Skip to main content

Criticisms of Eugenia Scott

She makes some good points about the underlying motives of some of those who call themselves IDers, as well as some systematic points about the inappropriateness of trying to infer beyond the limits of a natural science. These points I accept, but the following arguments made by her don't prove as much as she would hope:

1. While she makes an excellent point about how the bogus faux-science textbook used in Dover was really a slightly modified creationist book, she never addresses whether Discovery was involved in this deception. One gets the impression that the other entity was. Needs clarification.

2. She makes a very good point that all hard core creationists naturally love the arguments they find in ID manuals, as they offer support for creationist conclusions, and they are all found in Creationism. My reply: she is committing a kind of invalid conversion. Just because everything in ID is acceptable to Creationism doesn't mean the converse is true. Consider how all criticisms of laissez faire capitalism are useful to a communist critique of the same. But that doesn't imply that all opponents of laissez-faire are communists.

3. She asserts that an argument for an intelligent cause can only refer to God (after all, IDers have a religious agenda), and then rightly points out that you can't measure a transcendent agent. But some ID proponents have gone to great efforts to argue that their arguments do not necessarily support full blown monotheism. And these points actually undermine Creationism. So it's unfair of Eugenia to put words in the mouths of these fellows. On the other hand, creationists have worked hard to give a different impression, and this apparently has impressed Eugenia.

4. She criticizes the move from complexity to aritificality... more on that later...getting late!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...
Post a Comment
Read more

robot/computers, awareness of causality, holism

For a purportedly cognizant machine to be aware of causality, it would seem (given how it happens with us rational animals) that being aware of its own causal interactions is a necessary condition for its being aware of how causal relations exist in nature.  But to be aware of its own causal interactions, the machine would have to have a sense of its acting as a whole, as an individual, and as being acted upon at a whole.  It would not suffice merely to register information from this or that outside source: there would have to be a sense of the whole acting and being acted upon.   It seems that such awareness requires appropriation and that machines can't do that (at least not in the precise sense that I have discussed in this blog).
Post a Comment
Read more