essentially a gift of ignorance or as a product of incomplete information.
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In theology
The theological doctrine of divine foreknowledge is often alleged to be in conflict with free will. After all, if God knows exactly what will happen, right down to every choice one makes, how can one's choices be free? God's already true or timelessly true knowledge about one's choices seems to constrain one's freedom. This problem is related to the Aristotelian problem of the sea-battle: tomorrow there will or will not be a sea-battle. If there will be one, then it was true yesterday that there would be one. Then it would be necessary that the sea battle will occur. If there won't be one, then by similar reasoning, it is necessary that it won't occur. This means that the future, whatever it is, is completely fixed by past truths — true propositions about the future. (However, some philosophers hold that necessity and possibility are defined with respect to a given point in time and a given matrix of empirical circumstances, and so something that is merely possible from the perspective of one observer may be necessary from the perspective of an omniscient.) Some philosophers believe that free will is equivalent to having a soul, and thus that (at least some) animals do not have free will. Jewish philosophy stresses that free will is a product of the intrinsic human soul (neshama).
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In Christian thought
In Christian theology, God is described as not only omniscient but omnipotent, which some people, but not most, (Christians and non-Christians alike) believe implies that not only has God always known what choices you will make tomorrow, but actually chose what you would choose. That is, they believe, by virtue of His foreknowledge He knows what will influence your choices, and by virtue of His omnipotence He controls those factors. This becomes especially important for the doctrines relating to salvation and predestination. Other branches, however, believe that while God is omnipotent and knows the choices that you will make, He still allows you to make the decisions, hence creating "free" will and making you responsible for your actions. This, however, does not make logical sense, because if one knows what you will do, you do not have a choice as to whether or not you do it.
Proponents of the opposing view would make the point that knowledge of a future happening is entirely different than causing the event to happen. The definition of predestination varies among Christians. Many hold that it does not imply that God chose certain people to receive salvation and the rest have no chance of salvation, but rather, He knows that not everyone will choose salvation, and He specifically knows who will and who won't. The Bible says of God, "...God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:3-4, NIV).
Free will is also a point of debate among both sides of the Christian communism theory. Because some Christians interpret the Bible as advocating that the ideal form of society is communism, opponents of this theory maintain that the establishment of a large-scale communist system would infringe upon the free will of individuals by denying them the freedom to make certain decisions for themselves. Christian communists adamantly oppose this by arguing that free will has and always will be limited to some extent by human laws.
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In Calvinism
Calvinists embrace the idea that God chose who would be saved from before the creation. They quote Ephesians 1:4 "For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight." In its purist form, Calvinism is an extreme version of theological determinism. One of the strongest defenders of this theological point of view was the Puritan-American preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards.
Edwards believed that indeterminism was incompatible with our dependence on God and hence with his sovereignty. He reasoned that if our responses to God's grace are contra-causally free, then our salvation depends partly on us and therefore God's sovereignty isn't "absolute and universal." Edward's book Freedom of the Will defends theological determinism. In this book, Edwards attempts to show that libertarianism is incoherent. For example, he argues that by ‘self-determination’ the libertarian must mean either that one's actions including one's acts of willing are preceded by an act of free will or that one's acts of will lack sufficient causes. The first leads to an infinite regress while the second implies that acts of will happen accidentally and hence can't make someone "better or worse, any more than a tree is better than other trees because it oftener happens to be lit upon by a swan or nightingale; or a rock more vicious than other rocks, because rattlesnakes have happened oftener to crawl over it." (Freedom of the Will, 1754; Edwards 1957-, vol. 1, 327).
Non-Calvinist Christians attempt a reconciliation of the dual concepts of Predestination (determinism) and free will by pointing to the situation of God as Christ. In taking the form of a man, a necessary element of this process was that Jesus Christ lived the existence of a mortal. When Jesus was born he was not born with the omniscient power of God the Creator, but with the mind of a human child - yet he was still fully God. The precedent this creates is that God is able to abandon knowledge (or ignore knowledge) while still remaining God. Thus it is not inconceivable that although omniscience demands that God knows what the future holds for us, it is within his power to deny this knowledge in order to preserve our free will.
However, a reconciliation more compatible with non-Calvinist theology states that God is, in fact, not aware of future events, but rather, being eternal, He is outside time, and sees the past, present, and future as one whole creation. Consequently, it is not as though God would know that Jeffrey Dahmer (for example) would become guilty of homicide years prior to the event, but that He was aware of it from all eternity, viewing all time as a single present.
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In Catholicism
Free will is important in the Catholic Church, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas being major early figures in the history of the concept. Catholic Christianity's emphasis on free will and grace is generally in contrast to the emphasis on predestination in Protestant Christianity, specially after the Counter-Reformation (see the link to Catholic Encyclopedia below for more).
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In Mormonism
Mormons or Latter-day Saints, believe that God has given all humans the gift of free will (agency) where the ultimate goal is to return to His presence. David O. McKay, former prophet and president of the Church, stated, "It is the purpose of the Lord that man become like him. In order for man to achieve this it was necessary for the Creator first to make him free." (In Conference Report, Apr. 1950, 32.)
As for the conflict between predestination and free will, Latter-day Saints believe that God foreordained men to particular stations in life in order to advance His plan to lead humanity back to His presence. These foreordinations were not unalterable decrees, but rather callings from God for man to perform specific missions in mortality. Men are ultimately responsible for their own destiny, through their faith and obedience to the commandments of God. "Free agency" therefore should not be interpreted to mean that actions are without consequences; "free" means that it is a gift from God and consequences must necessarily come as a result of choices made. Thus free agency and accountability are complementary and cannot be separated.
A major difference, and a key insight to Mormons' understanding of free agency (will), between mainstream Christians and Latter-day Saints involves the belief of a life before mortality. Latter-day Saints believe that before the earth was created, all mankind lived in a pre-existent life as spirit children (Hebrews 12:9) of God. Here God, their Father, nurtured, taught and provided means for their development, but never robbed them of their free agency (Doctrine and Covenants 29:35). In this pre-existing state they could learn, choose, grow or retrograde even as on earth. This preparation would allow them to later become the men and women of earth, to be further educated and tested in the schoolhouse of mortality in order to return to God's presence and become like Him. Thus the pre-existent life is believed to have been an infinitely long period of probation, progression, and schooling. Some of the spirit children of God, so exercised their agency and so conformed to God’s law as to become "noble and great"; these were foreordained before their mortal births to perform great missions for the Lord in this life (Abraham 3:22-28). But even these who were foreordained for greatness could fall and transgress the laws of God. Therefore, mortality is simply a state wherein progression and testing is continued from what began in the pre-existence. Without free agency, mortality would be useless.
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In Jewish thought
The belief in Free will (Hebrew: bechirah chofshith בחירה חפשית, bechirah בחירה) is axiomatic in Jewish thought, and is closely linked with the concept of reward and punishment, based on the Torah itself: "I [God] have set before you life and death, blessing and curse: therefore choose life" (Deuteronomy 30:19). Free will is therefore discussed at length in Jewish philosophy, firstly as regards God's purpose in creation, and secondly as regards the closely related, resultant, paradox.
