Hitch is dead

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I contend that there is no rational argument to support the belief that we exist only as a result in mindless processes evolving form an endless stream of mindless processes all resulting in life as we know it.

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It is the most parsimonious explanation, with no obvious inadequacies. That makes it the most rational explanation. And your desperate rationalisations suggest that you know that.

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IMHO it is more rational to believe that there is an intelligent agency responsible for our existence

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Funny how you can’t find any decent rational arguments for it, then.

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The obvious inadequacy is that the evolutionary process requires a process to get it started, which required a process etc, all by mindless chance

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That’s a nice example of rationalisation. Any explanatory chain has to eventually run out, so that’s a problem for any view. And since there is no clear need for intelligence, assuming unintelligent causes is the parsimonious view (also note that intelligence is one of the things that cries out for explanation so assuming it without explanation actually is a problem)

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The most parsimonious answer is that an intelligent agency is behind it all regardless of how it was accomplished.

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That’s the sort of nonsense answer I’d expect from Faith. Parsimony is about throwing out unnecessary assumptions, not making massive assumptions you happen to like.

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And that is how you rationalize your way around an endless non-evidenced stream of processes to arrive at our present world.

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It’s not a rationalisation. I don’t accept your decree that there has to be an infinite regress. That’s just your invention.

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We have no way of knowing whether there is a need for an intelligent agent or not. Tangle claims that the process is the agency. That is a belief. WE can study the evolutionary process all we want but all that is going to give us is the latest process that got us to where we are. We don't know whether an intelligent agent was required or not.

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Then assuming that there is an intelligent agent involved is not a rational position.

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Sure it's a problem. Of course the theistic view is that God is not restricted to our one dimension of time and is eternal.

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Yes you handwave away the problems of your assumption with another problematic assumption. But it doesn’t address the issue. So that’s just another example of irrationality.

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Of course I don't know that nut IMHO it makes a great deal more sense to believe that than it does to believe that sentient life could have arisen from mindless chemicals without even asking where those chemicals came from.

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In fact it makes less sense if we know that the chemicals were present. Accepting known facts without an explanation is fine. Making things up and calling them facts is not. But it is also something of a strawman since science certainly is looking into the origins of the chemicals. So there’s a double dose or irrationality there.

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OK, but then that is the case for both of us. You are simply assuming that we are the result of mindlessness and claiming that no intelligent agency is necessary.

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Well no. Since we don’t know of any need the parsimonious position is to assume that there isn’t one. So again you fail to understand parsimony.

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OK. Let's make it easy. Just outline the process that was responsible for the process of evolution. Maybe when you've done that start thinking about the process that started that process.

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That’s just changing the subject.So let’s deal with the original point. You don’t get to artificially limit the possibilities available to me. And to accuse me of rationalisation because I refuse to accept your diktat is pretty disgusting.And to answer your question I think the idea that there is a process responsible for the process of evolution is daft.

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...then assuming that there is no intelligent agency involved isn't a rational position either.

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Yes it is. Parsimony is rational.

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In either case we look at what we know and come to a subjective conclusion. I have subjectively concluded that sentient life evolving through a series of mindless chemical processes is far less likely than there being an intelligent agency responsible for all of the processes. I know that Tangle would say that only gets us to deism. It is a different discussion to get to theism from deism

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However, my position is more rational which is the point of discussion. Your opinion lacks any firm basis.

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But the issue is how do we get sentient life from the mindless fundamental particles from the big bang. That is without even asking where those particles were before the BB. Did that all happen with or without intelligent agency?

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In the absence of any solid reason to think otherwise the rational answer is yes. And in fact we do know quite a bit about these things and nowhere do we see any clear sign of intelligent agency.

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That just isn't correct. Your position requires a series of processes each requiring a cause.

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So you say, but I don’t assume any processes without evidence. The idea that I believe in an infinite chain of additional processes is simply something you made up.

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I take the parsimonious position that there is only one cause which is that there is an intelligent agency responsible for the whole shebang.

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That isn’t parsimonious at all. My actual position is the parsimonious one because it avoids all the unnecessary assumptions of yours.

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It’s not.

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It is. Since the answer has no relevance - and would have no relevance even if there was a sensible answer - of course it is changing the subject.

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How am I limiting the possibilities for youi. I am simply asking the question of what is the process that kicked the evolutionary process off. You simply evade the question.

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By insisting that I have to believe in an infinite regress of course!
And since I answered the question - after dealing with the real issue - your accusation that I evaded it is clearly false.

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Just why is it disgusting

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You’re making false accusations because my actual beliefs are inconvenient for your argument and you have to ask why it’s disgusting?

