What's the Mechanism of Intelligent Design?
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1794-how-exactly-did-god-create-the-universe-and-the-world-what-process-was-involved
An intelligent designer creates by actualizing potential power at his disposition, information input ( words ), wisdom, and will. But how exactly does this work?
We don't know how exactly a mind might act in the world to cause change. Your mind, mediated by your brain, sends signals to your arm, hand, and fingers, and writes a text through the keyboard of the computer I sit here typing. I cannot explain to you how exactly this process functions, but we know, it happens. Consciousness can interact with the physical world and cause change. But how exactly that happens, we don't know. Why then should we expect to know how God created the universe? The theory of intelligent design proposes an intelligent mental cause as the origin of the physical world. Nothing else.
In genesis it says God spoke and things came into existence. God is a potent cause with power ( energy ) and his spoken word indicates information. Because we do not understand and in a detailled manner how he created the physical universe, and life, does not mean God does not understand or can't. Mystery to us is not mystery to God, but we do know that God is not limited to His spiritual realm, as he shown with his becoming of flesh in Jesus Christ.
Looking at the account of Genesis 1:1 for just a brief moment, the words in that first verse are quite remarkable. They are indicative of the incredible mind of God. God says in that first verse everything that could have been said about creation and He says it in such few terms. The statement is precise and concise almost beyond human composition. A well-known scientist named Herbert Spencer died in 1903. He discovered that all reality, all reality, all that exists in the universe can be contained in five categories...time, force, action, space and matter. Herbert Spencer said everything that exists, exists in one of those categories...time, force, action, space and matter. Now think about that. Time, force, action, space and matter. That is a logical sequence. And then with that in your mind, listen to Genesis 1:1. "In the beginning," that's time..."God," that's force, "created," that's action, "the heavens," that's space, "and the earth," that's matter. Everything that could be said about everything that exists is said in that first verse. Now either you believe that or you don't. You either believe that that verse is accurate and God is the force or you believe that God is not the force that created everything. And then you're left with chance or randomness or coincidence.
http://theoryofid.blogspot.com.br/
W.L.Craig : First, in order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn't have an explanation of the explanation. This is an elementary point concerning inference to the best explanation as practiced in the philosophy of science. If archaeologists digging in the earth were to discover things looking like arrowheads and hatchet heads and pottery shards, they would be justified in inferring that these artifacts are not the chance result of sedimentation and metamorphosis, but products of some unknown group of people, even though they had no explanation of who these people were or where they came from. Similarly, if astronauts were to come upon a pile of machinery on the backside of the moon, they would be justified in inferring that it was the product of intelligent, extra-terrestrial agents, even if they had no idea whatsoever who these extra-terrestrial agents were or how they got there. In order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn't be able to explain the explanation. In fact, so requiring would lead to an infinite regress of explanations, so that nothing could ever be explained and science would be destroyed. So in the case at hand, in order to recognize that intelligent design is the best explanation of the appearance of design in the universe, one needn't be able to explain the designer.
The best explanation of the origin and life and biodiversity is: intelligence. Conscious activity. The deliberate choice of a rational agent. Indeed, we have abundant experience in the present of intelligent agents generating specified information. Our experience of the causal powers of intelligent agents -- of "conscious activity" as "a cause now in operation"-- provides a basis for making inferences about the best explanation of the origin of biological organisms in the past. In other words, our experience of the cause-and-effect structure of the world -- specifically the cause known to produce large amounts of specified information in the present -- provides a basis for understanding what likely caused large increases in specified information in living systems in the past. It is precisely my reliance on such experience that makes possible an understanding of the type of causes at work in the history of life.