The traditional teaching regarding the purpose of creation, particularly as influenced by Jewish mysticism, is that "This world is like a corridor to the World to Come" (Pirkei Avoth 4:16). "Man was created for the sole purpose of rejoicing in God, and deriving pleasure from the splendor of His Presence… The place where this joy may truly be derived is the World to Come, which was expressly created to provide for it; but the path to the object of our desires is this world..." (Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim, Ch.1). Free will is thus required by God's justice, “otherwise, Man would not be given or denied good for actions over which he had no control” [1]. It is further understood that in order for Man to have true free choice, he must not only have inner free will, but also an environment in which a choice between obedience and disobedience exists. God thus created the world such that both good and evil can operate freely [2]; this is the meaning of the Rabbinic maxim, "All is in the hands of Heaven except the fear of Heaven" (Talmud, Berachot 33b).
In Rabbinic literature, there is much discussion as to the contradiction between God's omniscience and free will. The representative view is that "Everything is foreseen; yet freewill is given" (Rabbi Akiva, Pirkei Avoth 3:15). Based on this understanding, the problem is formally described as a paradox, beyond our understanding.
“The Holy One, Blessed Be He, knows everything that will happen before it has happened. So does He know whether a particular person will be righteous or wicked, or not? If He does know, then it will be impossible for that person not to be righteous. If He knows that he will be righteous but that it is possible for him to be wicked, then He does not know everything that He has created. ...[T]he Holy One, Blessed Be He, does not have any temperaments and is outside such realms, unlike people, whose selves and temperaments are two separate things. God and His temperaments are one, and God's existence is beyond the comprehension of Man… [Thus] we do not have the capabilities to comprehend how the Holy One, Blessed Be He, knows all creations and events. [Nevertheless] know without doubt that people do what they want without the Holy One, Blessed Be He, forcing or decreeing upon them to do so... It has been said because of this that a man is judged according to all his actions.” (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Teshuva 5:5)
(The paradox is explained, but not resolved, by observing that God exists outside of time, and therefore, His knowledge of the future is exactly the same as His knowledge of the past and present. Just as His knowledge of the past does not interfere with man's free will, neither does His knowledge of the future [3]. One analogy is that of Time travel: The time traveller, having returned from the future, knows in advance what x will do, but while he knows what x will do, that knowledge does not cause x to do so; x had free will, even while the time traveller had foreknowledge. This distinction, between foreknowledge and predestination, is in fact discussed by Maimonides' critic Abraham ibn Daud; see Hasagat HaRABaD ad loc.)
Although the above represents the majority view in Rabbinic thought, there are several major thinkers who resolve the paradox by explicitly excluding human action from divine foreknowledge. Both Saadia Gaon and Judah ha-Levi hold that "the decisions of man precede God's knowledge" [4]. Gersonides holds that God knows, beforehand, the choices open to each individual, but does not know which choice the individual, in his freedom, will make. Isaiah Horowitz takes the view that God cannot know which moral choices people will make, but that, nevertheless, this does not impair His perfection. See further discussion in the article on Gersonides.
The existence of free will, and the paradox above (as addressed by either approach), is closely linked to the concept of Tzimtzum. Tzimtzum entails the idea that God "constricted" his infinite essence, to allow for the existence of a "conceptual space" in which a finite, independent world could exist. This "constriction" made free will possible, and hence the potential to earn the World to Come. Further (according to the first approach), it is understood that the Free-will Omniscience paradox provides a temporal parallel to the paradox inherent within Tzimtzum. In granting free will, God has somehow "constricted" his foreknowledge, to allow for Man's independent action; He thus has foreknowledge and yet free will exists. In the case of Tzimtzum, God has "constricted" his essence to allow for Man's independent existence; He is thus immanent and yet transcendent.
See the related treatment of Negative theology, Divine simplicity and Divine Providence in Jewish thought, as well as Jewish principles of faith in general.
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See also
· Block time
· Civil disobedience
· Consciousness
· Christian anarchism
· Christian communism
· Determinism
· Daniel Dennett
· Elbow Room
· The free will theorem
· Gödel, Escher, Bach
· Robert Kane
· Philosophy of Freedom
· Predestination
· Prevenient grace
· Problem of evil
· Newcomb's paradox
· Randomness
· Responsibility assumption
· Self-ownership
· The Sirens of Titan
· Slaughterhouse-Five
· Stapp, Henry
· Teleology
· Theodicy
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External links
· Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
o Free Will
o Incompatibilism
o Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will
· Garden of Forking Paths - a blog by philosophers working on philosophy of action and free will
· Article at Roman Catholic Encyclopedia
· Article at Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
· Article at Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website
· Article at h2g2
· An Introduction to Free Will and Determinism by Paul Newall, aimed at beginners.
· Article at Jewish Encyclopedia
· Free Will from a conservative Calvinist perspective
· Repentance and Predestination in Jewish Thought
· The Paradox of Free Choice from a Jewish perspective, Discussess Determinism, Robotism, Prescience, Omnipotence, Oneness and Primal Cause
· Super Free Will: Metaprogramming and Quantum Indeterminism
· Libertarian Accounts of Free Will, by Randolph Clarke (electronic version of print book ISBN 019515987X)
· egodeath.com Ego Death and Self-Control Cybernetics - A discussion of dissociation, cybernetics, determinism, and metaphor.
· The incompatibility of human freedom and Christianity
Design arguments are empirical arguments for God’s existence. These arguments typically, though not always, proceed by identifying various empirical features of the world that constitute evidence of intelligent design and inferring God’s existence as the best explanation for these features. Since the concepts of design and purpose are closely related, design arguments are also known as “teleological arguments,” which incorporates “telos,” the Greek word for “goal” or “purpose.” Design arguments, then, typically consist of (1) a premise that asserts that the material universe exhibits some empirical property F; (2) a premise (or sub-argument) that asserts (or concludes) that F is persuasive evidence of intelligent design or purpose; and (3) a premise (or sub-argument) that asserts (or concludes) that the best or most probable explanation for the fact that the material universe exhibits F is that there exists an intelligent designer who intentionally brought it about that the material universe exists and exhibits F. There are a number of classic and contemporary versions of the argument: (1) Aquinas’s “fifth way’; (2) the argument from simple analogy; (3) Paley’s watchmaker argument; (4) the argument from guided evolution; (5) the argument from irreducible biochemical complexity; (6) the argument from biological information; and (7) the fine-tuning argument. Table of Contents (Clicking on the links below will take you to those parts of this article)1. The Classical Versions of the Design Argument a. Scriptural Roots and Aquinas's Fifth Way b. The Argument from Simple Analogy c. Paley's Watchmaker Argument d. Guided Evolution 2. Contemporary Versions of the Design Argument a. The Argument from Irreducible Biochemical Complexity b. The Argument from Biological Information c. The Fine-Tuning Arguments i. The Argument from Suspicious Improbability ii. The Confirmatory Argument 3. The Scientifically Legitimate Uses of Design Inferences 4. References and Further Reading 1. The Classical Versions of the Design Argumenta. Scriptural Roots and Aquinas's Fifth WayThe scriptures of each of the major classically theistic religions contain language that suggests that there is evidence of divine design in the world. Psalms 19:1 of the Old Testament, scripture to both Judaism and Christianity, states that "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." Similarly, Romans 1:19-21 of the New Testament states:For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse. Further, Koran 31:20 asks "Do you not see that Allah has made what is in the heavens and what is in the earth subservient to you, and made complete to you His favors outwardly and inwardly?" While these verses do not specifically indicate which properties or features of the world are evidence of God's intelligent nature, each presupposes that the world exhibits such features and that they are readily discernable to a reasonably conscientious agent. Perhaps the earliest philosophically rigorous version of the design argument owes to St. Thomas Aquinas. According to Aquinas's Fifth Way:We see that things which lack knowledge, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that they achieve their end, not fortuitously, but designedly. Now whatever lacks knowledge cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is directed by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God (Aquinas, Article 3, Question 2).It is worth noting that Aquinas's version of the argument relies on a very strong claim about the explanation for ends and processes: the existence of any end-directed system or process can be explained, as a logical matter, only by the existence of an intelligent being who directs that system or process towards its end. Since the operations of all natural bodies, on Aquinas's view, are directed towards some specific end that conduces to, at the very least, the preservation of the object, these operations can be explained only by