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It seems that pretty much everyone here is allowed to make ad hominem against theists but heaven forbid the holy grail of atheism be questioned.

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Oh, the usual you can tell the truth about us but we can’t lie about you whining. Yuck.

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In other words you can’t answer the question .

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I gave a perfectly correct answer. Evolution is itself a process which will occur whenever the necessary conditions are met. To assume that there is a single process responsible for arranging those conditions is daft.

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Darwin’s answer to the question was the parsimonious answer. There was a creator. You however deny that there is even a question.

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That is not a parsimonious answer. And it is not even a process.

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We exist which is what we firmly know. Why is that? You seem to believe that the mindless particles that existed after the BB have just somehow come together and formed chemicals that combined into incredibly complex basic cellular life and then into sentient beings all by good fortune, and then call that rational.

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By which you mean that I accept the scientific explanations. Seems pretty rational to me. And it’s not as if you have anything better.

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Just read my last sentence. We have mindless particles ending up in sentient life. What clearer sign do you need? As I’ve said before, it is like looking at a car and then finding out that it was built on an assembly line and then declaring that the assembly line just assembled itself.

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I suppose if you leave out all we know about what happened - including evolution - it sounds like a good argument. But that is an argument from wilful ignorance. Hardly rational.

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The evidence is that there has been an evolutionary process. What process is responsible for it? As you don’t know, you simply evade the question.

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There isn’t a process responsible for evolution. That is an answer.

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No. You seem to make the assumptions that evolution on its own got us from what existed after the time of the BB to sentient life without requiring additional processes in between

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No, I don’t. I simply point out that boiling all that down to a process is silly. There are a lot of things going on, from inflation, multiple generations of stellar formation, the formation. Of planetary systems, events within the system and events restricted to just the planets.

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It requires agency

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So you assert, but the evidence is lacking,

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Mindless agency requires a separate agency every step of the way meaning multiple agencies. Intelligent agency parsimoniously requires only one agency

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Bundling up a lot of assumptions into one single agency doesn’t help you. In fact it makes things worse for your position, at least with regard for parsimony. Assumptions should be as few and as modest as possible, not many grand and unnecessary assumptions that you happen to like.

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All I'm asking is how evolution was initiated. I realize like Tangle said that the term is abiogenesis. Tangle says that eventually science will solve that puzzle. So if and when it does then the question is why and how did abiogenesis occur

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Tangle’s answer is contentious because he’d have to define anything capable of evolving as life and that’s not generally agreed. Viruses, for instance, evolve but are often considered to be excluded as living things.So the correct answer is that the conditions were met, and there is no single process that can be labelled as the cause. But that’s the answer I already gave.

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My beliefs are inconvenient for your argument but I don't call them disgusting.

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I didn’t call your beliefs disgusting either. It was your false accusations. So let’s chalk this up as another example of your less than honest approach to debate.

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Well at least now you are agreeing that evolution required at least one previous process. However, you missed the point. Each process including evolution required a cause whether it be a mindless agent or an intelligent one. If a mindless agent is the cause the there needs to be a different cause every step of the way. If it is intelligent then there is only one cause required for each individual process.

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Of course this admission is something you should have known all along. And your point is one I’ve already answered in my previous post.

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There are huge gaps in scientific knowledge between the BB and sentient life. However science only answers the question of how things happened the way they did and not why they happened. I have no problem with the science.

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The gaps are being filled as we gain knowledge. But really if your argument is going to boil down to a God of the Gaps argument - and not even a good one - you haven’t got much of a claim to be rational.

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Well of course it requires agency.

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I don’t think so. If it is the working out of mindless processes where is the agency?

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So now I'm dishonest, if not disgusting. I am trying to have an honest debate and doing the best I can.

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It doesn’t look like an honest debate at all.

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Evolution filled a gap. If abiogenesis is scientifically explained it will fill a gap. However, the scientific explanation does not answer the question of why these processes exist as they do. How and why are two separate questions.

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There doesn’t need to be a why’ seperate from the how.

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The agency might be mindless or intelligent which is the question we're discussing

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Now that is an evasion. So what is this idea of mindless agency?Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

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I have no idea what you are referring to

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Well we can start with your unjustified misrepresentation of my position, where you insisted that I had to believe in an infinite regress.We can go on to your attempt to use rhetorical trickery to justify that. Because let us be honest, asking about how evolution started was never going to justify it. Nor lead to any valid justification.And that continued with your false accusations of evasion because my perfectly valid answer wrecked the trick.Really, none of that is honest debate or discussion.

