Category Archives: Science

The alternative to emergence as an explanation for life, if you exclude more than astronomically-remote mere chance, is teleology. I always remember my introduction to the word “teleology”, which was in an evolutionary context. Well it wasn’t, really, but it was in the mouth of the only one of my medical teachers who took evolution at all seriously.

I’ve recently had a brief exchange on Uncommon Descent with Elizabeth Liddle over emergence. She mentioned free-will as an emergent property of the brain, though she subsequently admitted she doesn’t like the term and prefers to think in terms of systems. My argument was (and is) that, in such a context, the word is essentially meaningless. I want to extend the argument here to the larger area of life in general.

When I reviewed Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell  I was a year late commenting on what others had said about it, and the book came out a year before that. Not wishing to sully my track record, I’m over two centuries late in reviewing William Paley’s Natural Theology. I read the book because it’s almost universally compared (unfavourably) with Origin of Species, and even opponents of Darwinian evolution speak mainly of its weaknesses. I suspected that a book apparently so mistaken, which nevertheless was a bestseller throughout the nineteenth century, had probably been misrepresented. Having read Origin of Species recently, I thought it was an opportune time for comparison.

I remember a cartoon in Punch many years ago (sadly all the cartoons in Punch were many years ago now), in which a sudden new display of stars in the night sky spelled out, in evenly spaced Roman capitals, “GOD IS DEAD”. The caption underneath read, “Official Humanist Miracle Declared.”