I would like to commend Thomas Cudworth for his latest attempt to engage ID critic Professor Edward Feser in dialogue. Over the past few weeks, I have been greatly heartened by Professor Feser’s clarifications of his position vis-a-vis Intelligent Design. For instance, in a recent post on his blog site, he wrote:

The dispute between Thomism on the one hand and Paley (and ID theory) on the other is not over whether God is in some sense the “designer” of the universe and of living things – both sides agree that He is – but rather over what exactly it means to say that He is, and in particular over the metaphysics of life and of creation.

Moreover, in an email sent to me last month, Professor Feser wrote:

I have never accused any ID defender of heresy, and would never do so. To say to a theological opponent “Your views have implications you may not like, including ones that I believe are hard to reconcile with what we both agree to be definitive of orthodoxy” is simply not the same thing as saying “You are a heretic!” Rather, it’s what theologians do all the time in debate with their fellow orthodox believers.

I welcome Professor Feser’s statements that he regards the Intelligent Design movement as theologically orthodox, and that he believes God is the designer of living things.

In his latest post, Thomas Cudworth put a question to Professor Feser. He asked Professor Feser whether, in his view, God could have possibly planned to create a universe in which intelligent beings could infer His existence from studying nature – in particular, from observing clues such as cosmic fine-tuning and irreducible complexity, which would show that the evolutionary process must have been intelligently planned. I know that Professor Feser is a very busy man with a lot of work on his hands, so I’d like to attempt a reply on his behalf. Read More ›

In a recent and very courteously worded article entitled, St. Thomas and the Inadequacy of Intelligent Design, Professor Beckwith summarizes his main beef with ID as follows:

According to Dembski, we discover design in nature after we have eliminated chance and law… Design, therefore, is not immanent in nature. It is something that is imposed on nature by someone or something outside it.

This means that for Dembski as well as other ID advocates, nature’s order, including its laws and principles, need not require a mind behind it except for in the few instances where the explanatory filter allows one to detect design.

Beckwith sees this line of argument as dangerous, because its case for a Designer of Nature is merely probabilistic rather than certain, and thus vulnerable to being falsified by future scientific discoveries. He later contrasts this view which he ascribes to Professor Dembski with his own theological position, which he believes rests upon a more secure metaphysical footing:

For the Thomist, and for many other Christians, law and chance do not eliminate design. “Design” does not replace efficient and material causes in nature when the latter two appear impotent as explanations (i.e., Dembski’s “gaps”). Rather, efficient and material causes require final causes… What is a final cause? It is a thing’s purpose or end… For the natural processes – even if they are complete and exhaustive – seem to work for an end, and that end is its final cause. This is why, in his famous Five Ways (or arguments) to show God’s existence, St. Thomas includes as a fifth way an argument from the universe’s design as a whole, appealing to those scientific laws that make motion possible…

Here are two quick questions I’d like to ask Professor Beckwith.

1. Which would you regard as the best piece of evidence for God’s existence:

(a) the existence of meaningful instructions in the natural world;
(b) the occurrence of end-oriented processes in the natural world; or
(c) random behavior taking place in the natural world?

2. Which gap do you think is greater:

(i) the gap between (a) and (b), or
(ii) the gap between (b) and (c)?
Read More ›

(This is a sequel to my previous post in response to Professor Anthony Grayling, entitled Is the notion of God logically contradictory?)

In a recent short essay, entitled God and Disaster, Professor Anthony Grayling, a leading atheist philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, lamented the loss of life from the recent earthquake in Japan and the tsunami that followed it. He then went on to voice his perplexity at television reports of people going to church after the massive earthquake which hit Christchurch, New Zealand, on February 22, killing over 200 people. Grayling concluded by wondering how such people could believe in such an “incoherent fiction” as the idea of a Deity. “This,” he wrote, “is a perennial puzzle.”

Before I address the substance of Professor Grayling’s essay, I’d like readers to keep one simple question uppermost in their minds: exactly what does Grayling want God to do, in order to prevent human suffering?

Let me begin with a short word about myself. Like Professor Grayling, I possess a Ph.D. in philosophy. Unlike him, I live and work in Japan, and I was working in Yokohama, Japan, when the earthquake struck on Friday, March 11th at 2:46 p.m. local time. After the quake hit, I spent the night with several hundred people in a shopping mall near Yokohama station, as the trains had stopped running. On the Sunday after the quake, I also attended my local church, where the congregation is almost entirely Japanese. Despite the tragic loss of life – the death toll is expected to exceed 20,000 – the earthquake did not weaken my belief in God. It did, however, reinforce my conviction that attempts to rationalize suffering – such as Leibniz’s optimistic assertion that we live in the best of all possible worlds, which Voltaire savagely satirized in his novel Candide – are fundamentally wrong-headed. Whole towns were swept away by the tsunami following the quake. The suffering that people experience in disasters is absurd and pointless; on this point, the atheists are surely right.