Ann Gauger : It's still worth considering how a mind might act in the world to cause change. The answer is we don't know. I sit here typing. My mind, mediated by my brain, is putting words into a computer program (designed by other minds, by the way), using my fingers to type. But how does it happen, really? Where does the impulse to press one key instead of another come from? And how do these words, products of my mind, communicate to others through their computer screens? We can't really say how our own minds work to interact with the world, yet we know they do. It is our universal, repeated, personal experience that shows us that our consciousness interacts with our bodies to produce information, but exactly how it works is not known. So why should we expect to know how the agent(s) responsible for the design of life or the universe may have worked? The theory of intelligent design does not propose a mechanism (a strictly or necessarily materialistic cause) for the origin of biological information. Rather, it proposes an intelligent or mental cause. In so doing, it does exactly what we want a good historical scientific theory to do. It proposes a cause that is known from our uniform and repeated experience (to borrow a phrase) to have the power to produce the effect in question, which in this case, is functional information in living systems.
Objection: We have never observed a being of any capacity creating biological systems and life.
Answer: We do not need direct observed empirical evidence to infer design. If investigators know that someone was deliberately killed, is their conclusion invalidated because they don't yet know exactly who did it and how?
When a detective arrives at the crime scence, and sees a bullet in the chest of the victim, and no arm nearby that could be a hint to suicide, the detective can with a degree of certainty conclude the victim was shot in the chest and killed. So its a murder crime scence.
Same when we observe the natural world. It gives us hints about how it could have been created. We do not need to present the act of creation to infer creationism / Intelligent design.
Meyer, Darwins doubt: At present no one has any idea how our thoughts—the decisions and choices that occur in our conscious minds— affect our material brains, nerves, and muscles, going on to instantiate our will in the material world of objects. However, we know that is exactly what our thoughts do. We have no mechanistic explanation for the mystery of consciousness, nor what is called the “mind-body problem”—the enigma of how thought affects the material state of our brains, bodies, and the world that we affect with them. Yet there is no doubt that we can—as the result of events in our conscious minds called decisions or choices—“will into existence” information-rich arrangements of matter or otherwise affect material states in the world. Professor Asher did this when he wrote the chapter in his book— representing his ideas impressed as words onto a material object, a printed page—attempting to refute intelligent design. I am doing this right now. This example, representative of countless daily experiences in life, surely satisfies the demands of uniformitarianism. Even though it remains entirely possible that we may never know how minds affect matter and, therefore, that there may always be a gap in our attempt to account for how a designing mind affected the material out of which living systems were formed, it does not follow that we cannot recognize evidence of the activity of mind in living systems.
Casey Luskin Must We Directly Observe the Intelligent Agent to Detect Design? June 19, 2015
Yesterday I discussed an email exchange[/url] with an atheist student who argued that we cannot detect design in nature unless we directly observe an intelligent designer. I explained the flaw in his objection through an analogy.
Let's say you find the remains of a campfire -- e.g., charred wood, a circle of stones, and smoldering ashes. You may reasonably infer that a campfire was present, even if you didn't see the fire as it burned. In the same way, we understand the kinds of effects that are produced by intelligent agency -- e.g., high levels of complex and specified information -- and infer that an intelligent agent was at work. We legitimately make that inference even if we didn't see the agent with our own eyes in the act of designing.
The student replied that there's a difference between detecting a campfire and detecting design in biology. He explained that we operate on the knowledge that humans exist, and that allows us to detect design in the case of the campfire. But, he argued, we haven't directly observed the intelligent designer behind life and the universe, so an inference to design there is unwarranted.
I replied by explaining that in the context of the campfire, it isn't necessary to know if humans were around beforehand. In a broader sense, it's not necessary to know beforehand if an intelligent agent existed to be able to infer that such an agent was at work in a given situation.
For example, let's say that in the year 2150, humans for the first time finally get around to visiting an extrasolar planet orbiting another star. Furthermore, they find that the planet has an oxygen atmosphere. Let's also say that in all our travels, we've never encountered any extraterrestrial alien beings.
