Puer Natus Est

When leaving Richard Feldman’s Epistemology class at 1:51pm Thursday afternoon Sarah called and said she was feeling a bit baby-ish and was going to call her midwife and see if they could get here in to be checked out.

At 3:34 pm John Paul Dougherty was born…all 9 lbs. 14 oz and 22 inches of him.

We started packing to leave about ten till five and were on our way home around six.

Mother and son are doing well.


More pictures at www.KodakGallary.com/dougherty.

td

RIP Jack Lewis

C.S. Lewis died at 5:30 p.m. at The Kilns, one week before his 65th birthday on Friday, November 22, 1963; the same day on which President Kennedy was assassinated and Aldous Huxley died. Every year at this time, for my Thanksgiving treat, I read Peter Kreeft's _Between Heaven and Hell_.

Most of you will have it--it was the first Kreeft I ever read. If you don't, get it. It's a delightful mythical dialog between JFK--playing the role of modern humanist--Huxley--the "New Ager"--and Lewis. It's a sort of Areopagus scenario with Paul battling Epicureans on one side and Stoicism on the other. It's barely over 100 pages and super-easy reading. It's still my "go to" book for people outside the academy who want to read something on the reasonableness of Christianity.

Photoblogging: Land o' Plenty

All summer we had fresh-picked berries from the surrounding woods.

Photoblogging: Who Needs Coffee?

I start every day by looking at this.

Photoblogging: Harkening Back to Summer

One of our garden helpers.

Photoblogging: Family Moment

Since I'm short on time and long on backlogged pictures, I'll probably be photoblogging for awhile as I catch up on my album.




This one will be obsolete pretty soon, so I better start with it. It will, of course, be followed ASAP by pictures in which he's on the outside.

Bloggage Cloggage

Blogging here will likely be slow since Sarah is due with John Paul any day now. The next post you see might be pictures of my first son!

Plus it's term paper time so school work will be really cranking up.

Add to that the fact that my laptop has a power short and has been randomly shutting off and might need to be sent in to be fixed and you've got timeframe disaster!

Cya

More Thoughts on Design Arguments

My friend replies:

One question I would have is theological. Wouldn’t Psalm 19 (to name a sample relevant passage of Scripture), by assuming the validity of arguments from design, effectively require we believers theologically to hold to the ultimate logical validity and practical legibility, or self-evident quality, of some version of the argument from design for theism? Also, might the Biblically-introduced datum (a la Genesis) that there was a Fall marring the created order account for “the failure of life to be more abundant in the universe?” (Notably, arguing to the historicity of the “Fall” in Genesis would not be do-able apriori, historical argument never being apriori argument.)

I replied thusly:

Psalm 19 implies that *something* about the heavens is a witness to God. Philosopher types (like me!) tend to want to put than in a philosophical mode and make an argument out of it: “The stars are blah blah, therefore there’s a God.” But this is not the only reading of the text. It could be that their sheer grandeur *impresses* upon us a sense of their being the handiwork of a deity (note that even Hume seems to be open to this kind of argument (further influence of Hutchinson?)).

This could translate cognitively as operating on a sensus divinitatus (don’t need to think Plantinga Here. Chisholm wrote of Hugh of St. Victor’s occuli mysterium before Plantinga wrote anything about the SD, a book which thanks Plantinga for reading and commenting upon). This way of heeding the testimony of the stars is consistent with the general lack of availability of an argument from design.

Furthermore, just *what* the argument which works is and precisely *how* it works—issues the philosopher of religion will care deeply about—are underdetermined by the text. It could be perfectly rational to realize *that* the world just couldn’t be an accident without knowing *how* to put the argument together just right. This is what Alston and Plantinga after him call the difference between knowing and showing.

They are insistent that knowing doesn’t always entail showing. This was one of the main points of Plantinga’s earliest book _God and Other Minds_. We are perfectly rational in believing each other to possess minds (whatever their nature, another mystery). Yet its very hard to *argue* for that. Basically, all we have are arguments from analogy. So even if it turned out that that was all we had for design arguments, we wouldn’t be in too bad shape. Still, a philosopher wants to formalize and I’m very unhappy with all current formulations.

Keywords: Plantinga, Alston, design arguments, teleological arguments, rationality, inference.

Update on Fine-Tuning Argument

I received an email from a friend about this post from last year "How the Evidence for God Screwed up my Paper" seeking an update. Here's the reply.

Sure, I'd like that because my views are in flux. I haven't stopped grappling with this for a week sense I wrote that. I've attached the most recent version of the paper. A snapshop of my evolving views now actually favor Dembski's argument. His books are extremely well-written, erudite, and well-argued (there are of course holes, but isn't there always). Sadly, they are virtually unread. They're pretty sophisticated and even new-wave lay apologists typically don't get it, and the usual suspects of the United Atheist Front (Southpark joke) don't seem to have given it a fair shake (Dawkins, Dennett, Kitcher, Sober, et al.).

Sadly, a lot of people who totally don't get the argument jumped on board the "Intelligent Design" bandwagon and broke the axel. This is extremely unfortunate because they seemed to verify the stereotype of the Dawkins tribe. I think it will be another decade before we really understand the impact of Dembski's work. (I started to say he's ahead of his time, which he is in many ways, but at the same time Norm Geisler was using Hubert Yockey's work in the 80's.

