Flint
Unregistered
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From Vindication:
<quote>Admiration could indeed be waning especially given the fact that Darwin had found a better solution than Paley’s appeal to the supernatural</quote> In principle this is not a fact, this is a policy position. Paley said, essentially, that how life forms originated is <i>inherently</i> forever beyond our understanding, that no possible explanation can be remotely as plausible as magic, and that we are best off worshiping rather than trying to understand it. At best, we can devise some apparently natural mechanism that might fit what little we're capable of observing, and we can kid ourselves that we're onto something.
Imagine some phenomenon that, for the sake of the mental exercise, meets these criteria. It is totally magic, outside of cause and effect, generated by "supernatural" means where "supernatural" is a code word meaning, inherently beyond human understanding. Now, how would science approach such a phenomenon? I submit science would presume (as it must) natural causes, find some (or many), subdivide one single phenomenon up according to which aspects of it seem related to which apparent causes, perform tests some of which (through sheer statistical distribution) would seem to explain some of it, toss the rest as needing reclassificiation or better methods, etc.
What makes Darwin's approach "better" than Paley's is that it appears to make useful predictions, in the sense that helpful discoveries have been made by assuming and treating such things as predictions. Part of what we've determined gives every indication of being at least mostly correct, as far as it goes. Is our "hit rate" better than science would generate in the case of "genuine pure magic"? How could we know?
Paley has not held our admiration mostly because when "magic" was presumed to be the cause of most everything, societies worldwide were depressingly static in their lack of progress toward any real (i.e. useful) understandings. The conceptual breakthrough that man COULD understand nature, at least in small and limited ways, and could validate such understandings and distinguish among competing proposals, has increased the human rate of understanding of the world we live in by a factor of at least 20, probably much more. After all, <i>anything</i> can be "explained" by magic, leaving nobody the wiser. Which is how it was done for millennia.
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