The first exploration party to this extrasolar planet discovers a circle of stones with charred wood and ash inside it -- the remains of a campfire! In fact, not only do we discover that evidence, but we also discover buildings and technology designed to transmit radio signals to outer space.
Now prior to this time, humans had no evidence that there were other non-human intelligent agents in the universe. We didn't know whether they existed. But now they're finding evidence of campfires, buildings, and technology on a planet far from home.
Are they justified in inferring design? Of course they are! In fact, even if they find no extraterrestrial beings on that extrasolar planet (maybe the alien civilization went extinct or abandoned the planet), our human explorers would still detect design.
Thus, we may not have direct "observable" evidence of the intelligent agents in the sense that we can see them physically before our very eyes, but we still have ample evidence that these structures were designed. And we can make this design inference despite the fact that we had no prior knowledge that these designers even existed. There is no logical flaw in this reasoning.
In fact, the same reasoning drives the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). SETI researchers don't know if there are intelligent extraterrestrial beings out in the universe trying to send us radio signals. But SETI researchers presume that if aliens did exist, then we could detect their presence.
ID theorists reason similarly. We don't know before we go out and study nature whether we're going to find evidence of an intelligent agent at work. We can even start off our investigation in an agnostic position about whether there is an intelligent designer. But we know that intelligent agents produce systems with high levels of complex and specified information (CSI). If we do find that evidence, then we are justified in inferring design:
"[T]he defining feature of intelligent causes is their ability to create novel information and, in particular, specified complexity."
(William A. Dembski,No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence, p. xiv (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2002).)
"Agents can arrange matter with distant goals in mind. In their use of language, they routinely 'find' highly isolated and improbable functional sequences amid vast spaces of combinatorial possibilities." (Stephen C. Meyer, "The Cambrian Information Explosion," in Debating Design (edited by Michael Ruse and William Dembski; Cambridge University Press 2004).)
"[W]e have repeated experience of rational and conscious agents -- in particular ourselves -- generating or causing increases in complex specified information, both in the form of sequence-specific lines of code and in the form of hierarchically arranged systems of parts. In the first place, intelligent human agents -- in virtue of their rationality and consciousness -- have demonstrated the power to produce information in the form of linear sequence-specific arrangements of characters. Indeed, experience affirms that information of this type routinely arises from the activity of intelligent agents. A computer user who traces the information on a screen back to its source invariably comes to a mind -- that of a software engineer or programmer. The information in a book or inscriptions ultimately derives from a writer or scribe -- from a mental, rather than a strictly material, cause. Our experience-based knowledge of information-flow confirms that systems with large amounts of specified complexity (especially codes and languages) invariably originate from an intelligent source from a mind or personal agent." (Stephen C. Meyer, "The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories," Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, 117(2):213-239 (2004).)
"[T]he discovery of the specified digital information in the DNA molecule provides strong grounds for inferring that intelligence played a role in the origin of DNA. Indeed, whenever we find specified information and we know the causal story of how that information arose, we always find that it arose from an intelligent source." (Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design, p. 347 (HarperOne, 2009).)
Thus, in the final analysis, it's not the case that there is no observable evidence for an intelligent agent. Irreducibly complex structures like bacterial flagella or CSI-rich entities like DNA or even the life-friendly architecture of the universeare evidence for an intelligent designer who was at work in designing life.
We don't logically require prior evidence that an intelligent agent existed in order to detect design, because the designer's existence is shown by the natural structures it made, which resemble things that in our experience come only from intelligence. To detect design, all we need is (a) to know the kinds of things that intelligent agents produce, and then (b) to find such things in nature. That isobservable evidence of an intelligent designing agent, even if you don't directly observe the agent with your eyes, or even if you didn't have prior knowledge about whether the intelligent agent existed.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/06/must_we_directl097021.html
Did God create Ex-nihilo?
