Stephen Law

Bit of new book for comments. I did something similar to the following in the Humanism book. Another version of semantic goalpost shifting is the unexplained analogy. In the introduction I outlined an objection to a certain sort of argument for theism – the argument that the universe appears, for example, to be fine-tuned, and that a designer god provides the best available explanation for its fine-tuned character. The objection is based on the thought that if God is a non-temporal agent, a sort a cosmic super-intelligence that creates time and space, then we run up against the objection that talk of a non-temporal agent appears to make scarcely more sense than, say, talk of a non-spatial mountain. To recap: for something to be a mountain is for it to have parts spatially arranged in a particular way. It must have a summit and sides, for example, which requires that one part must be higher than another. If we strip away the spatial context, talk of a mountain no longer makes sense. Sim...

Here are the notes I used for the debate with Professor Alister McGrath on the 29th October . I ended up only alluding to the second objection as I thought it too technical on the night. Does the natural world point to God? Cosmic fine-tuning arguments - that God provides the best, or even a half-decent, explanation of the character the natural world in which we find ourselves - face FIVE main types of objection. I am going to briefly outline all five. But, I intend to rest my case on just the last two. So the first three will just be sketched out, and are merely for your information only. FIRST OBJECTION. As Alister acknowledges in his book, the science on which fine-tuning arguments are based is by no means uncontroversial. For example, some scientists believe there may well be a multiverse – a plethora of universes governed by a wide range of different physical laws. If there is a multiverse, then it’s not particularly unlikely that there should happen to exist a universe that has t...

Human beings explain features of the world around them in two main ways. One way is to supply naturalistic explanations that appeal to features of the natural world, such as natural events, forces and laws. The explanations of physics and chemistry fall into this category. The other way is to offer intentional explanations – explanations that appeal to the beliefs and desires of more or less rational agents. Why is there a tree in this spot? Because Ted wanted to see a tree from his bedroom window, and so planted a sapling here correctly supposing it would grow into a handsome tree. When we are unable to explain something naturalistically, it is, of course, tempting to look for an intentional explanation instead. When we could not offer naturalistic explanations for why the heavenly bodies moved about as they did, we supposed that they must be, or must be moved by, agents - gods of some sort. When we could not otherwise explain diseases and natural disasters, we put them down to the ac...

Here in Washington at the CFI World Congress. The next one, in two years time, might well be in London. Many interesting talks, particularly from a panel of Muslims. Here's one set of statistics I took from scientist Lawrence Krauss. He searched the 10 million peer reviewed science papers published over last 12 years. 115 were on "intelligent design"; however most were on engineering. Only 11 actually on ID. Of those, 8 were critical of the science behind ID and the other 3 were conference proceedings. In other words, there was not one peer reviewed article supporting ID. There is, in short, no "scientific controversy" about ID. The idea that we should be "fair" and "open-minded" by "teaching the scientific controversy" in classrooms is just bullshit. Of course, Krauss knows the ID brigade say that the journals are biased against them. So he looked at books. There were 150 books on amazon on ID. But there were 165 on alien abduction...

Here is a post from Evangelical Outpost: You have to pity the modern atheist who attempts to present arguments for her cause. Unmoored from any respectable intellectual tradition, each generation is forced to recreate anti-theistic arguments from scratch. The result is that the claims which they believe to be clever and damning often turn out to be, to use a technical philosophical phrase, just plain silly. Take for example, the Flying Spaghetti Monster. According to Wikipedia, The Flying Spaghetti Monster is the deity of a parody religion founded in 2005 by Oregon State University physics graduate Bobby Henderson to protest the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to require the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to biological evolution. In an open letter sent to the education board, Henderson professes belief in a supernatural Creator called the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which resembles spaghetti and meatballs. He furthermore calls for the "Pastafar i...

Thought this worth including as main post (previously in the comments on my review of Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing below). Some argue like this: Surely we can know that something exists, yet also know that its existence is highly improbable, improbable enough to demand some sort of explanation? Isn't precisely this true of the existence of the universe? The playing cards Here's a Swinburne-type illustration of the general point. Suppose I am asked to guess each one of 52 cards, one by one. If I ever get one wrong, my brains will be blown out. I start guessing, and amazingly, I get all 52 cards correct. Now you may say, "What's so improbably about that? After all, the probability of you getting them all right is 1, as you wouldn't be here otherwise would you?"
 But of course, there's a sense in which something deeply improbable has happened. So improbable, in fact, that it would be reasonable for me to suspect this result wasn't just a m...

Does the Royal Institute of Philosophy now endorse, or even consider intellectually respectable, intelligent design (ID)? Some are saying so (see here ). Next time a neo-darwinist claims that ID people do not publish papers I am going to bring out the relevant edition of Think magazine and show them. I can just imagine their jaws drop in outrage when they see that the world's best philosophers have turned their back on the defunct theory of evolution and embraced ID. I edit the Royal Institute of Philosophy journal THINK: Philosophy For Everyone. I devoted Issue 11 to intelligent design and fine-tuning, and thought it would be interesting to get Phillip E Johnson - who is v much the public face of ID - to write a piece. Personally, I consider ID intellectually bankrupt (fine-tuning is slightly more respectable, I think). Many Christians agree with me about that of course. The idea was to let the ideas slug it out in THINK. Then people will hopefully have a better grasp of the argum...

Those who believe that the universe shows signs of intelligent design often draw the conclusion the designer must be the Judeo-Christian God - a being that is all-powerful and all-good. But of course, the conclusion that the designer is all-powerful and all-good is no more warranted on this evidence than is the conclusion that the designer is all-powerful and all-evil (which would clearly be a ridiculous thing to conclude, wouldn't it?). Worse still, there is surely overwhelming evidence against the good-god hypothesis (probably about as much as there is against the evil-god hypothesis, I'd suggest). Check out the following article published in Skeptical Inquirer that I wrote on this issue. The God of Eth. I will be developing the "God of Eth" argument further over the course of this year, in reply to comments on it from other philosophers, including Richard Swinburne and Tim Mawson.

In his blog on intelligent design (Wednesday 2nd Nov 2005), Peter Williams takes me to task for producing an unbalanced issue of THINK on Intelligent Design, pointing out that ID proponent Michael Behe has "responded" to Orr's demolition job ( here ) on Behe's argument for intelligent design (which I published). Behe has indeed responded ( here ), but not effectively. I have read Behe's response and still think Orr nails Behe. Orr points out that many organisms are irreducibly complex in the sense that if you remove parts like brains, lungs etc. they cease to function. Yet such systems can evolve by natural selection, because parts that were inessential can become so, e.g. air sacs can develop into useful but not essential primitive lungs, and later these may become essential when the gills or whatever disappear. Clearly, this could happen on the natural selection theory. So natural selection has no particular problem regarding such irreducibly complex systems. H...