I'm sick of hearing in the past few days that Hawking said that there's no role for God since the Universe can be explained by physical laws alone. How is his reasoning different from the following.
Let's suppose there were an experiment where a wad of £20 notes was placed on the ground outside. We observe that every single person who see the notes stoop quickly down, put them in their pocket, and furtively look around. So we can formulate a natural law that all human beings act this way. There are certain patterns to their behaviour which always pertain.
Then a Hawking comes along and says we understand completely why £20 notes, initially lying on the ground, end up in peoples' pockets. It's because of a law which says that when people see a wad of notes they will stoop down and place them in their pockets. There is no need to appeal to any supernatural explanations -- that is there is no need to appeal to peoples' intentions, desires, motivations.
Obviously this reasoning is utterly asinine. But it's *EXACTLY* the same as Hawking's reasoning! (as well as most scientists).
Mostly philosophical topics, especially pertaining to the philosophy of mind.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The Many Fallacies of "The Soul Fallacy"
1. Preliminary I recently finished reading The Soul Fallacy by Julien Musolino for the second time, and I thought I'd pen down some of...

Popular Posts
-
All 29 essays from the 2021 BICS essay contest that have been awarded a prize are now available to download and can be read for free from he...
-
1. Preliminary I recently finished reading The Soul Fallacy by Julien Musolino for the second time, and I thought I'd pen down some of...
-
Note: This response is approximately 13,000 words long. I have a shorter version of approximately 5,000 words that I have called A Review ...
-
Introduction This is the first part of an intended series of posts addressing alleged problems with the concept of reincarnation. Perhaps ...
-
The falsifiability criterion was advanced by Karl Popper to demarcate scientific from non-scientific theories. The idea is that if one has...
-
I read the following article two days ago: Can We Explain Near-Death Experiences? The author concludes that, " NDEs are probably caused...
-
Consciousness is necessarily causally efficacious It is widely believed by scientists and philosophers, and even the scientifically educa...
-
At the outset I need to stress that I specifically have in mind the reductive materialism that has prevailed in the West since the birth of ...
-
As a preliminary, I should point out that I haven't watched this series of programmes, nor have I read the book that the series is based...
-
The following essay is essentially an expanded and updated version of a previous blog post I've written called: Why are we all so convi...
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments must relate to the blog post or they will not be published.