Is that true? If we went back in time to before Darwin and gave a not-already-religious person (if we could find one) a thorough rationality lesson — enough to skillfully weigh the probabilities of competing hypotheses (including enough about cognitive science to know why intelligence and intentionality are not black boxes, must carry serious complexity penalties, and need to make specific advance predictions instead of just being invoked as “God wills it” retroactively about only the things that do happen), but not quite enough that they’d end up just inventing the theory of evolution themselves — wouldn’t they conclude, even in the absence of any specific alternatives, that design was a non-explanation, a mysterious answer to a mysterious question? And even imagining that we managed to come up with a technical model of an intelligent designer, specifying in advance the structure of its mind and its goal system, could it actually compress the pre-Darwin knowledge about the natural world more than slightly?
Dawkins actually brings this up in The Blind Watchmaker (page 6 in my copy). Hume is given as the example of someone who said “I don’t have an answer” before Darwin, and Dawkins describes it as such:
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: ‘I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn’t a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.’ I can’t help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. I like to think that Hume would agree, but some of his writings suggest that he underestimated the complexity and beauty of biological design.”
Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion are definitely worth a read. And I think that Dawkins has it right: Hume really wanted a naturalistic explanation of apparent design in nature, and expected that such an explanation might be possible (even to the point of offering some tentative speculations), but he was honest enough to admit that he didn’t have an explanation at hand.
Is that true? If we went back in time to before Darwin and gave a not-already-religious person (if we could find one) a thorough rationality lesson — enough to skillfully weigh the probabilities of competing hypotheses (including enough about cognitive science to know why intelligence and intentionality are not black boxes, must carry serious complexity penalties, and need to make specific advance predictions instead of just being invoked as “God wills it” retroactively about only the things that do happen), but not quite enough that they’d end up just inventing the theory of evolution themselves — wouldn’t they conclude, even in the absence of any specific alternatives, that design was a non-explanation, a mysterious answer to a mysterious question? And even imagining that we managed to come up with a technical model of an intelligent designer, specifying in advance the structure of its mind and its goal system, could it actually compress the pre-Darwin knowledge about the natural world more than slightly?
Dawkins actually brings this up in The Blind Watchmaker (page 6 in my copy). Hume is given as the example of someone who said “I don’t have an answer” before Darwin, and Dawkins describes it as such:
Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion are definitely worth a read. And I think that Dawkins has it right: Hume really wanted a naturalistic explanation of apparent design in nature, and expected that such an explanation might be possible (even to the point of offering some tentative speculations), but he was honest enough to admit that he didn’t have an explanation at hand.
As pointed out below, Hume is a good counterexample to my thesis above.