the existence of an intelligent being. Accordingly, the empirical fact that the operations of natural objects are directed towards ends shows that an intelligent Deity exists.This crucial claim, however, seems to be refuted by the mere possibility of an evolutionary explanation. If a Darwinian explanation is even coherent (i.e., non-contradictory, as opposed to true), then it provides a logically possible explanation for how the end-directedness of the operations of living beings in this world might have come about. According to this explanation, such operations evolve through a process by which random genetic mutations are naturally selected for their adaptive value; organisms that have evolved some system that performs a fitness-enhancing operation are more likely to survive and leave offspring, other things being equal, than organisms that have not evolved such systems. If this explanation is possibly true, it shows that Aquinas is wrong in thinking that "whatever lacks knowledge cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence." Back to Table of Contentsb. The Argument from Simple AnalogyThe next important version of the design argument came in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Pursuing a strategy that has been adopted by the contemporary intelligent design movement, John Ray, Richard Bentley, and William Derham drew on scientific discoveries of the 16th and 17th Century to argue for the existence of an intelligent Deity. William Derham, for example, saw evidence of intelligent design in the vision of birds, the drum of the ear, the eye-socket, and the digestive system. Richard Bentley saw evidence of intelligent design in Newton's discovery of the law of gravitation. It is noteworthy that each of these thinkers attempted to give scientifically-based arguments for the existence of God.David Hume is the most famous critic of these arguments. In Part II of his famous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume formulates the argument as follows: Look round the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it: you will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human designs, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since, therefore, the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man, though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work which he has executed. By this argument a posteriori, and by this argument alone, do we prove at once the existence of a Deity, and his similarity to human mind and intelligence. Since the world, on this analysis, is closely analogous to the most intricate artifacts produced by human beings, we can infer "by all the rules of analogy" the existence of an intelligent designer who created the world. Just as the watch has a watchmaker, then, the universe has a universe-maker.As expressed in this passage, then, the argument is a straightforward argument from analogy with the following structure:1.The material universe resembles the intelligent productions of human beings in that it exhibits design.2.The design in any human artifact is the effect of having been made by an intelligent being.3.Like effects have like causes.4.Therefore, the design in the material universe is the effect of having been made by an intelligent creator.Hume criticizes the argument on two main grounds. First, Hume rejects the analogy between the material universe and any particular human artifact. As Hume states the relevant rule of analogy, "wherever you depart in the least, from the similarity of the cases, you diminish proportionably the evidence; and may at last bring it to a very weak analogy, which is confessedly liable to error and uncertainty" (Hume, Dialogues, Part II). Hume then goes on to argue that the cases are simply too dissimilar to support an inference that they are like effects having like causes: If we see a house,… we conclude, with the greatest certainty, that it had an architect or builder because this is precisely that species of effect which we have experienced to proceed from that species of cause. But surely you will not affirm that the universe bears such a resemblance to a house that we can with the same certainty infer a similar cause, or that the analogy is here entire and perfect (Hume, Dialogues, Part II). Since the analogy fails, Hume argues that we would need to have experience with the creation of material worlds in order to justify any a posteriori claims about the causes of any particular material world; since we obviously lack such experience, we lack adequate justification for the claim that the material universe has an intelligent cause. Second, Hume argues that, even if the resemblance between the material universe and human artifacts justified thinking they have similar causes, it would not justify thinking that an all-perfect God exists and created the world. For example, there is nothing in the argument that would warrant the inference that the creator of the universe is perfectly intelligent or perfectly good. Indeed, Hume argues that there is nothing there that would justify thinking even that there is just one deity: "what shadow of an argument... can you produce from your hypothesis to prove the unity of the Deity? A great number of men join in building a house or ship, in rearing a city, in framing a commonwealth; why may not several deities combine in contriving and framing a world" (Hume Dialogues, Part V)? Back to Table of Contentsc. Paley's Watchmaker ArgumentThough often confused with the argument from simple analogy, William Paley's watchmaker argument is a more sophisticated design argument that attempts to avoid Hume's objection to the analogy between worlds and artifacts. Instead of simply asserting a similarity between the material world and some human artifact, Paley's argument proceeds by identifying what he takes to be a reliable indicator of intelligent design: uppose I found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think … that, for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for [a] stone [that happened to be lying on the ground]?… For this reason, and for no other; viz., that, if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, if a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it (Paley, 1).There are thus two features of a watch that reliably indicate that it is the result of an intelligent design. First, it performs some function that an intelligent agent would regard as valuable; the fact that the watch performs the function of keeping time is something that has value to an intelligent agent. Second, the watch could not perform this function if its parts and mechanisms were differently sized or arranged; the fact that the ability of a watch to keep time depends on the precise shape, size, and arrangement of its parts suggests that the watch has these characteristics because some intelligent agency designed it to these specifications. Taken together, these two characteristics endow the watch with a functional complexity that reliably distinguishes objects that have intelligent designers from objects that do not.Paley then goes on to argue that the material universe exhibits the same kind of functional complexity as a watch: Every indicator of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater and more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation. I mean that the contrivances of nature surpass the contrivances of art, in the complexity, subtilty, and curiosity of the mechanism; and still more, if possible, do they go beyond them in number and variety; yet in a multitude of cases, are not less evidently mechanical, not less evidently contrivances, not less evidently accommodated to their end, or suited to their office, than are the most perfect productions of human ingenuity (Paley, 13).Since the works of nature possess functional complexity, a reliable indicator of intelligent design, we can justifiably conclude that these works were created by an intelligent agent who designed them to instantiate this property.Paley's watchmaker argument is clearly not vulnerable to Hume’s criticism that the works of nature and human artifacts are too dissimilar to infer that they are like effects having like causes. Paley's argument, unlike arguments from analogy, does not depend on premise asserting a general resemblance between the objects of comparison. What matters for Paley's argument is that works of nature and human artifacts have a particular property that reliably indicates design. Regardless of how dissimilar any particular natural object might otherwise be from a watch, both objects exhibit the sort of functional complexity that warrants an inference that it was made by an intelligent designer.Paley's version of the argument, however, is generally thought to have been refuted by Darwin’s competing explanation for complex organisms. In The Origin of the Species, Darwin argued that more complex biological organisms evolved gradually over millions of years from simpler organisms through a process of natural selection. As Julian Huxley describes the logic of this process:The evolutionary process results immediately and automatically from the basic property of living matter - that of self-copying, but with occasional errors. Self-copying leads to multiplication and competition; the errors in self-copying are what we call mutations, and mutations will inevitably confer different degrees of biological advantage or disadvantage on their possessors. The consequence will be differential reproduction down the generations - in other words, natural selection (Huxley 1953, 4).Over time, the replication of genetic material in an organism results in mutations that give rise to new traits in the organism's offspring. Sometimes these new traits are so unfavorable to a being’s survival prospects that beings with the traits die off; but sometimes these new traits enable the possessors to survive conditions that kill off beings without them. If the trait is sufficiently favorable, only members of the species with the trait will survive. By this natural process, functionally complex organisms gradually evolve over millions of years from primordially simple organisms.Contemporary biologist Richard Dawkins uses a programming problem to show that the logic of the process renders the Darwinian explanation significantly more probable than the design explanation. Dawkins considers two ways in which one might program a computer to generate the following sequence of characters: METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL. The first program randomly producing a new 28-character sequence each time it is run; since the program starts over each time, it incorporates a "single-step selection process." The probability of randomly generating the target sequence on any given try is 2728 (i.e., 27 characters selected for each of the 28 positions in the sequence) - which amounts to about 1 in (10,000 x 1,000,0006). While a computer running eternally would eventually produce the sequence, Dawkins estimates that it would take 1,000,0005 years — which is 1,000,0003 years longer than the universe has existed. As is readily evident, a program that selects numbers by means of such a "single-step selection mechanism" has a very low probability of reaching the target.The second program incorporates a "cumulative-step selection mechanism." It begins by randomly generating a 28-character sequence of letters and spaces and then "breeds" from this sequence in the following way. For a specified period of time, it generates copies of itself; most of the copies perfectly replicate the sequence, but some copies have errors (or mutations). At the end of this period, it compares all of the sequences with the target sequence METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL and keeps the sequence that most closely resembles it. For example, a sequence that has an E in the second place more closely resembles a sequence that is exactly like the first except that it has a Q in the second place. It then begins breeding from this new sequence in exactly the same way. Unlike the first program which starts afresh with each try, the second program builds on previous steps, getting successively closer to the program as it breeds from the sequence closest to the target. This feature of the program increases the probability of reaching the sequence to such an extent that a computer running this program hit the target sequence after 43 generations, which took about half-an-hour.The problem with Paley's watchmaker argument, as Dawkins explains it, is that it falsely assumes that all of the other possible competing explanations are sufficiently improbable to warrant an inference of design. While this might be true of explanations that rely entirely on random single-step selection mechanisms, this is not true of Darwinian explanations. As is readily evident from Huxley's description of the process, Darwinian evolution is a cumulative-step selection method that closely resembles in general structure the second computer program. The result is that the probability of evolving functionally complex organisms capable of surviving a wide variety of conditions is increased to such an extent that it exceeds the probability of the design explanation. Back to Table of Contentsd. Guided EvolutionWhile many theists are creationists who accept the occurrence of "microevolution" (i.e., evolution that occurs within a species, such as the evolution of penicillin-resistant bacteria) but deny the occurrence of "macroevolution" (i.e., one species evolving from a distinct species), some theists accept the theory of evolution as consistent with theism and with their own denominational religious commitments. Such thinkers, however, frequently maintain that the existence of God is needed to explain the purposive quality of the evolutionary process. Just as the purposive quality of the cumulative-step computer program above is best explained by intelligent design, so too the purposive quality of natural selection is best explained by intelligent design.The first theist widely known to have made such an argument is Frederick Robert Tennant. As he puts the matter in Volume 2 of Philosophical Theology, "the multitude of interwoven adaptations by which the world is constituted a theatre of life, intelligence, and morality, cannot reasonably be regarded as an outcome of mechanism, or of blind formative power, or aught but purposive intelligence" (Tennant, 121). In effect, this influential move infers design, not from the existence of functionally complex organisms, but from the purposive quality of the evolutionary process itself. Evolution is, on this line of response, guided by an intelligent Deity. Back to Table of Contents2. Contemporary Versions of the Design ArgumentContemporary versions of the design argument typically attempt to articulate a more sophisticated strategy for detecting evidence of design in the world. These versions typically contain three main elements - though they are not always explicitly articulated. First, they identify some property P that is thought to be a probabilistically reliable index of design in the following sense: a design explanation for P is significantly more probable than any explanation that relies on chance or random processes. Second they argue that some feature or features of the world exhibits P. Third, they conclude that the design explanation is significantly more likely to be true.As we will see, however, all of the contemporary versions of the design inference seem to be vulnerable to roughly the same objection. While each of the design inferences in these arguments has legitimate empirical uses, those uses occur only in contexts where we have strong antecedent reason for believing there exist intelligent agents with the ability to bring about the relevant event, entity, or property. But since it is the very existence of such a being that is at issue in the debates about God's existence, design arguments appear unable to stand by themselves as arguments for God's existence. Back to Table of Contentsa. The Argument from Irreducible Biochemical ComplexityDesign theorists distinguish two types of complexity that can be instantiated by any given structure. As William Dembski describes the distinction: a system or structure is cumulatively complex "if the components of the system can be arranged sequentially so that the successive removal of components never leads to the complete loss of function"; a system or structure is irreducibly complex "if it consists of several interrelated parts so that removing even one part completely destroys the system's function" (Dembski 1999, 147). A city is cumulatively complex since one can successively remove people, services, and buildings without rendering it unable to perform its function. A mousetrap, in contrast, is irreducibly complex because the removal of even one part results in complete loss of function.Design proponents, like Michael J. Behe, have identified a number of biochemical systems that they take to be irreducibly complex. Like the functions of a watch or a mousetrap, a cilium cannot perform its function unless its microtubules, nexin linkers, and motor proteins are all arranged and structured in precisely the manner in which they are structured; remove any component from the system and it cannot perform its function. Similarly, the blood-clotting function cannot perform its function if either of its key ingredients, vitamin K and antihemophilic factor, are missing. Both systems are, on this view, irreducibly complex - rather than cumulatively complex.According to Behe, the probability of evolving irreducibly complex systems along Darwinian lines is sufficiently small that it can be ruled out as an explanation of irreducible biochemical complexity:An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced … by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional…. Since natural selection can only choose systems that are already working, if a biological system cannot be produced gradually it would have to arise as an integrated unit, in one fell swoop, for natural selection to have anything to act on (Behe 39; emphasis added).Since, for example, a cilium-precursor (i.e., one that lacks at least one of a cilium's parts) cannot perform the function that endows a cilium with adaptive value, organisms that have the cilium-precursor are no "fitter for survival" than they would have been without it. Since chance-driven evolutionary processes would not select organisms with the precursor, intelligent design is a better explanation for the existence of organisms with fully functional cilia.Though Behe states his conclusion in categorical terms (i.e., irreducibly complex systems "cannot be produced gradually"), he is more charitably construed as claiming only that the probability of gradually producing irreducibly complex systems is very small. The stronger construction of the conclusion (and argument) incorrectly presupposes that Darwinian theory implies that every precursor to a fully functional system must itself perform some function that makes the organism more fit to survive. Organisms that have, say, a precursor to a fully functional cilium are no fitter than they would have been without it, but there is nothing in Darwinian theory that implies they are necessarily any less fit. Thus, there is no reason to think that it is logically or nomologically impossible, according to Darwinian theory, for a set of organisms with a precursor to a fully functional cilium to evolve into a set of organisms that has fully functional cilia. Accordingly, the argument from irreducible biochemical complexity is more plausibly construed as showing that the design explanation for such complexity is more probable than the evolutionary explanation.Nevertheless, this more modest interpretation is problematic. First, there is little reason to think that the probability of evolving irreducibly complex systems is, as a general matter, small enough to warrant assuming that the probability of the design explanation must be higher. If having a precursor to an irreducibly complex system does not render the organism less fit for survival, the probability a subspecies of organisms with the precursor survives and propagates is the same, other things being equal, as the probability that a subspecies of organisms without the precursor survives and propagates. In such cases, then, the prospect that the subspecies with the precursor will continue to thrive, leave offspring, and evolve is not unusually small. Second, the claim that intelligent agents of a certain kind would (or should) see functional value in a complex system, by itself, says very little about the probability of any particular causal explanation. While this claim surely implies that intelligent agents with the right causal abilities have a reason for bringing about such systems, it does not tell us anything determinate about whether it is likely that intelligent agents with the right