November 2011

In some ways I have great respect for Will Provine, who is honest enough to declare the inevitable philosophical consequences of atheistic materialism (no free will, no dogs or gods worth having, no foundation for ethics, no ultimate purpose or meaning in anything, and eventually drop dead and go straight to eternal nihilistic oblivion). Richard Dawkins has written a children’s book (The Magic of Reality, an oxymoronic title if ever there was one). Dawkins could have easily distilled his most recent magnum opus into the following (with the obviously benevolent intent of edifying young children concerning Ultimate Truth and Real Science): Dear Children, You are the product of a random, materialistic process that did not have you in mind. (Please Read More ›

The Wikipedia hit-piece on Intelligent Design (NWE’s introductory article is much fairer and better informed) leads with an illustration of a watch; an invidious allusion to William Paley’s famous parable of stumbling over a stone in a field vs. finding a watch in the same field, that appears in Ch I of his 1802 [- 6 ] Natural Theology:

>>IN crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that for any thing I knew to the contrary it had lain there for ever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for any thing I knew the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone; why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first? . . . >>

He continues:

For this reason, and for no other, namely, that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive—what we could not discover in the stone—that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e. g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that, if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, or placed after any other manner or in any other order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it.

This is of course, an invitation to the argument by inference to best explanation of empirical observations.

However, it is usually dismissed today as an example of the weakness of attempts to argue by analogy (itself an error, credible analogy is a key facet of real world inductive argument, the cornerstone of science), and the issue put on the table in rebuttal is usually that unlike watches, living things can self-replicate at cellular level, and reproduce with variation, thus evolve. Problem solved, nothing to see here, let us move on.

Not so fast, this dismissal argument is a strawman fallacy.

As we have already reported, Discovery Institute’s Stephen Meyer recently paid a visit to London to present and defend the thesis of Signature in the Cell at a dinner party attended by scientists, philosophers, politicians and other men and women of influence. His visit included a radio debate against theistic evolutionist Keith Fox, which you can download and listen to here. Fox presented nothing fundamentally novel, and more or less all of the objections raised by him had already been thoroughly addressed in Meyer’s book. Keith Fox is a professor of biochemistry at the University of Southampton, and is also the chairman of Christians in Science — in essence, the UK equivalent of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA). Click here Read More ›

Historians will point to the eighteenth century Swedish super-scientist Carl von Linne, or Linnaeus, as a key figure in the history of thought who promoted the religious belief that once created, all species remain fixed throughout history.  Read more