06.23.09
Bashing materialism
Stephen Meyer Launches Signature in the Cell With a Speech at the Heritage Foundation
CSC director Stephen C. Meyer launched his important new book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and Evidence for Intelligent Design, with a speech today at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. In Signature, Dr. Meyer exposes the increasingly evident hopelessness of materialist explanations of life’s origins and makes a fresh, powerful, and seemingly conclusive new scientific argument for intelligent design.
I haven’t read this book, but feel (as usual) some alarm at the wording in this passage.
The problem is not materialism. The difficulty is accounting for the complex natural design in the cell by natural selection. There must be some more complex process.
It is pointless to reject materialism here without good cause. Cells amaze us because of their natural design, but also because of the amazing things that can be done with material objects at nano-scales.
Now there may be good cause for extending the material account with processes perhaps analogous to force fields, as physics has done for centuries, and quibbles are possible as to whether force fields burst asunder from ‘materialism’.
But is it not a very good argument to cavil ‘materialism’. And one reason for that is that, while materialism may prove a too limited container, its opposite is not coherently a spiritual domain, at least not in biology. It is far more likely to be some extended materialism.