Meyer 박사의 새 책을 둘러싼 평가들

지난 포스트에서 Meyer 박사의 새로운 책 Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design 이 아마존 과학부분 탑 10에 선정되었다는 소식을 전한 바 있다. 물론 극단적인 무신론자들로부터 지적설계 관련 서적이 좋은 반응을 불러일으키긴 어려울 거라 예상되지만 모든 무신론자들이 그런 것은 아니다.
 Times online 에서 2009년의 책을 선정한바 있는데, Thomas Nagel이라는 유명한 철학자이자 무신론자가 2009년에 주목할만한 책으로 두 권을 집어둔 것을 눈여겨 봐야할 것이다.

János Kis’s Politics as a Moral Problem (Central European University Press) is a superb study of the problem of dirty hands in politics, particularly democratic politics – the moral dilemmas that politicians face in achieving, maintaining, and exercising power. This is a particularly acute form of the moral problem of ends and means. The book discusses the philosophical background in Machiavelli, Hobbes, Kant, Weber and others, and examines a number of recent examples from European politics. Kis is a philosopher, but his political experience includes negotiating the transfer of power in Hungary in 1989, as leader of the primary dissident party, the Free Democrats.

Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperCollins) is a detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter – something that had to happen before the process of biological evolution could begin. The controversy over Intelligent Design has so far focused mainly on whether the evolution of life since its beginnings can be explained entirely by natural selection and other non-purposive causes. Meyer takes up the prior question of how the immensely complex and exquisitely functional chemical structure of DNA, which cannot be explained by natural selection because it makes natural selection possible, could have originated without an intentional cause. He examines the history and present state of research on non-purposive chemical explanations of the origin of life, and argues that the available evidence offers no prospect of a credible naturalistic alternative to the hypothesis of an intentional cause. Meyer is a Christian, but atheists, and theists who believe God never intervenes in the natural world, will be instructed by his careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem.