Evolution and Design II

By -
On Facebook, Danny Shahar continues to query me about my contention that acceptance of Darwinian evolution ought to have no impact, positive or negative, on an argument from design for the existence of God. I have devised this second example to try to explain things to the lad.


I make a trip to Arizona. When I get there, Danny asks me, "Gene what are you doing here?" I say, "Well, it was my plan [design] to spend a month in the desert as a cure for my respiratory problems." A eliminative materialist in his department overhears this and says, "Plan? Bah! Every single instant of Callahan's trip can be perfectly well explained by the laws of physics."


Would you agree that that is not a defeater for my claim that I planned to go to Arizona? My plan is not some miracle inserted at the start that then set everything else going: my plan was operative at every single turn I made, etc. As were the laws of physics. Looking at this in terms of my plan is not an explanation that competes with the laws of physics for explaining my trip, nor does it enter in at the point of some "incompleteness" in the physical explanation. Rather, it is the exact same events, seen from a different perspective.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more