Question #9: Could the Laws of Science Be Evolving?NOTE: this post was previously titled, “Why Aren’t the Laws of Science Evolving?” I changed the title after I realized that the previous title implies the very assumption being challenged :)
Rupert Sheldrake recently asked this question in his banned TED talk. I think it’s an excellent question that deserves serious inquiry. All observations I’m aware of converge: everything is evolving, except the laws that dictate the evolving! This ties right into the classic Aristotleian delineation: that which moves do so at the behest of something which does not move. Interesting, isn’t it?
Response To Larry Moran’s Challenge To TheistsIt’s always tough when somebody one admires makes a move that one can’t approve of. That was exactly the feeling I had when I heard of Larry Moran’s Challenge to Theists and Their Accommodationist Supporters, but, before we get to that, a brief note about why I admire Larry Moran, an atheist and Professor of biochemistry with whom I would seem to share little in common [ideologically, that is].
Asteroids, Cathode Rays & Requisite Knowledge: More Thoughts On EvidenceI’ve written recently on evidence here, here and here, and one can always visit TWIM’s Epistemology category to dig deeper.
Many atheists—dare I say the majority—operate under the assumed premise that “there’s no evidence for God (and/or the supernatural).” Many wave this around as some sort of trump card, but I opine that such is merely biased opinion masquerading as justification for denial. Like DD, I believe “there’s no evidence for God” is one of the worst arguments floating around (a)theism, and I remain puzzled as to the strange, pseudo-intellectual pretense with which I see that argument waged. Today and tomorrow, I’d like to review two examples from science’s history that I think illustrate the weakness of the “there’s no evidence for God” argument. The larger analogy to (a)theism should be apparent.
In actuality, what the person who utters those words really means is that they’ve not been persuaded by anything hitherto offered as evidence, which is an accurate assessment of the matter. From an atheist, this is also a tautology, because if it’s known that the person who says “there’s no evidence for God” is an atheist, that they’ve not yet been persuaded by any evidence is merely redundant. In rigorous discussion, I believe one would be justified in rejecting the “no evidence for God” argument solely on these grounds (subjectivity, tautology), but I think we have other sound reasons to reject it.
Note that “there’s no evidence for X” is really just a generic argument where X always represents some proposition whose theoretical or ontological possibility is being denied. Yet, show me a true theory today that did not have its skeptics and doubters yesterday. Airplanes, telephones and relativity were all vehemently objected to by skeptics and doubters who now ironically enjoy the benefits of each. Before more optimistic minds made these things happen, many skeptics claimed they’d never happen.
This leads to an interesting question: what does it mean to say that we have evidence for a given proposition? With that in mind, let’s go ahead and take a look at asteroids.
Aristotle’s Argument From Kinesis, 2It seems Aristotle’s argument leaves us with three options:
1) potency has been transitioning into act eternally, i.e. infinite regress;
2) the initial transition from potency to act arose from absolute nothing, i.e. creation ex nihilo;
3) the initial transition from potency to act arose from an unmoved mover of some sort.
For those who accept the third choice, the key question becomes which type of mover is the best explanation, which often gets defined as the the more parsimonious explanation. Paring down even further, we find two sub-options for the third choice: either the first unmoved mover is some sort of conscious entity with intent, or some non-conscious, impersonal self-organizing emergent process of matter. Beginning around here, commenter Dominic and myself exchanged along these lines in the Introduction.
In particular, I’ve noticed a consensus among atheists who object to describing Aristotle’s unmoved mover as any sort of conscious entity or God. They typically offer some variant of an Occam’s razor complaint, arguing that such requires “extra steps” or is “not parsimonious.” I would respond that merely asserting that something “isn’t parsimonious” isn’t an argument – it’s an assertion – and I’ll address the “extra steps” claim in today’s post.
Aristotle’s Argument From Kinesis: An IntroductionOne reason I haven't posted anything new in over two weeks is because we had a really good thread going off the last post. However, that's not the only reason.
Over the past two weeks I've been rethinking positions I'd previously been more or less 100% committed to. At least provisionally, although I am a believer, I still hold that no successful ontological argument for God's existence exists, meaning I do not believe there is an argument that logically requires a skeptic to accept God's existence as the only response. Nonetheless, I agree that at least philosophically, life requires an explanation — and I agree that depending on how they're delineated, First-Cause arguments can certainly be cogent — but I've just never felt they logically required the skeptic to accept God's existence. Today I'm not so sure.