1 post with tag “philosophy”

Colbert, O’Reilly, and God

Skip forward to about 2:20.

Update: Here is the original video from which Colbert’s clip was taken. More from O’Reilly about us being “lucky.”

It is so plainly obvious how deeply flawed O’Reilly’s reasoning is here, and these are more words than the subject could possibly deserve, but I can’t help but want to address it.

What’s really peculiar about it is that he doesn’t seem to be saying that the creation of the moon can’t be explained by ordinary, mechanical events. I’m sure he’d agree that it’s viable to theorize that a huge asteroid smashed into the earth a couple billion years ago and formed the moon. It has explanatory power, although there is no way to know for certain that that happened, because we can’t observe it directly. And that seems to be his point; it’s one thing for apologists to point to something that can’t be explained in order to suggest that there is a god — “Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is the gravitational constant what it is?” — but here he’s invoking something so trivial, something that can be explained, but whose explanation we can’t verify with absolute certainty, and suggesting that it has the same logical heft.

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