Discussion 1 to Talk Back 90
Just another false analogy
by: JT
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To be honest, I have my doubts that this Talk Back 90 actually represents someone's beliefs, particularly as the email address provided bounced. I suspect someone may be having me on. But, I have given the benefit of the doubt to the writer and published it, unedited.
It certainly entails an unusual definition of Agnostic.
However, that is not what I would take issue with. Rather it is the false analogy used;
Take A Puzzle Put It In A Box Shake It For A Billion Years Is It Ever Going To Put Itself Together? No It Wont. And To Believe This World Came Together By Chance
I'll quickly edit that into something a little more readable:
Take a puzzle. Put it in a box. Shake it for a billion years. Is it ever going to put itself together? No, it won't. And to believe this world came together by chance!
Similarly in Talk Back 89, Ben asserts:
the world is replete with beauty and order. It could have no more come about by chance than could a bomb going off in an auto parts store result in the formation of an automobile.
And going back a little further to Talk Back 88 David tells us:
It is true that if one travelled far beyond our known civilisation and suddenly bumped into a house with toilets, kitchen, bathroom and a roof yet with nobody there, that would be enough for him to talk about the existence of some "Intelligent being" Think closely of the systems of the human body, the food on this planet in its variety, the unique Oxygen and the plant/animal exchanges such as the nitrogen cycle. You could draw up long list of excellently well organised systems such that the existence of what I will term a "SUPER INTELLIGENT BEING" ceases to be questioned.
All of these from three consecutive Talk Backs are examples of what Will Petillo correctly identified in his initial response to Ben as variations of the watchmaker argument. And what these "arguments" share in common is a fundamental ignorance of what the actual claims of science are. Whether they address cosmology or evolution (which creationists conflate even though they are quite separate branches of science) the analogies are not relevant. They posit a false view of science, assert that the false view is ridiculous, and that by default, a creator must have done it.
While an analogy cannot prove anything, it can be illuminating. However, a false analogy not only does not prove anything, it also casts into the shadows what it claims to illuminate.