Intelligent Design was so thoroughly permeated by a sector of Christians trying to reserve some scrap of Creationism that it became unreliable even when individual parts of the argument were quite solid. I believe there were people who were trying to sincerely look at ID objectively and even give them credit for doing pretty well. But those were so thin on the ground that it became not worth my time to try and identify which were which. If I missed a great truth, I thought, oh well, I've missed a lot of them before. In a finite life, one has to play the percentages on where good information is going to come from.
So it has piqued my interest that the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel agreed with neither Intelligent Design nor its opponents. He did not believe in ID, but neither in materialism. We discussed it this week at the CS Lewis Study Center where we are about 80% through Miracles at present. It looks like Mind and Cosmos is the important volume here, and I have never read it. I am not sure the people in my current discussion understood it fully themselves, for reasons I won't go into, so I am seeking information elsewhere, including two philosophy professors from St Anselm College who are in my other book group. If you know something, let me know. I will try to be an open vessel.
4 comments:
I listened to Mind and Cosmos on Audible once, but that was well over a decade ago. My recollection is that nothing about the book particularly impressed me in anyway. I want to say it reminded me a bit of the "What The Bleep Do We Know?" documentary, but not nearly as sensational and misleading*. The audio book is under 4 hours, so maybe I should give it another listen. Maybe I was just particularly distracted while listening to it.
*My good friend told me that "documentary" was the first thing that made him inclined to believe in something like God. While I didn't want to quash that, I did feel obligated to explain to him how the film stretched a lot of quantum mechanics principles to get to some kind of ersatz spirituality.
I don't know about ID, but a lot of smart people from Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, and Scott Adams have pushed simulation theory. I don't see that as much different as ID.
Admittedly oversimplified interpretations of ID, simulation, Darwin's survival of the fittest, etc... the thing that strikes me in considering the first two is that "we humans" are somehow inherently deserving of survival whereas Darwin's idea is more Mafia like... so what have you got to offer?
For a thorough and reasonably accessibly discussion of evolution and theism from a philosophical perspective, I recommend "Where the Conflict Really Lies" by Alving Plantinga.
Another point that doesn't bear directly on Intelligent Design but often crops up nearby: You will often run into probability arguments, about how likely it is for even the simplest living thing to form spontaneously in a soup of nucleotides, amino acids, etc. I have come to the conclusion that these arguments are futile in the present state of our knowledge.
A favorite exercise in creationist literature is to take some simple protein or gene and calculate the odds on it forming at random. Typically, the author makes outrageously generous concessions for the number of combinations per second, or for the fidelity to the exact model, but they always find that the chances are ten-to-the-something-horrid to one against hitting the mark. They then point out that several thousand such molecules would be needed to form a single primordial cell.
Evolutionists retort that we have no way of knowing how many possible configurations there are for a successful primoridal cell. If there are enough, then there is no problem.
This is quite correct, but the catch is that the evolutionist doesn't know for sure that there *are* plenty of possibilities, any more than the creationist knows for sure that there *aren't* enough.
Recently, the RNA World hypothesis has reduced the size of the primordial organism to a single RNA molecule, which helps the evolutionist, but I'm sure the same game can still be played, with the same ignorance on both sides. (For that matter, the RNA World may be currently popular, but it has difficulties, and such origin theories have come and gone many times in the past. It would be rash to count on the RNA World theory becoming permanent. It might, or it might not.)
Furthermore, such calculations are irrelevant until we know how common life is in the universe. If we discover alien life elsewhere in the Solar System—in Martian dirt, or in the ice-capped ocean of some frozen moon—we will have a good indication that life appears readily and is common. But if we don't, we will only know that life isn't *that* common. Life might appear in most habitable star systems, or Earthly life might be unique in all the visible universe and (for all we can tell) a great way beyond, or its frequency might be anywhere in between.
The only scrap of empirical evidence we have on this issue is that life seems to have appeared on Earth just about as soon as it could physically survive. That suggests life appears readily. But it still doesn't tell you if it appears readily because it's physically easy for it to appear spontaneously, or because God or something is eager to make it appear. For that, you must compare the actual incidence of life with the a priori chances for it, and we don't know how to calculate those chances nor do we know the actual incidence of life in the universe.
Post a Comment