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To: Neocon who wrote (12410)	6/19/1999 7:25:00 PM
From: D. Long	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17770

I apologize for not responding to your earlier post. I didnt mean to give the impression I was ignoring it. To me, it is of little theoretical use to introduce concepts that are superfluous to explanation, much like Newton's concept of "force" is superfluous to the concept of gravitation. Occam's Razor and all that. The Cosmological Argument for the existence of God is inadequate, as you mentioned. The Ontological version is inadequate because it commits the fallacy of composition. A more up to date version is that of Richard Swinburne, who makes an argument similiar to yours. It is basically an argument for God on the grounds of probability. If a God was to create a universe, what kind of universe would he create? A complex universe such as ours gives a probabilistic proof of the existence of God. But this has problems, as pointed out by John Mackie. Basically an argument from probability relies on a judgement of the probability of God as deduced from a universe with nothing in it, as well as a complex universe, which is inconclusive. Your argument also resembles the Teleological argument, which is itself reliant upon the Cosmological argument, because it infers the existence of God from complexity. There is a thought exercise on the topic called the Problem of the Gardener, or something similiar, by whom I forget though I believe it was AJ Ayer. I'll look it up. You recognize the indecisivness of these arguments, and I am certain you understand why. I also understand that an argument from chance is not decisive, but I dont think that a purely non-theistic approach has to be bound by chance. I havent given much thought to making a defense of the argument as I would formulate it, so I defer to your conclusion that the matter is at best inconclusive. Derek