Monday, September 2, 2013

False ID at Steven Landsburg | The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics

False ID at Steven Landsburg | The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics: "So what responses might we expect from Behe or Dawkins? Behe, I think, would have the easier time of it, since he can always contend that the natural numbers must have been intelligently designed. But that paints him into a pretty isolated corner. In my experience, even the most committed theists are reluctant to believe that an equation like “2 plus 2 equals 4″ is the result of a design choice.

For Dawkins, I think, the game is up. Surely he won’t want to argue that the natural numbers have evolved, so that their properties today are different from their properties at some time in the distant past. (Of course, our knowledge of the natural numbers has evolved, but that’s a different matter entirely.)

Not everything that’s complex — not even everything that’s irreducibly complex — was designed. Not everything that’s complex evolved from something simpler. Whether any given complex structure was designed, or evolved, or was just plain complex from the get-go, is a question that requires more than an appeal to glib, and demonstrably false, generalities."

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