Intelligent Design needs a Re-Branding

In this age of consumerism, everyone understands the importance of positive branding, and indeed, companies and individuals alike readily comprehend that if your “brand” has negative connotations attached to it, then there are a great many people that will pre-judge you on that basis alone rather than taking the time to survey your ideas in the detail that they deserve, and though this may not be fair, it is reality, and so in light of this fact, I contend that given the branding difficulties that now surround it, it is now time for the Intelligent Design (ID) movement to re-brand itself with a new and improved label, which I claim should be the label of “Agent Detection Science”, and the reasons for this proposition are as follows:

1. First, in making this change, there is the obvious benefit that some small part of the negative branding and prejudice associated with ID would be removed, and thus ID may gain some extra proponents from making such a minor change;

2. Second, at least to me, the label “Agent Detection Science” sounds more professional, academic, and intellectually rigorous than Intelligent Design, just as the term “Forensic Science” sounds more professional, academic, and intellectually rigorous rather “Scenes of Crime Investigation”, and so, such a labeling change will have a positive persuasive effect at an almost sub-conscious level, which, in turn, should give ID at least a change at more of a fair hearing by a greater number of people;

3. Third, by labeling itself as “Agent Detection Science”, the ID movement actually links itself much more closely to other ID-type fields like forensics, archaeology, and SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) given that all these other fields are in the business of detecting the hall-marks of agent causation rather than natural causation, and furthermore, since all these fields are, quite literally, agent detection sciences, then by directly labeling itself as “Agent Detection Science”, the ID movement would gain greater credibility not only through its clear connection to these other already-credible fields, but it would also make it the case that any objections brought against the methodology of Agent Detection Science / ID would also have to be objections against such disciplines as forensics, archaeology, SETI, and so on;

4. Fourth, the label “Agent Detection Science” is more precise than the ID moniker, for ID, as well as all the other ID-type sciences already mentioned (like archaeology) are in the very business of using certain methodologies to detect the presence and activity of agents rather than of natural causes, and so, by changing the name from ID to something like “Agent Detection Science”, the ID movement would, in its very title, be clearly stating what it actually strives to do, and since what ID strives to do is in no way shocking when you consider that SETI, archaeology, forensics, and other fields strive to do the exact same thing, then in providing this clarity in its very label the ID movement would be clear that it is little different than these other sciences are;

5. Fifth, “Agent Detection Science” has the term ‘science’ in its very name, which helps to immediately and directly assert that ID is a science, just like forensics and archaeology are considered to be, and so its status as a claimed science is put right into the open for all to see (and please note that if you truly deny that ID is a science, then it would be easy enough to change the name to “Agent Detection Methodology” or “Agent Detection Theory” or even “Agent Detection Analysis”);

…and so these, therefore, are a number of reasons why I believe that the ID movement should consider the idea of re-branding itself as I think that doing so would help to take ID to the next level of its development while simultaneously dropping some of the negative baggage that is, at the present time, directly attached to the ID label.

The Multiverse and Creationism

I have, in the past, written about the multiverse–the idea, usually offered in answer to the fine-tuning of this universe, that there exist trillions upon trillions of different universes, if not, in fact, an infinite amount of such different universes, all with different physical laws and constants–and I have also written about how certain atheists often appeal to the multiverse as a “get anything you want or need naturalistically” card, and though I have also shown that atheistic appeals to the multiverse might not be as beneficial as atheists believe them to be, I will, in this thought, also note that another funny point about atheistic appeals to the multiverse is that although atheists often rail against creationism and chant that accepting creationism is utterly irrational and “anti-science”, it actually is the case that if the multiverse does exist, then, the fact is, it is highly likely that many “creationist-style” universes exist given that, in a multiverse, such created universes could easily be made by some kind of hyper-advanced being–in fact, if an infinite number of universes exist, then there are arguably a massive plethora, or even an infinite number of such creationist-styles universes that exist; and what this means is that if the atheist wishes to push the multiverse card as a means to account for the fine-tuning of this universe, then, by extension, such an atheist should arguably become silent about creationist-style ideas, for the fact is that in a multiverse, there is no way of knowing whether or not we are presently in a creationist-style universe–essentially, a universe which was intelligently designed and which appears old (based on our current science) but which is, in reality, actually only a few thousand years old–and so, in appealing to the multiverse, atheists give serious legitimacy and weight to creationism in general, for indeed, though such an idea might not necessarily support orthodox Christian creationism per se, atheistic endorsements of the multiverse without doubt make general creationism (and even a creationism very closely resembling Christian Creationism) eminently rational to believe in, which is a particularly humorous result given the general antipathy that most atheists feel towards creationism of any form…and perhaps the funniest issue is that in seeking to avoid the fine-tuning problem by appealing to the multiverse, atheists actually completely support the idea of the intelligently designed fine-tuning of this universe, for a creationism universe is an intelligently designed one, and thus atheistic attempts to defeat the problem of fine-tuning actually make fine-tuning that much easier to believe in.

An Argument for God from Freedom

The issue of free-will–and here I mean free-will in the broadly libertarian sense–is fascinating, but as interesting as that issue, in and of itself, is, free-will is also interesting in that it is an issue which can give us a very simple and intuitive argument for the existence of god, for consider the following layman’s chain of reasoning:

1. All my experience tells me that I have free-will and all of society is build on that belief, and so I am rational to believe that I do have free-will until and unless given good reason to believe otherwise;

2. Something like free-will can only come from something that has and/or can create free-will;

3. The only thing that I know of that has free-will are persons (minds), and so the best explanation is that my free-will comes from a person (a mind), but the chain of persons cannot go on infinitely, and therefore there must be an uncaused and first free-willed person who is the cause of all the other free-will in other persons, and such a person deserves the label of a god…

…and when put into more philosophically rigorous terms, the argument might go like this:

a. I have a properly basic belief that I have libertarian free-will, and therefore, not only am I rational to believe that I have it, but, because it is a properly basic belief, the burden of proof is actually on the person denying this belief to demonstrate his case, not on me to prove it, and so I am rational to hold to my belief that I have free-will until and unless a sufficiently warranted defeater is brought against this belief;

b. There are no sufficient defeaters to my belief that I have libertarian free-will;

c. Given the Principle of Proportionate Causality (which states that an effect must, in some way, be entirely contained in its cause), I thus note that whatever caused me to have free-will must somehow have the causal resources / ability to create free-will to exist in something else.

d. Not only are there no known impersonal forces / mechanisms which could cause free-will to exist in something else, but the only things that I know that have free-will are personal (rational) entities like me (essentially, minds).

e. In light of the above, the only presently known causal explanation for my having free-will is that it was caused in me by some other personal (rational) entity which can create free-will, but such a chain of causality cannot go on to infinity, and thus, there must be a first and uncaused personal (rational) entity which exists (or existed) which has the ability to cause free-will and which gave free-will to all other personal (rational) entities that exist and have free-will, and any such uncaused personal and rational entity with free-will that exists (or existed) deserves the label ‘god’, and so, given all this, I am rational to be a theist, not an atheist;

f. Or, alternatively, for a “Inference to the Best Explanation” type approach to this issue, one might, after point (d), simply point out that between atheism (atheistic-naturalism) and theism, atheism simply does not have the ‘explanatory power’ to account for the existence of free-will in persons like theism has (an omni-God could give free-will to others by definition), nor is atheism ‘congruent with the background knowledge’ that only persons have free-will, nor is atheism simple given that it postulates an impersonal “thing or force” which is somehow (miraculously?) able to confer free-will to persons through some unknown mechanism, and so theism is therefore the better explanation of free-will, and thus theism is rational to believe in on the basis of free-will, at least provisionally.

Christianity is the Only Worldview Not Based on Faith

There is a certain irony about the fact that it is so often claimed that Christianity is, at bottom, a worldview based on “faith”, when, in fact, Christianity (or something very much like Christianity) is actually the only worldview which does not leave man resting on faith, for whereas secular attempts to justify our knowledge and our beliefs ultimately fall directly in the fatal maw of Agrippa’s Trilemma, which makes any secular attempt to justify our beliefs ultimately end in either an 1) infinite and never-ultimately-justifying chain of justification, or 2) a fallacious circular justification, or 3) an ad hoc and faith-filled adoption of some “foundational” belief, it is only Christianity, with its view of “illuminationism”–the view that God, who is knowledge itself, pro-actively and positively illuminates that human mind with knowledge–which can overcome Agrippa’s Trilemma and thus provide a secure foundation for knowledge; indeed, whenever man himself reaches out to try to justify his beliefs on his own, he falls foul of Agrippa’s Trilemma, and thus can never justify his beliefs on a firm rock of knowledge but must ultimately rest those beliefs, in the end, on blind faith (some essentially arbitrary foundation), and thus it is only a worldview where a good omni-God who is knowledge itself reaches down to provide knowledge to man that can have the resources to overcome Agrippa’s Trilemma, and this is why I say that only a worldview like Christianity allows man to rest his beliefs on knowledge (essentially, God), not faith (his own efforts, which lead only to an infinite regress of justification, false circular justification, or arbitrary foundational justification)…and yet since we do believe that our beliefs rest on knowledge and not faith, then this fact, in light of the above, is thus a fact that points us to the existence of a knowledge-giving God, and so not only is this point a point which argues in favor of the existence of God, it is also a point which reverses the idea that Christianity is based on faith but other views are based on reason.

