John Hoopes of the University of Kansas claims to be a scientist, but it is clear to me that he’s no scientist! How do I know? Because he has concluded that some intelligent designer is responsible for producing 300 of these:
Surely he knows scientists cannot appeal to intelligent agency as an explanation for natural phenomenon. Besides, there is no need to appeal to any intelligent designer. Natural processes such as wind and water erosion are fully capable of producing the spherical shape of these rocks over billions of years. To appeal to some “rock-designer-of-the-gaps” is to give up on science. Currently, we may not know the exact pathway by which nature produced these spherical rocks, but given the past successes of science, I am sure we will discover it in the near future.
If these rocks are the products of some intelligent designer as Hoopes claims, then let him tell us who designed the designer. Guess what, he doesn’t know! Clearly, then, these rocks can’t be designed.
A few weeks ago the famed atheist and philosopher of science, Michael Ruse, wrote a response in the Guardian to the question, What can Darwin teach us about morality? Ruse’s multifaceted answer is accurate, intriguing, and at times, incoherent – but always and thoroughly enlightening about where atheistic and evolutionary thought leads.
Ruse admits that without God “there are no grounds whatsoever for being good.” Morality, he says, is just a matter of emotion and personal taste on the same level as “liking ice cream and sex and hating toothache and marking student papers.” But he’s quick to point out that just because there are no grounds for being good, it doesn’t mean we should be bad. While this is true insofar as it goes, it fails to answer the more important question: Why – in the absence of a moral law giver, and thus in the absence of any objective moral law – should anyone behave in ways traditionally thought to be “good” if and when it is in their own self-interest to do otherwise? In the name of what should they deny their own impulses? In the name of the Grand Sez Who?
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Thinking to Believe 