Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Houston Craighead's defense of the AFR

I'm not sure I'm happy with this one, but it is interesting.

4 comments:

  1. For anyone interested, Craighead's paper here is one of two published in that issue of Encounter. The other is
    H. Ross Cole's "C.S.Lewis' Teleological Argument: A Response" Encounter 1998(58), 291-6.

    Steve

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have not seen the Cole paper. What line does he take?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Despite it's title, the Cole paper isn't a response to Craighead in the sense of a critique of him. It is, in fact, an attempt to extend the arguments further. Cole uses quotes from Paul Davies' "The Mind of God" (and others of Davies' books) to argue that evolution not only can't explain the success of metaphysical reasoning, there are other mental capacities it can't explain either ... mathematical genuis and insight, musical ability and other things.

    Craighead extends Lewis's argument into an argument for God's benevolence. Ross thinks it can also be extended into an argument for Divine Conciousness, though his argument on that front is disappointingly brief.

    Craighead's paper is definitely the more interesting of the two, but the Davies references supplied by Cole make interesting reading.

    Steve

    ReplyDelete