A lock implies a locker
One of the arguments regarding the existence of a cosmic muffin, absent any proof, given by adherents of "Intelligent Design" is the Watchmaker Analogy which suggests that design implies a designer. Because we rely on our experience in life as a part of that equation (in our experience when we find a made thing it implies a maker) I discovered that the ID crowd had unintentionally laid a wreath on their deceased creator's missing body. They did the dirty work. I just brought along the mop.
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The Watchmaker Analogy is not a theory, it is what it says it is: an analogy, and one that pleased the ID crowd ever so much. It is important to remember that one can say just about anything to a believer as long as it seems to add mortar to the bricks of said belief. Anything that makes that ground of belief tremble is to be avoided at any and all cost. Logic is therefore evil, yet it is logic that is putatively used in the Watchmaker Analogy: the appearance of design implies a designer (AODIAD) and in the case of Western Monotheism we know who that designer is: The Great White Father/Black Uncle/Brown Cousin. Once pernicious logic is let out of its dark and heinous bag it will perform all sorts of mischief, mark my words, and that is what has happened in this case.
The Watchmaker Analogy relies on our experience as conscious human beings to make the reference work: we have seen watches, we have seen buildings, we have seen roads, and in each case we know that such things were built by people. We see bird nests and know that birds built them, we see termite mounds and know that termites built them, etc. What the ID crowd wants us to accept as a "quantifiable fact" is that everything in Nature has design elements, and therefore implies a (most likely single, middle-aged bipolar male) designer of the manifested world. We are to believe this because our experience tells us so: we are not to believe this idea based only on faith but on our experience of the observable world. Experience + Dogma = ID.
The unintended consequence of this foray into a sloppy sort of logic is a salient corollary: as we have experienced designs and designers in our lives, so too we humans have experienced the loss of friends and family, or public personalities, or pets or neighbors or...it goes on and on. Someone we knew grew old and died: we never saw them in the flesh again. Perhaps they died young, in school, and they never graduated (The Lovely Bones comes to mind). Perhaps we knew someone casually, and after not seeing them for a long time we came to find that so-and-so had perished, and we never saw that person again. Not remarkable this situation, though we will sometimes tell tall tales as we sit around the fire in the dead of night, stories of the dead walking among the living and voting for Pat Buchanan when we know they would have voted for Al Gore, but I digress. Our experience tells us that if someone is really old and we don't see them for another thirty years and they were ninety when we last saw them they are no longer alive.
So experience tells us two things: if there is a watch it implies a designer, and if we don't see someone for one hundred and thirty years then that person is dead. Anyone see where we're headed here?
The western god has not been seen in centuries. Evidence of design or not, there is evidence (based upon our experiences of this life) that if such a god existed he/she/it/Melvin is quite logically dead. If we are to believe, via logic, that design implies a designer than how can we not then understand that such a designer is not pining for the fjords but rather has ceased to be, and shall never be again. The truth of Christianity is that, akin to Monty Python, if they hadn't nailed that beautifully plumed deity to his perch...well, enough said. See you at the grave.
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Author's Note: as a pantheist I believe everything is Nature, whose ultimate source is also everything else--beyond that I can only postulate, or on a good day simply make shit up that pleases me.
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But!
(As a born-again, orthodox atheist I'd like to like to play devil's advocate for one very cheap. smart-ass second..)
If a baseball player throws a pitch, he's no longer influencing or connected to the ball any more as it flies along. But simply because his influence is not apparent in relation to the ball (assuming that's what we're watching)) doesn't mean he dropped dead of a steroid-induced heart attack the minute it left his hand, no?
The Holy Brethren could rebut by saying we are "in play" and have been "set in motion". And tell you that's how we have free will to be good or evil...
Easier to ask them why there's 40 Billion galaxies in 1% of 1? in the night sky and we can never go there...
Humans are verbs, not nouns
The pitcher is indeed "connected in a field of motion" with the ball that has been thrown. We think of ourselves as separate but is that really the case? Christians are by and large (some are bi & large but that's a different kettle of fishies) adherents of separation: their putative creator is distinct from the creation, man is somehow separate from nature, and Nature is okay except for the naughty bits which feel rather too good when massaged. But what if there is no distinction between "the source" and the creation? Ball, pitcher, observer are all part of a field of being (no pun intended) and there is not one purely distinct from the other, when viewed as a whole. Cut them up into bits, as our brains do, and everything appears distinct. Perhaps it would be difficult to get anything done if we were all as aware of our fluidity as we might be...
