Remark on Thesis #3. Wow, that is impossible to improve on.
Remark on Thesis #4. The venerable argument from design continues to be attractive to many people. My high-school physics teacher, an atheist, put it this way. He would listen to us teenagers arguing about faith and science with amusement. Once, he decided to intervene. We have measured it over and over again, he said. The law of gravity is perfect from the mathematical point of view. It is not X to the second power, plus some fraction. It is X to the second power, without any fraction whatsoever. It makes me wonder, he said.
It may be true that the ID version (which one?) of the argument from design frames the argument poorly. So what? It makes more sense to evaluate the argument from design – if you want to call it that – as framed by someone like John Polkinghorne. And yes, a discussion of these things belongs in the public square and in the classroom, the latter in terms of the history of science. The Rezeptionsgeschichte of Darwinism, its co-optation by atheists on the one hand and theists on the other, is a very fit subject of discussion.
Remark on Thesis #5. Paley understood, or thought he understood, Psalms 8 and 19. But he forgot all about Job 28 and God’s speeches in that book. I can’t help but thinking that Darwin might concur with the thrust of Psalms 8 and 19, and agree in his own way with Job 28 and 38-41. Many agnostics I know do. The distinction between design and intent is a red herring in this context. Upon reading Shakespeare’s King Lear or The Tempest, I am hard put to deny its designedness. But they are protean works, even if the intentions of Shakespeare remain a mystery, inscrutable indeed. They will remain so, I imagine, until we have faces. BTW, are King Lear and The Tempest ecologically cheerful? I’m not so sure the question is completely off-subject.
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