Showing posts with label argument from design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label argument from design. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

The Theory of "Intelligent Valuation"

I reject the economic theory of inflation.  That's right.  I firmly believe deep in my heart that all currencies were created with their real values by intelligent valuators.  Inflationists will have you believe that real values of currencies have changed over time and that our modern reality is just the current state of that ever-transient change.  But were any of them there to see it happen?  These so-called economists will go so far as to suppress the teaching of Intelligent Valuation in schools so that our children will all be converted to their beliefs.  It's time that people learn that Inflationism isn't all it's cracked up to be.

In this post, I'll be highlighting the flaws that the inflationists don't want you to know.  I will be taking the method of tearing down a lot of the common arguments they spew and illustrating countless counterexamples to stand as evidence that intelligent valuation explains the reality better.  Sure, the inflationists will try to confuse you with all their talk of consumer price indices, Giffen goods, demand pull, and cost push.  They're all just ad hoc hypotheses that are built on the faith-based assumption that intelligent valuation can't be true.

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

On Teleological Thinking...

On this blog, I tend to take somewhat different tacks to classical arguments.  It's not so much because I think the old counterarguments are invalid, but simply because I think there is so much more that could be said that simply isn't being explored.  Reddit's atheism channel had quite a time with my earlier approaches to WLC's favorite -- the Kalam Cosmological Argument -- for a little while because I put forth points and thought experiments that nobody else had apparently considered up until then;  in particular, in part two.  The thought experiment I mentioned has been brought to WLC's attention, but he has not responded in these years since -- either he has nothing to offer without straw-manning it (which he can't afford to after I spent so much time pointing out how often he does that), or he simply didn't care enough to pay it any mind.  Given how long ago this was and how new I was to blogging at the time, I'm inclined to believe that it's the latter.  To be honest, though, I don't think it was a particularly esoteric or brilliant counterargument, but it's merely one that never really gets explored because people don't typically have to go to that extent.

In that sense, I'm going to try in this one to get at some of the hardly -- if at all -- covered issues with the teleological argument, aka the argument from design.  We all know this one : a watch implies a watchmaker, a building implies a builder, therefore life, which appears designed, implies a designer.  Well, the obvious counterargument here is that the analogy falls apart when you compare to living things that can reproduce. Buildings don't have sex with other buildings to make little baby buildings that grow up to become skyscrapers and what not...  that would be terrifying when you think about it.  Living things have that option and the imperfections of the process coupled with natural selection can yield changes in the average probabilities of alleles throughout a population over generations.  That's the obvious counterargument, and most would stop right there;  but you could go further and really start to tear down the concept of teleological thinking to begin with.