I am Open to Design Arguments of a Sort

Things have changed a lot less than people think.

The epicureans were just as sophisticated as the best of today’s modern day atheists and Gregory of Nyssa’s responses to them in On the Soul and the Resurrection and On the Making of Man are every bit as cutting as anything coming from Plantinga or other analytic theists.

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I honestly consider some of the Church Fathers better than most theologians today.

Just putting it out there.

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Oh, and another thing. Have you read Origen’s Contra Celsum ?

In there he defends Christianity from Celsum a pagan philosopher.

Celsum argued that Christian doctrines are “irrational” denounced Christians as uneducated, deluded, unpatriotic, close-minded towards reason, and too accepting of sinners." He accused Jesus of “performing his miracles using black magic rather than actual divine powers and of plagiarizing his teachings from Plato.” And he warned that “Christianity itself was drawing people away from traditional religion and claimed that its growth would lead to a collapse of traditional, conservative values.”

Ah, those were the days.

Educate me on this.

"I hear that Epicurus carried his theories in this very direction. The framework of things was to his mind a fortuitous and mechanical affair, without a Providence penetrating its operations; and, as a piece with this, he thought that human life was like a bubble, existing only as long as the breath within was held in by the enveloping substance , inasmuch as our body was a mere membrane, as it were, encompassing a breath; and that on the collapse of the inflation the imprisoned essence was extinguished. To him the visible was the limit of existence; he made our senses the only means of our apprehension of things; he completely closed the eyes of his soul, and was incapable of seeing anything in the intelligible and immaterial world, just as a man, who is imprisoned in a cabin whose walls and roof obstruct the view outside, remains without a glimpse of all the wonders of the sky.

Verily, everything in the universe that is seen to be an object of sense is as an earthen wall, forming in itself a barrier between the narrower souls and that intelligible world which is ready for their contemplation; and it is the earth and water and fire alone that such behold; whence comes each of these elements, in what and by what they are encompassed, such souls because of their narrowness cannot detect.

While the sight of a garment suggests to any one the weaver of it, and the thought of the shipwright comes at the sight of the ship, and the hand of the builder is brought to the mind of him who sees the building, these little souls gaze upon the world, but their eyes are blind to Him whom all this that we see around us makes manifest; and so they propound their clever and pungent doctrines about the soul’s evanishment;— body from elements, and elements from body, and, besides, the impossibility of the soul’s self-existence (if it is not to be one of these elements, or lodged in one); for if these opponents suppose that by virtue of the soul not being akin to the elements it is nowhere after death, they must propound, to begin with, the absence of the soul from the fleshly life as well, seeing that the body itself is nothing but a concourse of those elements; and so they must not tell us that the soul is to be found there either, independently vivifying their compound.

If it is not possible for the soul to exist after death, though the elements do, then, I say, according to this teaching our life as well is proved to be nothing else but death. But if on the other hand they do not make the existence of the soul now in the body a question for doubt, how can they maintain its evanishment when the body is resolved into its elements?

Then, secondly, they must employ an equal audacity against the God in this Nature too. For how can they assert that the intelligible and immaterial Unseen can be dissolved and diffused into the wet and the soft, as also into the hot and the dry, and so hold together the universe in existence through being, though not of a kindred nature with the things which it penetrates, yet not thereby incapable of so penetrating them? Let them, therefore, remove from their system the very Deity Who upholds the world."

G. Nyssa “On the Soul and the Resurrection.”

http://newadvent.org/fathers/2915.htm

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Speaking of design in nature, he DOES NOT appeal to gaps in our knowledge or make a type of mechanistic Paley-esque argument:

“We see all this with the piercing eyes of mind, nor can we fail to be taught by means of such a spectacle that a Divine power, working with skill and method, is manifesting itself in this actual world, and, penetrating each portion, combines those portions with the whole and completes the whole by the portions, and encompasses the universe with a single all-controlling force, self-centred and self-contained, never ceasing from its motion, yet never altering the position which it holds.”

God’s power is seen through all things and penetrates all things. A soft panentheism.

I would agree, I expect, in the way that celery is every bit as good a wood splitter as margarine.

I see no argument there, just a bit of ridicule of those self-evidently silly Epicureans. What a bunch of maroons! This is the summa theologium?

@John_Harshman,

Please offer constructive comments. No, it’s not the Summa Theologica. Different work and different author. I appreciate your question, but your quickly brushing aside of almost everything that isn’t consistent with a secular worldview doesn’t seem productive. And I think the epicureans were extremely smart. Are you familiar at all with Lucretius’s poetry?

Dawkins could learn how to be a much better atheist by consulting them.

But Gregory was brilliant as well.

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https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2018/12/31/ep206-1-lucretius/

I wasn’t referring to the book but to the sentiment. I meant “This is the best you have?”

As to constructive comments, I don’t see anything worth critiquing there. Is there an argument in that quote? If so, could you explain what it is?

Only vaguely. What in there should I, in the 21st Century, be paying attention to? Is it the Whig view of history? “Oh, he thought about atoms; he predicted modern science.” Or is it something else?

Basically, yeah. It just seems like even with the advance of science, we’re still arguing about the same things. I find it fascinating.

What things? Lucretius’s idea of an atom bears little resemblance to what we know now. Could you make your points explicitly?

I suppose if one gets ones history from Neil deGrasse Tyson, ones theology from Jerry Coyne, and ones philosophy from Daniel Dennett, one may tend to assume these arguments are new and something to do with reason versus superstition.

Who cares about a lot of old Iron Age Greeks?

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I think Origen’s work was the first apologetic.

And Christianity’s opponents had a really similar arguments to what we see today.

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Depending how closely you want to define his apologetic, I think there were many others before even him (and after, of course). Here’s a post from this time last year, with a bias to “natural theology” more than “anti-Epicureanism,” though they clearly overlap.

How odd, then, thatafter all this time those arguments are still unanswered.

Possibly, but by the same token Epicureanism has been unable to refute its rivals in the last 2.4K years, though in terms of support, Epicureanism has always been in a minority.

Both still exist because, at root, they are fundamental axioms for understandng reality, and so are questions of choice. It boils down to the choice between two metaphysical propositions:

  • The ground of reality is a principle of chaos, which gives rise to the universe’s order by accident, or

  • The ground of reality is a principle of order, which gives rise to the universe’s order by choice.

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Sounds like a false dichotomy to me, as well as a false equation of order with choice with God. Perhaps you are shoehorning, and perhaps science isn’t Epicurean at all.

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Science never was Epicurean - it started theistic, and is practised with some attempt at metaphysical neutrality. But behind the practice of science lie one or other of those metaphysical assumptions. For those who are materialists, those assumptions will almost inevitably be Epicurean.

And yet you create a false dichotomy and a false equivalence, which you have not addressed. “Principle of chaos” and “accident” are not well defined, unless you mean anything at all that isn’t God. “Principle of order” isn’t well defined, unless you mean God. If so, then it’s not a false dichotomy, but it’s a meaningless one, in which the first encompasses much more than you imply and the second much less. “By accident” is also a problem.

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