Some other professor and I spoke today about the question of evolution and whether or not it is logical to believe in it.
A couple of the philosophy professors said that Occam's razor requires us to conclude that God had nothing to do with the origin of species. (As one of them put it, if you lose one of your socks when you do laundry, you don't have to resort to the "sock monster" to explain it.)
As is so often the case in such conversations, this begs the question. She is assuming that the naturalistic explanation is adequate to explain the origin of species. But that is the very thing to be proved. In the case of the missing sock, between the dryer itself and the possibility of dropping the sock somewhere between the dryer and your dresser, there are plenty of natural explanations for how the sock disappeared.
But this is not the case with evolution. What in our experience would lead us to conclude that after making love for millions of years, the ancestors of apes finally succeeded in giving birth to a human being? What is the evidence that natural processes are capable of producing a diversity of species? She did not say.
Until someone can demonstrate that, Occam's razor does not apply.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
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