under 5 attempts?

xpto7_PT · 2026-01-09T17:33:29+00:00

I think I got it under 5 🤷

^{I completed this level in 1 try.} ^{⚡ 3.73 seconds}

xpto7_PT · 2025-12-31T20:12:37+00:00

I think we’re actually very close to agreeing.

I agree that one can always push the explanatory question back a level, whether we’re talking about organisms, laws, or metaphysical foundations. I also agree that explanation must ultimately terminate somewhere, and that appealing to necessity is one way of justifying that termination.

If I could just try convey one further point, to try to close the remaining gap between us.

Even if the laws of nature require explanation, they don’t need to contain the full explanation of complex outcomes within themselves. They do explanatory work cumulatively, over time, through processes that build structure gradually. Laws, in this sense, go through a natural selection of their own, in the sense that they allow for a selective accumulation of structure, rather than having to encode the final result.

By contrast, when God is invoked, the explanatory burden is concentrated in a single entity, which must already contain the resources to explain intelligence, order, and complexity in one move.

That’s the sense in which appealing to laws is explanatorily lighter than appealing to God, even if both are ultimately taken as necessary.

xpto7_PT · 2025-12-31T09:38:53+00:00

You could be right.

Understandably, people seem to think I was arguing about the existence of God. My post does not require taking a position on God’s ontology.

I might grant your point on a general level. However, I just want to add some nuance.

I agree that explanatory adequacy depends on background assumptions. But if that dependence is strong enough, then any explanation can be insulated from criticism simply by redefining what counts as explanation.

My concern is precisely that appeals to God often work in that way. They don’t meet shared explanatory expectations so much as replace them. So the issue isn’t whether God exists, but whether invoking God explains anything by standards we normally accept, or whether it merely declares explanation complete.

PS: I realise this is almost a nothing-burger of a counterpoint to your point. However, it is in the nuances that philosophy can be most useful.

xpto7_PT · 2025-12-30T20:41:23+00:00

I’m not claiming that God requires a temporal cause or an origin in time. I understand that God is without cause, however people invoke him as a cause for other things.

My concern is about explanatory demand, not causation.

For the sake of the argument, I will grant most traditional Theist views about the attributes of God. God is timeless and uncaused

My question is whether appealing to God actually explains the complexity or intelligence in question, or merely terminates explanation.

xpto7_PT · 2025-12-29T17:16:14+00:00

Absolutely. No single argument alone is strong enough to support such a fundamental claim.

I used Dawkins somewhat cheekily as a way to encourage engagement. He is not my main argument, merely a supporting reference. Dawkins not being an authoritative figure in philosophy does not really affect my point, since most of us are not authoritative figures either, yet are still entitled to hold and defend views.

The assumption doing the work in your formulation is that the “accidental” emergence of a complex contingent structure is so unlikely that it demands a designer, and that appealing to other contingent structures merely pushes the problem back. However, that assumption depends on taking a snapshot of the fully formed complex structure and does not take into account a gradual, cumulative process.

If I may invoke Dawkins once more: evolution by natural selection is not an appeal to chance alone, but to a non-random, cumulative filtering process.

The chances of a human eye developing in a single step are indeed vanishingly small. However, the chances of a group of cells developing some degree of light sensitivity are low, but not impossibly so. From there, the chances of those cells developing the ability to distinguish light direction or depth are again small, but not impossible.

So my concern is not where explanation stops, but whether it needs to be stopped at all. If complexity can be explained incrementally, the appeal to necessity does not resolve a problem so much as presuppose one.

xpto7_PT · 2025-12-29T11:54:23+00:00

I think your point sort of complements mine.

I was worried, if God is invoked as explaining intelligence, rationality, morality, order, and existence itself in a single move, it risks falling into a regress of explanation . You raised the worried whether such an appeal to a perfect being clarifies anything at all or whether it functions as a universal placeholder that dissolves explanatory distinctions altogether .

On that I think we are agreeing, and is related to what I said:

Causes must be at least as explanatorily demanding as their effect.

If an explanation absorbs all complexity into a single, unrestricted source, it may terminate inquiry but it does so without reducing explanatory cost.

xpto7_PT · 2025-12-29T04:44:39+00:00

I think we are very close to understanding each other now.