causal powers did bring such systems about - because it does not tell us anything determinate about whether it is probable that such agents exist. As a logical matter, the mere fact that some existing thing has a feature, irreducibly complex or otherwise, that would be valuable to an intelligent being with certain properties, by itself, does not say anything about the probability that such a being exists. Accordingly, even if we knew that the prospect that the precursor-subspecies would survive was "vanishingly small," as Behe believes, we would not be justified in inferring a design explanation on probabilistic grounds. To infer that the design explanation is more probable than an explanation of vanishingly small probability, we need some reason to think that the probability of the design explanation is not vanishingly small. The problem, however, is that the claim that a complex system has some property that would be valued by an intelligent agent with the right abilities, by itself, simply does not justify inferring that the probability that such an agent exists and brought about the existence of that system is not vanishingly small. In the absence of some further information about the probability that such an agent exists, we cannot legitimately infer design as the explanation of irreducible biochemical complexity. Back to Table of Contentsb. The Argument from Biological InformationWhile the argument from irreducible biochemical complexity focuses on the probability of evolving irreducibly complex living systems or organisms from simpler living systems or organisms, the argument from biological information focuses on the problem of generating living organisms in the first place. Darwinian theories are intended only to explain how it is that more complex living organisms developed from primordially simple living organisms, and hence do not even purport to explain the origin of the latter. The argument from biological information is concerned with an explanation of how it is that the world went from a state in which it contained no living organisms to a state in which it contained living organisms; that is to say, it is concerned with the explanation of the very first forms of life.There are two distinct problems involved in explaining the origin of life from a naturalistic standpoint. The first is to explain how it is that a set of non-organic substances could combine to produce the amino acids that are the building blocks of every living substance. The second is to explain the origin of the information expressed by the sequences of nucleotides that form DNA molecules. The precise ordering of the four nucleotides, adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine (A, T, G, and C, for short), determine the specific operations that occur within a living cell and is hence fairly characterized as representing (or embodying) information. As Stephen C. Meyer puts the point: "just as the letters in the alphabet of a written language may convey a particular message depending on their sequence, so too do the sequences of nucleotides or bases in the DNA molecule convey precise biochemical instructions that direct protein synthesis within the cell" (Meyer 1998, 526).The argument from biological information is concerned with only the second of these problems. In particular, it attempts to evaluate four potential explanations for the origin of biological information: (1) chance; (2) a pre-biotic form of natural selection; (3) chemical necessity; and (4) intelligent design. The argument concludes that intelligent design is the most probable explanation for the information present in large biomacromolecules like DNA, RNA, and proteins. The argument proceeds as follows. Pre-biotic natural selection and chemical necessity cannot, as a logical matter, explain the origin of biological information. Theories of pre-biotic natural selection are problematic because they illicitly assume the very feature they are trying to explain. These explanations proceed by asserting that the most complex nonliving molecules will reproduce more efficiently than less complex nonliving molecules. But, in doing so, they assume that nonliving chemicals instantiate precisely the kind of replication mechanism that biological information is needed to explain in the case of living organisms. In the absence of some sort of explanation as to how non-organic reproduction could occur, theories of pre-biotic natural selection fail. Theories of chemical necessity are problematic because chemical necessity can explain, at most, the development of highly repetitive ordered sequences incapable of representing information. Because processes involving chemical necessity are highly regular and predictable in character, they are capable of producing only highly repetitive sequences of "letters." For example, while chemical necessity could presumably explain a sequence like "ababababababab," it cannot explain specified but highly irregular sequences like "the house is on fire." The problem is that highly repetitive sequences like the former are not sufficiently complex and varied to express information. Thus, while chemical necessity can explain periodic order among nucleotide letters, it lacks the resources logically needed to explain the aperiodic, highly specified, complexity of a sequence capable of expressing information.Ultimately, this leaves only chance and design as logically viable explanations of biological information. Although it is logically possible to obtain functioning sequences of amino acids through purely random processes, some researchers have estimated the probability of doing so under the most favorable of assumptions at approximately 1 in 1065. Factoring in more realistic assumptions about pre-biotic conditions, Meyer argues the probability of generating short functional protein is 1 in 10125 - a number that is vanishingly small. Meyer concludes: "given the complexity of proteins, it is extremely unlikely that a random search through all the possible amino acid sequences could generate even a single relatively short functional protein in the time available since the beginning of the universe (let alone the time available on the early earth)" (Meyer 2002, 75).Next, Meyer argues that the probability of the design explanation for the origin of biological information is considerably higher:[O]ne can detect the past action of an intelligent cause from the presence of an information-rich effect, even if the cause itself cannot be directly observed. For instances, visitors to the gardens of Victoria harbor in Canada correctly infer the activity of intelligent agents when they see a pattern of red and yellow flowers spelling "Welcome to Victoria", even if they did not see the flowers planted and arranged. Similarly, the specifically arranged nucleotide sequences - the complex but functionally specified sequences - in DNA imply the past action of an intelligent mind, even if such mental agency cannot be directly observed (Meyer 2002, 93).Further, scientists in many fields typically infer the causal activity of intelligent agents from the occurrence of information content. As Meyer rightly observes by way of example, "[a]rcheologists assume a mind produced the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone" (Meyer 2002, 94).Meyer's reasoning appears vulnerable to the same objection to which the argument from biochemical complexity is vulnerable. In all of the contexts in which we legitimately make the design inference in response to an observation of information, we already know that there exist intelligent agents with the right sorts of motivations and abilities to produce information content; after all, we know that human beings exist and are frequently engaged in the production and transmission of information. It is precisely because we have this background knowledge that we can justifiably be confident that intelligent design is a far more probable explanation than chance for any occurrence of information that a human being is capable of producing. In the absence of antecedent reason for thinking there exist intelligent agents capable of creating information content, the occurrence of a pattern of flowers in the shape of "Welcome to Victoria" would not obviously warrant an inference of intelligent design.The problem, however, is that it is the very existence of an intelligent Deity that is at issue. In the absence of some antecedent reason for thinking there exists an intelligent Deity capable of creating biological information, the occurrence of sequences of nucleotides that can be described as "representing information" does not obviously warrant an inference of intelligent design - no matter how improbable the chance explanation might be. To justify preferring one explanation as more probable than another, we must have information about the probability of each explanation. The mere fact that certain sequences take a certain shape that we can see meaning or value in, by itself, tells us nothing obvious about the probability that it is the result of intelligent design.It is true, of course, that "experience affirms that information content not only routinely arises but always arises from the activity of intelligent minds" (Meyer 2002, 92), but our experience is limited to the activity of human beings - beings that are frequently engaged in activities that are intended to produce information content. While that experience will inductively justify inferring that some human agency is the cause of any information that could be explained by human beings, it will not inductively justify inferring the existence of an intelligent agency with causal powers that depart as radically from our experience as the powers that are traditionally attributed to God. The argument from biological information, like the argument from biochemical complexity, seems incapable of standing alone as an argument for God's existence. Back to Table of Contentsc. The Fine-Tuning ArgumentsScientists have determined that life in the universe would not be possible if more than about two dozen properties of the universe were even slightly different from what they are; as the matter is commonly put, the universe appears "fine-tuned" for life. For example, life would not be possible if the force of the big bang explosion had differed by one part in 1060; the universe would have either collapsed on itself or expanded too rapidly for stars to form. Similarly, life would not be possible if the force binding protons to neutrons differed