Indeed, parts of it - like Esther - clearly are fiction.

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So explain the following:

Matt 7:13-14 writes:

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"Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. 14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

Why is the road to destruction so broad? What misapplied evidence leads so many to travel that path?

Why do only a few find the narrow path? Surely the evidence is available for everyone.

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You need to read the full chapter Phat.This part is especially relevant. It’s not about mere assent to propositions like God exists or even Jesus is Lord. It’s because doing what Jesus requires is HARD.The evidence may show the way but it doesn’t compel you to walk it. You, of all people, should know that.

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Fiction was invented until the 12th century.

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To be honest you should have said: fiction in a precise, technical sense.A sense which apparently excludes obvious examples like Lucian of Samosata’s A True Story from the second century - a thousand years older.

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My point that was that the Gospel accounts aren't written as fiction.

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Funny how the scope narrows from the entire Bible to just the Gospels. However, we can be certain that the Gospels are unreliable accounts written by biased and credulous people.

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The Gospels in one case was written by an eye witness, (John), and the others would have compiled their material from eye witnesses.

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The authorship of John is in question, and the synoptic Gospels show clear evidence of literary dependencies (I.e. two of them use another synoptic Gospel as a source). We cannot know that any of them made a serious investigation, and we can be certain that writing history in the modern sense was not a concern.

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There is considerable additional support for the NT writing that doesn't exist for what Homer wrote.

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There is very little. We can be sure that Herod the Great existed, and that Quirinius conducted a census of Judaea. However Herod died about ten years before that census. Which is rather a problem when Matthew has Jesus born in the reign of Herod the Great and Luke has Jesus born during the census. They also disagree on Jesus’ ancestry.

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I can never win these arguments with evidence, apart from talking about my own changed life and growing awareness. What gets me about you, PaulK is that you can use scripture to enunciate a point regarding human behavior yet you spend as much time calling Christian belief and certainty into question.

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I occasionally do the former typically when addressing a Christian, or the behaviour of a Christian. Scripture is a useful means of making a point. And, of course, Scripture can contain worthwhile insights.For the other, Galatians 4:16 seems an apt answer.

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Engaging in arguments that call into question the reliability of the lessons being taught as any better than any other human wisdom is, in my opinion, a ripe target.

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Do you agree that historical reliability is a different question? A fiction can convey a lesson - that after all is where parables and allegory come in. And the value of the lesson - so far as it has any - is not diminished by being conveyed through fiction.

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To start with, let's define what reliable teachings are?

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Alright. Go ahead.

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Different philosophies lead to different behaviors from those utilizing them for understanding.

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Perhaps, but I think you will find that other factors are also relevant, to a large degree.

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Atheism is not exempt from this critique. It is my personal belief that human wisdom is *not* all we have, but I cannot prove this to be true.

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Atheism in itself is not a philosophy. It may be a component of a philosophy - in some an axiom, in others more of a conclusion - but it’s not a philosophy in itself. Atheists may be Marxists or Objectivists or Buddhists - among others.

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What I have noticed is that the scholars and critics of Jesus Christ as an actual Spirit, Relationship, and personal philosophy is accepted by most believers and rejected by the most ardent critics. I can only guess at reasons why anyone would seek to disprove such a character. Do you have any insights?

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In the first place, if you bring something up as an argument those who disagree will reject it. That is the nature of debate.In the second place anyone seeking to understand the world will come to their own conclusions. It is only natural for those of us who were raised as Christians to include Christian beliefs in our evaluations. Do you really expect me to believe both that Jesus is dead and gone and that you have a personal relationship with him? Or expect me to change my mind just because you claim to have a personal relationship with him?As an aside since Matthew 7 recently came up, let me quote a relevant section: I never knew you is hardly compatible with a personal relationship.

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Let's look at the story of the feeding of the 5000. I think that there is a strong possibility that there were actually a lot fewer people there than that suggests. Who knows? That is an embellishment but if the miracle did happen as is written then that embellishment does not make it fiction.

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There is also a good chance that it never happened, and the real origin is Elisha feeding 100 (2 Kings 4:42-44). That would make it fiction. We don’t know where the Gospel writers got the story from at all.

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I guess I didn't make my point clear. There were still those around who witnessed the 3 years of Jesus' ministry and would know if the story of the feeding of the 5000 was a complete fabrication then the whole account would be brought discredited.

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If they got to hear it, and cared to discredit it, and if they were believed. And we know that didn’t happen.The accounts of the post-Resurrection appearances in Matthew and Luke are sufficiently different that one must be badly wrong. But neither was corrected - and believers would want to correct those errors.