Tag: purpose
Does Nature Show Purpose? Reply to a Materialist Philosopher
Aristotelian teleology is, as Joseph Carter points out, manifested by order in nature. More precisely, teleology is consistency: natural processes tend to consistent ends.
None Dare Call it Journalism
Whether the Times will discover the full scope of the threat is uncertain. No one at the Times has yet noticed, for example, that if you play the movie’s interview with Richard Dawkins backward, you can hear Ben Stein saying, “Bill Dembski is dead”
O’Leary Reviews Cardinal Schonborn’s Chance or Purpose?
I am often asked what to make of Christoph Cardinal Schonborn’s new book Chance or Purpose? Luckily, I can now point people to Denyse O’Leary’s spot-on review. Among the many highlights, O’Leary notes that
Beckwith: Dawkins Unwittingly Endorses Purpose in Nature
Over at the First Things blog On the Square, Francis Beckwith carefully shows how even Professor Dawkins cannot escape the common sense perception that the world is filled with agency, and those agents have a proper function. To get at all this, Beckwith describes Dawkins’ lambasting of Kurt Wise, the young-earth creationist who did doctoral work under Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard. Dawkins writes:
Gerhart and Kirschner’s Speculations on The Plausibility of Life
The September/October issue of Books & Culture has a review by CSC senior fellow Jonathan Wells of The Plausibility of Life by Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart, two eminent biologists. The book has been acclaimed since its arrival earlier this year for providing answers for the last remaining “gap” in Darwin’s theory of evolution. Wells –an eminent biologist himself– is, not surprsingly, skeptical of the claim. (He knows a thing or two about the gaps in Darwin’s theory.)