William O'Meara (c) Copyright, 1997
Answer the following questions by writing full sentences. If I ask you to discuss an issue, please consider at least two different views of the issue along with your evaluation of the reasoning for the two different views. If I ask you to give your personal response to a question or to state what would be personally meaningful or applicable to you from this material, please be sure to give a full answer rather than a short one
1. What is the thesis of Nogar's first book?
2. What is the thesis of his second book?
3. Why does Nogar say that without accepting God as the source of evolution human action will be neither fully free nor fully intelligent? Explain why you think he said so.
4. What are the two premises and the conclusion of Nogar's argument for God as the source of order in evolution?
5. If the premises are true, does the conclusion follow with necessity, that is, is the argument valid in the logician's sense? Explain.
6. What is the evidence or analysis for the truth of the first premise?
7. What is the key objection to this first premise?
8. How does Nogar answer this objection? Do you agree with his answer? Why or Why not?
9. What is the evidence for the second premise?
10. How does Nogar's argument compare with Kant's summary of the argument for God from order in the world?
11. What argument from Simpson did Nogar accept after he had completed and published his first book?
12. How is this argument from Simpson similar to Kant's key question against the argument from order?
13. Give some details about Nogar's questioning of the human assumption that the world is an order, is a cosmos, whether we investigate the world in astronomy or in subatomic physics.
14. Why does Nogar say that we do not so much need a God who made the world in the beginning and who made it evolve as that we need a God whom people can believe in and trust in their present lives?
15. Why does Dobzhansky reject Aristotle's and Chardin's spiritual explanation by appeal to purpose inherent in the species as an explanation of those activities that seem to have such 'wisdom' in them?
16. When does the lack of the inherent purposefulness in living things become strikingly evident?
17. What is Dobzhansky's main point, and why does he hold it?
18. What is science right about and what wrong about, in Whitehead's view?
19. How does Whitehead attempt to refute the materialist (purposeless) explanation of the behavior of living things?
20. The genetic fallacy is an incorrect method of argument that mitakenly evaluates the last stages of a reality only by what is present at its earliest stage in its origin. How does Whitehead argue that the naturalist explanation of evolution might be committing the genetic fallacy?
21. Which argument of Nogar do you personally prefer, the first one which is preferred by Whitehead (and Chardin) or the second one which is preferred by Dobshansky and the author of the essay "The Watch in the Desert" at the end of the Link given at the very top of the first page, and why do you prefer it. Explain fully.
22. Granted that you have stated which argument you prefer and why you prefer it, what of value can you apply to your understanding of the universe from the other book? Explain fully.
If you have questions, email me at omearawm@jmu.edu