AE911truth.org's Statement on Alleged death of Osama bin Laden

Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth have posted a statement on the alleged death of Osama bin Laden.

Reading The Last Superstition

Now that I have some confidence that Edward Feser is able to make himself clear when he wants, I've started reading his book, The Last Superstition; a Refutation of the New Atheism.

It's a good thing I didn't try reading the book before my confidence in Feser had been established. As he himself describes it, it is an "angry book," wherein not only does he try to refute Atheism, but also takes potshots at liberals and conspiracy theorists. Since I am both of those, I probably would have thrown the book out before I got past the first chapter. So if you are a liberal, conspiracy theorist or a "secularist," my guess is that you would find Feser's book to be rough sailing. Which is too bad. I'm in the second chapter, where he presents a very concise yet clear view of Greek philosophy, which is the foundation for Western thought. I want to read his book, since I've always had trouble understanding Aristotle. How significant is Aristotle? According to Feser,

"Abandoning Aristotelianism, as the founders of modern philosophy did, was the single greatest mistake ever made in the entire history of Western thought."

Having obtained an undergraduate degree in philosophy from a university where modern analytic philosophy was the thing, I can vouch for the fact that Aristotle was never taken very seriously. If modern philosophical problems (and there are many) can be traced to rejecting Aristotle, then understanding him may be the key to fixing those problems. So I look forward in hope to Professor Feser being able to explain Aristotle (and Aquinas) to me.

And Feser has also eased my conscience. I often doubt the wisdom of occasionally spouting off about my liberalism and conspiracy notions. He's reminded me that there is a need for a voice like mine, if only to show that one can believe in God without being a conservative who swallows, unexamined, whatever official account is given of major political events.

C.S. Lewis and Natural Evil

Biologos has been printing in sequence parts of Michael Peterson's article, C.S. Lewis on Evolution and Intelligent Design. In Part IV, Peterson argues from statements that Lewis makes in his introduction to The Problem of Pain, that

On the possibility of a cumulative case, see Peterson, Reason and Religious Belief, 115–6.

" Lewis would say that it is too glib—and conveniently selective—for IDers to argue that a Transcendent Intelligence is the best explanation of selected complex forms (e.g., the whip-like tail of a certain bacterium) while ignoring other phenomena in the biological realm such as carnage, pain, and death."

What Peterson ignores is Lewis's chapter 9, "Animal Pain," where he writes:

"It seems to me, therefore, a reasonable supposition, that some mighty created power had already been at work for ill on the material universe, or the solar system, or at least, the planet Earth, before ever man came on the scene: and that when man fell, someone had, indeed, tempted him. This hypothesis is not introduced as a general "explanation of evil": it only gives a wider application to the principle that evil comes from the abuse of free will. If there is such a power, as I myself believe, it may well have corrupted the animal creation before man appeared. The intrinsic evil of the animal world lies in the fact that animals, or some animals, live by destroying each other. That plants do the same I will not admit to be an evil. The Satanic corruption of the beasts would therefore be analogous, in one respect, to the Satanic corruption of man. For one result of man's fall was that his animality fell back from the humanity into which it had been taken up but which could no longer rule it. In the same way, animality may have been encouraged to slip back into behaviour proper to vegetables. It is, of course, true that the immense mortality occasioned by the fact that many beasts live on beasts is balanced, in nature, by an immense birth-rate, and it might seem, that if all animals had been herbivorous and healthy, they would mostly starve as a result of their own multiplication. But I take the fecundity and the death-rate to be correlative phenomena. There was, perhaps, no necessity for such an excess of the sexual impulse: the Lord of this world thought of it as a response to carnivorousness -- a double scheme for securing the maximum amount of torture. It it offends less, you may say that the 'life-force' is corrupted, where I say that living creatures were corrupted by an evil angelic being. We mean the same thing: but I find it easier to believe in a myth of gods and demons than in one of hypostatised abstract nouns. And after all, our mythology may be much nearer to literal truth than we suppose. Let us not forget that Our Lord, on one occasion, attributes human disease not to God's wrath, nor to nature, but quite explicitly to Satan. [Luke 13:16]
If this hypothesis is worth considering, it is also worth considering whether man, at his first coming into the world, had not already a redemptive function to perform. Man, even now, can do wonders to animals: my cat and dog live together in my house and seem to like it. It may have been one of man's functions to restore peace to the animal world, and if he had not joined the enemy he might have succeeded in doing so to an extant now hardly imaginable."

So should there be good evidence for ID, then Lewis would not have been troubled that there might also be evidence for evil ID. For him, Satan would be a prime candidate for the role.

