>>57
the problem with your argument is that all you did was boil it down to the point where you're not saying it's a SPECIFIC being that is responsible for the initial spark of stimulus but ANYTHING sentient. you've just found a clever way of side-stepping the use of the word God and replacing it with the term 'sentient initial stimulus'. it's still vulnerable to the burden of proof and Occam's razor, and you've left a possibility so open ended that you could very well say that you have no proof it wasn't the flying spaghetti monster because you have no way to test for sure it wasn't so there's every chance it was.
So here's what i think we get to do: we DO get to ignore the idea the universe was created by an initial sentient stimulus because there is no proof to back of the extraordinary claim. It's not arrogant to do that because even the theories we currently have, with all the evidence pushing them forward, are still vulnerable to being disproved (our understanding of gravity might be completely off, but it's still a better theory than the hand of god keeping all things moving as they should). only when a theory has something substantial to back it up will it ever be considered. 'intelligent design' has no such evidence, at least none that isn't warped and misinterpreted science.