Tapsearch Com EditorThe court is right because it evolved to be right
September 6th 2007 23:36
I don't have a whole lot to say about John Derbyshire and Tom Bethell's fight in the American Spectator's letters column -- I tend to agree with Derbyshire that Darwinian evolution happens, but I share Bethell's skepticism that it explains every development in life for millions of years. I question Bethell's assumption that if Darwinian evolution didn't create something, though, that some "designer" did.
I just wanted to point out an absurd point from Derbyshire, which he's repeated in other contexts:
So if a court finds it, it's true? A court could never reverse itself under this formulation.
And Derbyshire does a good job of summing up the Great Mystery of Life, though he acts like it's a unique problem of Intelligent Design theories:
Of course, one could do that with evolution, too. What did we evolve from? What did they evolve from? What did they evolve from? "The only way out of that infinite regress is to invoke some force outside the natural world."
This doesn't prove that the theory of evolution is "supernaturalist" -- it's an attempt to explain as much as possible without resorting to the supernatural. But if Derbyshire's right that "infinite regress" demands a supernatural explanation, it's life itself that's "supernaturalist." So far as the natural world goes, everything has to come from something else, whether the predecessor is more intelligent or less evolved than the successor.
I just wanted to point out an absurd point from Derbyshire, which he's repeated in other contexts:
Intelligent Design is creationism. This has been proved to courtroom standards of evidence.
So if a court finds it, it's true? A court could never reverse itself under this formulation.
And Derbyshire does a good job of summing up the Great Mystery of Life, though he acts like it's a unique problem of Intelligent Design theories:
Who is the designer? If he's part of the natural world, he needs to be more intelligent than the things he's designing. But then who designed him? You get an infinite regress. The only way out of that infinite regress is to invoke some force outside the natural world. Ergo, Intelligent Design is supernaturalist. Q.E.D.
Of course, one could do that with evolution, too. What did we evolve from? What did they evolve from? What did they evolve from? "The only way out of that infinite regress is to invoke some force outside the natural world."
This doesn't prove that the theory of evolution is "supernaturalist" -- it's an attempt to explain as much as possible without resorting to the supernatural. But if Derbyshire's right that "infinite regress" demands a supernatural explanation, it's life itself that's "supernaturalist." So far as the natural world goes, everything has to come from something else, whether the predecessor is more intelligent or less evolved than the successor.
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