"The amazing realization of evolution by natural selection is that the interaction of environments with traits can all by itself, over millions and millions of years make the changes happen with no intelligent agency at all necessary. And, in fact, many of the ways the “designs” that resulted from these dynamics came out, it is clear that they’re not always perfect or logical. They involve all sorts of inefficiencies and non-ideal designs and superfluous dimensions all because they were the traits and combinations of traits that happened to evolve and fit well enough to the environment that they worked. They don’t bespeak a perfect designer who foresaw what maximum efficiency would require and implemented it. They look exactly as they would if random mutations and random changes in environment were selected by whichever happened to fit the best, though not perfectly."
Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/camelswithhammers/2014/03/a-philosophy-professor-analyzes-gods-not-deads-case-for-god/#ixzz3Arc1s7Vv
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
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If you’re going to respond to people’s desires for a coherent rationality based ethics for approaching the world (or to theists’ barbs accusing such a thing of being impossible), you’re going to be engaged in philosophy. If you’re going to puzzle out the nature and limits of free speech, separation of church and state, or other rights, you are going to be engaging with difficult philosophical problems. If you are going to puzzle out the nature of objective discourse itself, or who can provide insight into what questions and why, or whether some questions are too dangerous to ask or whether everything must be questioned, you’re going to be engaged in philosophy. If you’re going to have a thoughtful and careful grasp of when war is justified or why, you’re going to be engaged in philosophy. If you’re going to try to figure out how to crack the nut of whether or to what extent we paradoxically must tolerate the intolerant, you’re going to be doing philosophy. When you’re faced with excruciating end of life decisions related to active or passive euthanasia, you’re going to be doing philosophy. When you’re trying to build AI as a computer scientist, you’re going to have to solve an immense amount of philosophical problems or the AI will be everything science fiction nightmares are made of.
If you are going to have to figure out how to understand the role of your emotions in your life, the challenge to rank priorities in life, the ways to assess competing values of urgent existential import in your life—you are going to be doing philosophy.
There are plenty of constructive debates to be had about exactly how to do philosophy appropriately, how to improve our methods, how to situate its role within the larger project of knowledge development. But it’s a dangerous world where people are philosophically incompetent. And I’m disgusted and disappointed by my supposed fellow defenders of reason when they short-sightedly and ignorantly turn on philosophy and, to my mind, betray the very cause we were supposed to be allied together in.
Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/camelswithhammers/2014/03/a-philosophy-professor-analyzes-gods-not-deads-case-for-god/#ixzz3AryzhX68
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