Disproving the Watchmaker Argument on the Atheist Experience

[worldlystone]

cool.I didn't know that was you!Great call

[rimfa123]

Why was there a sudden flash at about 1:50

[EGarrett01]

I don't see a flash. Maybe something to do with the annotations?

[LessthanJake14]

And at 1:06 too. Perhaps it's to scare Creationists off. You know what they're like with sudden movements. Just look at how they responded to 20th Century science!

[rimfa123]

lol

[generalslip]

I see it.

[Nashy119]

What about a natural creator, a loop in complexities?

If you consider us we have things much bigger and much smaller. It depends how superior the person considers themself.

Has that got a name? I'm bad at naming ideas.

[emuholic]

there's so much going on in your head garret you get confused by your own crap and you struggle to form any coherence - feel free to delete my comment and block me x

[EGarrett01]

I didn't.

[bizzee1]

Fundies are unconvinced by the Theory of Evolution, because we weren't there to observe the developemnet of the simplest forms of life and we don't have an absolute knowledge of the physical laws of the universe to say that a god is not actively pushing molecules into place to design the life. However, we do have an absolute knowlege of how the Mandelbrot set is formed and it can be demonstrated on demand that an infinitly complex design can be formed by repetative aplication of simple rules.

[bizzee1]

That is the best that I can state the case. Matt's devil's advocate argument that magic man (god) created math, so math=magic is unfounded unless someone can show a magic code in 1+1=2. I haven't had a fundie suggest this, so I'll have to take Matt's devil's advocate argument as flippant nonsense, until somebody seriously claims that math=magic. I've heard fundies claim some odd things like logic is a person, but these ideas are not widly held, so the fractal argument should work on most.

[TheStephenation]

I haven't seen the episode in question, so I can't comment on what he actually said. But it sounds like he MIGHT have been talking about the fact that theists making this argument already believe that god designed everything (including math). So their reaction to any counterexample could be to simply assert that god created that thing too. If you managed to convince one that an ordinary stone was extremely complex, he could simply fall back on "Well, the stone was designed too." Silly, I know.

[bizzee1]

You have Matt's argument about right as I understood it. My point is, however math came to be, it is provably not an infinitely complex set of rules, yet the repetitive application of these simple rules produces infinitely complex design. The provably simple set of rules is a bottleneck through which an infinitely complex designer's complexity cannot pass. So, we are left only with the simple rule set producing the M-set design.

[bit4man]

Fix the sound

[EGarrett01]

Sounds fine to me.

[bit4man]

You must have good ears then. All the videos from these guys have almost no volume. Given that all they do is talk, I think focusing on the audio would be a great benefit.

[RobWRobins]

@bit4man It's cable access, it's not their equipment. They are using the studios equipment. Focusing on the audio is not an option, because they do not control the audio.

[TheStephenation]

Another problem with the Watchmaker argument is that it assumes that the reason we are able to detect design in man-made objects is that they are complex, but all of the examples have another thing in common: they were designed by humans. Creationists don't have an example where the designer is identified to be non-human and complexity is the only tip-off for humans to recognize design in the first place.

[TheStephenation]

I'm glad you clarified this in the description box. I get what you're saying now. Seems like this applies to cellular automata too. I think it's a perfectly good refutation of the Watchmaker argument.

[EGarrett01]

Yeah, I didn't want to talk too long on the show and it's difficult to tell when they're answering, which is why I randomly stopped sometimes and then talked over them. I noticed now that other callers do the same.