Probable, given the background information at the time.
Before Darwin, remember that the only known powerful optimizations processes where sentient beings. Clearly, Nature is the result of an optimization process (it’s not random by a long shot), and a very very powerful one. It’s only natural to think it is sentient as well.
That is, until Darwin showed how a mindless process, very simple at it’s core, can do the work.
I’ve come across this arguments before—I think Dawkins makes it. It shows a certain level of civilised recognition of how you might have another view. But I think there’s also a risk that because we do have Darwin, we’re quick to just accept that he’s the reason why Creation isn’t a good explanation. I actually think Hume deconstructed the argument very well in his Dialogue Concerning Natural Religion.
Explaining complexity through God suffers from various questions
1) what sort of God (Hume suggests a coalition of Gods, warring Gods, a young or old and senile God as possibilities)
2) what other things seem to often lead to complexity (the universe as an organism, essentially)
3) the potential of sheer magnitude of space and time to allow pockets of apparent order to arise
Explaining complexity through God suffers from various questions
Whose answers tend to just be “Poof Magic”. While I do have a problem with “Poof Magic”, I can’t explain it away without quite deep scientific arguments. And “Poof Magic”, while unsatisfactory to any properly curious mind, have no complexity problem.
Now that I think of it, I may have to qualify the argument I made above. I didn’t know about Hume, so maybe the God Hypothesis wasn’t so good even before Newton and Darwin after all. At least assuming the background knowledge available to the best thinkers of the time.
The laypeople, however, may not have had a choice but to believe in some God. I mean, I doubt there was some simple argument they could understand (and believe) at the time. Now, with the miracles of technology, I think it’s much easier.
What exactly do you mean by “good explanation”?
Probable, given the background information at the time.
Before Darwin, remember that the only known powerful optimizations processes where sentient beings. Clearly, Nature is the result of an optimization process (it’s not random by a long shot), and a very very powerful one. It’s only natural to think it is sentient as well.
That is, until Darwin showed how a mindless process, very simple at it’s core, can do the work.
I’ve come across this arguments before—I think Dawkins makes it. It shows a certain level of civilised recognition of how you might have another view. But I think there’s also a risk that because we do have Darwin, we’re quick to just accept that he’s the reason why Creation isn’t a good explanation. I actually think Hume deconstructed the argument very well in his Dialogue Concerning Natural Religion.
Explaining complexity through God suffers from various questions 1) what sort of God (Hume suggests a coalition of Gods, warring Gods, a young or old and senile God as possibilities) 2) what other things seem to often lead to complexity (the universe as an organism, essentially) 3) the potential of sheer magnitude of space and time to allow pockets of apparent order to arise
Whose answers tend to just be “Poof Magic”. While I do have a problem with “Poof Magic”, I can’t explain it away without quite deep scientific arguments. And “Poof Magic”, while unsatisfactory to any properly curious mind, have no complexity problem.
Now that I think of it, I may have to qualify the argument I made above. I didn’t know about Hume, so maybe the God Hypothesis wasn’t so good even before Newton and Darwin after all. At least assuming the background knowledge available to the best thinkers of the time.
The laypeople, however, may not have had a choice but to believe in some God. I mean, I doubt there was some simple argument they could understand (and believe) at the time. Now, with the miracles of technology, I think it’s much easier.