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Re: Russell's teapot - this is just the classic Red Hering. If you argue for a bearded man in the sky you can put it as absurdum this way, but it has nothing to

Re: Russell's teapot - this is just the classic Red Hering. If you argue for a bearded man in the sky you can put it as absurdum this way, but it has nothing to do with the intelligent design hypothesis, also called simulation hypothesis. Are we special because of the anthropological principle or is there some deeper underlying cause? Even finding intelligent alien life wouldn't fully answer the question - you can also apply it to the physical constants of our universe that are remarkably well chosen. That's not to say that assuming natural processes as a principle doesn't have legs - so far Dr. Penrose's hypothesis of arbitrary scaled time convinces me most, which avoids any requirement of intelligent design, but so far there is not sufficient evidence to prove it, or any other origin theory, and as long as that is the case I think it is too quick to dispell intelligent design.

Grue3 8y ago
"Intelligent design" is silly because it doesn't answer the question of creation at all. Ok, it wasn't a bearded man in the sky but a bunch of lifeforms who created a simulation for people to live in. So, these lifeforms, and the world they live in - where did they come from? We know they're more advanced than humans because humans don't currently have the ability to simulate worlds of this scale. Now instead of the question of how relatively simple creatures like humans came to life, we have a question of how much more advanced lifeforms came to life. You just made the question more complicated for no reason whatsoever.
- m_mueller 8y ago
  all we can do is observe our universe and try figuring it out. so far what we can observe matches a coherent scientific model up to a point, but there are severe issues left to explain: * so the universe was at one point pure energy at a scale smaller than an atom core? how did this happen? * why did it first inflate so fast so it wouldn't fall back immediately? what happened to this inflation force after it was done? * what is that force that accelerates expansion? * why can't we observe most of the mass required to hold galaxies together? * how does gravity effect the quantum world? I'm hopeful that these can still be answered, especially since gravity may actually allow us to observe what's behind the CMB. But with such severe gaps I find intelligent design still as good an answer as any - intuitively it looks to me like a lab experiment that has been tuned to produce interesting results. If we do find answers to the above, intelligent design can probably be ruled out, but otherwise a valid hypothesis is that our universe does not make sense internally because there are external forces acting on it that come from an outside universe, potentially steered in an intelligent way.

Grue3 8y ago

"Intelligent design" is silly because it doesn't answer the question of creation at all. Ok, it wasn't a bearded man in the sky but a bunch of lifeforms who created a simulation for people to live in. So, these lifeforms, and the world they live in - where did they come from? We know they're more advanced than humans because humans don't currently have the ability to simulate worlds of this scale. Now instead of the question of how relatively simple creatures like humans came to life, we have a question of how much more advanced lifeforms came to life. You just made the question more complicated for no reason whatsoever.

m_mueller 8y ago
all we can do is observe our universe and try figuring it out. so far what we can observe matches a coherent scientific model up to a point, but there are severe issues left to explain: * so the universe was at one point pure energy at a scale smaller than an atom core? how did this happen? * why did it first inflate so fast so it wouldn't fall back immediately? what happened to this inflation force after it was done? * what is that force that accelerates expansion? * why can't we observe most of the mass required to hold galaxies together? * how does gravity effect the quantum world? I'm hopeful that these can still be answered, especially since gravity may actually allow us to observe what's behind the CMB. But with such severe gaps I find intelligent design still as good an answer as any - intuitively it looks to me like a lab experiment that has been tuned to produce interesting results. If we do find answers to the above, intelligent design can probably be ruled out, but otherwise a valid hypothesis is that our universe does not make sense internally because there are external forces acting on it that come from an outside universe, potentially steered in an intelligent way.