Thursday, September 03, 2009

Evolution tells us how, but why remains fuzzy

An interested exchange of dueling thought on science and religion.
First came Robert Wright with his book The Evolution of God, applying psychology and game theory to examine our evolving idea of the divine.
Then came biologist Jerry Coyne with a sharply negative review in The New Republic, saying essentially that Wright's book was pointless because the very idea that a divinity was at work in the universe had been disproved by science.
Here Jim Manzi argues back: "The theory of evolution, then, has not eliminated the problems of ultimate origins and ultimate purpose with respect to the development of organisms; it has ignored them."
In other words, we are learning more every day about the HOW, but science can't tell us the WHY, and can't prove or disprove the existence of a WHY.
COMMENT: I'm with Manzi here. I didn't find Coyne's argument or Richard Dawkins' famous bestseller "disproving" God convincing. Dawkins argued convincingly that God as Dawkins defined Him did not appear to exist, but that's not the same thing.

No comments: