As William Dembski has pointed out, there are three basic types of explanations we can give for any phenomenon, E:<\/p>\n
In many cases, one of these types of explanations will strike us as the overwhelmingly most plausible type of explanation.<\/p>\n
For example, suppose I pick up a rock, hold it suspended in midair, and let go. The rock falls and lands with a thud. Why? However we answer that, I’m confident that almost everyone would hazard a lawlike explanation as their best guess. Today we’d propose the law of gravity. Earlier ages would have proposed that rocks have a natural tendency to move toward the center of the universe. We probably wouldn’t even consider appealing to chance or design in this case–although there’s no strictly logical reason why we couldn’t. There’s no logical contradiction, after all, in supposing that the rock’s falling was simply coincidental and that it could just as easily have gone upwards, sideways, or hung suspended in midair. Nor is there any contradiction in supposing that the rock fell because some invisible agent or spirit made it fall. But few would take such proposals seriously, and rightly so.<\/p>\n
Contrast this with Paley’s example of stumbling across a watch and noticing that it contains an intricate assembly of parts apparently working together toward a purpose, namely, measuring hours, minutues, and seconds. As Paley points out, a design type of explanation jumps right out at us, whereas law and chance type explanations strike us as woefully implausible. Again, strict logic does not force a design explanation on us. We could without contradiction suppose there to be some, perhaps very complex, natural law of watch formation or chalk the emergence of a watch up to the chance interplay of natural forces. But few would take such proposals seriously, and rightly so.<\/p>\n
So when it comes to determining the best explanation for E, we always have a choice between three different types of answers–law, chance, or design–a choice that logic alone cannot settle for us. Other explanatory considerations must be brought in to assess plausibility, considerations like simplicity and coherence with existing background knowledge. Hence, determining whether to appeal to chance, law, or design is generally a complex matter that needs to be judged on a case-by-case basis. And there’s no a priori<\/span> guarantee that all rational and informed persons will arrive at the same determination.<\/p>\n There’s another complicating issue as well. How are these three types of explanation related to each other? Considerations of parsimony encourage us to try and reduce one or more of these types of explanation to the others, and there are several proposals on how this might be done.<\/p>\n For example, metaphysical materialism holds that design can be reductively explained in terms of either law or chance or some combination of law and chance. There is some divergence of opinion here. On the one hand, it used to be commonly thought that everything could be reduced to law. Laplace, for example, famously claimed that given a complete understanding of the laws of nature and the state of the world at a given time, he could calculate with complete precision the state of the world at any other time. Chance, on the this view, is merely a cloak for our ignorance of the real causes of things. On the other hand, Charles Peirce at one point argued that design and law could be reduced to chance, with natural laws having evolved over countless eons from a primeval chaos.<\/p>\n Theistic and idealistic worldviews, on the other hand, usually try to reduce law and chance to design. Thus, why do we have the natural laws that we do? God designed the world that way. What is chance? Simply our ignorance of the real causes of things, whether law or design. Not every theist or idealist views chance as completely epistemological, however. And there are different views as to whether everything can be reduced to one designer or not. Theistic determinists like Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, hold that there is really only one designer, namely God, who has meticulously prescripted everything that comes to pass. Most theists, however, believe that God has granted a measure of free will to his creatures, such that many events cannot be fully explained without appealing to two or more designers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As William Dembski has pointed out, there are three basic types of explanations we can give for any phenomenon, E: Law: We can posit some nomological regularity L which allows us to predict E as a (probable) consequence of antecedent conditions. Chance: We can say that E had no systematic cause but was simply a\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}