A Christian Argument for the Immaterialism of Reality

As a Christian immaterialist–a person who holds that matter literally does not exist–I hold a position which is not actually mainstream among other Christians, and yet an interesting argument for immaterialism, at least in a purely Christian context, is that Romans 1 tells us that the universe and reality itself reflects the nature and attributes of God, and yet God is an immaterial ‘mind’ with ideas, and so by necessary reasoning, it seems that this is at least a scriptural argument for the claim that the universe itself should be nothing but an idea in the mind of God, for only in this way could the universe truly and fully reflect God’s immaterial attributes and nature; and while this argument is surely not conclusive, it is compelling enough–at least in my view–that it gives the Christian immaterialist plausible scriptural ammunition to support his own position, and it means that the non-Christian-immaterialist cannot simply discount this view as unscriptural from the outset.

An “Evil” Argument for an Afterlife

One of the things that often vexes unbelievers and believers alike is that while an honest inquirer will admit that there are, at the very least, plausible “reason-only” arguments for the existence of a good and holy God, it is the case that the existence of an afterlife is something which seems to require empirical / experiential evidence to argue for, for while we do have testimonial evidence from NDEs and from resurrected individuals concerning the existence of a postmortem realm–and such evidence is not to be easily discounted–it is nevertheless the case that it would be beneficial to be able to formulate an argument for the existence of an afterlife without needing to appeal to such testimonial-type evidence, and the fact is that, ironically, it is the so-called problem of evil which can provide us with such an argument, and this argument could be articulated in something approximating the following manner:  1) a good and moral omni-God exists (based on, say, the ontological and/or moral argument, or one of Aquinas’ arguments…and also note that this first premise can be used on a solely “for the sake of argument basis” as well); 2) sin, pain, and injustice exist in our present worldly life; 3) God would not allow sin, pain, and injustice to exist in the world unless these evils were ultimately rectified; 4) sin, pain, and injustice cannot be rectified in this Earthly existence; 5) ergo, some other type of existence must exist in which sin, pain, and injustice are rectified, which means, in simple terms, that some type of an evil-resolving afterlife must exist; and so, this wholly rational argument–each premise of which is quite defensible–does indeed give us a non-testimonial reason to believe that some type of justice-creating afterlife exists where wrongs are righted and evil overcome…and note that this is not meant to be some pie-in-the-sky wish that “badness” is ultimately made right some day and so I feel that an afterlife simply has to exist, rather it is a simple logical chain which argues, irrespective of our wishes and desires, that the existence of a good God and the existence of unresolved Earthly evil necessarily requires the existence of a place and a time where such a God will resolve such evil, and since that resolution is not done in this life, then that place and time must be some type of after-this-life existence, and so this argument for an afterlife is an entirely rational one which, ironically, employs the problem of evil as a means to demonstrate yet one more facet of the Christian faith.

The Multiverse Does Not Necessarily Help Atheistic-Naturalism

It is without a doubt that certain atheists appeal to the idea of a “multi-verse” as a means of combating the problem of the fine-tuning of this universe, but one of the things that is often overlooked and forgotten by such atheists and unbelievers is that even if the multi-verse is a viable and plausible means of addressing the problem of fine-tuning from an atheistic perspective–and this point is itself debatable–the fact remains that the multi-verse, as just a general posit, not only does not necessarily help the atheist, but may actually make the problem for him astronomically worse, for imagine that we somehow gather evidence of the existence of trillions upon trillions upon trillions of other universes, and yet every single one of these other universes is also fine-tuned to permit the existence of embodied intelligent life and yet did not have to be so (essentially, there is no necessary reason that they had to be that way); in such a case, the inference to design has exponentially increased even though the multiverse exists, and so the atheist, in order to make his appeal to the multiverse plausible in terms of its support for the atheistic-naturalistic hypothesis of “it’s just chance”, must not only provide evidence that the multiverse exists, but he must also provide evidence that the multiverses being generated by some universe-generating force (itself possibly fine-tuned) is actually producing a wide variety of different universes with different constants in them, for if the universe-generating force could create any type of universe, and yet was creating only universes which were life-permitting, then this would simply be more evidence for theism, not evidence for atheism (by analogy, just imagine a candy dispenser which could randomly dispense any one of the hundreds of different candies in existence, and yet it only spit out your favorite candy over and over and over again…after about a dozen such occurrences, you would be entirely rational to believe that a ‘mind’ was behind the dispensing, not mere ‘chance’)…and so, as stated, the multiverse, as an idea in and of itself, offers no help to the atheist, for what the atheist needs is a certain type of multiverse, and good luck providing any evidence for that!

