An Accident? Convince Me...

@TurboLung,

TurboLung;146183 wrote:

This is a question for those who believe life is an accident.

Looking at the human body; it doesn't look like an accident to me.

Please explain.

In an attempt to not get one of your "failed, unconvinced" responses - please know I'm not going to attempt to convince you of anything, it appears that your mind is not open for any other possiblity other than your own conclusion.

I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions:

1.) Is you conclusion that life is not an accident only based on the human body not looking like an accident, or does it apply to all living things, or to all things that make up what is?

2.) Are you of the group of Darwinist who appear to think if it evolved it was because it was better then that which it evolved from?

okay, I have more then a couple questions...

3.) If you do not think it was a process of change based on placement and conditions and those best at adaptation to said place and conditions evolving into whatever, what other knowledge has convinved you someone/something had a plan?

Lost1

@TurboLung,

Darwin doesn't say evolution was an accident. He said it happened in accordance with laws, which are as follows:

Growth with reproduction
Inheritance
Variability
A Ratio of Increase, leading to a struggle for life
Divergence of Character, leading to the Extinction of less improved forms

That is it. There is really nothing in it about either chance or design. When you think about it, this is really a rather modest proposal. What is surprising is the way it has been interpreted. It has been understood to make virtually every previous philosophy or religious account, insofar as this claimed to explain how we came to be what we are, obsolete.

I don't know if there is a warrant for that supposition in the work itself, though.

@jeeprs,

jeeprs;148486 wrote:

Darwin doesn't say evolution was an accident. He said it happened in accordance with laws, which are as follows:

Growth with reproduction

Inheritance

Variability

A Ratio of Increase, leading to a struggle for life

Divergence of Character, leading to the Extinction of less improved forms

That is it. There is really nothing in it about either chance or design. When you think about it, this is really a rather modest proposal. What is surprising is the way it has been interpreted. It has been understood to make virtually every previous philosophy or religious account, insofar as this claimed to explain how we came to be what we are, obsolete.

I don't know if there is a warrant for that supposition in the work itself, though.

Yes. "accident" has two meanings. 1. uncaused. 2. not designed. It does not follow that because some event is accidental is sense 2., that it is accidental in sense 1. Although the implication does go the other way.

@jeeprs,

jeeprs;148486 wrote:

Darwin doesn't say evolution was an accident. He said it happened in accordance with laws, which are as follows:

Growth with reproduction

Inheritance

Variability

A Ratio of Increase, leading to a struggle for life

Divergence of Character, leading to the Extinction of less improved forms

That is it. There is really nothing in it about either chance or design. When you think about it, this is really a rather modest proposal. What is surprising is the way it has been interpreted. It has been understood to make virtually every previous philosophy or religious account, insofar as this claimed to explain how we came to be what we are, obsolete.

I don't know if there is a warrant for that supposition in the work itself, though.

It seems that whenever we have some thing, or process, that behaves in accordance with laws, the laws themselves indicate design. Or are we to believe ,the laws themselves materialized by accident?

@jeeprs,

jeeprs;148486 wrote:

Darwin doesn't say evolution was an accident. He said it happened in accordance with laws, which are as follows:

Growth with reproduction

Inheritance

Variability

A Ratio of Increase, leading to a struggle for life

Divergence of Character, leading to the Extinction of less improved forms

That is it. There is really nothing in it about either chance or design. When you think about it, this is really a rather modest proposal. What is surprising is the way it has been interpreted. It has been understood to make virtually every previous philosophy or religious account, insofar as this claimed to explain how we came to be what we are, obsolete.

I have absolutely no problem with being obsolete. I have said many times that I live better than all the kings of the past. I have things in which they only dreamed of having. I have gone more places than the average king of the past had ever visited. I have been entertained more times than all the kings of the past put together have had in their entire life time. Compared to their life, mine is one of greatness even though in relative terms I am just an average person without any real high esteem. I see this and recognize that their lives were obsolete and mine will be obsolete all the same. There will be an arrogant annoying and incredibly intelligent person who will replace me in the future who will have a million times more ease and knowledge (and if you will), wisdom than I could even dream about having.

I am fine with being obsolete. I don't have a problem that life ends and so does my self. I don't need to feed my ego any more than it already has by trying to fool myself into believing I will exist for ever. What do I have in this world to complain about? Absolutely nothing. Yet there are some who can't even simply think beyond their own delusions.

@wayne,

wayne;148572 wrote:

It seems that whenever we have some thing, or process, that behaves in accordance with laws, the laws themselves indicate design. Or are we to believe ,the laws themselves materialized by accident?

No, we are to believe that the laws of nature are a part of the structure of the universe. The kind of universe we have is defined in terms of its laws of nature. So, what you seem to be asking about is whether the universe had a cause. Some people think that the universe itself is the result of design. For instance, Creationists, Intelligent Designers, and, of course, people who believe that God created the universe. But many do not.

@TurboLung,

although I myself think there is much more to that question than many people will allow. It is one thing to argue that God involves himself in creating creatures. It is quite another to say the God designed the laws, or even to say that there are higher-order laws than those operating at the level of either matter or individual organisms. It seems to me that scientific opponents of religion go to a lot of trouble to deny that the order of nature is itself grounds for a religious feeling. In so doing, they are skating on very thin ice.

My attitude is that anyway these laws are not nearly so demonstrable as physical laws, for the reason that biological and evolutionary phenomena are orders of magnitude more complex that physical phenomena. As I said before, we haven't got to the bottom of the nature of matter, yet the scientific opinion seems to be that Darwin's laws are proved beyond any shadow of doubt. To be skeptical about that last claim is to be subject to a lot of ridicule in this day and age.

That says a lot, in itself.

This comment on Neitszche's and Hume's skepticism of the idea 'natural law' captures something very important about the modernist attitude to the idea of 'natural law':

Quote:

The total character of the world... is in all eternity chaos-in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms... Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word "accident" has any meaning.

Thus, the denial of God has driven Nietzsche to deny science, the laws of nature, the existence of order and even of causality. There is no purpose in the world, only chaos. Instead of "law," Nietzsche substitutes "necessity." But what is this but another name for "law"? Likewise, biologist Jacques Monod, in Chance and Necessity (1971), denied the purposefulness implied by "teleology" only to exchange it with an almost identical word, "teleonomy." What is gained by substituting one word for another if both are intended to describe the same thing?

Now it is interesting to note that Nietzsche is not alone in the conclusions he reaches. Before him, David Hume trod the same path, and in his efforts to deny God did away even with the connection between cause and effect. Thus, as Professor Jacques Barzun notes, Hume arrived at a distrust of science and religion alike: "Hume's last word of doubt on religion carries with it such a doubt about the mind of man that the certainty of science goes down in shipwreck too." It was Kant who, transcending Hume, slipped a fresh foundation under the work of science.

From Nietzsche, God and Doomsday by Henry Bayman

@jeeprs,

jeeprs;148641 wrote:

This comment on Neitszche's and Hume's skepticism of the idea 'natural law' captures something very important about the modernist attitude to the idea of 'natural law':

From Nietzsche, God and Doomsday by Henry Bayman

Indeed, what John Dewey called, "the quest for certainty" is a constant theme in philosophy since Plato, and then, Descartes. I don't know about Nietzsche, but even Hume thought that unless there was certainty, we could have no knowledge of anything other than our ideas. That was a mistake. (I suppose that what you mean by "natural law" is not, laws of nature).

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