Jun 11, 2010

Weinert on Naturalism & Evolution

I'll have to finish this post another time; got distracted with Hawking & co.

Reading thru one of my phil of science textbooks on Inference to the Best Explanation & Darwin and such, I find a section which seems particularly non-rigorous. The text hasn't impressed hugely with its earlier account of Copernicus, Galileo and such (described as "the loss of centrality") - it doesn't seem to have taken into account much of the modern work in the history of science such as you'd find here: http://www.amazon.com/Galileo-Other-Myths-Science-Religion/dp/0674033272/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1276255391&sr=8-1-fkmr0, but that's another story.

"To trust in evolutionary theory means to adopt naturalism."

The section in question seems to sloppily slip between methodological and metaphysical naturalism and doesn't bother to justify the 1st, let alone the 2nd; it also conflates different hypotheses of "design" when it suits and ignores the quote from Darwin it gives in a footnote on the same page, about the relative plausibility of teleological evolutionary accounts - but I'll tell you more about it soon.

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