25
votes
Accepted
Does Intelligent Design (ID) entail an infinite regress of designers, and if so, is that problematic?
Your question contains a couple of misconceptions about ID. First, it assumes that ID is an argument for God. This is not the case. ID can certainly be used in an argument for God, and most (but not ...
- 13.1k
21
votes
Accepted
Is it ever reasonable to infer impossibility from high improbability?
For the word to be useful in everyday life, the word "impossible" must colloquially mean nothing but very improbable. Because we can never rule anything out with perfect certainty.
In ...
- 18.9k
15
votes
Resisting a classic Buddhist Argument for Mereological Nihilism
The problem as stated is equivocating on the meaning of "their parts". This phrase is used to mean two different things: "their mere collection of parts" or "their parts in ...
- 13.1k
14
votes
Does the argument from order apply to God?
I would like to outline the basic branches of the argument:
Some theists may like to say "The universe cannot have come into existence itself, it must have a creator".
A non-theist might ...
- 3,967
11
votes
Is the notion of "Complex System" a philosophy of science? Is it the opposite of Reductionism? Is it related to Holism?
A system is a complex system if its characteristic properties cannot be investigated by studying its components in isolation. A typical example of a complex system is the weather: One cannot study the ...
- 42.4k
11
votes
Is the notion of "Complex System" a philosophy of science? Is it the opposite of Reductionism? Is it related to Holism?
Short Answer
Complex systems is a mathematical approach to studying certain objects of science, and is neither a science, nor a philosophy, but an approach that might be considered a combination of ...
- 35.5k
11
votes
Accepted
How complex is the God of Classical Theism?
It might be better to replace "complex" with "complicated". An electron is simple but complicated - it takes an entire theory (Quantum Electrodynamics) to grasp the complicated ...
- 4,121
10
votes
Is it ever reasonable to infer impossibility from high improbability?
Imagine that you had a fair die with 10200 sides (I don't know if a die with exactly that many sides could be fair, but presumably there are possible fair dice of that order of magnitude). When you ...
- 22.5k
9
votes
Accepted
Can the simplicity of a hypothesis be objectively measured?
Yes, see Solomonoff's theory of inductive inference. The idea is that you start with a formal language that lets you formally describe mutually exclusive hypotheses. And then we can measure simplicity ...
- 18.9k
8
votes
How complex is the God of Classical Theism?
I understand your post as asking “How complex is the God-concept of classical theism?”
In philosophy one can only assess the concept of God.
My answer: The God-concept is not only complex, it is ...
- 42.4k
7
votes
Is the notion of "Complex System" a philosophy of science? Is it the opposite of Reductionism? Is it related to Holism?
I would suggest that a complex system is simply a system which is not a simple system; where a simple system is one where you can see with a (possibly long) glance at the components every way it's ...
- 3,710
7
votes
Does Intelligent Design (ID) entail an infinite regress of designers, and if so, is that problematic?
if Complexity(ID1) < Complexity(X), we are admitting that complexity can increase over time, which would sound great to the ears of evolutionists, so let's just ignore this case for the purposes of ...
- 7,417
7
votes
Does the argument from order apply to God?
The question presupposes that God is composite, but in classical theism a key attribute which is derived from God is simplicity. By this what is meant is no real divisibility into parts in any way. As ...
- 765
7
votes
Does the simplicity or complexity of God even matter with respect to worldviews?
The theistic worldview is based on the god-concept. The latter
conceives the universe according to a personal model: The creator,
law-giver and final judge of the universe is a personal being. One
...
- 42.4k
6
votes
Does Intelligent Design (ID) entail an infinite regress of designers, and if so, is that problematic?
Disclaimer of Bias
My bias, to be clear, is in favor of rejecting ID, but I do acknowledge that there's prima facie grounds for accepting the argument that ID is a scientific theory. ID, however, ...
- 35.5k
6
votes
Isn't there a very obvious flaw in the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit?
We then ask how it originated and developed, and this leads us to a Creator.
That is an enormous leap to make. Can you craft an argument that the origin of life necessarily has a capital-C creator?
...
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6
votes
Is it ever reasonable to infer impossibility from high improbability?
In this specific context, it is absolutely not justified to give a actual number to what an upper bound is.
Meyers references the "universal probability bound" proposed by Dembski. Dembski ...
- 379
6
votes
How complex is the God of Classical Theism?
Theological simplicity has its roots in Neoplatonism. The idea is that the phenomenal world is an illusion, and that True Reality exists in a more abstract, simpler, perfect realm. We can imagine a ...
- 30.7k
5
votes
Is there a fundamental difference between strong and weak emergence?
I had some heated arguments with “emergentists”, who tend to define strong emergence as something like:
Strong emergence (definition 1): a property of the system that can not be derived from the ...
- 5,185
5
votes
Does Intelligent Design (ID) entail an infinite regress of designers, and if so, is that problematic?
No.
I propose a thought experiment to prove my answer;
Imagine humans develop advanced, self-aware, AI systems that include robot machines. Such entities could maintain their own hardware and power ...
- 314
5
votes
How complex is the God of Classical Theism?
He's however complex your arbitrary complexity function returns when input your arbitrary definition of God.
If you follow the classical theists and define something like "God is beyond human ...
- 8,413
5
votes
Does the simplicity or complexity of God even matter with respect to worldviews?
It is often that the complexities of the universe can be summarised in a simple set of rules, which we call laws of physics. But this program has limitations, as there is still an insane amount of ...
- 693
5
votes
Is William Dembski’s argument for Intelligent Design self undermining?
To understand this, just apply Bayes' formula.
P(design | observation) = P(observation | design) P(design) / P(observation)
For an observation to make design more likely, the factor P(observation | ...
- 18.9k
4
votes
Is the notion of "Complex System" a philosophy of science? Is it the opposite of Reductionism? Is it related to Holism?
This is a personal opinion. I do research related to the Systems Theory for long years, and it's clear for me that the alleged discipline of complex systems is just an academic fraud. Classifying a ...
- 8,100
4
votes
Does Intelligent Design (ID) entail an infinite regress of designers, and if so, is that problematic?
Would ID proponents agree with this reasoning, and if so, do they find an infinite regress of intelligent designers problematic?
That seems to be a request for speculation. In any given case, I ...
- 867
4
votes
Resisting a classic Buddhist Argument for Mereological Nihilism
The language in (B) could mean either of two different things, one of which is true but irrelevant and one of which would be relevant but is not supported, and as a result I would reject (D).
First ...
- 18.9k
4
votes
Resisting a classic Buddhist Argument for Mereological Nihilism
This is an interesting problem, I’ll try my hand at it, here we go:
A. If wholes exist, then either wholes are identical with their parts or distinct from them.
This premise seems straight forward ...
- 720
4
votes
Chaos vs statistical mechanics vs complexity science
As far as I understand it, I think chaos theory basically says:
There are some functions that depend so strongly on their initial conditions, that a very small difference in the initial conditions ...
- 1,009
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