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To: The_Reader_David
Personally, I see design not in tinkering, but residing, way down deep, under the entire structure. GR and QM are each far too elegant to not be the product of Mind. The problem for folks who want a theory of intelligent design is precisedly that if they went to escape from the bogus use of a priori probability estimates, they need to get over the 'tinkering' mentality, and start thinking in terms of anthropic cosmology, and how one could detect in a convincing way a 'signature of intelligence' there, rather like detecting the signature of the Big Bang in the background radiation.

I have no objection to the idea that the structure of the universe derives from some massive intelligence; I am skeptical about the likelihood that it can be detected; and certainly about efforts to date. Dembski, for example, seems to have moved hardly at all from 'bogus use of a priori probability estimates'. And I do agree that 'God the Tinkerer' would be a disappointing deity.

It is hardly hostility to attribute to you confidence in what you, yourself, present forcefully.

Of course not. It is hostile to attribute absolutism. I am an atheist not out of absolutism, but because of all the possible ways the universe might have come about, a single individual deity created in man's image seems to be one of the least plausible, and I refuse to label myself in terms of an uncertainty about whether this creature, of all the possible cosmologies, exists. As you say, disbelief in 'one god paganism' is sensible.

194 posted on 11/01/2005 7:56:19 AM PST by Right Wing Professor
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Placemarker.


195 posted on 11/01/2005 4:24:45 PM PST by PatrickHenry (Reality is a harsh mistress. No rationality, no mercy)
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