Belligerati

« We just finished Jericho | Main | Good for you need not be good for your genes »

December 31, 2008

How is a black monolith like a rock that tells time?

The following quote from God: Philosophers weigh in caught my eye:

An example that briefly appears in Darwin’s Black Box nicely illustrates the point. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, a magnetic anomaly in one of the moon’s craters leads to the discovery of a perfectly regular slab buried under lunar soil. The characters have no idea how the slab was constructed, or what it is for, and have never known an artist capable of making one; nevertheless they reasonably conclude that it was designed. But that is precisely because the characters are not in Paley’s position. They know enough about lunar geology, astronomy, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life to discredit the rival hypothesis that the monolith is a natural object (a big crystal, say) that formed on the moon or collided with it. Paley, on the other hand, had no reason, other than the failure of his imagination, to dismiss the hypothesis of "causes without design."

This argument doesn't cut it. Astronauts could just as easily had a failure of imagination. The universe is a big place and it is easily possible that things that humans have observed only as man-made (or designed) phenomena occur naturally elsewhere in the cosmos. Bumping into something that wasn't place by humans and nevertheless looks identical to something designed by man is not are argument that it was designed by man.All you really know when you see something like that is that it is unlikely given what we know. But wait, that's the exact same argument of "I can't imagine how that could happen naturally so it must be designed" that Paley makes over the watch on the doorstep.

In both cases you are assuming that what you know is close to the truth that governs the construction and operation of the universe. I suspect that's a dressed up appeal to ignorance; since you don't have any evidence that something was natural, it must not be natural. But as they say, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, and therefore absence of evidence of a natural cause isn't evidence of absence of natural cause. You might not have looked hard enough.

The work is excellent but long. Best work of philosophy I've read in some time. The payoff is actually understanding the ontological argument, among others.

Posted by OneEyedMan at December 31, 2008 3:27 PM

Comments

Post a comment