What if the Aliens Say…

One of the things that I have heard certain atheists from time-to-time semi-humorously posit is that they wonder what advanced aliens, if they ever came to Earth, would think of our religious beliefs and other “superstitions”, and by formulating this sort of semi-thought-experiment, these atheists and unbelievers are clearly implying that these imagined aliens beings would clearly be atheistic in orientation and outlook, and so these unbelievers try to imagine that Christians and other theistic believers would find such an outcome–namely, advanced interstellar beings being atheists–disconcerting and counter to their most deeply held beliefs; but what is interesting to think about, and one of the things these unbelievers rarely seem to consider, is to think how they would react if–and given that we are talking about presently fictitious aliens that no one knows anything about, this upcoming idea is as plausible and possible as the atheistic one–upon arrival, these advanced aliens, far from being atheistic, actually stated that they had come to Earth to preach the Good News of the Son of God who died for the sins of all rational beings…just imagining how certain atheistic jaws would drop at such a sight forms a good-natured and jovial smile on my face, and who knows, maybe one day that is exactly what will come to pass.

The Strength of the Argument from Consent

In modern times, the religious Argument from Consent–the idea that since the overwhelming majority of people believe that atheistic-naturalism is false and that supernaturalism is true, that therefore supernaturalism is true (or at least rational to believe in)–is considered invalid and weak, and yet while this argument is, as stated, generally considered weak and invalid in today’s day and age, I wish to draw a parallel (with which I have personal experience)  which illustrates that not only is this type of argument very powerful, but that we use it often in daily life as well, and in the most serious of circumstances, for after all, consider that when the police go to assess a person for mental health issues in order to determine whether or not that person should be taken to a hospital for further care, it is precisely the idea of “common consent” that police often use to determine whether or not the person being assessed does indeed have mental health issues; indeed, if, for example, a potentially mentally ill person claims to hear or see something, the police use the common consent of themselves and other people to determine if what the potentially ill person claims to have seen and heard (or not seen or heard) is actually there (or not there), and if the person’s claims go against those of the common consent of the police and others, then the person is assessed as mentally ill and is apprehended and taken for further assessment…and so my point is that if the idea of “Arguing / Reasoning from Consent” can be valid enough in society for us to apprehend people against their will and force them into treatment, then reasoning from consent is arguably just as valid a tool to use to come to believe that atheistic-naturalism is false (or at least not rational to believe in).

Does the Reasoning of Atheists Undermine Evolution?

One of the most used atheistic catch-phrases in modern times is that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, and while there is much wrong with this phrase there is also much much right with it when properly understood, and yet what is most often overlooked with this idea is that when it is turned on beliefs associated with and linked to the atheistic-naturalistic worldview, the fact is that its effect is utterly devastating to that worldview, for consider, for example, not only that the grand blind-watchmaker interpretation of evolution is something totally alien to our experience, and thus an extraordinary claim, and therefore needing extraordinary evidence, but things are actually astronomically worse than is for the evolutionary narrative, for it is actually the case that one could consider each major claim in the naturalistic evolutionary story as an individual extraordinary claim, and so each of the vast multitude of such claims requires extraordinary evidence, and it is actually needless to say that the grand naturalistic evolutionary story by no means has extraordinary evidence for many (if not most) of its claims (in fact, it does not even have any ordinary evidence for many of its claims…just think of abiogenesis, the Cambrian Explosion, sexual reproduction, consciousness, rationality, etc., etc., etc.); so, in an interesting twist of irony and reasoning, it is actually the very skeptical slogans championed by atheistic-naturalists which give us the grounds and justification to reject ideas integral to the atheistic-naturalist worldview, such as the grand blind watchmaker evolutionary narrative…and so, the next time an unbeliever balks at your rejection of the blind watchmaker version of evolution, and questions your rationality because of it, just reply that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and since no such extraordinary evidence has been provided (“just-so” stories and “we just need more time” pleas do not count) then one is entirely rational to reject the claim until such a time as the extraordinary evidence required to believe all the various myriad extraordinary claims is provided.