The arguement that recently convinced me of god's existence

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I was merely thrown off when Dawkins started his preface with so much of an argument for evolution. I therefore thought he was directing it basically to those who don’t buy it. He isn't going to get anywhere with them anyway. So this, too, is what I mean in that he fails. He is preaching to the choir, really. He is really addressing evolutionists.

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He's addressing those that either don't know how complex our biological systems are, or those that think this complexity necessitates design.

Here is the preface (for those that want to reference it without downloading the entire PDF):

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This book is written in the conviction that our own existence once
presented the greatest of all mysteries, but that it is a mystery no
longer because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it, though we
shall continue to add footnotes to their solution for a while yet. I wrote
the book because I was surprised that so many people seemed not only
unaware of the elegant and beautiful solution to this deepest of
problems but, incredibly, in many cases actually unaware that there
was a problem in the first place!
The problem is that of complex design. The computer on which I am
writing these words has an information storage capacity of about 64
kilobytes (one byte is used to hold each character of text). The
computer was consciously designed and deliberately manufactured.
The brain with which you are understanding my words is an array of
some ten million kiloneurones. Many of these billions of nerve cells
have each more than a thousand 'electric wires' connecting them to
other neurones. Moreover, at the molecular genetic level, every single
one of more than a trillion cells in the body contains about a thousand
times as much precisely-coded digital information as my entire
computer. The complexity of living organisms is matched by the
elegant efficiency of their apparent design. If anyone doesn't agree that
this amount of complex design cries out for an explanation, I give up.
No, on second thoughts I don't give up, because one of my aims in the
book is to convey something of the sheer wonder of biological
complexity to those whose eyes have not been opened to it. But having
built up the mystery, my other main aim is to remove it again by
explaining the solution.

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[hmkpoker]

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Atheists walk by faith and don't realize it.

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If you have the time and incentive, please elaborate on this.

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He's equivocating the word "faith". We've been through all this before. He's saying that induction is "faith" (or at least thinking that induction is valid/reasonable is).

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You mean like how I don't really think about how the engine/keylock mechanism works when I start my car, I just kinda know that it'll start when my key goes in and turns?

Bah, I want to hear this from the horse's mouth [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[jthegreat]

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He's equivocating the word "faith". We've been through all this before. He's saying that induction is "faith" (or at least thinking that induction is valid/reasonable is).

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More specifically, he is stating that the idea of an orderly universe, which is required for the validity of science, is based on an unprovable assumption and therefore must be taken on faith.

However, as I stated in the thread I started earlier today, that the universe is currently ordered is axiomatic.

[college kid]

Sorry, but no. Your argument is flawed in numerous ways. First of all, as somebody pointed out, if God does exist, then who or what created God, ad infinitum. Secondly, you must take into consideration what exactly IS a woonden chair. What makes it a wooden chair. Must it be polished and be able to rock back and forth? What about a tree stump with a back? Your argument assumes that you KNOW what a wooden chair is and that you find one. But if you didn't know what a wooden chair was supposed to look like it would not seem out of the ordinary. Now suppose that the tree stump with a back on it, provides some extra use to the tree and over time, more trees appear that way. Suddenly the tree has evolved into a wooden chair.

The analogy is flawed because human aren't like your wooden chair in that there was no preset way for us to be or for what we should look like. Now ask yourself how probable it is that you find something that kind of might resemble a piece of furniture in the middle of nowhere. More probable??? You say it's silly to think that we appeared by random chance? Why? The universe is so vast and old that even an improbable occurance like life CAN happen. And once it does, it can morph and evolve any number of ways. If you take human beings as we are now and say that it's improbable, you are right. But if you think about the idea that we are just one of many possible directions early life could have evolved into, the probability of our occurance or something else is HIGHLY likely.

If you pick a number 1-20, chances are that it won't be 16. But you ARE picking a number and the fact that it happened to be 16 doesn't make 16 significant.

I don't know anything about biology or life or really a whole lot about religion for that matter, but I hope you see the flaw in your argument. You are assuming that your wooden chair MUST have come to be a certain way because that's how it is now. But if you backtrack and think that the outcome was only one of many possible outcomes, you find that the occurance of a wooden chair is more likely. Simple Bayes.

Of course I am continually criticised on this forum for my stupidity, so if somebody would care to pick me apart and call me an idiot, maybe you can just forget my post!

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He's equivocating the word "faith". We've been through all this before. He's saying that induction is "faith" (or at least thinking that induction is valid/reasonable is).

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More specifically, he is stating that the idea of an orderly universe, which is required for the validity of science, is based on an unprovable assumption and therefore must be taken on faith.

However, as I stated in the thread I started earlier today, that the universe is currently ordered is axiomatic.

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Yeah... and we know the universe is ordered by induction. We examine it. Since every oberservation has shown it to be ordered, we induce that it is ordered. And the sun will come up(*) tomorrow. I know that by faith, of course. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

(*) Note: by "come up", I mean that the rotation of the earth will bring the sun into our line of sight, in a way that it appears to be "coming up". [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

[jthegreat]

Induction doesn't provide certainty, though. Axioms do.

[Scotch78]

This is called the argument by design, and I'm surprised that a gambler would be taken in by it. I have a standard six-sided die, what are the odds of me rolling a 1? Okay, I just rolled a one, now what are the odds of me having rolled a 1?

Scott

[Jeff V]

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If you pick a number 1-20, chances are that it won't be 16. But you ARE picking a number and the fact that it happened to be 16 doesn't make 16 significant.

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Not significant, but it establishes probability, which can help us decide how likely the outcome would be and how much we should be concerned about such an outcome.

Biochemist Michael Behe said the probabliity of linking 100 amino acids to create one protein molecule would be the same as a blindfolded man finding a marked grain of sand in the Sahara desert- not once but 3 different times.

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Induction doesn't provide certainty, though. Axioms do.

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Science doesn't provide certainty either. It provides cogency.

[IbrakeFORrivers]

read St. Augustine... he goes into a lot of Plato-nian concepts... Read Timaeus by Plato... It's interesting stuff...