Calilasseia wrote:The only "agents" we have reliably repeatable and verifiable evidence for, are assorted living organisms. The presumption that an agent
other than this exists, is of course what I was referring to above.
Yet we have an entire radio astronomy project that suspects there are living organisms not on planet earth for which we have no repeatable and verifiable evidence of. Some biologists even suspect that aliens seeded our planet with life:
UK Scientists Find Evidence that Aliens May Have Seeded Life on Earth: https://www.outerplaces.com/science/ite ... e-on-earthDid extraterrestrials deliberately seed the first life on Earth? Astrobiologists from the University of Buckingham have discovered a mysterious object that may have been sent from an intelligent race of aliens to propagate life on our planet. The tiny metal globe, pictured above, is of unknown origin, and is eerily made of both organic and inorganic materials: "It is a ball about the width of a human hair, which has filamentous life on the outside and a gooey biological material oozing from its centre," said team leader Milton Wainwright. The strange, seemingly engineered composition of the object led the researchers to conclude that it could be evidence that life as we know it was deliberately engineered and sent to Earth by an intelligent alien species, or "directed panspermia."
Or could the alien engineers have been angels? Either way, it seems that this is clear evidence for intelligent design,
Except that blindly asserted magic "agents" from mythology don't count as "agents" in reality. They're figments of human imagination. Plus, there are plenty of interactions that are not caused by agents of any sort. Gravity, anyone?
Gravity still depends on mass and the relative distances between them. Newton concluded that, while gravity explained how the earth went round the Sun, only God (the agent) could have carefully arranged the celestial bodies in their orbits.
There was no "who" involved. Oh, and don't try slipping Douglas Adams' Puddle in by the back door.
OK.
What determined the mass ratios and charges for protons, neutrons and electrons?
At bottom, particles (or their string landscape equivalents, for those who took the requisite physics classes) are products of quantum fields. Those quantum fields are, as far as physicists can currently ascertain, have always existed. Indeed, that's a point I keep raising whenever questions of the form "what instantiated X" are inserted into discourse, namely, that either explanations (natural or otherwise) will continue diving deeper and deeper into an infinite regress, or will come to a stop at some point with "we can go no further, and this particular X simply exists, as a brute fact".
'Brute fact' arguments don't explain the finely tuned constants of physics.
Bollocks. They merely assumed that an invisible magic man was responsible, because they didn't possess the cognitive powers to work out that lots of interactions continue happening, without any "agent" being responsible. Intentionalist thinking is inherently misleading whenever this is the case.
No. The ancients understood there were regularities. That's how they made their weapons and machines. Of course, they did attribute divine agency to natural phenomena like lightning, for example. However, scientists admit that they don't know what causes lightning, lending weight to the idea of supernatural tinkering:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2012092 ... lightening
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