The views I present in this essay are mine, and I take sole responsibility for them. My aim is to show that two mistaken theological assumptions – the notion that God can do anything imaginable and the notion that God always does things for the best – lie at the heart of the contemporary “New Atheist” insistence that senseless suffering renders belief in God irrational. In passing, I also point out examples of invalid arguments for Darwinian evolution which rely on the assumption that that God can do anything imaginable. Read More ›

Anthony Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. He has a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy from Oxford, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts. Professor Grayling has written and edited over twenty books on philosophy and other subjects. In addition, he sits on the editorial boards of several academic journals, and for nearly ten years was the Honorary Secretary of the principal British philosophical association, the Aristotelian Society. One would therefore hope that if a man with such a distinguished background were to pen an attack on belief in God, it would be an intelligent critique. But one would be wrong.

In a recent email exchange with Professor Jerry Coyne (an atheist who, to his credit, is at least prepared to entertain the possibility of theism) over at Why Evolution Is True, Anthony Grayling contends that the notion of God is a logical absurdity:

[O]n the standard definition of an infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent etc being – on inspection such a concept collapses into contradiction and absurdity…

and again:

But ‘god’ is not like ‘yeti’ (which might – so to say: yet? – be found romping about the Himalayas), it is like ‘square circle’.

Now, if Grayling is right, then the implications for Intelligent Design are obvious: the notion of an infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent Designer can be automatically ruled out.

But has Grayling established his case? Not by a long shot. Read More ›

UPDATE: Since posting this article online, I have received an email from Professor Feser, in which he writes:

I have never accused any ID defender of heresy, and would never do so. To say to a theological opponent “Your views have implications you may not like, including ones that I believe are hard to reconcile with what we both agree to be definitive of orthodoxy” is simply not the same thing as saying “You are a heretic!” Rather, it’s what theologians do all the time in debate with their fellow orthodox believers.

I appreciate this clarification from Professor Feser, and I have therefore changed the title of this post, to make it less inflammatory. (I’ve removed one of the pictures, too.) I apologize for any pain I have caused Professor Feser; however, I should point out that in his latest article, Thomism versus the design argument, Professor Feser wrote: “ID is, from a Thomistic point of view, bad philosophy and bad theology.” Moreover, he approvingly cites Christopher Martin as writing that “The Being whose existence is revealed to us by the argument from design is not God but the Great Architect of the Deists and Freemasons, an impostor disguised as God,” and he later writes that “Paley’s ‘designer’ is really just the god of Deists and Freemasons and not the true God.” I hope the reader will pardon me for drawing the inference that Feser regards Intelligent Design as heretical. If that was not his intention, he really should have said so, very clearly, in his post. I have posted Professor Feser’s clarifying remarks in the interests of journalistic accuracy, and I welcome his statement that he regards the Intelligent Design movement as theologically orthodox.

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It’s been a long time since my last post at Uncommon Descent. The reason, for readers who may have been wondering, is that I’ve been working on a very long but interesting post aimed at showing, on scientific grounds alone, that a human embryo is just as important, morally speaking, as you or I. Uncommon Descent readers will find it especially interesting, because it employs a line of argument which will be familiar to people who accept Intelligent Design. I’ve nearly finished that post and it will be coming out soon. Several other posts are in the pipeline, so you’ll be hearing a lot from me in the next couple of weeks.

The topic of today’s post is Professor Edward Feser’s latest article, Thomism versus the design argument, over on his Website. The article makes a number of claims about Intelligent Design argument which are either irrelevant or demonstrably false.

Let’s start with Feser’s main beef with design arguments of any kind whatsoever: “The problem with these arguments is rather that they don’t get you even one millimeter toward the God of classical theism, and indeed they get you positively away from the God of classical theism.”

Here’s a simple question for Professor Feser. Which of the following is closest to the God of classical theism?
Read More ›

In part 1 of this series, I laid out what I see as some key differences between Thomism and ID. In this post I want to focus on why Thomists should nevertheless support ID – even while granting some or all of the most common criticisms Thomists have of ID.

In order to do that, though, I’m going to have to be a little hair-splitting – particularly, I want to explain just what I mean by “support ID”. I think there’s a few ways this “support” can manifest – some easier to achieve than others, and some harder.