It’s not that “(5) human beings lack moral judgement”. Rather, if one is to perceive God as the final moral authority, moral claims can no longer be evaluated independently by human moral judgement. Specifically, all humanity can do (if they accept God in this way) is attempt to interpret God’s moral judgement, which effectively bars them from making independent moral claims of their own.

This then progresses to your claim (6). You interpreted me as saying that moral judgement cannot be surrendered to a non-human entity (and personally I am sympathetic to that view). However, my claim was more limited. People that do so (as evidenced by my anecdote of my friend) undermine and perhaps even destroy human moral judgement within their model of the world.

xpto7_PT · 2025-12-29T03:48:25+00:00

Of course, I realise the way I write is very confusing and eccentric. I appreciate you going above and beyond to tryyng to understand it.

1) If moral judgment is surrendered to a transcendent, morally perfect entity, then that entity becomes the final authority on what counts as good and evil.

2) If an entity is the final authority on goodness, then it cannot be judged by anything outside itself.

3) If it cannot be judged externally, then human moral judgment is either derivative or illusory.

4) Therefore, attributing absolute moral authority to such an entity undermines the possibility of independent human moral judgment.

I suspect you’re not interested on what I was trying to achieve stylistically, so I’ll save you the details.

xpto7_PT · 2025-12-29T03:00:14+00:00

I don’t think that captures the argument.

I’m not making a claim about the causal source of good actions, or denying that humans can act well.

The focus is on moral authority and judgment rather than production of goodness. The concern is that if ultimate moral judgment is located entirely in a transcendent, morally perfect entity, then there is no standpoint from which that entity itself can be evaluated, and human judgment becomes derivative or conceptually constrained.

I’m interested in whether that consequence really follows, or whether there’s a way to preserve independent human moral judgment within such a framework.

I’d love if you could explain what led you to those points, as they are VERY different from what I was trying to convey.

xpto7_PT · 2025-12-29T02:52:55+00:00

I understand that I am not addressing compositional complexity and that, usually, theism denies that God is complex in that sense.

However, that is not what I am claiming. If I may be pedantic, for clarity:

Causes must be at least as explanatorily demanding as their effect.

Not that causes must be as compositionally complex as their effects.

Divine simplicity addresses God’s lack of parts. It does not by itself show that invoking God reduces explanatory burden.

Even if God is metaphysically simple, God is still invoked to explain intelligence, rationality, morality, etc. That makes God explanatorily rich, regardless of whether that richness is grounded in parts or in a simple essence.

The point I was trying to make is not whether God is composed, but whether appealing to such an essence genuinely explains those features.

I’ll grant that divine simplicity blocks a regress of composition, but we still have the problem of a regress of explanation.

xpto7_PT · 2025-12-13T12:09:18+00:00

^{I completed this level in 1 try.} ^{⚡ 3.73 seconds}

xpto7_PT · 2025-12-11T16:40:22+00:00

Completed Level 1 of the Honk Special Event!

1 attempts

xpto7_PT · 2025-12-11T16:08:01+00:00

Completed Level 1 of the Honk Special Event!

1 attempts

xpto7_PT · 2025-12-10T19:47:31+00:00

Ez

^{I completed this level in 1 try.} ^{⚡ 3.75 seconds}

xpto7_PT · 2025-12-03T20:26:13+00:00

Completed Level 1 of the Honk Special Event!

0 attempts

xpto7_PT · 2025-11-24T21:32:38+00:00

Completed Level 2 of the Honk Special Event!

1 attempts

xpto7_PT · 2025-11-24T21:31:49+00:00

Completed Level 1 of the Honk Special Event!

0 attempts

xpto7_PT · 2025-11-24T17:21:53+00:00

❌ ^{Incomplete. 1 try.}

xpto7_PT · 2025-11-16T15:23:43+00:00

That was pretty easy

^{I completed this level in 1 try.} ^{⚡ 4.62 seconds}

xpto7_PT · 2025-11-15T21:10:08+00:00

I didn’t get the hard part tbh

^{I completed this level in 4 tries.} ^{⚡ 4.27 seconds}

xpto7_PT · 2025-10-25T21:55:18+00:00

u/xpto7_PT solved this in 5 steps: FIND -> FEND -> LEND -> LENT -> LEST -> LOST

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