C. S. Lewis on the Propriety of Miracles

Now that I finally understand Professor Feser's position, I want to return to C.S. Lewis and ID. Let me begin by quoting from part of his chapter 12, "The Propriety of Miracles," in his book, Miracles; a Preliminary Study:

"If the Ultimate Fact is not an abstraction but the living God, opaque by the very fullness of His blinding actuality, then He might do things. He might work miracles. But would He? Many people of sincere piety feel that He would not. They think it unworthy of Him. It is petty and capricious tyrants who break their own laws: good and wise kings obey them. Only an incompetent workman will produce work which needs to be interfered with. And people who think in this way are not satisfied by the assurance given them in Chapter 8 that miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of Nature. That may be undeniable. But it will still be felt (and justly) that miracles interrupt the orderly march of events, the steady development of Nature according to her own inherent genius or character. That regular march seems to such critics as I have in mind more impressive than any miracle. Looking up (like Lucifer in Meredith's sonnet) at the night sky, they feel it almost impious to suppose that God should sometimes unsay what He has once said with such magnificence. This feeling springs from deep and noble sources in the mind and must always be treated with respect. Yet it is, I believe, founded on an error.
....
A supreme workman will never break by one note or one syllable or one stroke of the brush the living and inward law of the work he is producing. But he will break without scruple any number of those superficial regularities and orthodoxies which little, unimaginative critics mistake for its laws. The extent to which one can distinguish a just 'license' from a mere botch or failure of unity depends on the extent to which one has grasped the real and inward significance of the work as a whole. If we had grasped as a whole the innermost spirit of that 'work which God worketh from the beginning to the end', and of which Nature is only a part and perhaps a small part, we should be in a position to decide whether miraculous interruptions of Nature's history were mere improprieties unworthy of the Great Workman or expressions of the truest and deepest unity in His total work. In fact, or course, we are in no such position. The gap between God's mind and ours must, on any view, be incalculably greater than the gap between Shakespeare's mind and that of the most peddling critics of the old French school."

The whole chapter is worth reading, but I think I've quoted enough, for now, to show that Lewis would have no problem with the idea of God intervening in natural history in order to accomplish His ends, such as possibly bringing about the origin of life, or causing the necessary mutations needed to bring a new form of life into being. In other words, Lewis would have no theological or philosophical objections to Intelligent Design theory.

Ed Feser's Reply to Torley and Cudworth

Ed Feser has posted his reply to Torley and Cudworth. I think this post brings a great deal of clarity to the debate and is very helpful. In fact, I think it shows that there is no fundamental disagreement between A-T philosophy and ID theory. The comment I put in his combox:

Prof. Feser,

I think this post brings a great deal of clarity to the debate, and I think it shows that there does not need to be a fundamental disagreement between A-T philosophy and ID theory. My guess is that if Dembski reads this post, he will agree with what you have said, and correct or clarify his own statements regarding the incompatibility between Aristotelianism and ID. But if I'm mistaken about Dembski, then I would agree with you that Dembski's form of ID is philosophically and theologically problematic. But let's get down to details. You write:

"For something to be an “artifact” in the Aristotelian sense, it is also necessary that its parts have no immanent tendency to function together as a whole, and this is not true of corn any more than it is true of the various dog breeds or of human infants, while it is true of a hammock or of the other examples of artifacts."

Agreed!!! It is patently obvious that the parts of living organisms have an immanent tendency to function together as a whole. I think Dembski would agree with this. If he doesn't then he's mistaken. However, I don't think this is what he meant by referring to living things as artifacts. What I think he meant is that it was exceedingly unlikely that the parts could be brought together and in the right order so that they could then function together as a whole. So unlikely, that a reasonable person would infer that an agent must have brought the parts together and in the right order.

"In the case of a snake or a strand of DNA, for example, there is for A-T simply no such thing as a natural substance which somehow has all the material and behavioral properties of a snake or a strand of DNA and yet still lacks the “information content” or teleological features typical of snakes or DNA. And so, when God makes a snake or a strand of DNA, He doesn’t first make an otherwise “information-free” or teleology-free material structure and then “impart” some information or final causality to it, as if carrying out the second stage in a two-stage process."

Agreed!!! And this provides the answer to Mr. Green's question about the robocow. If a robocow has all the identical parts, arranged in the right way, of a living cow, then it is not a robocow. It is a living cow.

Now whether the living cow evolved from a different kind of animal, without the need of an agent imparting additional information, or whether it evolved with an agent imparting additional information, or whether it had to be specially created is a separate question.

So I see no fundamental disagreement between A-T philosophy and ID. Only, perhaps, between Dembski's version of ID. Let's hope he replies. I'm betting he will correct or clarify his position.

Mike Gene Catches PZ Skimmy-dipping

Go here if you want a good laugh. And PZ also doesn't understand Mike Gene's front-loading hypothesis, which is what you expect from a skimmer.

The Usual Muddle

I was hoping for clarity from Prof. Feser, so that I would finally understand his objections to ID. Instead it was the usual muddle. In answer to a question from Vincent Torley he wrote:

"2. Forming a man from the dust of the ground involves causing the prime matter which had the substantial form of dust to take on instead the substantial form of a man. I'm not sure what "sequence of steps" you have in mind. There's no sequence involved (nor any super-engineering -- God is above such trivia). It's just God "saying," as it were: "Dust, become a man." And boom, you've got your man.

So it seems that Feser is willing to admit that God caused a pre-existing prime matter that had once substantial form to take on a different substantial form. How exactly is this different from the IDists claim that agency was needed for non-living matter to become living matter?

I grow weary of Feser's inability to deal with this issue. I think he's just afraid to admit that he's wrong about anything.