Evolution

I became an evolutionist last week. I can't help it - sorry. The logic is so compelling.

See, I was watching this program on Channel 4 where they autopsied some kind of giant whale. And Richard Dawkins explained with such charm how it got to be the way it is. Here it is - at the moment.

The way it happened, said Richard, is that having come out of the sea and with a great deal of difficulty adapted itself to the land, it decided to go back into the sea. But the fur it had evolved on the land isn't a very good insulator in deep water, so it (or rather, they) swapped the fur for blubber. That's what he said. Swapped it.

And that did it for us. Suddenly, a mental picture formed of all these great bear-like creatures lining up to swap their fur for blubber, and everything slotted into place. It's so obvious. Light dawned. Let there be ligh -- oh, no, sorry; that's the Other Side. The penny dropped. It really did happen.

Yeah, right.

On the other hand....

Not all philosophers are the same, of course - any more than all preachers, or all theologians. You'll find here the beginnings of Paul Helm on why Wright is wrong. Good stuff.

The Trouble with Philosophers

Partly because of a debate elsewhere on the blogosphere, I've started to re-read Bryan Magee's fascinating 'Confessions of a Philosopher'. Here's a passage that I think says something about 'the trouble with philosophers':

All the problems that plagued me were questions about the situation in which I immediately found myself. Some of them were questions about me, some were questions about the world around me, but all of them were practical questions, which is to say questions about how things are, to which something or other had to constitute a true answer, or so it seemed to me. To none of these questions would the existence of God have constituted an answer, and I never felt any inclination, no matter as how young a child, to believe in one. There is a story that G.E. Moore, when asked why he had never addressed himself to questions about God, replied that he had never seen any reason for taking such questions seriously, and the same applied in those days to me. The postulation of a God seemed to me a cop-out, a refusal to take serious problems seriously; a facile, groundless and above all evasive response to deeply distrubing difficulties: it welcomed the self-comforting delusion that we know what we do not know, and have answers that we do not have, thereby denying the true mysteriousness, indeed miraculousness, of what is...'

Well, where do we start? We could notice that he is, at the time, between nine and twelve years old, and since he was 'in a family in which religion was never mentioned', a little humility about the possibility of having missed something might be a good thing.

But look how he sees the existence of God: a theoretical thing, that might answer some problem, or be a cop-out as far as answers to the problems are concerned. He's missing completely the possibility that God might be an objective reality - and that, if he is, it's probably wise to know it. He thinks he's answering life's problems; or at least looking for them. But he's ignoring the elephant in the room because in his opinion it's no help at all. Sadly, Magee goes on to speak of the daily terror that his philosophic speculations brought: 'From that day on I wrestled with demons for at least a part of every day of my life...'

That's the trouble with philosophers - well, some of them. They think they're dealing with the big things and all they're doing is ignoring the big things in favour of academic games...