I believe that God is eternally in the disposition of infinite potential energy and disposes of it whenever it fits for him to use it. He can both be an eternal mind of infinite knowledge, wisdom, and intelligence, that creats minds similar to his own mind, but with less, and limited intelligence, but also physical worlds/universes through his eternal power. Power comes from Latin, and means, potere. Potere means able of doing. Able to provoke change. God is spirit, but has an eternal power at his disposal to actualize it in various forms. So basically, he is not creating the physical world from nothing, but from potential at his disposal, which can manifest when HE decides so, precisely in the way that he wills and decides to do. So anything external to him is instantiated, and uphold, and secured by his eternal power.
The potential of energy was/is with God and when God created our universe, in the first instant, he focussed, concentrated enormous power or energy that is at his disposition, into a single point, a singularity, which triggered the creation and stretching out our universe. The temperatures, densities, and energies of the Universe would be arbitrary, unimaginably large, and would coincide with the birth of time, matter, and space itself, and God subdued and ordained the energy to start obeying the laws of physics. We know that matter/energy are interchangeable. There had to be a connection from God to the Universe. God did not only create the universe, but sustains it permanently through his power, and ordains the laws of physics to impose and secure that the universe works orderly, and with stability. Atheists always question and ask: How did God create the universe ? What mechanism did he use? The answer is His eternal infinite intelligence, information, and energy/power, both, freely at HIS disposal as potential. Anytime. That's why he is the great: I AM.
Looking it from that standpoint, the distinction of physics, to metaphysics, or natural, to supernatural, vanishes. There Is however the creator/creature distinction. God, the creator, is the eternal, uncreated necessary ultimate being, upon which everything else depends, but everything else is a manifestation of his will and action. And creation, a manifestation of God's mind and power, was created, is secured, and hold to remain existent based on his power. Removing God from the equation then becomes absurd, and creation would be the product of no causal agency whatsoever. Once you remove God as the creator, what mechanism is left? None. Colossians 1:17 He is before all things, and in him, all things hold together. Hebrew 1:1b The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1794-how-exactly-did-god-create-the-universe-and-the-world-what-process-was-involved
An intelligent designer creates by actualizing potential power at his disposition, information input ( words ), wisdom, and will. But how exactly does this work?
We don't know how exactly a mind might act in the world to cause change. Your mind, mediated by your brain, sends signals to your arm, hand, and fingers, and writes a text through the keyboard of the computer I sit here typing. I cannot explain to you how exactly this process functions, but we know, it happens. Consciousness can interact with the physical world and cause change. But how exactly that happens, we don't know. Why then should we expect to know how God created the universe? The theory of intelligent design proposes an intelligent mental cause as the origin of the physical world. Nothing else.
In genesis it says God spoke and things came into existence. God is a potent cause with power ( energy ) and his spoken word indicates information. Because we do not understand and in a detailled manner how he created the physical universe, and life, does not mean God does not understand or can't. Mystery to us is not mystery to God, but we do know that God is not limited to His spiritual realm, as he shown with his becoming of flesh in Jesus Christ.
Looking at the account of Genesis 1:1 for just a brief moment, the words in that first verse are quite remarkable. They are indicative of the incredible mind of God. God says in that first verse everything that could have been said about creation and He says it in such few terms. The statement is precise and concise almost beyond human composition. A well-known scientist named Herbert Spencer died in 1903. He discovered that all reality, all reality, all that exists in the universe can be contained in five categories...time, force, action, space and matter. Herbert Spencer said everything that exists, exists in one of those categories...time, force, action, space and matter. Now think about that. Time, force, action, space and matter. That is a logical sequence. And then with that in your mind, listen to Genesis 1:1. "In the beginning," that's time..."God," that's force, "created," that's action, "the heavens," that's space, "and the earth," that's matter. Everything that could be said about everything that exists is said in that first verse. Now either you believe that or you don't. You either believe that that verse is accurate and God is the force or you believe that God is not the force that created everything. And then you're left with chance or randomness or coincidence.