by even five percent. It is immediately tempting to think that the probability of a fine-tuned universe is so small that intelligent design simply must be the more probable explanation. The supposition that it is a matter of chance that so many things could be exactly what they need to be for life to exist in the universe just seems implausibly improbable. Since, on this intuition, the only two explanations for the highly improbable appearance of fine-tuning are chance and an intelligent agent who deliberately designed the universe to be hospitable to life, the latter simply has to be the better explanation.This natural line of argument is vulnerable to a cogent objection. The mere fact that it is enormously improbable that an event occurred by chance, by itself, gives us no reason to think that it occurred by design. Suppose we flip a fair coin 1000 times and record the results in succession. The probability of getting the particular outcome is vanishingly small: 1 in 21000 to be precise. But it is clear that the mere fact that such a sequence is so improbable, by itself, does not give us any reason to think that it was the result of intelligent design. As intuitively tempting as it may be to conclude from just the apparent improbability of a fine-tuned universe that it is the result of divine agency, the inference is unsound. i. The Argument from Suspicious ImprobabilitysGeorge N. Schlesinger, however, attempts to formalize the fine-tuning intuition in a way that avoids this objection. To understand Schlesinger's argument, consider your reaction to two different events. If John wins a 1-in-1,000,000,000 lottery game, you would not immediately be tempted to think that John (or someone acting on his behalf) cheated. If, however, John won three consecutive 1-in-1,000 lotteries, you would immediately be tempted to think that that John (or someone acting on his behalf) cheated. Schlesinger believes that the intuitive reaction to these two scenarios is epistemically justified. The structure of the latter event is such that it is justifies a belief that intelligent design is the cause: the fact that John got lucky in three consecutive lotteries is a reliable indicator that his winning was the intended result of someone's intelligent agency. Despite the fact that the probability of winning three consecutive 1-in-1,000 games is exactly the same as the probability of winning one 1-in-1,000,000,000 game, the former event is of a kind that is surprising in a way that warrants an inference of intelligent design. Schlesinger argues that the fact that the universe is fine-tuned for life is improbable in exactly the same way that John's winning three consecutive lotteries is improbable. After all, it is not just that we got lucky with respect to one property-lottery game; we got lucky with respect to two dozen property-lottery games - lotteries that we had to win in order for there to be life in the universe. Given that we are justified in inferring intelligent design in the case of John's winning three consecutive lotteries, we are even more justified in inferring intelligent design in the case of our winning two dozen much more improbable property lotteries. Thus, Schlesinger concludes, the most probable explanation for the remarkable fact that the universe has exactly the right properties to sustain life is that an intelligent Deity intentionally created the universe such as to sustain life. This argument is vulnerable to a number of criticisms. First, while it might be clear that carbon-based life would not be possible if the universe were slightly different with respect to these two-dozen fine-tuned properties, it is not clear that no form of life would be possible. Second, some physicists speculate that this physical universe is but one material universe in a "multiverse" in which all possible material universes are ultimately realized. If this highly speculative hypothesis is correct, then there is nothing particularly suspicious about the fact that there is a fine-tuned universe, since the existence of such a universe is inevitable (i.e., has probability 1) if all every material universe is eventually realized in the multiverse. Since some universe, so to speak, had to win, the fact that ours won does not demand any special explanation.Schlesinger's fine-tuning argument also appears vulnerable to the same criticism as the other versions of the design argument (see Himma 2002). While Schlesinger is undoubtedly correct in thinking that we are justified in suspecting design in the case where John wins three consecutive lotteries, it is because - and only because - we know two related empirical facts about such events. First, we already know that there exist intelligent agents who have the right motivations and causal abilities to deliberately bring about such events. Second, we know from past experience with such events that they are usually explained by the deliberate agency of one or more of these agents. Without at least one of these two pieces of information, we are not obviously justified in seeing design in such cases. As before, the problem for the fine-tuning argument is that we lack both of the pieces that are needed to justify an inference of design. First, the very point of the argument is to establish the fact that there exists an intelligent agency that has the right causal abilities and motivations to bring the existence of a universe capable of sustaining life. Second, and more obviously, we do not have any past experience with the genesis of worlds and are hence not in a position to know whether the existence of fine-tuned universes are usually explained by the deliberate agency of some intelligent agency. Because we lack this essential background information, we are not justified in inferring that there exists an intelligent Deity who deliberately created a universe capable of sustaining life. ii. The Confirmatory ArgumentRobin Collins defends a more modest version of the fine-tuning argument that relies on a general principle of confirmation theory, rather than a principle that is contrived to distinguish events or entities that are explained by intelligent design from events or entities explained by other factors. Collins's version of the argument relies on what he calls the Prime Principle of Confirmation: If observation O is more probable under hypothesis H1 than under hypothesis H2, then O provides a reason for preferring H1 over H2. The idea is that the fact that an observation is more likely under the assumption that H1 is true than under the assumption H2 is true counts as evidence in favor of H1. This version of the fine-tuning argument proceeds by comparing the relative likelihood of a fine-tuned universe under two hypotheses: (1) the hypothesis that there exists a God who created the universe such as to sustain life (i.e., the Design Hypothesis); (2) the hypothesis that there exists one material universe, and it is a matter of chance that the universe has the fine-tuned properties needed to sustain life (i.e., the Atheistic Single-Universe Hypothesis). Assuming the Design Hypothesis is true, the probability that the universe has the fine-tuned properties approaches (if it does not equal) 1. Assuming the Atheistic Single-Universe Hypothesis is true, the probability that the universe has the fine-tuned properties is very small - though it is not clear exactly how small. Applying the Prime Principle of Confirmation, Collins concludes that the observation of fine-tuned properties provides reason for preferring the Design Hypothesis over the Atheistic Single-Universe Hypothesis. At the outset, it is crucial to note that Collins does not intend the fine-tuned argument as a proof of God's existence. As he explains, the Prime Principle of Confirmation "is a general principle of reasoning which tells us when some observation counts as evidence in favor of one hypothesis over another" (Collins 51). Indeed, he explicitly acknowledges that "the argument does not say that the fine-tuning evidence proves that the universe was designed, or even that it is likely that the universe was designed" (Collins 53). It tells us only that the observation of fine-tuning provides one reason for accepting the Theistic Hypothesis over the Atheistic Single-Universe Hypothesis - and one that can be rebutted by other evidence.The confirmatory version of the fine-tuning argument is not vulnerable to the objection that it relies on an inference strategy that presupposes that we have independent evidence for thinking the right kind of intelligent agency exists. As a general scientific principle, the Prime Principle of Confirmation can be applied in a wide variety of circumstances and is not limited to circumstances in which we have other reasons to believe the relevant conclusion is true. If the observation of a fine-tuned universe is more probable under the Theistic Hypothesis than under the Atheistic Single-Universe Hypothesis, then this fact is a reason for preferring the Design Hypothesis to Atheistic Single-Universe Hypothesis.Nevertheless, the confirmatory version of the argument is vulnerable on other fronts. As a first step towards seeing one worry, consider two possible explanations for the observation that John Doe wins a 1-in-7,000,000 lottery (see Himma 2002). According to the Theistic Lottery Hypothesis, God wanted John Doe to win and deliberately brought it about that his numbers were drawn. According to the Chance Lottery Hypothesis, John Doe's numbers were drawn by chance. It is clear that John’s winning the lottery is vastly more probable under the Theistic Lottery Hypothesis than under the Chance Lottery Hypothesis. By the Prime Principle of Confirmation, then, John's winning the lottery provides a reason to prefer the Theistic Lottery Hypothesis over the Chance Lottery Hypothesis. As is readily evident, the above reasoning, by itself, provides very weak support for the Theistic Lottery Hypothesis. If all we know about the world is that John Doe won a lottery and the only possible explanations for this observation are the Theistic Lottery Hypothesis and the Chance Lottery Hypothesis, then this observation provides some reason to prefer the former. But it does not take much counterevidence to rebut the Theistic Lottery Hypothesis: a single observation of a lottery that relies on a random selection process will suffice. A single application of the Prime Principle of Confirmation, by itself, is simply not designed to provide the sort of reason that would warrant much