tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post5225758297516187779..comments2023-07-31T10:39:53.182-05:00Comments on The Blog of the American Chesterton Society: Some Very Serious Stuff - and Some LaughingNancy C. Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06169395014931291729noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-38929540766958702732008-11-15T18:13:00.000-06:002008-11-15T18:13:00.000-06:00Thanks Joey - this topic is well worth pursuing, a...Thanks Joey - this topic is well worth pursuing, and perhaps we might talk further as time may permit. If you get a journal article, or perhaps a dissertation out of this, I hope to read it! <BR/><BR/>OFL, I do not have time to add to Joey G, but I would like to say this. The issue is tied to "order" and also to "chance". However, the problem with "chance" is that very few people know what it is, even mathematically - and would be quite distressed if they actually studied the nature of so-called "random" numbers and such things. They've had a smell at technical matters, but know nothing serious about them.<BR/><BR/>Moreover, anyone who has tried to write any serious computer software, or any non-trivial story, understands the nature of "design" - and would argue stridently against it being a matter of chance! <BR/><BR/>When you get some time, seek out Sayers' <I>The Mind of the Maker</I>, which explores this; also see Tolkien's very important essay on Fairy Tales.<BR/><BR/>I hope to write more on the issue (if I get a chance) on my own blogg. But to keep this reply Chestertonian, I would simply quote GKC: <BR/><BR/>A cosmos one day being rebuked by a pessimist replied, "How can you who revile me consent to speak by my machinery? Permit me to reduce you to nothingness and then we will discuss the matter." Moral. You should not look a gift universe in the mouth.<BR/><BR/>[Ward, <I>Gilbert Keith Chesterton</I> 49-50]Dr. Thursdayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04666301445831509481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-52933614922398238342008-11-14T20:19:00.000-06:002008-11-14T20:19:00.000-06:00I think Chesterton's argument for design is a comp...I think Chesterton's argument for design is a compelling one. It's in Orthodoxy - I think the Ethics of Elfland - and further developed in scattered places throughout his writing.<BR/><BR/>Basically, it goes thus:<BR/>We seem ethically to want a "complex" end to things, and nature on its own, if it tends toward any object, must go to a simple object. Equations eventually resolve in the lowest reduction possible; chemicals break down to the least complex combination if left to decay. Even the ancient philosophers saw this in insisting in a primary principle or element from which all matter came and to which all matter went: a general conflagration, or all things becoming water, etc.<BR/><BR/>Consider next the general tendency of things to fall into decay. There is, even in nature, a certain combination which prevents such. Analogously, these can be called "artistic" combinations. It seems unlikely that things would regularly combine in such a way as to perpetuate and remain in existence (here speaking about things as simple as molecules, which have not even appetites governing them). Or, at least, it's as likely as not that they would. And when things do combine in a way to become more permanent, they are "fragile" in a sense; whereas, when things do destruct, the change is more final. The law of conservation of energy is no disproof: there's no real way other than dumb luck - without a design - for explaining why all matter and energy and matter doesn't just simply remain in its simplest, most basic forms. The old question "why is there something, and not nothing" is good for a basic proof of the uncaused cause. But for the argument of order, the basic formula is, "why are the things that are <I>what</I> they are, as opposed to what they are <I>made</I> from?"Joe Grabowskihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09696215890270543320noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-17888441297679287302008-11-14T16:53:00.000-06:002008-11-14T16:53:00.000-06:00Dr. Thursday, How do we answer the atheist claim ...Dr. Thursday,<BR/> How do we answer the atheist claim that we can't really prove that design even exists? I'm having a "conversation" with an atheist and his objection that given enough time and materials the random motion of quarks and other such wild realties would get something that seems designed eventually seems irrefutable, though maybe not sensible.<BR/> Don't worry, of all of Aquinas's proofs of the existence of God, this was the only one that my personal heretic was able to make the slightest hole in.Old Fashioned Liberalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15139437884293877190noreply@blogger.com