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The 2001 Principle, Revisited

© Frederic Giacobazzi

Visitors to this page will have noted the animated (and very welcome) discussion occasioned by my most recent Suite101 article, The 2001 Principle. That article described The 2001 Principle Web site, which, among other things, advances the classical argument for the existence of God known as the Argument from Design. Armed with this fresh evidence of an interested and engaged readership, but without any intent of advocacy, I thought it might be interesting to offer a second installment about the site presenting the fruits of my intereview with one of the site's creators.

I asked Mr. Mordechai Steinman (author of a book on which the Web site is based, originally published under the title 2001 Principle and subsequently republished as The Obvious Proof) to offer his thoughts on such matters as the sources of his thinking about the design argument, the aims and purposes of the site he helped to create, and his thoughts about the Web as a medium for philosophy.

He began by explaining that the site "re-examines and attempts to re-validate the classical 'Argument from Design' using the concept of Cognitive Dissonance and audience reaction to the film 2001 - A Space Odyssey."

Here are the main points of what Steinman regards as "new and original" in his agument:

1. Ostensibly, one of the basic problems with the "Argument from Design" is that it is difficult to quantify what constitutes a "Level of Design" that warrants the conclusion. For example, the statement "This is a fast computer" does not specify how fast. We would want to know the computer's specifications. Our original argument tries to solve this problem by defining the "Threshold for Design" and the parameters of a scientific experiment that could test whether the universe surpasses the required threshold to justify the conclusion.

2. The concept of "Cognitive Dissonance" (first coined in 1957 by psychologists) is pretty much accepted. We have all experienced it firsthand when we see a "mental block" in others who are incapable of perceiving what we and most people would perceive as obvious due to prior "investments" they have made. Of course, in ourselves it is harder to notice the above phenomena. In fact, the history of scientific research gives many examples where ideas which had sufficient evidence to justify their acceptance were, in fact, not accepted even by scientists of the highest calibre due to prior emotional commitments. (We list some of these in the Menu at the end of our site.)

Steinman builds upon this foundation as follows:

It is our hypothesis that something akin to this occurs when we attempt to think about the concept of God. Many people can accept