confidence in preferring one hypothesis to another.For this reason, the confirmatory version of the fine-tuning argument, by itself, provides a weak reason for preferring the Design Hypothesis over the Atheistic Single Universe Hypothesis. Although Collins is certainly correct in thinking the observation of fine-tuning provides a reason for accepting the Design Hypothesis and hence rational ground for belief that God exists, that reason is simply not strong enough to do much in the way of changing the minds of either agnostics or atheists. Back to Table of Contents3. The Scientifically Legitimate Uses of Design InferencesIt is worth noting that proponents are correct in thinking that design inferences have a variety of legitimate scientific uses. Such inferences are used to detect intelligent agency in a large variety of contexts, including criminal and insurance investigations. Consider, for example, the notorious case of Nicholas Caputo. Caputo, a member of the Democratic Party, was a public official responsible for conducting drawings to determine the relative ballot positions of Democrats and Republicans. During Caputo's tenure, the Democrats drew the top ballot position 40 of 41 times, making it far more likely that an undecided voter would vote for the Democratic candidate than for the Republican candidate. The Republican Party filed suit against Caputo, arguing he deliberately rigged the ballot to favor his own party. After noting that the probability of picking the Democrats 40 out of 41 times was less than 1 in 50 billion, the court legitimately made a design inference, concluding that "few persons of reason will accept the explanation of blind chance."What proponents of design arguments for God's existence, however, have not noticed is that each one of these indubitably legitimate uses occurs in a context in which we are already justified in thinking that intelligent beings with the right motivations and abilities exist. In every context in which design inferences are routinely made by scientists, they already have conclusive independent reason for believing there exist intelligent agents with the right abilities and motivations to bring about the apparent instance of design.Consider, for example, how much more information was available to the court in the Caputo case than is available to the proponent of the design argument for God's existence. Like the proponent of the design argument, the court knew that (1) the relevant event or feature is something that might be valued by an intelligent agent; and (2) the odds of it coming about by chance are astronomically small. Unlike the proponent of the design argument, however, the court had an additional piece of information available to it: the court already knew that there existed an intelligent agent with the right causal abilities and motives to bring about the event; after all, there was no dispute whatsoever about the existence of Caputo. It was that piece of information, together with (1), that enabled the court to justifiably conclude that the probability that an intelligent agent deliberately brought it about that the Democrats received the top ballot position 40 of 41 times was significantly higher than the probability that this happened by chance. Without this crucial piece of information, however, the court would not have been so obviously justified in making the design inference. Accordingly, while the court was right to infer a design explanation in the Caputo case, this is, in part, because the judges already knew that the right kind of intelligent beings exist - and one of them happened to have occupied a position that afforded him with the opportunity to rig the drawings in favor of the Democrats. In response, one might be tempted to argue that there is one context in which scientists employ the design inference without already having sufficient reason to think the right sort of intelligent agency exists. As is well-known, researchers monitor radio transmissions for patterns that would support a design inference that such transmissions are sent by intelligent beings. For example, it would be reasonable to infer that some intelligent extraterrestrial beings were responsible for a transmission of discrete signals and pauses that effectively enumerated the prime numbers from 2 to 101. In this case, the intelligibility of the pattern, together with the improbability of its occurring randomly, seems to justify the inference that the transmission sequence is the result of intelligent design.As it turns out, we are already justified in thinking that the right sort of intelligent beings exist even in this case. We already know, after all, that we exist and have the right sort of motivations and abilities to bring about such transmissions because we send them into space hoping that some other life form will detect our existence. While our existence in the universe - and this is crucial – does not, by itself, justify thinking that there are other intelligent life forms in the universe, it does justify thinking that the probability that there are such life forms is higher than the astronomically small probability (1 in 21136 to be precise) that a sequence of discrete radio signals and pauses that enumerates the prime numbers from 2 to 101 is the result of chance. Thus, we would be justified in inferring design as the explanation of such a sequence on the strength of three facts: (1) the probability of such a chance occurrence is 1 in 21136; (2) there exist intelligent beings in the universe capable of bringing about such an occurrence; and (3) the sequence of discrete signals and pauses has a special significance to intelligent beings. In particular, (2) and (3) tell us that the probability that design explains such an occurrence is significantly higher than 1 in 21136 - though it is not clear exactly what the probability is. Insofar as the legitimate application of design inferences presupposes that we have antecedent reason to believe the right kind of intelligent being exists, they can enable us to distinguish what such beings do from what merely happens. If we already know, for example, that there exist beings capable of rigging a lottery, then design inferences can enable us to distinguish lottery results that merely happen from lottery results that are deliberately brought about by such agents. Similarly, if we already have adequate reason to believe that God exists, then design inferences can enable us to distinguish features of the world that merely happen from features of the world that are deliberately brought about by the agency of God. Indeed, to the extent that we are antecedently justified in believing that God exists, it is obviously more reasonable to believe that God deliberately structured the universe to have the fine-tuned properties than it is to believe that somehow this occurred by chance.If this is correct, then design inferences simply cannot do the job they are asked to do in design arguments for God's existence. Insofar as they presuppose that we already know the right kind of intelligent being exists, they cannot stand alone as a justification for believing that God exists. It is the very existence of the right kind of intelligent being that is at issue in the dispute over whether God exists. While design inferences have a variety of scientifically legitimate uses, they cannot stand alone as arguments for God's existence. Back to Table of Contents4. References and Further ReadingMichael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Touchstone Books, 1996)Richard Bentley, A Confutation of Atheism from the Origin and Frame of the World (London: H. Mortlock, 1692-1693)Robin Collins, "A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God," in Michael J. Murray (ed.), Reason for the Hope Within (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999)Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Everyman's Library (London: J.M. Dent, 1947)Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (New York: Norton Publishing, 1996) William Dembski, The Design Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)William Dembski, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002)William Derham, Physico-theology, or, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God from his Works of Creation Being the Substance of XVI Sermons Preached in St. Mary le Bow-Church, London, at the Hon'ble Mr. Boyle's Lectures in the Years 1711 and 1712 (London: W. Innys, 1713)William Derham, Astro-theology, or, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God: From a Survey of the Heavens (London: W. Innys, 1715)Kenneth Einar Himma, "Prior Probabilities and Confirmation Theory: A Problem with the Fine-Tuning Argument," International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 51, no. 4 (June 2002) Kenneth Einar Himma, "The Application-Conditions for Design Inferences: Why the Design Arguments Need the Help of Other Arguments for God's Existence," forthcoming in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion.David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, edited with an introduction by Norman Kemp Smith, (New York: Social Sciences Publishers, 1948)Julian Huxley, Evolution as Process (New York: Harper and Row, 1953).Stephen C. Meyer, "DNA by Design: An Inference to the Best Explanation," Rhetoric and Public Affairs, vol. 1, no. 4 (Winter 1998)Stephen C. Meyer, "Evidence for Design in Physics and Biology: From the Origin of the Universe to the Origin of Life," in Behe, Dembski, and Meyer (eds.), Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002)William Paley, Natural Theology: Or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1867)Del Ratzsch, Nature, Design, and Science: The Status of Design in Natural Science (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001)John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation Being the Substance of Some Common Places Delivered in the Chappel of Trinity-College, in Cambridge (London: Printed for Samuel Smith, 1691)Hugh Ross, Beyond the Cosmos: What Recent Discoveries in Astronomy and Physics Reveal about the Nature of God (Colorado Springs: Nav Press, 1996)George N. Schlesinger, New Perspectives on Old-time Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)Frederick Robert Tennant, Philosophical Theology, Volume 2 (1928-30)Back to Table of Contents
Author Information: Kenneth Einar Himma Email: himma@spu.edu HomePage: http://faculty.washington.edu/himma © 2006
Great to hear from you!
