Argument from Beauty
Created on: January 9th, 2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JTVtOtKefU
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for all the retards out there, as an fyi: generally, eyes start out as a few photo-sensitive cells; creatures with more of the cells can perceive better and survive to reproduce where others fail. thus it becomes a big ol' smattering of photo-sensitive cells over many thousands of *generations*. the membrane starts to bend to allow more surface area for more light-sensitive cells; and eventually transparent membranes form a sort of lid over these cells etc. lenses come as a result of this later etc.
That's what we call a fallacy, Firebird, because it assumes that religion is the source of all morality. Morality is a product of simple lessons of life and experiences accrued over time and beginning with childhood. If you were raised in the Middle East, you'd likely feel that subjugating women is a perfectly moral thing to do because that's how you'd have been raised, much like how you think it's perfectly OK to talk and pray to your imaginary friend because your deluded parents raised you to do so.
Bauersnark, You say the spontaneous generation of life is complete bullsh*t. But if life could never be generated, how could it exist? Now here's where you say god created life. So that means that God spontaneously generated life right? You see, we both believe in spontaneous generation of life, the only difference is, you believe that there has to be some kind of supernatural component to it, whereas most people do not (because they're not morons).
The judgment that something is beautiful is nothing but the claim that something appears designed though it may lack practical function. This appearance of design and unity in nature brings us to reject chance as a possible cause and we infer that there is a unified, perfect, mighty, wise, and self-sufficient Being behind that beauty. This may give us hope, but it cannot prove with certainty the existence of such a being. For that, we require a necessary being with all-embracing reality, which in turn must be shown necessarily exist.
Beauty is something I call "optimal stimulation." When you see just the "right" colors, a pianist hits just the "right" chords, or get just the "right" amount of salt out of a potato chip: that's beauty. It's not the perception of design in nature. That arises from the oft-unrealized notion that we would design Nature like that if it were up to us: to provide ourselves with optimal stimulation in order to maximize emotional highs.
Design on a fundamental level, is connected with the attempt to produce the "right effect" either sensually or otherwise. Your first example is certainly the sort of thing we would only be willing to attribute to design while your second is an object of design (engaged in by the Pringles factory daily). In addition, I never claimed that we are actually seeing design. No, we never see the property of design itself. I claimed that we experience the appearance of design whose truth is contingent upon a designer and- if it is to be anything more than a contingent product of human judgment -must be proven aside from the appearance.
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