My personal view is if this forum is as libertarian as it is supposed to be you should never feel the need to apologies to the people in advance, people who do not share your views. They will mock you anyway. So have fun and share away.
Agreed. Mocking is fun!
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But that is nonsense. It is not that the circle is the result of intelligence, but that it requires intelligence, consciousness, etc to discuss it as an abstraction.
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This is a very good point. The next step would be to ask whether the "circle" exists without intelligence/consciousness discussing it as an abstraction or is it created by the mere fact of some consciousness describing it. Or the other way to put it: "Do mathematical structures give rise to consciousness or does consciousness give rise to mathematical structures?" From my empirical experience my consciousness is the root to everything else I get to think about, there is no outside to it.
In the end it all boils down to definitions in our language. What is "intelligence"? What is "abstraction"? What is "proof"? What is "what" and who is asking?
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In my view, God is not separate from its Creation (and is definitely not a bearded elder on a cloud).....
Prove it.
Because God is "a bearded elder
in a cloud (read datacenter)":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wdKlWXyUkcsee the difference?
If you draw a perfect circle, then measure its diameter, measure its circumference, divide circumference by diameter, you get PI, always.
There's no intelligent design there, it just IS, it's fact, it's math, a circle is defined as an 2d object where the diameter is the same measured from any edge to another passing through the center, no intelligence, no magic, just math.
Just as 1+1 = 2, no intelligence, it just is.
If these facts are true, and there are other facts that ring true regardless of circumstance, then you have solid building blocks for a complex system without design.
That's the problem. You see, the circle needs me to do all these manipulations to construct it. And from the looks of it I cannot say for sure that there is a single unique way to arrive to that construct. In fact you will most likely see this pattern a lot as you go. So what is circle then? A path in a chain of logical conclusions or a destination? Can there be a destination without a path?