One of the big mistakes of the Christian faith (and probably many others) has been its attempts to invoke God via the argument of intelligent design.Originally Posted by triple5
Yep, I'm the same - I want proof before I commit to believing in something, or dedicating my life to it. But in the case of God nobody can prove his existence or nonexistence. On Nigel's thread, "If you could teach the world one thing..." My reply was that if we taught kids from an early age about the "facts" of religion - that we don't actually know all the answers, sometime in the future one of those kids might grow up and work it all out
Religion has got pretty messed up over the years, no doubt about it, and even though I don't adhere to any of them I'm pretty certain there is intelligent design to everything in the universe
Intelligent design like many other religious concepts attempts to REDUCE God to a level comprehensible by humans instead of attempting to expand our comprehension to approach the sheer wonder of an existence on the inside of a 13.5 billion year old probability explosion.
Just try to get your mind around the sheer size of the reality we live in.....
Every concept of God that I have ever seen fails horribly in terms of scale, the sheer scale of what religion calls Creation and science calls the Universe (in reality more likely the Multiverse) is so much larger in both time and space than this small planet and its population of a thin skin of animated carbon based compounds.
We as a species have been here for the blink of an eye, we might not be here for much longer, so why is the creation malarkey so big, what was it doing all that time before we woke up?
My point is that God in the conventional sense is human like, with behaviour and emotional judgement not unlike our own human judgement, as a favourite author once said "most religions cooked up a God that has the manners and morals of a spoiled child" (think old testament tantrums).
The place we live in and the stuff we are made of has an unbelievable beauty in terms of its behaviour and the math describing that behaviour, what we see around us and what we are is the emergent behaviour of the materials from which we are made and the fundamental rules that govern the interactions of said materials.
If you want to call that God then go ahead, for me at least you would be welcome, the rules, the math, the fabric might as well be God at least that God would be on the same scale as the observable Universe, the alternative is proposing a God that is outside and disconnected from the Creation/Universe and then we are back to the "why is it so big and why so complex a creation"? question.
If you stretch the scale even further, taking into account potential mathematical evidence (and possibly some observational evidence) for a multiverse, where does that leave a local benevolent God modelled on a human pattern with human like concerns about our behaviour?
It's a big place people and it's a very beautiful and mysterious place, it may well have a force behind it but it is unlikely in my opinion to be the God of the Christian faith or that of any other contemporary faiths.
One last thing in a recent bit of research that I had to conduct into finding the best current available solutions to a particular business problem known as the Job Shop Scheduling Problem, I had to investigate Genetic Algorithms and programming. I can point you at simple fully working examples of programs that will EVOLVE the answer to complex optimisation problems in a relatively short space of time by employing Darwinian evolution in a mathematical model inside a computer program, hell give me a few more weeks and I will probably be writing this kind of code myself, it's fascinating and for me I can see more of a universal God in the Maths underlying our reality than I can in the consciousness of human beings inhabiting it.
