Friday, June 22, 2007

Quip Of The Day

From a comment to this post:

In an infinite number of universes the presence of a designing intelligence is not just a possibility but an inevitability.


Also, a salient point from another comment:

“Just add time and really big numbers”. Reason, logic and the scientific method are thrown to the winds in desperation to fend off teleology. Just imply it is “scientific” - after all, a scientist is proclaiming it. No way to observationally confirm the existence of any of these other universes? No way to falsify the hypothesis? Not to worry, anything to fend off notions of ID.

He carefully chooses the kind of infinite multiverse he wants, “….an infinite multiverse with a finite number of distinct macroscopic histories (each repeated an infinite number of times)”. Any reason to suggest that this particular kind of partial infinity is the one? No, but it seems to lead where he wants to go. Where he wants to go is to anything that avoids teleology even with greatest strainings of credulity. Of course that must be the truth, since anything else would be unthinkable, strictly taboo.

He points out that in this infinite multiverse even an OOL event way below Dembski’s limit of submicroscopic improbability would happen. In fact it would happen an infinite number of times. But everything else would happen an infinite number of times. So all the uncountable events, “random” mutations, etc. that happened in evolution also had to happen an infinite number of times on an infinite number of other earths. So they were also inevitable and didn’t require a designer, any more than the origin of life. But since all these incredible number of events in the history of life were inevitable, Darwinistic processes had nothing to do with evolution - it all just happened. No need for any explanation.

This sort of idea foisted off as a valid hypothesis is a reductio ad absurdum of muddled philosophical thinking. I agree with Behe in Edge of Evolution that this is akin to abandoning reason altogether.

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