catchword: anthropic principle

A lot of time is spent on theoretical fiat. Here is the periodic table, here is some evolutionary history, etc.

A lot of other time is spent on the annual science project, which typically amounts to experiment without theory. You are supposed to follow something called The Scientific Method. I will skip the details of what The Scientific Method is, since everyone with an American education has heard it a thousand times. It leaves out the essential step of using theory to plan and interpret experiments. The scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which an alleged witch weighs no more than a duck would be just fine as a grade school science experiment.

The other problem is that to most people the story of biblical creation appears much simpler than the story of adam and eve. If fact, I’ve heard multiple people tout adam and eve (yes, actual biblical literalism) as much more appealing than science because of its simplicity. To you and me it’s obvious that they’ve got it backwards, but most people have very large chunks of their brain and lots of their experience devoted to understanding of humans and their relationships, with hardly any experience in natural processes, so the difficulty of their brain understanding the concepts is very different from the innate complexity of the concepts.

But maybe she did not mean to design us perfectly – just functionally, to a first approximation. Maybe she indeed has a sick sense of humor. Maybe her species does not have a sense of humor at all. Or perhaps she is not even a she, perhaps her species has 26 different sexes, and she is a fhe, or a xhe. If only for this, how could we measure with some certainty if phe exists or not?

“Even the fact that we can make “sense” of things seems to kind of prove my point.”

I don’t know what to say. Perhaps I got your point wrong.

1. Of course they make sense. They evolve upon precise laws modelable scientifically.

2. You can make ‘sense’, or even ‘make sense’, of just about any (incomplete) set of data. It does not mean that it makes any sense.

3. If you mean that it makes sense for things to be the way they are, I would propose that people hurting each other like imbeciles, or being killed by the hundreds in a few seconds, with all they have unique and interesting, makes just about enough sense – but definitely not too much.”
(Anonymous)

Well…
1. What I meant is that they make MORE sense than can be explained by the scientific laws we already know or have thought of right now. That’s why I said “too much” sense.

2. Even the fact that we can make “sense” of things seems to kind of prove my point. I’m not saying that the sense itself was put there by any ol’ guy-with-a-beard, just that there is some logic in chaos, whether someone put it there or it managed to emerge on its own.

3. I was talking about the big picture. And in the big picture, the world survives, and it evolves. And then it dies. The world, not people, not political leaders, not even humanity in general. I don’t really know what “the world” *wants* to do, but it seems to be doing quite well from where I’m standing.

He has pretty long and dense fur.
The designer did a really good job there.

>why would you be embarrassed because >it eats its own poop?

That’s just how I am.

By the way, dogs also eat bird poop which can make them sick.
Why would a reasonable designer not fix that? If I (designed by the designer) can recognize the design flaw (and there are many, also in other species) the designer had to be aware of it too.

There are possible explanations (time [?] pressure, but did she not design time as well?) but none very convincing to me.

The designer has also designed some of us to believe in different (sets of) designers, so that groups believing in different versions of the designer can keep each other occupied by fighting wars.

Presumably, the designer was working under a deadline and that would explain all the deficiencies in the design. The next version will fix some of them.

The designer, as far as we are concerned, can thus be defined completely by the design doc. Darwinism is an attempt to understand this design doc. ID/creationism attempts to understand the designer, hoping to please the designer and get a better role in the next version.