Thursday, June 16, 2005

Unintelligent Design

As I've said before I don't know much about Intelligent Design (ID). But one doesn't have to know much about it to see that its opponents expose themselves to a telling criticism. As Richard Dawkins writes in the first chapter of The Blind Watchmaker:

All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way.

For Dawkins the universe only looks designed. Since the laws of physics are blind (lacking intelligence), perhaps he would say not only that the universe is not intelligently designed, but also that the design evident in the universe is unintelligent.

This all means that Dawkins and his ilk are proponents of Unintelligent Design (UD).


Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (W.W. Norton & Company, 1986).

1 comment:

Lawrence Gage said...

What gave me this idea was the tactic of the early Christians I recalled that Jaroslav Pelikan wrote about:

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Employing the specific name Logos implied in addition to this that what had come in Jesus Christ was also the Reason and Mind of the cosmos. To be "without logos [alogos]" had meant, also in classical Greek, to be without reason or contrary to reason; those second-century Christian heretics who were opposed to the use of the Logos doctrine—and to the Gospel of John because it contained that doctrine—had therefore been dubbed "the Alogoi," and those fourth-century thinkers who denied the eternity of the Logos were accused of teaching that God had once been alogos, insane.
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MJ

Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). [a truly excellent book that I highly recommend]