| | We get it, he opposes creationism as all thinking men must; but he is also a man of mixed premises and the article laced with contradictions that poorly argue his case.
I don't see how it's possible to talk about this without having at least some vague idea of what a designer would be like. If I take pleasure in a car, a house, or a new hat, I don’t care one whit about knowing ‘what the designer is like’.
Above all, today we understand that even human beings are the result of natural selection acting over millions of years of breeding and eating. A common misconception. The road from anthropomorphic primate to man takes place in the short space of 1 million years or less.
According to the "chaotic inflation" theories of André Linde and others, the expanding cloud of billions of galaxies that we call the big bang may be just one fragment of a much larger universe in which big bangs go off all the time, each one with different values for the fundamental constants. Is this speculation substantially different from speculation about different deities?
You don't have to invoke a benevolent designer to explain why we are in one of the parts of the universe where life is possible: in all the other parts of the universe there is no one to raise the question
The universe is very large, and perhaps infinite, so it should be no surprise that, among the enormous number of planets that may support only unintelligent life and the still vaster number that cannot support life at all, there is some tiny fraction on which there are living beings who are capable of thinking about the universe, as we are doing here.
A bit a contradiction between these two quotes.
Thus, to judge whether our lives show evidence for a benevolent designer, we have not only to ask whether life is better than would be expected in any case from what we know about natural selection, but we need also to take into account the bias introduced by the fact that it is we who are thinking about the problem. Sorry, reality is independent of the mind of the observer.
My life has been remarkably happy, perhaps in the upper 99.99 percentile of human happiness, but even so, I have seen a mother die painfully of cancer, a father's personality destroyed by Alzheimer's disease, and scores of second and third cousins murdered in the Holocaust. Signs of a benevolent designer are pretty well hidden.
I don't need to argue here that the evil in the world proves that the universe is not designed, but only that there are no signs of benevolence that might have shown the hand of a designer.
He clearly rejects Rands benevolent universe.
but for good people to do evil—that takes religion. I think he is forgetting about Lenin, Stalin, Mao and a host of lesser despots who were not religious.
|
|
