UD welcomes our new News anchor. As a starter for reflection, let’s clip from his current book:
Naturalism holds that nature is all there is,
and that the order of the universe, including the order of the living world,
is merely the result of the laws of nature, or, as some put it, of “chance and
necessity.” [Jerry] Coyne went a step further. He insisted that this view cannot
even be questioned in a public university science course—or to be more
precise, cannot be questioned even in a cross-disciplinary course on sci-
entific discoveries and their larger cultural implications.
But the question as to whether philosophical naturalism is true is
too important to shove into a corner. This and other closely related ques-
tions are precisely those anyone striving to live an examined life will ask . . . .
They include: Are
matter and the laws of matter all there is? Do the things we have discov-
ered about physical reality undermine or support a conclusion of human
significance? When we experience a sense of wonder in contemplating
the vastness of our universe, what if anything does that feeling signify? If
we feel small and lost as we contemplate the vast reaches of the universe,
what if anything does that tell us? Is either emotional response informa-
tive? How do we fit into the overall scheme of things? Is life meaningful,
or meaningless? Can science shed light on what we might most earnestly
desire to know? What are the implications of the fact that our universe
is not eternal, but had a beginning? Why is there something rather than
nothing? What about intelligent design (ID), the idea that certain fea-
tures of the natural world are best explained by reference to an intelligent
cause rather than to any purely mindless material cause? And going be-
yond that hypothesis, can science provide support not just for intelligent
design but for the existence of God?
Well worth reflecting on. END
PS, it will probably help to put three points of evidence on the table by way of diagrams, to help anchor us to facts:
FACT 1, a presentation of fine tuning, as in it is a fact that this is contemplated seriously:
FACT 2, what Crick thought by March 19, 1953:
FACT 3, some reflections on protein synthesis:
