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To: Dante Alighieri
Gravitation, like particle matter in all it forms, is evidence of intelligent design inasmuch as it performs consistently, moving from cause to effect. Cause and effect are essential attributes of intelligence and design. Intelligent design does not necessarily mean intelligence resides within the product, but its residual effects do. I'm sure you are aware of that.
279 posted on 08/20/2006 2:55:48 PM PDT by Fester Chugabrew
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To: Fester Chugabrew

Ah, the contingency argument (which breaks down when it gets to quantum physics of course) but, no, it doesn't work like that. There is no evidence to suggest that gravitation is under the influence of non-natural intelligency agencies which are necessarily unfalsifiable. This is the problem that Greek scientists made; it's not enough to have logic, you have to out and actually look.

Ichneumon has beautifully dealt with it already:

" For a shorter approach, let's look at your claim that: "everything is contingent upon something else" (known in philosophy as the "PSR", or "principle of sufficient reason"). Question: How did you manage to examine "everything" in order to determine the truth of your assertion? Oh, right, you didn't.

This reminds me of a translation I read of an essay by an ancient philosopher, I think it may have been Aristotle. He was wrestling with the question of whether matter was infinitely divisible, or whether there was a miminum unit beyond which matter could not be divided without losing its properties (i.e, atoms).

As he saw it, he ran into a logical problem either way. If matter was infinitely divisible, then upon what did the physical properties of a material (i.e. color, density, hardness, etc.) rest? One would never be able to "peel open" a particle of a material to find what made it tick, you'd just find more of the material no matter how deep you looked, with nothing to provide its properties.

Conversely, if you reached a point where you found a minimal unit of the material (e.g. an atom), how did *its* internal workings produce the familiar physical properties of the material which it formed? Lacking any modern understanding of elementary particles, electromagnetic forces, quantum effects, etc., he finally arrived at a plausible explanation, which sounds good, reasonable -- and wrong.

He suggested that when an object gets hot, for example, it hurts to touch it because the heat makes the atoms pointy and likely to prick your fingers. Wrong.

He suggested that if the material was green in color, it was because the atom contained an elemental "greenness" within itself. Wrong again.

And so on. What led him astray was the presumption (plausible but wrong) that things at the atomic (and sub-atomic) level had to work in ways similar to our experience at human-sized levels. Wrong. Instead, for the most part they work by very different "rules" entirely, and the human-level properties we're familiar with (e.g. color, texture, hardness, etc.) are made up of *emergent properties* formed by configurations or interactions at levels *above* the atomic level, and do not exist at all (or in the same form) at the atomic level itself. If you look "deep" enough, most of the rules change entirely.

...and similarly for extremes of temperature (weird things happen near absolute zero, and also at temperatures high enough to cause breakdowns in the laws of physics), velocity (e.g. Relativity), etc. etc.

And why, exactly, should it be any different for causality itself? Causality is pretty standard behavior at human-level scales, but is hardly guaranteed to hold true at various extreme conditions of size, time, or energy, etc. In fact, many quantum experiments already look pretty bizarre from a standpoint of classical causality. We may already be exploring the fringes of where causality as we know it no longer applies.

So getting back to your point -- just what basis do you have for your belief that causality holds universally, for all things, under all conditions? For all we know, just as time itself was created by the Big Bang, causality itself may have been -- the trigger of the Big Bang may have occurred outside of our familiar causality, or by another form of it entirely."

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1003273/posts?page=297#297


290 posted on 08/20/2006 3:05:18 PM PDT by Dante Alighieri
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