http://theoryofid.blogspot.com.br/
W.L.Craig : First, in order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn't have an explanation of the explanation. This is an elementary point concerning inference to the best explanation as practiced in the philosophy of science. If archaeologists digging in the earth were to discover things looking like arrowheads and hatchet heads and pottery shards, they would be justified in inferring that these artifacts are not the chance result of sedimentation and metamorphosis, but products of some unknown group of people, even though they had no explanation of who these people were or where they came from. Similarly, if astronauts were to come upon a pile of machinery on the backside of the moon, they would be justified in inferring that it was the product of intelligent, extra-terrestrial agents, even if they had no idea whatsoever who these extra-terrestrial agents were or how they got there. In order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn't be able to explain the explanation. In fact, so requiring would lead to an infinite regress of explanations, so that nothing could ever be explained and science would be destroyed. So in the case at hand, in order to recognize that intelligent design is the best explanation of the appearance of design in the universe, one needn't be able to explain the designer.
The best explanation of the origin and life and biodiversity is: intelligence. Conscious activity. The deliberate choice of a rational agent. Indeed, we have abundant experience in the present of intelligent agents generating specified information. Our experience of the causal powers of intelligent agents -- of "conscious activity" as "a cause now in operation"-- provides a basis for making inferences about the best explanation of the origin of biological organisms in the past. In other words, our experience of the cause-and-effect structure of the world -- specifically the cause known to produce large amounts of specified information in the present -- provides a basis for understanding what likely caused large increases in specified information in living systems in the past. It is precisely my reliance on such experience that makes possible an understanding of the type of causes at work in the history of life.
Ann Gauger : It's still worth considering how a mind might act in the world to cause change. The answer is we don't know. I sit here typing. My mind, mediated by my brain, is putting words into a computer program (designed by other minds, by the way), using my fingers to type. But how does it happen, really? Where does the impulse to press one key instead of another come from? And how do these words, products of my mind, communicate to others through their computer screens? We can't really say how our own minds work to interact with the world, yet we know they do. It is our universal, repeated, personal experience that shows us that our consciousness interacts with our bodies to produce information, but exactly how it works is not known. So why should we expect to know how the agent(s) responsible for the design of life or the universe may have worked? The theory of intelligent design does not propose a mechanism (a strictly or necessarily materialistic cause) for the origin of biological information. Rather, it proposes an intelligent or mental cause. In so doing, it does exactly what we want a good historical scientific theory to do. It proposes a cause that is known from our uniform and repeated experience (to borrow a phrase) to have the power to produce the effect in question, which in this case, is functional information in living systems.
Objection: We have never observed a being of any capacity creating biological systems and life.
Answer: We do not need direct observed empirical evidence to infer design. If investigators know that someone was deliberately killed, is their conclusion invalidated because they don't yet know exactly who did it and how?
When a detective arrives at the crime scence, and sees a bullet in the chest of the victim, and no arm nearby that could be a hint to suicide, the detective can with a degree of certainty conclude the victim was shot in the chest and killed. So its a murder crime scence.
Same when we observe the natural world. It gives us hints about how it could have been created. We do not need to present the act of creation to infer creationism / Intelligent design.
Meyer, Darwins doubt: At present no one has any idea how our thoughts—the decisions and choices that occur in our conscious minds— affect our material brains, nerves, and muscles, going on to instantiate our will in the material world of objects. However, we know that is exactly what our thoughts do. We have no mechanistic explanation for the mystery of consciousness, nor what is called the “mind-body problem”—the enigma of how thought affects the material state of our brains, bodies, and the world that we affect with them. Yet there is no doubt that we can—as the result of events in our conscious minds called decisions or choices—“will into existence” information-rich arrangements of matter or otherwise affect material states in the world. Professor Asher did this when he wrote the chapter in his book— representing his ideas impressed as words onto a material object, a printed page—attempting to refute intelligent design. I am doing this right now. This example, representative of countless daily experiences in life, surely satisfies the demands of uniformitarianism. Even though it remains entirely possible that we may never know how minds affect matter and, therefore, that there may always be a gap in our attempt to account for how a designing mind affected the material out of which living systems were formed, it does not follow that we cannot recognize evidence of the activity of mind in living systems.
