I found the following article listed on the Arts & Letters Daily web-site:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/print?id=315976
It's an interesting example of the confusion of some philosophers about what constitutes "evidence" of God's existence. I see this particularly in light of my previous entry's observations about the symbolic nature of things. I.e. the complexity of DNA says
absolutely nothing about the existence of a God or intelligent being just as the symbols "%^&^%&*^%*&^" are incredibly complex (except from the perspective of a human being) but say nothing about anything unless I interpret them to mean something--I could make it say "God exists" by saying that '%^&^%&' is the name of God and that '*^%*&^' is the third-person form of the verb
to exist in some crazy language.
Or...suppose we found these symbols inscribed on some rock or something in a cave. We could justifiably account for these by saying that humans made these symbols and so say..."people were here!" But we cannot use the same argument to argue from complex non-natural-looking phenomena to the existence of an Absolute Being. (Well, we can but not without assuming a whole load of stuff that has nothing to do with the symbols themselves.) Why can't we do this? Well, first off, arguing for humans having been in the cave is ok because we have independent knowledge that humans exist
at all. We have no independant experience confirming even the possibility of an Absolute Being.
So far this is mostly ranting and raving, but i hope to elucidate the ideas further...they would require a whole fucking book to do that. Note: I am not an atheist, just a concerned theist.
