The Law of Parsimony Favors Intelligent Design - B

Crucial to your argument from parsimony is a theory of intelligent design that is, by your own admission, "oversimplified". So theists utilize omnipotence to maximize "explanatory power", mystery to eliminate falsifiability, and now oversimplification to achieve parsimony. But how can "God created" be any more singular than "the singularity created" (the corresponding secular oversimplification)? Infinite universe theories, which constitute a subset of secular theories of everything, do not "explain the less than 1 in 10 raised to the negative 1,018 probability of life emerging by chance" (as probabilities max out at 1, I'll assume you mean simply "10 raised to the negative 1,018"), nor is that their intention. You make the mistake of thinking an unlikely event needs an explanation better than that it was possible. If you roll a 6 your first time at a craps table, do you require a greater explanation for your rolling a 6 than that a 5 in 36 chance is still a chance? Do you suspect the dice are loaded? When you roll dice, or indeed ask a random number generator to produce a number between 1 and 10 raised to the 1,018", a likely particular outcome is IMPOSSIBLE. The question you should be asking is not "what is the probability of this occurrence" but instead "what is the probability of an occurrence this improbable". Because of the nature of dice, the probability of an outcome at least as improbable as 5 in 36 is 30 in 36. What about the nature of the universe makes it impossible or even IMPROBABLE that some events with "10 raised to the negative 1,018" probabilities would occur? Your source doesn't give a probability anywhere near "10 raised to the negative 1,018", and even the odds it does mention are suspect. It intends to find the probability of protein forming by "chance and normal thermal conditions". But what is the probability of certain thermal conditions remaining constant indefinitely? I'd imagine it's quite low. Another assumption is that the "92 natural elements" will be "distributed at random". What has the author learned that would lead him to believe "carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur" should be only as likely to appear as, say, radium, francium, actinium, thorium, and protactinium? The "natural" distinction seems incomplete. We call the "natural" elements "natural" because they're naturally common enough for us to have observed them in nature. Incidentally, they tend to have relatively low proton counts and are thereby simpler, more parsimonious, more likely, which explains their naturalness. Presumably, you wouldn't accuse Kurt Warner of cheating based on the extremely low probability that one out of about 6 billion non-cripples, "distributed at random", would make it to the Super Bowl twice. Your source goes on to make a classic mistake in probabilities, assuming that there is a certain amount of time or space required for an improbable thing to occur. If a Roulette wheel comes up 29 (or any other number), do you conclude that there must be 37 or 38 other Roulette wheels going at the same time, to justify the 1 in 37 or 38 chance occurrence? Do you conclude that same wheel must be on at least its 37th or 38th spin? Your source evidently does. The Multiverse, in its final extension, is algorithmically the most parsimonious possible theory. Its wealth of universes is in fact the consequence of its algorithmic economy: 0 parameters. Your ID, on the other hand, specifies a particular physical universe caused by a single intelligent designer in a single metaphysical universe. "In Intelligent design we take what we know about how intelligent agents act when designing and are able detect design in our universe." How could the behavior of intelligent designers lead you to conclude that a thing had been designed? Give me an example. Is there anything God is meant to have NOT designed, so that we could compare designed things with non-designed things? Was God, who's by definition more complex than His designs, designed? If not, how can complexity be the mark of design? If God, by his complexity, does require design, isn't an infinite regression of universes—or at least gods--also required? I don't agree that ID has equal "explanatory power". In fact, ID can't explain the cause of a single thing besides genesis: every other event could be either the direct doing of God or the result of processes He set in motion long ago. ID is thus disruptive of attempts to explain most things.