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Showing posts from April, 2014

How The Argument from Design gives Humanity a God Complex

An argument that Christians like to throw around these days traces its roots back to Thomas Aquinas. It’s called The Argument from Design . Basically, this argument suggests that, because everything looks designed, it must therefore be designed, which in turn means there must be what Father Daniel O’Reilly of Columbia Catholic Ministry referred to as, a “benevolent designer." One potential confirmation bias present in this argument comes from the problem we have of making order among ideas.   As Jacques Barzun explained in The House of Intellect , we may then come to believe, quite mistakenly, that the order has been discovered ready made in the facts. [i] Assuming we have not succumbed to the mistake Barzun warns of, like the other arguments, the problems with this reasoning should be readily apparent. First, if we look at a random generated pattern long enough, it may well begin to look as if it were designed, because our brains naturally try to discern patterns and d