Comment by bmartin13

2 years ago

[flagged]

You are objectively wrong. It requires no faith. There is simply no evidence for an intelligent being at the root of creation, no data that cannot be explained with much simpler mechanisms than intelligence. The proton is complicated by human standards, but it still is nowhere near as complicated as intelligence. You can't have a conversation with a proton.

  • Technically it requires faith to assert that the universe did not have its origin from some intelligent supernatural being, just as it does to assert the opposite. The only thing we can truly say based on the data is "we don't know for certain at this time".

    • No, it doesn't (at least not if you are adhering to the scientific method). This is a very common bit of religious propaganda, and it is 100% wrong. Intelligence has some very specific and readily identifiable characteristics. In particular, it has high Kolmogorov complexity [1]. This is what distinguishes intelligence from other forms of complexity, like chaos or the decimal expansions of irrational numbers. And there is no evidence of high Kolmogorov complexity in the creation of the universe. To the contrary, all of the evidence points to extraordinarily low Kolmogorov complexity at the foundations of our reality, things that can be described in just a few pages -- maybe even just a few lines -- of math. So to posit an intelligence as the explanation is every bit as unjustified as positing that the Tooth fairy is responsible for the coin under your pillow.

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity

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    • And here you're equivocating on the word faith.

      In your post, "faith" either means "accepting best current evidence and logic" or "believing that there's a supernatural explanation without any evidence whatsoever" and it can't rightly mean both, because those definitions are incompatible.

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  • where did all these building blocks come from then? you still know nothing

    • That's not true. I know that the fundamental processes that occur in our universe can be described by simple mathematical laws, so there is no need to posit anything as complex as an intelligence to explain them. Yes, it's possible that there is an intelligence there, just as it is possible that the tooth fairy exists. But mere possibility is not enough to make a good scientific hypothesis.

Your tone suggests you think this statement is provocative because religion attempts to justify itself with its insidious attempts to appropriate language.

You appear to think “intelligent being” and “faith” are inextricable, but the word faith exists perfectly fine without a need to believe in an “intelligent being”.

What if the rules of the universe are themselves a form of God-like intelligence?

They're omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. Their true form exists somehow outside of reality and cannot be (currently) comprehended by us mortals. Their touch can be found wherever we look, but their intent and motivation remain mysterious.

I believe this idea is called Pantheism.

But what is the intelligent being made of? Did they come from randomness or from yet another higher-level intelligent being? You're just scratching the surface of this rabbit-hole!

  • It's Djinns all the way down, that's why you've got to turn to GOD (GOD over Djinns)...