| Farmageddon said:
No problem, it was fun to try and focus enough to type that.
Language might make this a little tricky, but I'll try to explain my point of view.
Say you find a corpse with a stab wound. You naturally take that to mean the perpetrator had a knive, and that's a sensible deduction.
What is happening here is that you're using the information of the stab wound to deduce what the murder weapon was.
So, because you see the stab wound, you expect the muder weapon to have been a knife.
Now, and this is the crucial point here which words might make a little ambiguous.
What you can say, and do have every practical reason to believe, is this:
1. "the reason I know the guy had a knife is the presence of a stab wound"
But you'd never say
2. "the reason the guy had a knife is the presence of a stab wound"
It's actually clearly the other way around:
3. "the reason there was a stab wound is that the guy had a knife"
As in: there being a stab does allow you to suppose reasonably that the guy had a knife, but the wound itself didn't somehow put a knife on the guy's hands, quite the opposite: the fact that the guy had a knife decided what kind of would the victim would receive.
Now, you might suppose the attacker's intent was specifically to stab the victim. In this case you could say:
4. "the reason the guy had a knife is that he wanted to stab the victim"
In this scenario the goal is to stab and the knife is the instrument. The other possibility, discussed before, being that the attacker just happened to have a knife and thus imparted a stab wound, while he would still have killed our poor victim had he had any other sort of weapon, leaving a diffent kind of wound.
In fact, just going by the evidence we have the attacker might not even had any intention at all of killing the victim. Maybe he was a mugger and things came out the worst way possible. Hell, maybe it was just an accident! We can't really know.
Say we think of all this and recognise 3. and 4. as the viable explanations for the stab wound. Either way we would expect to find aknife. So say we do find a knife nearby, covered on the victim's blood. But we never get to actually track the attacker or get any more evidence. Since we'd expect a knife in both cases, we can then safely say:
5. "the existence of the knife can in no way sway us toward either point 3. or point 4., but is compatible with both, and expected by both"
Now the stab wound is humanity, the other possible wounds are possible life-forms. No wound at all means no life. The knife are the conditions necessary for the emerging of humanity, the other possible weapons those necessary for other forms of life. The attacker is the universe.
So you can reason from the fact that humanity exists in this world that this world should have the necessary conditions for humanity to exist (point 1. above). But that is not the same as saying the world has these conditions so that it can support humanity (point 2. above).
So either humans exist as they are because the world is as it is (point 3. above) or the "universe itself" (including "the universe itself trough a creator") wants humans and that's the reason the world is as it is. That is point 4. above.
We do see humans, so either way we should expect the world to have the necessary conditions for humans to live. What this means is that finding these conditions can't be used to discriminate between either of the possibilities. This, of course, is point 5. above.
So, is it, logically speaking, plausible (as in, not leading to contradictions and impossible to disprove beyond a reasonable doubt using this evidence, not as in "this seems to make more sense to me") that humans are some sort of speacial goal of the universe?
Yes, it is. But not more so than it's plausible, in this same sense of the word, that humans are the way they are just because the world is the way it is.
Both are, in this sense, equally as valid, and neither can be favoured on the basis of this observed evidence (the compatibility between humans and the world).
So, sure, maybe humans are special, but they might just as well not be. Maybe no specific life form is special. Maybe not even life itself is a goal of the universe (see the underlined sentence above). These are all plausible conclusions given the evidence being discussed.
Again, I'm using plausible here in the sense I discribed. It has no bearing in this sense wheter a possibility seems more or less likely to you or me or anyone else. But just as well, because, as seen before, no claim on the likelihood of either one can be derivedfrom this evidence.
In closing, and this was the point I was trying to make, if you say "humans being specail for the universe would be a sign of a creator", then using this evidence (human-world compatibility) to prove there's a creator works if and only if you presupposehumans to be special, since the evidence itself renders this possibility just as plausible as the others.
But if you say "humans being special for the universe would be a sign of a creator" and, at the same time presuppose that "humans are special to the universe" than this amounts to the same as saying: "The creator exists because I presupposed that humans are special".
But if "humans being special for the universe would be a sign of a creator" is true than the last proposition is exactly the same as saying "The creator exists because I presupposed that He does".
I think it's clear why that's a problem. You could obviously presuppose anything (which is plausible, in the sense described) to be true and then you would automatically reach the conclusion that it is thus. This is called a tautology, it is saying "If proposition A is true, then proposition A is true", and it just can't be used to try and prove "propostion A" true, no matter what "proposition A" might be.
So the takeway is this: the evidence we are discussing, in the way of the compatibility between humans and the world, can in no way be used to argue, much less prove, which of these distinct interpretations (humans are/are not special) is right or wrong. What we can take from this evidence is that both interpretations are consistent with it. And that's all.
Now, obviously if you can't use this argument to show that humans must be special, than clearly you can't use it to show that some creator must exist because humans are special.
Hope this makes sense to you. For some reason I like the idea of comparing the universe to a raging murderer.
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