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Readers, you may recall June’s announcement that Pluto had been reclassified from a “dwarf-planet” to a…”plutoid”, a status it shares with Eris, which gave rise to all this confusion in the first place.  (Really.)

A third…non-planet (?) has been granted this dubious honour, and with it, receives a new name: Continue reading »

Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, first published in 1986, was written to counter arguments made in favour of creationism by the eighteenth century theology William Paley’s Natural Theology, published in 1902.

Paley is perhaps best remembered today for his watchmaker analogy, intended as an argument in favour of the existence of an intelligent designer, or god. This was first seriously challenged by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection (the consequence of, or process by which “favourable” traits become prevalent and “unfavourable” traits become rarer), made well known in his Origin of the Species first published in 1859. Dawkins further decimates Paley’s theory, arguing instead for a “blind” watchmaker, as highly complex systems can be produced by a series of small, cumulative – yet naturally selected – steps, rather than relying on a supernatural designer.

If you walk up and down a pebbly beach, you will notice that the pebbles are not arranged at random. The smaller pebbles typically tend to be found in segregated zones running along the length of the beach, the larger ones in different zones or stripes. The pebbles have been sorted, arranged, selected. A tribe living near the shore might wonder at this evidence of sorting or arrangement in the world, and might develop a myth to account for it, perhaps attributing it to a Great Spirit in the sky with a tidy mind and a sense of order. We might give a superior smile at such a superstitious notion, and explain that the arranging was really done by the blind forces of physics, in this case the action of the waves. The waves have no purposes and no intentions, no tidy mind, no mind at all. They just energetically throw pebbles around, and big pebbles and small pebbles respond differently to this treatment so they end up at different levels of the beach. A small amount of order has come out of disorder, and no mind planned it.

Dawkins explains that, of course Continue reading »

There are those (Richard Dawkins among them) who consider certain aspects of human behaviour to be contrary to nature, “unnatural”. Quite frankly, I don’t understand what this means. How could such a thing be possible? What is there that is beyond nature?

With all this talk of what is “natural” and “unnatural” in recent posts we might do well to look at how these words are defined. The Canadian Oxford English Dictionary lists sixteen distinct definitions of the word “natural” with various sub-definitions employed as well. Foremost amongst these oft conflicting definitions, and most relevant to our topic, “natural” is defined as “existing in or caused by nature; not artificial”. Whereas “unnatural”, which lists only four definitions, is first defined as “contrary to nature or the usual course of nature”. Continue reading »

Natural Law appears to be a map that does not correspond to any real territory, but like other Idols it becomes almost “real” when the worshipper stares at it long enough with passionate adoration. Like Catholic statues of Mary, it will even seem to “move” or ‘come alive’.

–Robert Anton Wilson, Natural Law

The late, great cosmic schmuck Robert Anton Wilson published Natural Law in 1987 partially in response to editor Samuel Edward Konkin II’s butchering of an article he wrote for the New Libertarian magazine, and, it seems, as an attempt to try to stem a certain perceived propensity in indulging in misguided line of thought harkening back to a “pre-scientific” era.

Indeed, Wilson makes a careful distinction between “natural law” in an ideological sense versus scientific. He writes: “Aristotle originated and Thomas Aquinas developed the idea of the world made up of ‘entities’ each possessing an indwelling ‘nature’, which can be known by abstract reasoning from abstract definitions.” He distinguishes this from science, noting that “[S]cience has not employed this Aristotelian-Thomist-Cartesian model for over 300 years. Science does not assume ‘natures’ spookily indwelling ‘within’ things, at all, at all [sic]. Science posits functional relations between ‘things’ or events…A so-called natural law in the physical sciences is not a law in the legal sense at all, but a statistical or mathematical generalization from which predictions are deduced…” Continue reading »