Casey Luskin Must We Directly Observe the Intelligent Agent to Detect Design? June 19, 2015
Yesterday I discussed an email exchange[/url] with an atheist student who argued that we cannot detect design in nature unless we directly observe an intelligent designer. I explained the flaw in his objection through an analogy.
Let's say you find the remains of a campfire -- e.g., charred wood, a circle of stones, and smoldering ashes. You may reasonably infer that a campfire was present, even if you didn't see the fire as it burned. In the same way, we understand the kinds of effects that are produced by intelligent agency -- e.g., high levels of complex and specified information -- and infer that an intelligent agent was at work. We legitimately make that inference even if we didn't see the agent with our own eyes in the act of designing.
The student replied that there's a difference between detecting a campfire and detecting design in biology. He explained that we operate on the knowledge that humans exist, and that allows us to detect design in the case of the campfire. But, he argued, we haven't directly observed the intelligent designer behind life and the universe, so an inference to design there is unwarranted.
I replied by explaining that in the context of the campfire, it isn't necessary to know if humans were around beforehand. In a broader sense, it's not necessary to know beforehand if an intelligent agent existed to be able to infer that such an agent was at work in a given situation.
For example, let's say that in the year 2150, humans for the first time finally get around to visiting an extrasolar planet orbiting another star. Furthermore, they find that the planet has an oxygen atmosphere. Let's also say that in all our travels, we've never encountered any extraterrestrial alien beings.
The first exploration party to this extrasolar planet discovers a circle of stones with charred wood and ash inside it -- the remains of a campfire! In fact, not only do we discover that evidence, but we also discover buildings and technology designed to transmit radio signals to outer space.
Now prior to this time, humans had no evidence that there were other non-human intelligent agents in the universe. We didn't know whether they existed. But now they're finding evidence of campfires, buildings, and technology on a planet far from home.
Are they justified in inferring design? Of course they are! In fact, even if they find no extraterrestrial beings on that extrasolar planet (maybe the alien civilization went extinct or abandoned the planet), our human explorers would still detect design.
Thus, we may not have direct "observable" evidence of the intelligent agents in the sense that we can see them physically before our very eyes, but we still have ample evidence that these structures were designed. And we can make this design inference despite the fact that we had no prior knowledge that these designers even existed. There is no logical flaw in this reasoning.
In fact, the same reasoning drives the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). SETI researchers don't know if there are intelligent extraterrestrial beings out in the universe trying to send us radio signals. But SETI researchers presume that if aliens did exist, then we could detect their presence.
ID theorists reason similarly. We don't know before we go out and study nature whether we're going to find evidence of an intelligent agent at work. We can even start off our investigation in an agnostic position about whether there is an intelligent designer. But we know that intelligent agents produce systems with high levels of complex and specified information (CSI). If we do find that evidence, then we are justified in inferring design:
"[T]he defining feature of intelligent causes is their ability to create novel information and, in particular, specified complexity."
(William A. Dembski,No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence, p. xiv (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2002).)
"Agents can arrange matter with distant goals in mind. In their use of language, they routinely 'find' highly isolated and improbable functional sequences amid vast spaces of combinatorial possibilities." (Stephen C. Meyer, "The Cambrian Information Explosion," in Debating Design (edited by Michael Ruse and William Dembski; Cambridge University Press 2004).)
