A splendid video about evolution

I find the “designer” argument overly simplistic. It takes the fact that we can’t yet explain something and immediately concludes that an external “designer” must have created the universe (yet without even defining this designer as a deity due to negative feelings towards religion). I’d rather view these explanatory gaps as opportunities for future discoveries than fill them with meanings borrowed from traditional Christian ideas of paradise.

I find the “designer” argument overly simplistic. It takes the fact that we can’t yet explain something and immediately concludes that an external “designer” must have created the universe (yet without even defining this designer as a deity due to negative feelings towards religion). I’d rather view these explanatory gaps as opportunities for future discoveries than fill them with meanings borrowed from traditional Christian ideas of paradise.

For me it's also a situation of humans are hilariously ignorant as to the workings of the universe. Going back all the way to our current understanding of the beginning, before the big bang/cosmic inflation kicked in our understanding of physics simply does not work. We don't know what happened and we will never know what happened before hand because the laws that our universe exist under now simply did not exist then. Fast forward into the future and either the cycle will begin all over again, or it won't and then we will reach a point once again where our understanding of the universe simply ceases to become relevant, the laws that we would normally use just don't function. And that's not even considering weird ideas of the universe like different dimensions, multiverses, whatever. 

And yet here we are talking about how evolution or creation might have been directed or designed by some alterior force. It's all good to talk about these ideas in isolation, but once we go a bit further everything gets all the more complicated.

Replacing established religion with personal musings about the meaning of life doesn’t, in my opinion, make the idea of a spiritual dimension any more plausible. I happened to visit Hiroshima last Friday and went to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Reading about the fates of children who weren’t instantly killed by the bomb but who then died horrible deaths within a few weeks did little to comfort me or reinforce the belief that our existence has any inherent meaning.

I think we have a psychological need to invent meaning in our lives—it’s simply too difficult to face the alternative.

Extremely, extremely true. We are so lucky to be in a safe position when we ponder things like this and it fundamentally affects our views on these kinds of topics. People in the middle ages dealing with wars and disease had very different ideas of meaning and people who live on the other side of the world to us today are the exact same way, it's all relative. I don't fault people for speculating on meaning but it's always best to stick with evidence first. 

Also important to be said that the meaning we ourselves apply to things is just as valuable as any inherent meaning. But again, all relative.

I find the “designer” argument overly simplistic. It takes the fact that we can’t yet explain something and immediately concludes that an external “designer” must have created the universe (yet without even defining this designer as a deity due to negative feelings towards religion). I’d rather view these explanatory gaps as opportunities for future discoveries than fill them with meanings borrowed from traditional Christian ideas of paradise.

Since RM+NS is absolutely built in to the supposed scientific view of life, it is rather staggering to find that this mechanism does not seem to be valid for DNA strings, forcing you back on to the God of the gaps argument! I admit It took me a while to accept that the argument against evolution of DNA was valid.

Since you are falling back on the God of the Gaps argument, does that mean that you accept that Darwinian evolution does not happen on a large scale?

David

Strangely enough, I am much keener on the argument based on the impossibility of the evolution of DNA. The concept of fine tuning is just too abstract, and I really have doubts about a lot of modern physics, as you know.

A lot of human leisure pursuits involve pain and/or risk - sometimes quite a lot of it, yet strangely enough people engage in these activities to "build their character" or just for the excitement. I'm thinking of:

Climbing a very high mountain.

Rock climbing.

Skiing at high speed, accepting the risks.

Having potentially risky sex.

Pushing yourself to the limit running.

Remember, from my perspective, the spirits that you think of as being "entertained" are us.

David

For me Cosmic Fine Tuning is a fact, there's only a question of whether it is Design or not. When the Atheist-Materialist faith started to use the Multiverse as their "get out jail free card" I started leaning more strongly toward Design, just like I started to see Consciousness as irreducible when the pseudo-skeptics insisted the Experiencer is an illusion.

