Introduction: The Illusion of Design [Richard Dawkins]

Natural History Magazine ^ | November 2005 | Richard Dawkins

[Dimensio]

Do you actually have an argument to make, or are you just going to branch off into meaningless tangents in lieu of a rational response?

[Aquinasfan]

Don't forget that it was Galileo's arrogance and refusal to swallow Aristotelian physics (as filtered through Aquinas, mostly) that really started modern physics.

But don't forget Galileo's contemporary Copernicus, whose research several cardinals were funding.

You're right about Aquinas promoting some of Aristotle's errors. But it's important to remember that Aristotle was the greatest philosopher in history, at least up to St. Thomas' time, so Aquinas' adoption of some of Aristotle's flawed theories regarding the natural world is understandable.

[Dimensio]

Excellent reply.

Indeed. Completely ignore the substance of the work, attack it all for one little off-the-cuff remark. Very creationist.

[snarks_when_bored]

I was just making a sarcastic remark about how scientists pluck numbers from the air and then try to back them up.

Well, that number wasn't picked entirely at random, as I recall. It's related to the number of possible values of parameters in certain string theory scenarios, with the idea that each choice of parameters might correspond to a possible universe (the vast majority of which would be unable to support life as we know it, of course). Still, it's highly speculative, which I why I used the expression 'bandied about'.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

" But don't forget Galileo's contemporary Copernicus, whose research several cardinals were funding."

But none of them really thought the Copernican system was REAL; they just saw it as useful fiction that enabled better calculations of certain orbits. If Copernicus had ever insisted that his system was more than a mathematical model, he would have been silenced.

[Aquinasfan]

You didn't answer the question I asked,

#33?

These statements of the teaching authority of the Church expressed an atmosphere in which faith in God had penetrated the medieval culture and given rise to philosophical consequences. The cosmos was seen as contingent in its existence and thus dependent on a divine choice which called it into being; the universe is also contingent in its nature and so God was free to create this particular form of world among an infinity of other possibilities. Thus the cosmos cannot be a necessary form of existence; and so it has to be approached by a posteriori investigation. The universe is also rational and so a coherent discourse can be made about it. Indeed the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.

[sauropod]

mark

[snarks_when_bored]

...it's important to remember that Aristotle was the greatest philosopher in history, at least up to St. Thomas' time...

Now you've stepped in it! I'm going to have to drag out one of my favorite Alfred North Whitehead quotes:

"Aristotle dissected fishes with Plato's thoughts in his head."

Whitehead had a real gift for the apposite (slight) exaggeration. Here's another famous one which is relevant in the present context:

"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."

I stand with Whitehead on this question.

[Aquinasfan]

If Copernicus had ever insisted that his system was more than a mathematical model, he would have been silenced.

So the cardinals wanted to fund a mathematical model that had no relationship to reality?

Galileo's mistake was in demanding that the Church endorse his theory. At that point, their theories were unprovable scientifically.

Regardless, the finding regarding Galileo was that of a fallible tribunal, so I don't know what purpose it serves for evolutionists except to supposedly prove that the Church has always been opposed to science. This is ridiculous, since it was the Catholic West that gave birth to science, as Stanley Jaki ably attests.

[Aquinasfan]

I beg to differ with Albert North Whitehead...

[RightWingAtheist]

Mount Rushmore belonged firmly in the second category until the sculptor Gutzon Borglum carved it into the first.

Don't tell Cher.

[Antonello]

So are you saying that science owes Christianity free reign simply because it lorded its power over the great thinkers during its medieval heyday?

[shuckmaster]

So a chicken IS just an egg's way of making another egg.

I'm a believer!

[RightWingAtheist]

Galileo could have gone even further if his own devout Catholicism-which was unwavering in spite of his being persecuted by those he trusted the most-held him back from coming up with a theory of gravitation. Similarly Cuivier, the greatest biologist between Linnaeus and Darwin, might have come up with the theory of evolution if his own pious Christianity hadn't prevented him from doing so.

[snarks_when_bored]

Good points. And, as a young man, Darwin was himself a pious believer; had his curiosity and his intellect been weaker, he might never have recognized what his eyes and his notebooks were telling him during and after the voyage of the Beagle.

[Gumlegs]

Premature encapsulation?

[BelegStrongbow]

Excellent apologetic. That's the meat of what I was allusively and without citation trying to say.

[BelegStrongbow]

You have an interesting pantheon, snarks. Would Alfred North Whitehead be a major prophet or just one of the twelve, so to speak (so long as you feel content to make poetic allusion suffice for critical analysis, which is all ANW is adding so far).

I don't take Dawkins or Darwin as infallible (and I don't take St. Thomas as infallible either, just less likely to err).

Dawkins steps well over the bounds of discourse in this and, by denying the contingency of the cosmos we occupy, severely damages intellectual inquiry. If Darwin has anything right, it will be within the context of a theory which provide some kind of cosmological basis for the rules of development he enunciates to work.

I can accept just one infinite unbounded system: a creating transcendant Being, to whom (can't be to which) the plane of reality we jointly occupy is completely subject.

Whether there is also need for that Being to provide the means for our reality to subsist is a further question, but I don't want to push you past your endurance in this.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

" So the cardinals wanted to fund a mathematical model that had no relationship to reality?"

If it helped them to better predict the movements of the planets and stars, absolutely.

"Galileo's mistake was in demanding that the Church endorse his theory. At that point, their theories were unprovable scientifically."

He demanded the Church endorse his theory? When? His *problem* was the Church's initiation of force on anybody who deviated from their positions. He was tried for heresy, not for being a nag.

"This is ridiculous, since it was the Catholic West that gave birth to science, as Stanley Jaki ably attests."

When it wasn't trying scientists for heresy for saying things it didn't like. BTW, it was the pagan Greeks who gave birth to science.

[BelegStrongbow]

You are of course not suggesting that his notebooks were writing themselves are you, because they would only reflect what he himself thought, and would therefore only be of independent interest to those wishing to trace his thought from origin to final formulation. They would be of zero value to him independently of what he came to think and basically as aids to remembering points he had made but could have otherwise forgotten.

For myself, I am quite content with a theory of evolution as directed by the transcendant powers of a living Being superior to the created order and its rightful and just Lord. A directed evolution makes eminent sense...

...but again, only as a theory. Despite Dawkins, evolution is still not a fact, though it has a congeries of facts to assemble with speculation and outright guess.

I admire your faith in him, though, it's perversely admirable.