God is a stack overflow?

[Ariphaos]

Does this make sense to anyone?

ekko84: It presents more questions than it answers
ekko84: For example
ekko84: What did the first thing evolve from?
ekko84: You work within a world that both posits the temporal impermanence of things and claims that everything has a cause and effect.
ekko84: That's self contradictory.
ekko84: To say that every effect has a cause, including the effect that first caused anything at all, is to exhaust your recursion stack.
ekko84: I say to you: STACK OVERFLOW!!!
ekko84: God is a stack overflow.

It was shoved into a conversation about him thinking evolution is compatible with ID.

This is a poor analogy, and if he wants a deductive reason, his premise has two flaws:
a) The Universe appears to be infinite. On such a scale, if it is operating through some form of recursion (by his analogy), it is more appropriately considered a Turing machine. Infinite recursion is possible in such instances.
b) He uses recursion but does not consider a loop structure. This is dishonest debating at best, outright idiocy at worst.

I'm assuming he's talking about the first cause of the Universe itself, because anything less is moronic. It goes life -> DNA/RNA world -> RNA world -> PNA world -> primordial soup -> formation of Earth/moon system -> formation of Solar System -> supernova (repeat this step and previous star system steps to generate sufficient metallicity) -> formation of Milky Way (partly coincides with supernova steps) -> formation of supercluster/void structure of the Universe (the initial randomness, probably caused by quantum variation - the chance isn't on the plate, it's in the plate itself). -> formation of the singularity at the dawn of the Universe.

Now here, just because we don't know doesn't mean that nothing we know applies. There are several effects than can cause a cyclic Universe, even though the timescales of some of them are pretty extreme.

But his original data is incorrect.

Further, randomness, or rather, effective randomness, is a fundamental property of out Universe. We call it the Heisenburg uncertainty principle, and it is as undeniable as gravity or light.

[Lord Zentei]

Xeriar: it's Heisenberg. Otherwise, good show.

[SirNitram]

Laughable. Whose the 'Designer', if not a deity?

Indeed. Unless he is an alien primogenetor such as in drachefly's over-the-top apologism in the "Letter to the Editor" thread. Other than that, ID does require a diety de facto, even if you refuse to call him such.

Recalling some aspects of Intelligent Design(And really, that this is not the type advocated by 'Group X' means nothing, as it is not codified), it includes the creation of the universe and/or the planet. This requires either divinity or technology so advanced the difference is moot.

[Lord Zentei]

Laughable. Whose the 'Designer', if not a deity?

Indeed. Unless he is an alien primogenetor such as in drachefly's over-the-top apologism in the "Letter to the Editor" thread. Other than that, ID does require a diety de facto, even if you refuse to call him such.

Recalling some aspects of Intelligent Design(And really, that this is not the type advocated by 'Group X' means nothing, as it is not codified), it includes the creation of the universe and/or the planet. This requires either divinity or technology so advanced the difference is moot.

Quite so. Only the problem is that the wishy-washy presentation by half-wit apologists leave out such details and start ranting about "rah, rah, rah, not all possible scenarios involving design are in principle incompatible with science, etc" all while ID peddles its pseudoreligion to the gullible masses.

[Frank Hipper]

A trolling philosophy student, how entertaining...not.

[Ariphaos]

Xeriar: it's Heisenberg. Otherwise, good show. ;)

I spelled 'our' wrong too, I wonder which is worse.

Both my handle and my real name suffer at the mercy of many a misspelling... Hell I've been accused of spelling my own name wrong. So I'm going with 'our'.

----

Alternative argument: Tell him to shove his sanctimonious sophistry up his pseudopoligetic ass and to come back when he's willing to lay off the sesquipidalianism for long enough to form sentences whose intent is to be understood, rather than inflate his bloated ego.

[Wyrm]

ekko84: It's a straightforward argument Chris. I have two of them. 1a) Intelligent design does not imply the existence of God. 1b) God does not imply the existence of Intelligent Design. 1c) Since ~(G -> ID), ~(~ID -> ~G). 1d) Conclusion: the article, which infers from its claim that ~ID that ~G, contradicts sub-conclusion (c) and is therefore wrong.

Ekko84 is wrong. If G is the proposition that god existence, and ID is the proposition that ID is true, then 1a is ¬(ID ⇒ G). Ekko84 is asserting from this that ¬(G ⇒ ID). But this does not follow; 1b is the contrary of 1a, which is not a valid deduction.

Actually, ¬(ID ⇒ G) is equal to ¬(G ∨ ¬ID), which by de Morgan's laws equals (¬G ∧ ID), which implies that both ID is true AND god does not exist. Therefore, if ¬(ID ⇒ G) is true, then god does not exist. Oops! The lesson here is you should take extreme care on which implicaiton propositions you negate.

ekko84: 2a) Evolution requires genetic recombination and only genetic recombination; any existence of genetic recombination is evolution. 2b) Genetic recombination presupposes the existence of genes and a process of recombining them.

Mmmyeess? Both of which have been shown to exist.

2c) The existence of genes neither implies nor contradicts any particular explanation of the origin of genes. 2d) Intelligent Design in its less fundamentalist forms does not deny the existence of genes, nor does it deny that they can be recombined. 2e) Therefore, nothing in ID contradicts the existence of evolution; they are logically compatible.

Wrong. Plain vanilla Newtonian gravity and general relativity both imply that Mercury orbits the sun. However, they are incompatible; general relativity predicts a residual precession of Mercury's orbit, and the other doesn't.

Our friend is making the very common logical blunder (X ⇒ Y), therefore (Y ⇒ X). It does not.

[Macross]

I find the whole Intelligent Design vs. Evolution debate to be rather pointless.

Even if you can prove that humans were created through intelligent design, all it would suggest is that evolution occurred someplace else. Any such intelligent designer would have had to have evolved somewhere.