7 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2023
  2. Jul 2022
    1. By rejecting the idea that the stone provides useful evidence of a creator, Paley avoids the oversimplified argument that the existence of anything proves God’s existence. But the watch provides something different: evidence of purpose.

      This piece argues that seeing Natural Theology simply as an attempt to prove the existence of a creator by claiming the living world is irreducibly complex is to misunderstand the main thrust of Paley's argument. Paley was primarily concerned with what the living world can tell us us about the nature (no pun intended) of such a creator. Organisms' complex adaptations, claimed Paley, show that the universe has purpose.

      The piece argues that both advocates of evolution and advocates of 'intelligent design' have misunderstood the main thrust of Paley's argument. He was primarily concerned with disproving other theological viewpoints, rather than atheistic ones.

  3. Nov 2020
    1. As a result, at least one theistic evolutionist, when confronted with student’s own admissions, has declined to defend the student’s blog.36

      I am the TE to whom Jeanson is referring here. He has misrepresented my statement, and declined my request to correct his misrepresentation.

      https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/would-jeanson-please-correct-a-clear-misrepresentation/11066?u=swamidass

  4. May 2020
    1. wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet's)

      How this has anything to do with the topic at hand is beyond me. Wrote a computer program that preserved the correct sequence (instead of generating it from scratch each time?)

      This is basic probability! It has nothing to do with the argument for/against creationism

      I was hoping for a more well developed retort to this point.

    2. even if life on Earth turned out to have a nonevolutionary origin (for instance, if aliens introduced the first cells billions of years ago), evolution since then would be robustly confirmed by countless microevolutionary and macroevolutionary studies.

      How is creationism different from "aliens" introducing life? This becomes more a question of "who" introduced life vs how life was introduced.

    3. The origin of life remains very much a mystery, but biochemists have learned about how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and other building blocks of life could have formed and organized themselves into self-replicating, self-sustaining units, laying the foundation for cellular biochemistry. Astrochemical analyses hint that quantities of these compounds might have originated in space and fallen to Earth in comets, a scenario that may solve the problem of how those constituents arose under the conditions that prevailed when our planet was young.

      This sounds incredulous. The possibility of such a circumstance resulting in life is infinitesimally small.

  5. Mar 2017