Was there ever an aha moment that finally made you abandon atheism?
Several, but one in particular actually shocked me.
I asked myself two questions: What is information? And: Can information ever come from a non-intelligent source?
It was a shocking moment for me because I had to confront the fact that DNA is information. If I remained an atheist, I would have to believe that all the intricate, detailed, complex information contained in DNA comes out of nowhere and nothing.
But I also knew that idea did not make sense. After all, I don’t look at billboards — which contain much simpler information than DNA — and think that wind and erosion created them. That wouldn’t be rational. Suddenly, I found that I was a very discomfited atheist.
How can people get this so wrong? In reality the vast majority of complex, information bearing systems are of natural rather than designed origin. The billboard is the exception to the rule: consciousnesses actually are very amateurish at creating things compared to natural, iterative processes (and a very long time). The whole notion that information derives from minds exclusively is completely backwards and readily explicable as a psychological bias in humans towards explaining things in human terms.
11 comments:
I read the article. Now I will be praying for God to humiliate you. I suppose you can't mind.
Hey if God wants to humiliate me then it must be good.
Toups. You have to realize that you're begging the question of information's origin. If we're asking the question "from where does the information in DNA come?" I don't advance knowledge by saying "from God of course" nor do you advance knowledge by saying "it evolved of course". The best we can do is reason about from where information comes. The billboard maker is inferred because the billboard is observed. In fact, probably every time we observe some low-entropy/high-information-content object we infer a designer. (i.e. books, Mt Rushmore, a billboard, a watch, this post, etc.) To see DNA as information and then to infer a source from which the information came is not unreasonable.
Modern humans might make this mistake, because they spend most of their time in environments which are filled with the work of human hands and these things are the most salient to us. However, from my point of view, every living creature on earth is an example of a complex, information bearing system - this includes their DNA as well as their outward physical structure. Human built things make up the minority of complex things in the universe. If there is no compelling evidence for a creator of things other than human things, then we can conclude that structure is, in most cases, not the product of a mind, and human objects are the exception to the rule. This seems most reasonable to me - particularly because what evidence we have materially points to the inadequacy of mind-produced complexity to meet the complexity of most naturally produced complex objects. Arguably, no human endeavor matches the complexity of a macro virus, much less a multicellular organism.
Given that the agencies which produced human complexity (humans) are observable phenomenon with specific material properties and given that we observe no equivalent "scaled up" material phenomenon associated with a "giant mind" which might be responsible for the digestive system of Hoatzin (for instance), it is very reasonable to conclude that minds are not the exclusive source of order, even if we didn't have countless examples of information appearing from iterative processes over competitive environments and complexity arising from simple rules (not minds). See, for instance, the Golem project, examples of microevolution, Conway's Game of Life and other cellular automa.
The upshot is that it is entirely reasonable to look at a complex object and not associate it with the activity of a mind. It might not be intuitive to do so, but human intuition is a terrible place to start when looking for the truth.
from wikipedia:
In logic, begging the question has traditionally described a type of logical fallacy (also called petitio principii) in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises.
I'm sure you knew that, but people so often say " ... that begs the question..." which I take to mean something different from this traditional use.
Pointing to all biology as an example of undirected information genesis implicitly presuposes life from non-life style evolution. It need not. A deity could have authored evolution in the way it is popularly thought to occur which would also invalidate your claim.
To point out that the complexity of a virus far surpasses the complexity of any human design better supports the claim it was made by something super-human; It does not support the claim that it was derived from random processes. In fact the reason evolution had traction with scientists at all is because it was thought that single celled organisms were incredibly simple. It is now known that that they are not. Evolution is still adhered to.
If you are not allowed to use biology to support the claim that information can derive from undirected processes, what do you have left?
My point is not to take the complexity of life as evidence of non-intelligent origins of complexity naively. My point is that in the face of the complete absence of evidence of any "super intelligence" and other scientific results indicating that complexity can result from the repeated application of very simple rules/structures, the observation that natural complex objects resemble unnatural ones (designed by humans) is not sufficient to imply the existence of a person/creator.
Aha! but if I point to the complexity of biology as evidence for an intelligent creator, you cease to have a complete absence of evidence.
If you go further, and ask the question: "Why should material objects obey physical laws?" Why should like charges repel or masses attract? Why do they have the strength that they do? Why does nature have seemingly unbreakable rules? Science can't answer these questions. (As we discussed, science does "how?" not "why?") I reason that nature's laws point to a Law-Giver. Where else do you see law without a law-giver?
As I have indicated elsewhere - demonstrate that the uncaused cause need in any sense have a mind - demonstrate that mind can exist at all without the material described a few posts back, provide even one single counterexample of a non-material mind and one piece of logic which indicates that an uncaused cause must have a mind associated with it, and I can begin to see the need to hypothesize one. Outside of that, the hypothesis that the uncaused cause has a mind seems, ultimately, non-credible to me and much better explained as anthropocentrism.
I should also point out that the exact nature of the universe is not really important here - from my point of view it is very likely that the nature of being will be outside of the grasp of humanity's understanding for my entire lifetime.
The argument I have made before depends entirely on the fact that we can be confused about the very nature of being - I am upholding that the Christian worldview and image of God implies that existential questions would be manifestly resolved by the nature of reality itself so that a person could not fail to merely find God, and could only do wrong intentionally, by a fully informed choice to go against Him, rather than by reasonable accident.
And finally, there are all sorts of non-biological disciplines which demonstrate that complexity can derive from systems with simple rules Complexity is not always associated with consciousness or mind.
I listed a few examples above.
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