Those who see active "verbs" (the Universe is a verb, too: it has no still point) as "static nouns" can separate the thrower from the thrown, but that is merely a device of perception and not actually what is occurring.
Where does a circle begin and where does it end? I suppose one could make an arbitrary choice, i.e. it begins here, comrade but it's a relative one. And if an Intelligent Design adherent (nee Creationist) suggests that "something" started the world but is no longer here, well, that sort of puts the harsh on their belief system (at least the monotheists). You can't have ID (and its suggestion that experience of designs and designer somehow proves that a particular creator exists) without also invoking experience to show that such a creator is pushing up daisies.
Play ball!
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David Hume, Could Out-Consume, Schopenhauer and Schlegel...
That's a very original and interesting twist on that argument. I like it, and find it quite humurous.
Next time I'm looking for a laugh, I'll definitely use yours. I usually rely on something by David Hume from Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, wherein he states that as analogies get stretched farther and farther out to infinity, their relevancy drops to zero.
In particular:
Starting with the watch:watchmaker analogy, both the watch and the watchmaker are small and finite things. Going from that to infinitely expanding universise:infite god is an infinite stretch, and the analogy goes in the shitter.
Hume explains it better, with some intermediate examples to really make it humorous.
Another very humorous argument from Hume, that I think you'll like, is as follows:
Going with the analogy method of believing in god, most people think of god as a giant cosmic brain. That's why people use watch:watchmaker analogies. Well the Deist character in Hume's book really has a different, and hilarious twist on that. Most forms of life are not even animals, they are plants. They don't think, they just reproduce. Therefore, by analogy, people shouldn't view god as a giant brain but as a giant vegetable. My own personal twist on that argument is to view god as a giant, unthinking cosmic vagina, rather than a brain. That is, if I were so inclined to believe in a god in the first place.
Thanks for the Hume, Voodoo Chile
Using logic (even sophistry) to prove something exists without any quantifiable data is the sort of legerdemain that should make most of us chuckle, instead of bowing our heads and pretending a particular form of the ineffable exists and is taking a keen interest in all things human. I can't hammer the point any harder: if logic tells us that the appearance of design proves a designer, then logic also tells us that when you don't see someone for over one hundred and thirty years that being is dead (though how one survived to make that observation is less clear*).
Starting with the watch:watchmaker analogy, both the watch and the watchmaker are small and finite things. Going from that to infinitely expanding universe:infinite god is an infinite stretch, and the analogy goes in the shitter.
Since Hume's time we have learned of subatomic particles, and the knowledge that the search for Platonic ultimate building blocks has led to ever smaller bits in ever-widening seas, to the point where matter itself is as much relationship as it is quanta (it's a dessert topping! it's a floor wax!). We are all made of "star stuff" just like everything else. We too are "fields of being" that participate in eternity (but not its mathematical cousin "infinity"--one is a circle, the other is a line)--not as an "out there or infinite stretch" but rather as our very essence. Keep digging and one finds we are deeper wells than we can imagine (think of Dennis Hopper's loony photographer in Apocalypse Now "what are you going to land on - one-quarter, three-eighths?" or factor Pi on and on and on...no place to land when you approach infinity's beach).
btw: your idea of god as a "giant, unthinking cosmic vagina" has merit. Most of us would probably be spilled on the accompanying thigh, but so be it.
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*unless we're talking about a tree or ...wait a minute: trees are the only life forms to live for centuries (some fungi as well) and therefore are the creators! The Christ died on the Tree which is the Christ! He could have gone for the Mushroom, but too late now! The Norwegian Blue was nailed to the perch as Christ was nailed to the cross, which is himself! I've solved the riddle of the...(sound of gunfire, followed by a thud)...
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But! No!
But the Holy Brethren won't accept the consequences of that rebuttal. They're dead set on getting you to first agree that there was a designer, and THEN argue that the designer is their deity who they believe is STILL influencing events in the world on a daily - and substantive - basis. If they're reduced to arguing for a designer who set things in motion and then left the scene, then they've retreated from theism to deism.
And thus made their religion utterly irrelevant.