Re: [asa] Cosmologial vs. Biological Design

>>> "David Opderbeck" <dopderbeck@gmail.com> 10/04/06 11:06 AM >>>writes:
After reading Francis Collins' new book, and seeing some of the reviews of
it, I'm trying to understand the distinction he apparently makes between
cosmological/moral and biological design argments. On the one hand, he
says
the appearance of fine tuning, the emergence of mind and reason in humans,
and the human moral sense are not explainable only by naturalistic causes,
and support belief in a creator-God. On the other hand, he says that
arguments from the appearance in design in biology are merely worthless
God-of-the-gaps arguments.

I can't see the principled distinction here. In fact, the argument from
human mind, reason and the moral sense is a type of biological gap
argument.

<BIG SNIP>

So what am I missing?

Ted replies:
Very good points, David. I can't answer for Collins, but I'll make one
suggestion.

He's a biologist, and he's dead convinced that evolution (incluidng common
descent of humans and other organisms) is true--ie, that the empirical
evidents more than warrants that conclusion. Thus, he's worried about the
ways in which IDs typically invoke "design" as the best explanation for
things that are in his view better explained--already explained, in many
cases--by evolutionary biology in one of its many specific forms. The great
success of evolutionary explanations, in his view, should give great pause
to anyone who wants to say that "design" is the answer when naturalism has
failed to answer adequately.

Whereas in cosmology, it's a lot less clear. Multiverse hypotheses are
loaded with metaphysics and seem thus far not to be empirically testable in
the ways in which evolution *is* empirically testable. (And I won't defend
the latter part of this, b/c others on this list are far more capable than I
am of doing so. I simply refer to what looks to me like a valid conclusion,
based on arguments that more capable people often make.) Also, there may be
a unique singularity when one discusses the "nature of nature," which is
really what cosmology is ultimately about--it is probably impossible to
remove all of the contingency concerning not merely constants of nature but
also the laws themselves, let alone the mathematical forms in which we
express those laws.

And in morality, there has never been (IMO) anything like a satisfactory,
purely mechanistic account of intelligence and agency. My goodness, here I
sit *deciding* which characters to type onto the screen; of course there are
biochemical pathways in my brain; of course there are muscles and nerves
that respond to my brian impulses. But there is a "there" there, telling
which muscles and nerves to fire off, in patterns that are learned and not
imposed. Otherwise, we might as well say that quantum physics, evolution,
and computers were all somehow self assembled by randomly moving molecules,
using those randomly assembled people (with their randomly assembled brains)
as mechanisms. Somehow lots of metaphysics is loaded into this.

Well, as I say, I can't directly answer for Collins. But that's what I
would say, if I were him.

Ted

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Wed Oct 4 12:26:22 2006