One of the first things I did when I went to the University after studying with Norm was to find in the stacks the Journal of Theoretical Biology and copy Yockey's 1983 article. Norm's book _Creation Science_ had quite a bit about specified complexity. I'd have to look back to see if this was before or after Denton's book.However, I'm very interested in self-organization scenarios.

My main beef with them as with the FTA is that if their premises were true I'd expect life to be more abundant in the universe. This is bound up with a lot of other issues, in particular the nature of quantum indeterminacy. Like Lewis, I'm not very happy about design arguments, they make surprisingly powerful assumptions and they always speak with a forked tongue due to redness of nature's tooth and claw.

Some versions of the FTA are consistent with both the rarity of life and quantum indeterminacy, but only at a cost of the sort of inefficiency we find all over nature when it comes to generation, but then again we're stuck with that anyway. The inefficiency of which I speak is how nature tends to produce very many times more seed/offspring than is necessary to compensate for the low rate of success.

The only models of "fine-tuning" I can think of consistent with both rarity and quantum indeterminacy are of this kind (for example God makes a gazillion universes and one of them spawns life).The fact is I don't think we have anything like the scientific data necessary for hard and fast conclusions on these matters. However, this version of the paper seeks to show that any of the serious possibilities lead to a good argument for theism, which is an interesting result.

Why am I not surprised?

When I went and got the link for that Garmin commercial, there was a video playing from a Letterman show where Brittany Spears did a cameo. Here's a comment that was left:

"she looks so awesomecant wait for new stuff from herwe need a new albummmmmmmmm"

Can there be such people? Apparently so. I note that it was signed, and I'm not making this up, by TheHereticAnthem666.

Here's another brilliant remarks by a Brittany fan.

"OMG than the heavens britney is hot again n hodin her head up got away from dat fake rapper evin n gona get bk to wha we love her for...xxx"

Be Wondered

A have a good friend of mine who is a brilliant artist and poet (and who happens to be doing a PhD in a very difficult branch of mathematics). She is fluent in English though she is not a native English speaker, and so she occasionally turns and unexpected phrase which might range from the charming to the profound. Here's one that struck me. I told her I'd acquired her Christmass present and dropped some mysterious hints. He replied

"Oh wow! I am wondered, what is it? (Don't tell me of course!)"

"I am wondered". I love it. "Curious" conveys something totally different. I am now amazed that the English language survived so long with out a conjugation of "to wonder" in the first person singular, present passive indicative. The previous English just seems impoverished by comparison.

So, has anything wondered you today? If not, I hope you get wondered before it is over.

A have a good friend of mine who is a brilliant artist and poet (and who happens to be doing a PhD in a very difficult branch of mathematics). She is fluent in English though she is not a native English speaker, and so she occasionally turns and unexpected phrase which might range from the charming to the profound. Here's one that struck me. I told her I'd acquired her Christmass present and dropped some mysterious hints. He replied

"Oh wow! I am wondered, what is it? (Don't tell me of course!)"

"I am wondered". I love it. "Curious" conveys something totally different. I am now amazed that the English language survived so long with out a conjugation of "to wonder" in the first person singular, present passive indicative. The previous English just seems impoverished by comparison.

So, has anything wondered you today? If not, I hope you get wondered before it is over.




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This post is dedicated to David Laverick, Chief Product Designer and Aesthetic Conscience for Garmin International (check out their funny new commercial).

A Bit of Silly Re-Search

Google has an interesting service which allows you to see the search stats on high-volume search strings.

Here are some results of potential interest to readers. [I've made similar posts on X-Catholics and my philosophy blog]

"C.S. Lewis"
1. Nashville, TN, USA 2. Salt Lake City, UT, USA 3. Oklahoma City, OK, USA 4. St Louis, MO, USA 5. Richardson, TX, USA 6. Dallas, TX, USA 7. Columbus, OH, USA 8. Cincinnati, OH, USA 9. Raleigh, NC, USA 10. Austin, TX, USA

"Chesterton"
1. Chesterton, IN, USA 2. Valparaiso, IN, USA 3. South Bend, IN, USA 4. Indianapolis, IN, USA 5. Chicago, IL, USA 6. Elmhurst, IL, USA 7. Cincinnati, OH, USA 8. Pittsburgh, PA, USA 9. Washington, DC, USA 10. Minneapolis, MN, USA

"truth"
1. Washington, DC, USA 2. Atlanta, GA, USA 3. Denver, CO, USA 4. Pleasanton, CA, USA 5. Irvine, CA, USA 6. Philadelphia, PA, USA 7. Austin, TX, USA 8. Minneapolis, MN, USA 9. St Louis, MO, USA 10. Raleigh, NC, USA

"beauty"
1. Irvine, CA, USA 2. Pleasanton, CA, USA 3. Los Angeles, CA, USA 4. New York, NY, USA 5. Houston, TX, USA 6. San Diego, CA, USA 7. San Francisco, CA, USA 8. Austin, TX, USA 9. Sacramento, CA, USA 10. Philadelphia, PA, USA

"education"
1. Columbus, OH, USA 2. Washington, DC, USA 3. Cambridge, MA, USA 4. Pittsburgh, PA, USA 5. New York, NY, USA 6. Baltimore, MD, USA 7. Philadelphia, PA, USA 8. Atlanta, GA, USA 9. Cincinnati, OH, USA 10. Minneapolis, MN, USA

I stared at these lists side-by-side for quite some time looking for patterns. Though I'd found some interesting ones, but then I started going all Beautiful Mind...