What you cannot answer is this: How can final cause -- purpose or motivating reason for something -- arise out of nothing? Indeed, the intelligent person recognizes that such an idea is non-sense, and rejects it out of hand.
I can indeed answer this, and I will. Also, it strikes me as bad form to imply that someone who disagrees with you is unintelligent because they do not reject the ideas you want them to reject.
Now to my answer: purpose arises from lack of purpose because purpose itself is merely emergent behavior in the neurons of our brains, arising from the laws of physics.
You get purpose, or reason for being, from a priori purpose or reason. I work in order to have money. I want money in order to buy food and shelter. I want food and shelter to continue to survive. And so on.
You never get purpose, or reason for being, from nothing.
You still have to show that purpose, itself, exists in any form other than a chemical arrangement in our brains. For that matter, you have to define the "nothing" from which purpose is supposed not to have originated, before I can agree that, indeed, that sort of "nothing" is incapable of creating "purpose", or even agree that such a definition of "nothing" is tenable.
But in so doing, you are demonstrating teleology. You have a goal.
I may have a goal behind this comment, but behind that goal is an emergent phenomenon of the laws of physics, and as such, my "goal" is not incompatible with my claimed nonexistence of teleology.
I can indeed answer this, and I will. Also, it strikes me as bad form to imply that someone who disagrees with you is unintelligent because they do not reject the ideas you want them to reject.
Now to my answer: purpose arises from lack of purpose because purpose itself is merely emergent behavior in the neurons of our brains, arising from the laws of physics.
You get purpose, or reason for being, from a priori purpose or reason. I work in order to have money. I want money in order to buy food and shelter. I want food and shelter to continue to survive. And so on.
You never get purpose, or reason for being, from nothing.
You still have to show that purpose, itself, exists in any form other than a chemical arrangement in our brains. For that matter, you have to define the "nothing" from which purpose is supposed not to have originated, before I can agree that, indeed, that sort of "nothing" is incapable of creating "purpose", or even agree that such a definition of "nothing" is tenable.
But in so doing, you are demonstrating teleology. You have a goal.
I may have a goal behind this comment, but behind that goal is an emergent phenomenon of the laws of physics, and as such, my "goal" is not incompatible with my claimed nonexistence of teleology.