The Gap?

Stephen Hawking, the well-known Cambridge scientist, recently declared that ‘philosophy is dead’ and that the big questions which people have always asked (eg What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from?) are now to be answered by science. What he failed to notice was that his statement ‘philosophy is dead’ is not a conclusion, but a philosophical claim! No-one can escape philosophy. It is essentially the exercise of examining rationally the nature and structure of the reality of the world, physical and mental, in which we live. To deny the validity of philosophy in this area is to deny the gap between our observations and the means by which we interpret them. A key aspect of Intelligent Design is the philosophical legitimacy of making a design inference from empirical evidence in Nature and not being limited by the assertion that nothing can exist beyond the physical.