Now you say:
Before you said (my emphasis):
Take a moment with that, and let me know if you are going to stick with the tuning being sufficient (in which case intelligent design can’t be required) or revert to saying it is insufficient (in which case it isn’t fine tuning).
Again, you can’t have it both ways.
You made a straw man argument by changing the way sufficient was used. I used the smily face to see if you would catch yourself doing this. Fine tuning can be necessary for life yet it is not the only condition required.
Fine tuning of matter is evidence of intelligent creation. The parts functionally arranged in a cell are also evidence of intelligent creation. These are simply different pieces of evidence that support a hypothesis.
Allow me to explain something to you about theology. Not all theological positions or arguments are peculiar to a specific religious denomination. In the specific case of ID Creationism, it is really not much more than a gloss on William Paley’s watchmaker argument, itself simply a form of teleological argument. Behe, for one, has as much as admitted this. This argument is equally applicable to any theology that entails the existence of a god who created the universe with particular purpose in mind and, as such, pertains equally well to Christianity, Judaism, Islam and many other faiths.
Hope that was helpful!
You used the word wrong and it’s my fault? Really?
‘Tuning’ could be necessary but insufficient, fine tuning could not be insufficient.
As was discussed in another thread, there is no evidence of any tuning at all:
As they look precisely as they should from natural processes, this is clearly false.
I’d be glad to, if you knew anything about it that I didn’t already know, but that’s counterfactual.
A term which, at least in the sense you intend it, is inaccurate and deliberately misleading about the contents of the thought of many ID proponents…
Even if that were true, it would not justify your claim of “bad theology.” Whether or not the watchmaker argument is strong, by what standard would you adjudge it to be bad theology? What makes a theology bad? What makes the watchmaker argument bad theology? You’ve made a claim without providing any basis for the claim.
How could it be helpful, when it dodged the objection that was raised in my previous post?
Let us all know, someday, what Faizal Ali considers “good theology” and “bad theology” and how he arrived at those standards, and how he applies those standards to ID. But you’ll forgive me if don’t hold my breath waiting for your answer…
Biology isn’t yours, but that doesn’t seem to affect your propensity to make pronouncements about it.
I can see that there might be a place for a Hindu ID tinkerer, but all of the rest trivialize God. That’s what makes ID bad theology.
Please name one or more Hindu ID advocates, while you’re making these sweeping generalizations.
Yes, one can say that as a very accurate generality. It’s pathetic biology and bad theology, promoted with a massive number of outright falsehoods–like claiming that peptidyl transferase is a protein. Remember that one?
On the contrary, your specific objection was that an ID argument could not be dismissed as theologically unsound without specifying the particular religious standard or tradition by which this was determined, since ID proponents do not all belong to the same religion. I have addressed that and, hopefully, you now realize that this is a baseless objection.
Sheer assertion, with no explanation. You’re merely repeating Faizal’s claim, without adding any force to it. And speaking of Faizal, I know he’s reading, because he gave your post a “Like” a few hours ago, but he still hasn’t answered my question. I’m guessing he has no intention of offering any more exposition than you do, and that I’m never going to get his answer to my question. But maybe he will surprise me yet.
These are unsupported assertions
Let’s review:
Let’s look at the way you have addressed that. You wrote that the differences between religions don’t matter for the point in dispute, because of what they have in common:
And I asked you: even supposing that to be true, how did you move from that to the conclusion that ID is “bad theology”? Are teleological arguments automatically “bad theology”? You provided not a shred of evidence, and not even one sentence of reasoning, to justify that conclusion.
If you claim that the teleological argument is “bad theology”, you need to say why it’s bad theology. And you’ve failed to do that. So your statement remains sheer assertion, with no supporting argument. I will continue to treat it as such, and ignore it, until the argument is provided.
By being aware of the arguments that ID Creationists make. I had no intention of going into detail regarding all those arguments, and still don’t. My comment was in response to a specific example of bad IDC theology given by @John_Harshman. That is all.
Self-referential and unpunctuated?
That is insufficient. You need a theological standard by which to judge those arguments. And you don’t have one – or you refuse to state what it is.
His comment reflected his own private view of what a competent God would be like, but no religious body in the world has appointed him to teach the nature of God, so his view is not of any public importance.
You’re completely ignoring the context in which the charge “ID is bad theology” is usually made. It is usually made in a Christian context, by people who at least nominally belong to some particular denomination or school of Christian theology. And those denominations or theological schools have, at least in principle, a set of standards by which to distinguish good from bad theology. But in almost all cases, the people making the claim that ID is bad theology are lay people, and theological quacks, basically “scientists who go to church but know beans about theology” – like Ard Louis, Kathryn Applegate, Dennis Venema, Darrel Falk, Francis Collins, and Karl Giberson. And when they have been challenged to show what part of the Christian tradition they are employing to show that ID is bad theology, they quickly bail out of the conversation – just as you are doing here. They know that they can’t articulate a genuine standard, based on knowledge of their creeds, confessions, and theological tradition. To adapt a saying usually applied to art: they don’t know much about theology, but they know what they like. And since to do more than merely state their dislike would expose their lack of theological knowledge, they drop the subject the moment someone who actually knows something about theology walks into the room.
Nothing new here, folks, except that the person making the unsubstantiated charge here, and refusing to offer substantiation, is an atheist rather than a TE/EC.
Isn’t the discoverability argument nothing more than a series of unsupported assertions? you assert that a discoverable universe could be that way only if created that way on purpose. But what’s your evidence for that? You further assert that God would want his universe to be discoverable. And that an uncreated universe would not be expected to be discoverable (and, bizarrely, that intelligent beings in a natural universe should not be composed of the same particles as the rest of the universe). Where is your support for any of that?
The Finetuning Argument is just a logical fallacy of the form “If A, then X; X, therefore A”. In fact it is even worse: we have no reason to assume ‘If A, then X’ in the first place.
I can’t believe how much ink is spilled about it.
Incorrect. Their arguments can be judged according to whether their logic is valid and sound and whether their factual claims are accurate. These standards are not particular to theology.
Indeed, because most ID promoters are Christian.
However, it’s bad theology if it comes from any monotheistic religion in which the deity is omnipotent.
We are not talking at all about “their arguments”, i.e., the arguments of ID proponents, whether about design or anything else. We are talking about your claim (not originally yours, but since you expressed wholehearted agreement with it, it becomes yours) that ID offers “bad theology.”
You cannot say whether ID offers bad theology without having a standard, i.e., good theology, against which to measure the theology of ID. If you can’t see that you are necessarily employing such a standard, then you aren’t capable of the performing the most elementary operations of reason. And if you are aware that you are employing such a standard, then you are obligated (if you expect anyone to agree with your judgment) to present that standard, and to show how “ID theology” fails to meet that standard. And you refuse to do the latter. So basically, your charge is sheer bluff at this point.
So, can you tell me: according the formal theological confessions of (the list is not meant to be exhaustive) Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Reformed church, Orthodox Judaism, Sunni Islam, Shia Islam, Saivism, Vaishavism, Sikhism, and according to the theological positions of (again, the list is not intended to be exhaustive) Sankara, Ramanuja, Aquinas, Augustine, Calvin, Cranmer, Al-Ghazali, how is “ID theology” (which you have yet to define or even describe) a “bad theology”?
If you cannot answer that question for even one of the above religions or authoritative theologians (or some equivalent example not given on the list), then I would suggest that you never should have expressed an opinion on the subject.
Actually we are. Or at least, that is what several of us were talking about, and then you felt compelled to jump in and start talking about something else.