Responding to philosopher Joseph Carter on how we can pretend that the universe has purpose even though it doesn’t, at Evolution News & Views:
As I noted yesterday, materialist philosopher Joseph Carter wrote a fatuous essay for the New York Times philosophy forum The Stone in which he denies purpose in the universe and does an amusing dance around the implications that follow.
Carter claims (erroneously) that modern science has disproven teleology in nature:
The laws of physics are inherently mechanistic.
Except for quantum mechanics and relativity, which reveal space-time curving in gravitation, time slowing with velocity, light that travels with the same velocity irrespective of the velocity of its emitter or absorber, sinks of gravity so intense that neither light nor information can escape the undefined singularity at its core, the emergence of the entire universe from such a singularity, equivalence of energy and matter, potentiality collapsing to actuality at the atomic level, particles that are also waves, superposition of quantum states comprehensible only as alternate levels of reality, observer effects and quantum entanglement — “spooky action at a distance” in Einstein’s words.
Carter has confused “mathematical” with “mechanistic.” More.
Great physicists did not make that mistake. But lots of small people do.
See also: What great physicists have said about immateriality and consciousness
and
How naturalism rots science from the head down