Best one sentence summation of how I feel, ever.

[DrKvothe]

Originally Posted by Csihar [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Paraphrased: Everything made by man requires a man to be made.

It's a rather poor version of the watchmaker analogy.

From wikipedia, David Hume's criticism:

"Hume gave the classic criticism of the design argument in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. He argued that for the design argument to be feasible, it must be true that order and purpose are observed only when they result from design. But order is observed regularly, resulting from presumably mindless processes like snowflake or crystal generation. Design accounts for only a tiny part of our experience with order and "purpose". Furthermore, the design argument is based on an incomplete analogy: because of our experience with objects, we can recognize human-designed ones, comparing for example a pile of stones and a brick wall. But to point to a designed Universe, we would need to have an experience of a range of different universes. As we only experience one, the analogy cannot be applied. We must ask therefore if it is right to compare the world to a machine—as in Paley's watchmaker argument—when perhaps it would be better described as a giant inert animal. Even if the design argument is completely successful, it could not (in and of itself) establish a robust theism; one could easily reach the conclusion that the universe's configuration is the result of some morally ambiguous, possibly unintelligent agent or agents whose method bears only a remote similarity to human design. In this way it could be asked if the designer was God, or further still, who designed the designer? Hume also reasoned that if a well-ordered natural world requires a special designer, then God's mind (being so well ordered) also requires a special designer. And then this designer would likewise need a designer, and so on ad infinitum. We could respond by resting content with an inexplicably self-ordered divine mind but then why not rest content with an inexplicably self-ordered natural world?"

The watchmaker analogy is regurgitated ad nauseum and should be replied to with a quote, really.

Beautifully reasoned argument. Snowflakes are a great example. I was leaning towards describing self-assembling materials to demonstrate that physical laws could assemble complexity from simplicity in a predictable fashion, but I was having a hard time figuring out how to dumb it down enough for Illusionz to understand with his 1st grade education.