Category Archives: Philosophy

One of the minor ongoing spats in the origins debate is the objection of some analytical Neo-Aristotelians like Ed Feser to the idea that one can perceive divine design in nature, or anywhere else, come to that. My own reaction to this is here, and I’ve also referred to another dissenting Aquinas scholar, Logan Paul Gage, an essay by whom is here. There are, in other words, objections to such ideas within the writings of Aquinas himself.

In yesterday’s post I recounted some of the panoply of thinkers who have propounded the argument from design down the centuries. At the beginning I asked at what point this respectable enterprise had become “bad science and bad theology”. The usual answer would seem to be that Darwin confronted William Paley and overcame.

In my last post I mentioned in passing YEC thinker Dr Arthur Jones, who has commented here in the past and who is remarkable in being one of the only people ever to get a PhD in evolutionary biology with original research leading to anti-evolutionary conclusions. The link was intended as an introduction to him, but the essay so linked is educational in its own right. It shows a remarkable degree of perception on the stuff I discussed in the last post, given that it was written back in 1970, even before his PhD, and only eight years after Kuhn published his book on paradigm shifts in science.