"[W]e have repeated experience of rational and conscious agents -- in particular ourselves -- generating or causing increases in complex specified information, both in the form of sequence-specific lines of code and in the form of hierarchically arranged systems of parts. In the first place, intelligent human agents -- in virtue of their rationality and consciousness -- have demonstrated the power to produce information in the form of linear sequence-specific arrangements of characters. Indeed, experience affirms that information of this type routinely arises from the activity of intelligent agents. A computer user who traces the information on a screen back to its source invariably comes to a mind -- that of a software engineer or programmer. The information in a book or inscriptions ultimately derives from a writer or scribe -- from a mental, rather than a strictly material, cause. Our experience-based knowledge of information-flow confirms that systems with large amounts of specified complexity (especially codes and languages) invariably originate from an intelligent source from a mind or personal agent." (Stephen C. Meyer, "The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories," Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, 117(2):213-239 (2004).)
"[T]he discovery of the specified digital information in the DNA molecule provides strong grounds for inferring that intelligence played a role in the origin of DNA. Indeed, whenever we find specified information and we know the causal story of how that information arose, we always find that it arose from an intelligent source." (Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design, p. 347 (HarperOne, 2009).)
Thus, in the final analysis, it's not the case that there is no observable evidence for an intelligent agent. Irreducibly complex structures like bacterial flagella or CSI-rich entities like DNA or even the life-friendly architecture of the universeare evidence for an intelligent designer who was at work in designing life.
We don't logically require prior evidence that an intelligent agent existed in order to detect design, because the designer's existence is shown by the natural structures it made, which resemble things that in our experience come only from intelligence. To detect design, all we need is (a) to know the kinds of things that intelligent agents produce, and then (b) to find such things in nature. That isobservable evidence of an intelligent designing agent, even if you don't directly observe the agent with your eyes, or even if you didn't have prior knowledge about whether the intelligent agent existed.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/06/must_we_directl097021.html
Did God create Ex-nihilo?
I believe that God is eternally in the disposition of infinite potential energy and disposes of it whenever it fits for him to use it. He can both be an eternal mind of infinite knowledge, wisdom, and intelligence, that creats minds similar to his own mind, but with less, and limited intelligence, but also physical worlds/universes through his eternal power. Power comes from Latin, and means, potere. Potere means able of doing. Able to provoke change. God is spirit, but has an eternal power at his disposal to actualize it in various forms. So basically, he is not creating the physical world from nothing, but from potential at his disposal, which can manifest when HE decides so, precisely in the way that he wills and decides to do. So anything external to him is instantiated, and uphold, and secured by his eternal power.
The potential of energy was/is with God and when God created our universe, in the first instant, he focussed, concentrated enormous power or energy that is at his disposition, into a single point, a singularity, which triggered the creation and stretching out our universe. The temperatures, densities, and energies of the Universe would be arbitrary, unimaginably large, and would coincide with the birth of time, matter, and space itself, and God subdued and ordained the energy to start obeying the laws of physics. We know that matter/energy are interchangeable. There had to be a connection from God to the Universe. God did not only create the universe, but sustains it permanently through his power, and ordains the laws of physics to impose and secure that the universe works orderly, and with stability. Atheists always question and ask: How did God create the universe ? What mechanism did he use? The answer is His eternal infinite intelligence, information, and energy/power, both, freely at HIS disposal as potential. Anytime. That's why he is the great: I AM.
Looking it from that standpoint, the distinction of physics, to metaphysics, or natural, to supernatural, vanishes. There Is however the creator/creature distinction. God, the creator, is the eternal, uncreated necessary ultimate being, upon which everything else depends, but everything else is a manifestation of his will and action. And creation, a manifestation of God's mind and power, was created, is secured, and hold to remain existent based on his power. Removing God from the equation then becomes absurd, and creation would be the product of no causal agency whatsoever. Once you remove God as the creator, what mechanism is left? None. Colossians 1:17 He is before all things, and in him, all things hold together. Hebrew 1:1b The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.
Last edited by Otangelo on Thu Aug 18, 2022 10:09 am; edited 24 times in total