RE: [asa] ID/Miracles/Design (Behe vs. Behe)

Cameron:

Can you say more about what you say here:

> I maintain that the
> fundamental metaphysical question is design vs. chance, and that all other
> questions pale in importance beside it. I think that TE often obscures
> this. I am grateful that the current Pope does not obscure it. The merit
> of both ID and Dawkins-evolutionism is that they do not obscure it. From
> someone with my training, the Lucretian affinities of neo-Darwinism are
> painfully obvious, and the Platonist and Aristotelian affinities of ID are
> equally obvious. (Of course, this says nothing about "evolution" per se.
> "Evolution", even evolution from molecules to man, is integratable within a
> Platonist/Aristotelian framework, which is why a rational thinker like Behe
> can completely accept evolution. But "Darwinism" is not integratable within
> a Platonist/Aristotelian framework.)

It seems that Artistotelian/Medieval science took the animate and living
as fundamental, using these as the starting point for analogs and
metaphors to describe and explain the world. Whereas modern science takes
the inanimate and mechanical as fundamental, using this as the starting
point for analogs and metaphors to describe and explain the world.

However, it is not clear to me that Darwinism is Lucretian. I take this
to refer to simplistic atomistic models. I agree that modern science
attempts to explain things from the bottom up, using an atomistic
(construed broadly) approach. It is not clear to me that Darwinism does
the same, although neo-Darwinism does.

bill

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Received on Mon Apr 27 11:29:31 2009