Teleological Tree June 5, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Brennekce in Creation vs. Evolution, Philosophy of Science, Random.Tags: Agency, Barry, Chance, Creation, Descent, Design, Evolution, law, other, tree, Uncommon
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This showed up on Uncommon Descent a while ago (and, yes, I just now picked up on it). Thought some of you might find it interesting, though not, perhaps, a perfect analogy.
Suppose you come across this tree:
[continue reading after the break]
You know nothing else about the tree other than what you can infer from a visual inspection.
Multiple Choice:
A. The tree probably obtained this shape through chance.
B. The tree probably obtained this shape through mechanical necessity.
C. The tree probably obtained this shape through a combination of chance and mechanical necessity.
D. The tree probably obtained this shape as the result of the purposeful efforts of an intelligent agent.
E. Other.
Select your answer and give supporting reasons.
So is the ‘You know nothing else about the tree other than what you can infer from a visual inspection’ thing a way of saying ‘hey, let’s just pretend we don’t know anything about life other than what we can see visually, so if we forget everything else we know it looks designed, right?’
I mean, you do know that we’re fully capable of doing more than just looking at things, right?
The whole idea just stinks of the ‘common sense’ fallacy. ‘Life appears designed because common sense says so.’ ‘Common sense’ is a really highly flawed thing to use as any kind of authoritative judgement. Isn’t common sense what tells us that the earth is flat, and the sun revolves around the earth, and there’s no such thing as germs, and…
Can you give a common sense explanation of how a car works, or can you infer that accurately by nothing more than a visual inspection? Doesn’t stop you from driving one around, does it?
Does common sense say life looks designed? It occurs to me that Darwin originally wrote off a “common sense” perspective. Humans appear rather like monkeys, and reptiles are similar to amphibians, and the like. Now obviously, seeming to look like and being technically homologous are different things, but something isn’t wrong just because it “stinks of the ‘common sense fallacy’ “.