[Phaedrus]

Wonderful, wonderful contribution at #73 and indeed worthy of its own thread. Thank You, again, bb!

[betty boop]

Thanks Phaedrus. "Entrenched atheist" and Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins (he calls himself an evolutionary biologist) says that we live in a universe in which there is “no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” With that as your fundamental premise, how is it possible to do science? The moral implications are stark; but the methodological problems stemming from an assumption like this are much harder to see.

The point is, if things have "no design" (i.e., are not ordered according to some principle -- and arguably you need a Limit, a First Cause, an "uncaused cause" for things to be "as they are, and not some other way" -- if all of nature is "blind" and purposeless, you aren't talking about ordered things, but of chaos. If it is true that chaos is the fundamental nature of the universe, if the universe is utterly random -- an "accidental accident culminating from a long causal chain of accidents" -- then how could one falsify propositions? How could one replicate experiments? To do either requires the entities under examination to have a certain persistence and substantiality. If things are only just transiting from one ambiguous form to the next random manifestation, then how can they be measured at all?

More to the point, how does one explain one's own self on such a view?

I imagine Professor Dawkins is feeling a tad sad that the Human Genome Project has failed to deliver on its promises. Thanks again, P. All my very best, bb.