Re: So Long Judge Moore, We'll Miss You

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Severian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Mon, 24 Nov 2003 03:43:40 +0000 (UTC), [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> (ambrose searle) wrote:
> 
> >The mechanism of natural selection doesn't do what Darwin claimed
> >http://iscid.org/papers/Dembski_WhyNatural_112901.pdf
> 
> I (unfortunately but resulting in great elucidation) read that entire
> paper. I don't claim to be a philospher or a scientist, but I can
> smell bullshit. I can suss out an agenda. I can recognize
> rationalizations.
> 
> It's so very sad to see someone waste what could have been a useful
> mind.
> 
Therein lies the tragedy. Had Dembski just decided to be a philosopher,
or just be a statistician, he could have made useful contributions
despite, or even with, his religious a priorism. In ordinary philosophy,
some of the best arguments come out of people trying to run a line
proving God or that faith is best, etc. Debates over the Anthropic
Principle verge on the extremes of maths, for example.

But Dembski tried to revivify Paleyism as science. In the past we have
seen people try to revivify various old philosophies as science - when I
was doing theology, I would occasionally run across Thomists arguing
that biology could only be done on Thomistic principles. We have seen
neo-Platonists try it, and sometimes they sound almost plausible. More
recently still, ordinary Platonists tried it. None succeeded, because
science is not based on a philosophy, although philosophies have been
absed on science (and they have been some of the more interesting ones,
from Locke through Hume, Kant and to the positivists and after).

But Dembski failed, for the reasons Paleyism failed in the first
instance - it requires limits to or an end of science. At one time it
may have been an argument to the best inference (although I doubt it
really ever was after Ray, and certainly after Hume) but from 1859
onwards, that avenue was increasingly marginal. It evaporated around the
time of the modern synthesis, once and for all. Revivifying the dead is
supernatural in every sense that word carries.

-- 
John Wilkins
DARK IN HERE, ISN'T IT?
wilkins.id.au