Another quickie post until I get a chance to sit down and really respond.
Dr. Coyne’s observations on an excellent destruction of “natural theology” aka the claim we can see some god (usually the Christian god though Christians often try to hide their god under an avalanche of vagueness) in reality. Please note the comments about solipsism and the baseless claims of Plantinga.Of course I’m pleased someone has made similar observations to mine. 🙂
“Natural theology” is the discipline that attempts to find evidence for God in the natural world. The most famous example of this doomed exercise is, of course, the erstwhile use of animal and plant “design” as evidence for God’s beneficence. But Darwin dispelled that in 1859. Earlier, Newton cited the regular and stable orbits of the planets as evidence for God’s intervention. That, argument, too, was refuted by science, and such is the fate of all natural theology.
But the discipline won’t die. It regularly resurfaces via people like Francis Collins and Alvin Plantinga, who claim, respectively, that intuitive human morality (“The Moral Law”) is evidence for God, and that the “fine tuning” of the physical constants of the universe was done by God to allow human life. Last year I listed several other examples, including the supposed inevitability of human evolution (an argument for God used by Kenneth…
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Club Schadenfreude 