Read More ›

I have often found that the best refutations of arguments for atheism are written by atheists. Raymond Tallis is a splendid example of this rule. In an article entitled “Why I am an atheist,” in Philosophy Now, May/June 2009, 73:47-48 (click here or here to read online), he manages to slay no less than three arguments for atheism, before advancing two much better arguments of his own. Interestingly, however, some of the best online refutations of Tallis’s own arguments for atheism have been written by …. you guessed it, atheists.

The relevance of all this to Intelligent Design should be obvious. Arguments for Intelligent Design are based not only on the existence of complex specified information in living organisms, but also on the fine-tuning of the cosmos. If there were a cosmic Creator, then it would have to be a God of some sort. But if there were compelling or even strong arguments against the existence of God, they would also be arguments against at least the cosmic version of Intelligent Design.

Without further ado, let’s have a look at what Tallis calls the bad arguments for atheism. Read More ›

I would like to thank Dr. Sullivan for his recent post, Nature, Artifacts, Meaning and Providence which has helped to clear the air enormously. In his closing comments, Dr. Sullivan calls for calm in the debate over life’s origin, and urges that the origin of life should be examined dispassionately, in an atmosphere free from theological bias. He is of course quite right, and in this post, I intend to engage him on precisely those terms. What I propose to do is address some general issues raised by Dr. Sullivan in his latest post on ID.

Life – an agreed definition?

While our views on the formal conditions for something’s being alive are somewhat divergent, I think we can now agree on the finalistic conditions.
Read More ›

First, I would like to thank Michael Sullivan for taking the time and trouble to comment on my post, In Praise of Subtlety, after successfully defending his dissertation. I look forward to reading future articles by Dr. Sullivan on issues relating to teleology and design.

I would also like to thank Sullivan for his courtesy and his honesty. He admits that he has not read any ID books, and because he has no preconceived ideas as to how the first life-forms might have originated, he generously acknowledges that the first living cell might have been assembled, one piece at a time. For my part, I would entirely agree with him when he writes that the answer to the question of how the first cell originated is an empirical one.

I’d just like to make a few numbered comments on various issues raised by Sullivan in his posts, Nature, Artifacts and Machines 1, Nature, Artifacts and Machines 2 and ”Intelligent Design” and Scotism.

1. The perils of Aristotelian science Read More ›

You might not know the guy in the picture above. John Duns Scotus, O.F.M, was one of the greatest theologians of the Middle Ages. A penetrating thinker of unsurpassed ingenuity, he was nicknamed the Subtle Doctor. Later on in this post, I’ll argue that in one particular respect, his philosophy is particularly ID-friendly – even more so than that of St. Thomas Aquinas. (By the way, my post on Aquinas, ID and evolution will be coming out next week.)

Duns Scotus, as he is generally known, appreciated arguments with many twists and turns, and I think he would have enjoyed reading Professor William Dembski’s recent post, Does ID presuppose a mechanistic view of nature? . But after reading his response to Dembski’s post, I get the strong impression that Professor Edward Feser does not appreciate subtle arguments. Fair enough. We all have our own personal strengths. Professor Feser is a formidable fighter, a brilliant metaphysician and a very profound thinker. If subtlety is not his cup of tea, then I shall undertake to rephrase Professor Dembski’s argument in a way that makes it crystal clear that ID’s argument for a Designer poses no threat whatever to Aristotelian and Thomistic arguments for the existence of God. By the way, this will be my last UD post in response to Professor Feser, as I think that prolonging the argument further would not be helpful. I shall do my best to make him reconsider his opposition to ID, in this post. Wish me luck!

All right. Now let’s get down to tin tacks.

What exactly does Professor Dembski mean by a “mechanistic” view of nature? Read More ›

Christopher Hitchens is nothing if not a straight-shooter. He calls it like he sees it, and not even a vicious attack could stop him from denouncing evil, racist ideologies that are still with us today. He is also a fearless and formidable debater. In recent years, he has declared himself an anti-theist, a term he defines as follows:

You could be an atheist and wish that the belief was true. You could; I know some people who do. An antitheist, a term I’m trying to get into circulation, is someone who’s very relieved that there’s no evidence for this proposition.

On Bastille Day in 2007, in response to an article entitled What Atheists Can’t Answer by op-ed columnist Michael Gerson in The Washington Post, Christopher Hitchens threw down the gauntlet to theists:

Here is my challenge. Let Gerson name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever. And here is my second challenge. Can any reader of this column think of a wicked statement made, or an evil action performed, precisely because of religious faith? The second question is easy to answer, is it not? The first – I have been asking it for some time – awaits a convincing reply. By what right, then, do the faithful assume this irritating mantle of righteousness? They have as much to apologize for as to explain.

Hitchens has repeated this challenge on numerous occasions since then. The first time I heard him issue this challenge, I thought: “He has a point.” Read More ›