I am busy with my upcoming, free (about 20-page short) Ebook on surviving an encounter with an atheist*, so my thoughts are a bit more in that direction, even though this is isn’t our usual subject matter.
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I just came across the following Wikipedia article titled “Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit” summarizing Richard Dawkins’ counter-argument to the Design Argument.
(If this doesn’t interest you, skip this.)
Here’s Wikipedia’s summary:
The Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit is a counter-argument to modern versions of the argument from design for the existence of God. It was introduced by Richard Dawkins in chapter 4 of his 2006 book The God Delusion, “Why there almost certainly is no God”.
The argument is a play on the notion of a “tornado sweeping through a junkyard to assemble a Boeing 747” employed to decry abiogenesis and evolution as vastly unlikely and better explained by the existence of a creator god. According to Dawkins, this logic is self-defeating as the theist must now account for the god’s existence and explain whether or how the god was created. In his view, if the existence of highly complex life on Earth is the equivalent of the implausible junkyard Boeing 747, the existence of a highly complex god is the “ultimate Boeing 747” that truly does require the seemingly impossible to explain its existence.
I didn’t read Dawkins’ book and don’t want to go into whether knowledge is an intrinsic “quality” of God, the anthropic principle, etc., but rather to point out that whether his counterargument follows or not is irrelevant, because, firstly, I don’t think there is any “proof” of God’s existence, secondly, because the Argument from Design is no good anyway, and thirdly, God is not a scientific explanation of anything (Yeshayahu Leibowitz).
Postulating a prime mover that is capable of indulging in intelligent design is, in Dawkins’s opinion, “a total abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation”…
But could an explanation be eventually found, even theoretically? If we speak, not of abiogenesis or evolution or the like, but of all everything; the “universe”, then since nothing can be said of the universe itself, the nihilistic quest is vain and misconceived.
Parenthetically, I assume the reason most all “Theist” debaters ignore this point is because they are actually Cursedian idolaters, not believers in one, transcendent God.
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