Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Economist John Maynard Keynes understood ID?

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Whatever his merits or failings as an economist (the world is pretty divided on that), John Maynard Keynes got ID basically right in his Treatise on Probability (1921):File:John Maynard Keynes.jpg

The discussion of final causes and of the argument from design has suffered confusion from its supposed connection with theology. But the logical problem is plain and can be determined upon formal and abstract considerations. The argument is in all cases simply this—an event has occurred and has been observed which would be very improbable à priori if we did not know that it had actually happened; on the other hand, the event is of such a character that it might have been not unreasonably predicted if we had assumed the existence of a conscious agent whose motives are of a certain kind and whose powers are sufficient.(p. 340)

So the obvious question he asks  is, what does the evidence suggest?

That would make Keynes way smarter than many Catholic philosophers who can exquisitely explain who the universe shows no evidence of design, through dozens of casuistries, though then it is unclear what the Catechism of the Catholic Church is even about.

If there was ever a document that showed more evidence of absolute certainty of the design of life, I invite you to suggst it. Warning: It is long and involved.

(Book is free, various formats, here. )

Comments
Between the long overdue 'aggiornamento' of Vatican II and the early seventies, a movement seems to have grown in the Catholic Church, whereby, judging from the Catholic newspapers and the popularity, even among good clergy, of 'theologians' (in the least rigorous sense of the world imaginable), such as Karl Rahner, the Catholic intelligentsia seem to have come to the conclusion that Christ, indeed, the supernatural, were, to put it kindly, a tad downmarket, so that rendering theology into philosophy was actually a very intellectually progressive way to proceed. Of course, they 'fell between two stools'. They had been taken in, 'hook, line and sinker' by the secular fundamentalist establishment, who had long been more 'respectable' in the eyes of the world, anyway. But heck, they made big names for themselves in rag time; very much the flavour of the times. I remember a lovely old priest teaching us in Mill Hill seminary, scoffing at the notion that God would have deigned to ACTUALLY walk in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve - the implication being, obviously, that he was far too grand. Ahem. Isn't Christianity based on the utter self-abasement of Christ to the level of a mortal man? And beyond that, to his desperately degrading and shameful crucifixion. The Christian convert, writer and apologist, Malcolm Muggeridge, is withering about that phobia relating to the supernatural, remarking that, if the priests stood at the church doors, whip in hand, to flog 'would be' entrants, they could scarcely have been more effective in driving hem away. Arnold Lunn, another agnostic convert to Catholicism, whose father had been a Methodist minister, and later founded the travel-agency, was, actually, very, very witty. The same level of wit as Evelyn Waugh. Parenthetically, right-wingers deriding their own are normally the savagest humorists there are, the more so for their understated delivery. I think one of the funniest of his jests was that when an Anglican clergyman, was asked whether cohabiting, before 'tying the knot', was all right with God, he stuttered something to the effect that he supposed it depended on the girl... Too much of 'the curate's egg' mentality is not conducive to clarity, is it. Least of all in Christianity.Axel
June 13, 2013
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Great clip! JMK is way smarter than most of his detractors, too. He really changed the world. KFkairosfocus
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