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The probabilistic teleological argument exploits the idea that it is extremely improbable that the laws of the universe should be so balanced as to permit the development of life unless we adop the hypothesis that these laws were fixed by a creator who desired the development of life. The argument, however, faces the same kind of objection as the one we brought against the cosmological argument in the previous chapter: it takes a certain concept out of a context in which it is obviously applicable, and applies it to a context in which that concept is not applicable. In the case of the cosmological argument, the crucial concept is that of causation; in the case of the teleological argument, it is statistical probability. Neither argument carries conviction because we can plausibly deny that the concept in question can be extended to cover extraordinary contexts.

Robin Le Poidevin, Arguing for Atheism, (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 57.

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« Help Shelley pay for her education—she's a poor graduate student | Main | Ever have that bloated feeling? »

Cephalopod Awareness Day Alert #3

Category: CephalopodsOrganisms
Posted on: October 8, 2007 4:50 PM, by PZ Myers

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More cephalopods are being celebrated everywhere. Send me more!

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Comments

#1

Posted by: dwarf zebu | October 8, 2007 5:22 PM

Did anyone see the weird and questionable special on Animal Planet last night called "The Future's Wild"?

It featured huge walking land squid with intelligent arboreal octopi as the squid's favorite prey on an earth projected 200 million years into the future.

#2

Posted by: palau | October 8, 2007 5:26 PM

In all the time I've been reading Pharyngula, lurking and commenting we've had a squid archive on our blog, but you've never come over. I feel spurned, I tell you, spurned!

Well, here's the welcome mat.

Granted there's only ten posts in there now, but there's 5 years' worth of squid posts waiting to be tagged since we shifted to Wordpress. I'll do it if I think they'll get read.

#3

Posted by: palau | October 8, 2007 5:30 PM

Bah... remember to check what's on the clipboard before pasting.

The correct link is here. I really am crap at this blogwhoring thing.

#4

Posted by: Diego | October 8, 2007 5:44 PM

Hurray for Cephalopod Day!!

I love the octopus tattoo.

I am tempted to send a photo of the octopus I drew (with a regular pen not as a tattoo) on a friend's skin for her "Octopussy" costume last year, but the resolution from her camera is pretty poor. If only I'd taken some shots with my camera!

#5

Posted by: Derek K. Miller | October 8, 2007 6:11 PM

On this Canadian Thanksgiving, let's me thankful for our "head foot" friends. Like us, cephalopods are big-brained, smart, agile, and dextrous, but otherwise they are so *unlike* us that if they didn't exist, we might not be able to imagine them.

#6

Posted by: The_Stone | October 8, 2007 6:15 PM

Its true, I am meat-swaddled. hahahaha.

#7

Posted by: Carlie | October 8, 2007 6:30 PM

The overfishing is almost inevitable - they're predators, so there are fewer of them to begin with, and we're taking away a lot of their food sources as well.

#8

Posted by: Mena | October 8, 2007 6:56 PM

dwarf zebu, I saw something like that a few years ago, maybe the footage has been recycled. I remember thinking that the producers couldn't seem to be able to imagine new critters so they had to go with the old ones. Were they literally swinging from the trees? That was kind of funny, actually. The morphology wouldn't change to fit the environment in 200 million years, they would just be able to somehow live on land. I can see that some descendant of a modern cephalopod species could someday be able deal with a land environment but it would be a totally different looking animal.

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