New Books In Science

The story goes: you are walking in the woods and see a wrist-watch on the ground; you don’t know how it got there or why it has come to be abandoned here, but you can surmise that someone somewhere designed and made it due to its complexity. This is the basic premise of the argument for intelligent design, mobilized by the religious in their efforts to demonstrate evidence for their belief in a divine creator. So how does this relatively simple story translate into a more fully fleshed out philosophy for understanding our world and universe, and how does that philosophy stand up to mathematical scrutiny? This is what Professor Elliott Sober works to elaborate in his new book The Design Argument, which is a monograph in Cambridge University Press’s series “Elements in the Philosophy of Religion.” Sober’s book analyzes the various forms that design arguments for the existence of God can take and focuses primarily on two of these. The first is known as biological creationism and concerns the complex adaptive fea