Huntsman said:
In any case, back to kitten's statements. Kitten, I was explicitly talking about the IDers proposing an acasual intelligent creator. That is the logical flaw. Why should their proposed creator be acasual, when they rely on causality for the initial part of the argument? THe IDers argument starts from a aspecific baseline, I think we can agree on that (and I'm talking about the logical argument they represent, not the reasons and psychology behind it): IDers propose that many natural forms are too complex to have been designed without an external intelligence. This is an argument based on causality...they argue that complex forms must have had an intelligence cause, therefore there must be an intelligence behind them. Yet, the illogic comes in when they then argue that the compelx intelligence that would act as this cause does not require a cause.
Except that that's not "illogic," but a fundamental postulate that you're simply failing to accept -- and therefore failing to communicate As I said before, the idea that every event or object has a cause can itself be shown to be fundamentally illogical by that very reason. For this reason, cosmologists don't like speculating upon what "caused" the Big Bang, and in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas pointed out a similar argument for the existence of an uncaused cause, which he equated with God.
So far, then, hard-line scientists and medieval theologians are in agreement that
something must exist without a cause, but that nothing beyond that singular thing is uncaused.
You are applying a straw man when you insist that their own logic implies that God must have a cause. That's an abuse of the logical formalism, no more valid than any of the thousand proofs available that 1=0.
So basically, the argument boils down to "there's an intelligent designer if there's an intellgient designer." Because of the postualte they use to "prove" intelligent design, they cannot use the arguemnt for an acasual intelligence without nullifying their argument and, basically, making it the same argument as asserting a diety. They use causality to require a designer, then refuse to apply that same argument to the designer they require.
Yes. This is pretty close to the truth here. What you fail to realize is that -- by their lights -- this is not illogical.
Specifically, they argue that the creation of intelligence itself requires intelligence; that intelligence does not arise from nothing. Since you are (by gentleman's agreement) intelligence, but there was a time when you did not exist (say, 1830), you and your intelligence must at some point have arisen. Again, this should be pretty uncontrovertible. Depending upon your point of view, you could argue that your intelligence "arose" from your parents' intelligence, or you could argue that it's a gift from God created especially for you. But either way, it's fairly clear that your intelligence "arose" at some point, and one can even put a fairly narrow time window on when that event occurred.
By contrast, God, by assumption,
did not arise. Therefore, the question of where and His intelligence arose also does not arise. It's not a legitimate question, because it refers to a non-existent event.
They may mean God when they say designer, but that does not follow from the logic they use. One could just as easily posit computer intelligence or extra-terrestrials. There is no requirement that their designer be acausal, and that does not follow logically from their argument. By asserting that their designer can be intelligent and acasual, they violate the postulate they use to calim that humanity must have a designer.
Of course they mean "God" when they say "designer"; that's the whole point of the ID movement; to put "creationism" and specifically the Judeo-Christian creation myth back into the teaching of "science." Almost no ID proponent, for this reason, would seriously believe that a computer intelligence or extraterrestrial was really the "ultimate" souce of human intelligence, for exactly the reasons you cite. However, if you look at what their ultimate purpose is, it's not to put ETs into the science curriculum. The whole point is not simply to assert that the designer "can be" intelligent and acausal, but to assert the structure that will inevitably lead to the fact that the designer
must be both intelligent and acausal, and hence (because the only acausal thing in their framework is God) must be God.
So your supposed "illogic" is actually the line of reasoning that you are supposed to follow. Specifically, the
arising of intelligence (or more generally complex forms) should imply the existence of a (complex and intelligent) designer who caused that arising. (That's the camel's nose in the tent, and the point at which you have to attack.) An intelligent/complex designer that did not arise does not result in a paradox, and in fact is a necessary consequence of the camel's nose. This "designer" that never arose and in consequence has existed eternally is exactly what they want you to accept as one of the attributes of "God."
So, yes. As you pointed out earlier, their assertion of causality is exactly equivalent to the assertion of a deity. But the statement "God exists and has always existed" is not, in and of itself, illogical. It's simply another postulate. With the admission of that postulate, the ID position is both self-consistent and logical. It simply happens to be empirically wrong (to the best of our current empirical knowledge).
