If humans eventually create intelligent robots that think like us and have similar sel-awareness, what would the implication be for the intelligent Design (ID) argument. Would it show that we are intelligently designed by a creator God?
In an online debate with creationists I suggested that: if all things need a designer, the designer is a thing, and therfore needs a designer. Of course they went to their version of the first cause argument.
As I said before an intelligently designed creation requires an intelligent creator. Period. You sidestepping, deflecting, mudding the waters, asking who created the creator, is just making excuses. The creator would be uncreated. It must be. The Creator would be eternal. There was never a time that it didn’t exist. Now, what’s your problem? This state of affairs you obviously consider to be unfavorable or distasteful. You clearly have a problem with it. Why? To deny the Creator IS to hate it.
The first issue here is the presupposition that we are intelligently designed – because it would be tautologically true that by definition an intelligently designed thing needs an intelligent designer. That aside, let’s stick with the usual creationist Intelligent Design (ID) claim:
- We humans design and ceate things, and if you came across a designed thing, like a watch, you’d presume it was created by a human.
- Therefore things that look designed have a creator.
- This world, and we humans in it, look designed, therefore we have a designer and creator.
- That creator is God.
- But, intelligent creaator God does not require a designer and creator, that God is eternal.
The error starts with the presumption that this world and us in it look designed. There are no grounds to make this claim. It’s a category error to presume that because we design things, we need a dersigner – we are not like the things we design, in regard to the capacity to design.
If we were actually designed it would be fair to claim there must be a creator. But if everything needs a creator, then so does the designer, and claiming the creator does not need a creator but in fact is the first cause is comitting the fallacy of special pleading.
And, if theists think that there can be things that don’t need a creator, then our universe doesn’t need a creator, and always existed – and the Big Bang and subsequent events we know about are just a phase in that eternal system.
AI, Robots, Thinking Machines
What if we eventually create intelligent robots that thing in ways similar to ourselves, in that they are self-aware, and feel as if they have free will.
If we manage to create such entities, would that show that in fact intelligent things can be designed, and therefore falsify the atheist hypothesis that we are not designed? Would this show that we had a designer, and would that in turn prvide a loophole for theists to claim their Creator exists?
No.
AI would show that intelligent systems CAN be designed, not that they must be. We would still have no evidence that we are designed.
It would add an extra difficulty for thesists. It would show that you don’t need a ‘soul’, or dualist mind, to be an intelligent self-aware system.
The atheism + science world view would remain intact, and it would all be consistent. As always, it would lead to yet more contradictions for the theistic world view.
Ramblings 