The argument is the presentation of a counterexample from reality, in which one can see that there does not have to be an intelligent designer in order to create a product that appears to us human beings to be intelligent.

If so, this is a worn-out, ancient argument. What does it have to do with Dennett? You could ask the same thing from a snowflake or from an atom, which are far more complex than a termite structure. The question is: who created the mechanisms that created them? The termites, or the laws of nature? In addition, how many disordered creations were produced in parallel? Maybe there are many, so that one of them would be ordered with reasonable probability. Like the anthropic argument, except that regarding the creation of the world the anthropic argument is nonsense, because we have no indications of the existence of universes with different laws.

I didn’t understand—does this castle actually exist in reality, or did he make it up?

It exists.

By the same token, one could invent an argument from design that creatures could not possibly have arisen from DNA, and therefore God must have created them…

And more seriously, in my opinion the argument from design can be refuted by the argument from stupidity. The human beings that exist in the world are so stupid that it’s impossible that someone intelligent created the world.

As I understand it, the difference between an atom/snowflake and a castle built by termites is that the former is, by everyone’s admission, a product of nature—and that is the very question itself: who created the laws of nature? Whereas in the latter case one can prove demonstrably that the castle is nothing but the handiwork of a non-intelligent creature, while the architectural level of the product can be compared, to the naked eye, to an intelligent product.
Even if we assume that most termite creations do not appear intelligent, at the end of the day we have a straightforward example of intelligent-looking complexity produced by non-intelligent creators (the termites), which makes the argument from design harder to maintain, since its basic premise is that a complex product requires a creator possessing intelligence.

What is the difference between the laws of nature and termites? Who created the termites? Their creator built into them the ability to build castles.

At the end of the day there is a phenomenon here—whether we relate to a creator or not—and the phenomenon is a product that appears intelligent coming from non-intelligent creatures, and that is what needs to be addressed.

RjjB — let’s explain it this way. Ask yourself: what is the scientific explanation for the special nature of the castle?

The answer is that evolution preserved termites that build such a castle, because those that built other kinds of castles could not survive. This shows that it was not lack of intelligence that created the castle; rather, nature shaped the termites so they would do this. That teaches just how impossible it is for something non-intelligent to do something intelligent. The only reason they built it is that nature engineered them to do so through the evolutionary mechanism. So you learn that this is not an example showing there is no need for intelligence; on the contrary, even this example proves that something special is required for the sake of the castle. In this case, that something is the laws of nature. There is nothing in Dennett’s example that differs from any argument about the special nature of the laws of nature.

That itself is the difficulty: the naturalist claims from the outset that there is nothing intelligent in evolution; in particular, there is nothing intelligent in the evolutionary mechanism that filtered these termites. The fact that they survived can at most testify to their adaptation to the environment, not to their intelligence..

The idea he was trying to say is that the termites did not make the castle of their own accord, but by force of a law of nature.

So what? The question is one: do we have an example from nature in which it is possible that a product that appears intelligent to us as human beings was created by a non-intelligent creature? According to the one who says there is no creator of the world, the laws of nature are non-intelligent, and therefore the termites too are non-intelligent, and yet their castle looks highly intelligent. There you have an example that an intelligent factor is not necessary in order to create an intelligent product.

If there is no creator of the world, then the laws of nature themselves are an example no less good. Except that it is not plausible, regardless of the question of what we know from experience.

Why is it plausible to Steven Weinberg? What is the Nobel Prize winner missing?

Exactly what I wrote. Is this an ad hominem question?

To the questioner: how are termites different from anything else that looks complex, like a cow?
The point is that anything within the laws is, on your view, deterministic (I’m not speaking at the quantum level), but that is exactly the claim—that God created a reality that is complex…. For example, why don’t you ask the same question about the bug itself? After all, if God created the world and the ant, then He created it such that it could build an ant castle inside a transparent plastic sandbox…

So if that’s the case, it is no different from the ordinary question: given that we have before us a complex event, what is preferable to say—that it was created randomly, or not, for example by a designer?

P.S. As for the fact that the castle is assembled by termites without intelligence, the Rabbi once wrote that water, on your view, perhaps has intelligence too, since it satisfies the Navier-Stokes equations.
See column 35.

@mikyab: This is actually an ad hoc question proper: if this is such a simple idea, claiming that a complex universe does not necessarily require an intelligent creator, how is it possible that those who deal with the subject in the deepest way miss it?

I suggest asking them. I also wonder how they manage with all their hair-splitting apologetic excuses. But religious sects always build towers of apologetics, even the talented ones.

Fair enough, thanks.