Word: proof
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...have not been impressed. The great skeptic was David Hume (1711-76), who scoffed at the design argument because nature is so savage and wasteful that it might have been the work of "some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance." Turned inside out, the proof is really a question: Could this intricate universe have evolved by pure trial and error? The last major philosopher to promote the argument, Britain's F.R. Tennant, wrote in 1934: "Presumably the world is comparable with a single throw of the dice. And common sense is not foolish...
Forsaken by philosophers, the proof was brought up to date last year by James E. Horigan, a Denver lawyer intrigued by scientific theory. In Chance or Design? (Philosophical Library; $13.95) he contends that narrowly antireligious Darwinism ignores the way in which inanimate nature is in harmony with organic evolution. Nor, he asserts, can evolutionary theory possibly explain the rapid emergence of the large brain in the developing human species...
...Ontological Proof. This, the most controversial approach, moves from a mental concept of God to his actual existence. It was originated by Anselm, the 11th century Archbishop of Canterbury who defined God as "a being than which nothing greater can be thought." The Archbishop reasoned that since existence would have to be part of any such perfect and necessary being, this being must actually exist. This is "too good to be true," says one skeptic, and even one of its current defenders admits that it "looks too much like word magic...
...partly defensible. Since then it has been the most debated proof among philosophers...
Ross, a leader in modernizing the thought of medieval scholars, favors the revision of Anselm done by John Duns Scotus (1265-1308) but does some renovation himself. In the forthcoming new edition of his Philosophical Theology (Hackett; $17.50), Ross is bold enough to claim that he has an airtight proof that "remains unscathed" after a decade of scrutiny. Ross does this with his "Principle E" (for explicability), which is virtually inexplicable to the uninitiated. Roughly, it means that it is possible for everything, including God's existence, to be explained, but that God's nonexistence does not admit...