I do get that these spirits are us, but it still feels bizarre and empty of meaning to me. Imagine we knew a country where you just couldn't die, you could change shape, and your memory could be reset. And what people in that country did was seal themselves off and just for experience created a society with wars, human trafficking, etc. Would we praise that nation or think of them as insane hedonists?

I find the “designer” argument overly simplistic. It takes the fact that we can’t yet explain something and immediately concludes that an external “designer” must have created the universe (yet without even defining this designer as a deity due to negative feelings towards religion). I’d rather view these explanatory gaps as opportunities for future discoveries than fill them with meanings borrowed from traditional Christian ideas of paradise.

For me it's less about negative feelings toward religion and more just that Design, as a scientific possibility, is not an effective argument for God. Even Feser, a Catholic theologian, agrees there with regards to ID. Dembski has even said ID could be the result of some principle or inherent teleology in nature:

ID’s metaphysical openness about the nature of nature entails a parallel openness about the nature of the designer. Is the designer an intelligent alien, a computional [sic] simulator (a la THE MATRIX), a Platonic demiurge, a Stoic seminal reason, an impersonal telic process, …, or the infinite personal transcendent creator God of Christianity? The empirical data of nature simply can’t decide.

I'm more wary of ID but I do think Cosmic Fine Tuning is a reasonably strong argument for Design especially when paired with the Argument from Psycho-Physical Harmony.

I find the “designer” argument overly simplistic. It takes the fact that we can’t yet explain something and immediately concludes that an external “designer” must have created the universe (yet without even defining this designer as a deity due to negative feelings towards religion). I’d rather view these explanatory gaps as opportunities for future discoveries than fill them with meanings borrowed from traditional Christian ideas of paradise.

None of these arguments "immediately" conclude that an "external designer" must have created the universe. Few such arguments also "fill" them with meanings borrowed from Christianity. You almost seem so... reviled by the idea of a designer that you feel the need to strawman any and all of the designer arguments as a whole.

In reality, fine-tuning and very complex structures of ecosystems and organisms give pause to proclamations that it was because of "determinism" or "randomness". These structures are far too reminiscent of engineering to be put aside so easily ~ there are no explanations of how mere determinism or randomness can ever create such complexity in such a short span of time that we know that these structures have popped up, relative to other events.

Modern designer arguments take stock of the facts that we observe immense complexity everywhere ~ even star and planet systems, galaxies, have a lot of complexity to them. Why are there massive voids of nothing? Why any of this, rather than disorganized chaos? It all speaks of an unidentified intelligence of some kind. A designer ~ or many. Who knows.

Do not think to easily conflated religion's corrupted ramblings with the reality of what we do know ~ hat, for one, the complex structures we humans have originated have only ever come from intelligent, clever humans... macrocosm, microcosm.

I do get that these spirits are us, but it still feels bizarre and empty of meaning to me. Imagine we knew a country where you just couldn't die, you could change shape, and your memory could be reset. And what people in that country did was seal themselves off and just for experience created a society with wars, human trafficking, etc. Would we praise that nation or think of them as insane hedonists?

Memory is never reset for souls, from my experience ~ only the incarnate aspect has difficulty accessing memories of past lives, generally. If I've been able to have some strong insights into past life experiences, that implies that memory is never reset... just buried in the unconscious.

Memory is never reset for souls, from my experience ~ only the incarnate aspect has difficulty accessing memories of past lives, generally. If I've been able to have some strong insights into past life experiences, that implies that memory is never reset... just buried in the unconscious.

Does that make the hypothetical country I mentioned more meaningful though?

That seems even worse? 

Does that make the hypothetical country I mentioned more meaningful though?

That seems even worse? 

Perhaps, though I think it's more that we benefit from having fresh perspective to look at things in new ways and angles.

Many incarnate individuals get trapped in mindsets that aren't meaningful for growth or learning from new experiences, so it's good to have a fresh start.

It's why entities that live a long time can be mentally rigid ~ it becomes easier to get stuck in patterns, being more resistant to change.