I'll take your questions one at a time, if I may, and hopefully we can arrive at a little bit of order for your active brain. In the Buddhist view, the purpose of your life is to be happy. There are many things you can do while being a human on earth. But the highest purpose you can achieve is happiness. In Buddhism, that is success. The way to achieve happiness is through enlightenment. The way to achieve enlightenment is to follow the Buddha's teachings.
If factors are coming together for you in a way that makes you feel there is some sort of divine influence on your purpose in life, use Occam's Razor: "The simplest answer is usually the correct answer." Perhaps it is you yourself who planted the seeds of these factors, and they are now coming to fruition. It may just be cause and effect.
Let me try to give you a Buddhist perspective on this. In the third chapter of His Holiness the Dalai Lama's book "Practicing Wisdom" he comments on The Two Truths as described by Shantideva in his eighth century C.E. text "The Way of the Bodhisattva", one of the most important spiritual and philosophical texts of Mahayana Buddhism. In it, Shantideva defines the two truths in this way:
"Relative and absolute,
These the two truths are declared to be.
The absolute is not within the reach of intellect,
For intellect is grounded in the relative."
His Holiness the Dalai Lama explains:
"One is from the perspective of our everyday experience, and the other is from the perspective of the true insight into the ultimate nature of reality.
In this view, when we examine the nature of the reality of things and events-everyday objects such as tables, chairs, vases, and flowers-the degree of reality that we perceive at the level of our phenomenal experience relates to their relative truth. And so long as we remain content within this framework, we remain at the level of phenomenal experience and conventional validity. The moment that we are not content with the validity of the conventional framework and seek to go beyond its confines, we are then searching for a deeper or truer essence or core identity. Yet what we find through the ensuing analysis is that things and events are actually unfindable. When engaged in this way, we are relating to the world, to things and events, at their ultimate level, their total emptiness. This is their emptiness of intrinsic existence, the absence of any identity and existence of things and events in their own right. At this point we find that the two truths are most clearly understood as two different perspectives on the things and events that make up the world."
Pg.19
"As for the sequence in which the two truths are established, let us take the example of an everyday object such as a flower. First, the object, the flower, will appear to the mind, and then, on the basis of that appearance, we are able to examine it's real nature. ...the Buddha talks in great detail about the causal principle that exists in nature-how certain causes and conditions lead to certain effects and situations. First in these scriptures are extensive treatments of the conventional level of reality. By examining how certain causes and conditions give rise to certain events, we can become more familiar with this world of multiplicity, which in turn has a direct effect on our experience. It is only on the basis of such solid grounding in understanding how things work in the phenomenal world of conventional reality that the analysis of the ultimate nature of reality can be brought into the picture. Once we have developed confidence in our understanding of the world of conventional truth, then we can enter productively into the examination of the ultimate truth. We will then be able to fully recognize the discrepancy that exists between our perception of the world and the way things really are.
To fully appreciate the extent of the discrepancy between our perceptions and reality, it is essential that we successfully challenge the idea of concrete reality that we ordinarily project onto things and events. This is our belief and experience that things and events exist in their own right and that they possess some kind of intrinsic identity and existence. It is through this process of negating this belief that we arrive at a deeper understanding of the ultimate truth, of emptiness." Pg.21-22
Buddhism is not about feelings, belief or ideas, and especially not clinging so strongly to ideas that you think your mind can't be changed. It is the clinging attachment to your ideas that is causing you confusion and suffering. But the good news is that your mind is still able to be changed. And, yes, our brains can be very easily fooled indeed. It's important that you keep an open mind and investigate with reason these ideas and what Dr. Wong tells you. "Whatever one listens to, one should carefully and systematically reflect upon it. When the facts of the matter are clearly beneficial and it results in the quenching of suffering, one may finally believe it one-hundred per cent." Source
I wish it was possible to give you a no-God conclusion, but I can't, because I'm a Buddhist. God can't be proven. So, spending time contemplating God is time taken away from my efforts at calming my mind, practicing the Path and working towards enlightenment. I'll find out eventually. But I don't have much time on earth. And it's a rare and precious opportunity to have been born a human on earth. I don't want to waste the little time I have. I also have gained enough wisdom to know that contemplating the existence of a deity would drive me cuckoo, and where is the good in that? I'm trying to end my suffering, not perpetuate it.
Yes. But keep investigating while following the guidelines as stated above.
Ajani, my sweet, you're head is going faster than your heart. Try to bring them into alignment a little more and wisdom will come more easily to you. Go back to the beginning and concentrate on the development of compassion with equanimity, or impartiality. This is essential for the understanding you seek. Once you have developed a firm basis of compassion, your investigation into the ultimate reality of life and the universe will be more clearly directed. There are sequential steps to the happiness and understanding you seek. The study and practice of Buddhism will show you the way.
Love,
Brigid
Thanks everyone, yesterday we were motivated somemore. Personally now Ernest has become a manifestation of success for me. I'm writing to him now about my dream and how from a "weirdo" his teachings made me a "normal" - he did speak about the human mind and encouraged us to read about quantum physics - things I have been telling people for quite some time.
Well, Brigid, I think perhaps you are very right. The reason why he is here today he because he was that and he is this today. Even if he was planted here for a purpose, then perhaps I should do that purpose, instead of being distracted.
We had also learnt autogenic training to sleep - I'm using it now, but I think, when used in conjunction with meditation, this thing rocks.
Coming in late...but.......
Yes...part of being a Buddhist is taking what others say to you and testing it thoroughly for yourself to see if it makes sense for YOU. Listen to what others have to say, but do your own research. And yes, you can be "successful" (whatever that means!) by beaing completely satisfied with what you have, rather than always trying to make more money, have nice things, etc. The definition of "success" is going to vary greatly per person. I consider myself to be successful because of where I am at in my life, but someone else may look at me and say "She's not very successful because her and her husband do not make over a million dollars each year".
After taking time to read your posts to Ajar may I commend you for your approuch to the issues he raised. This is indeed a good example of the qualities of this site.
Good work.
HH
Thanks, schmoopy.
-bf
Unless they find him, we'll never know.....
http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=1,2439,0,0,1,0