Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

Potential Theistic Explanations 83
be constrained by laws. And, as Sober suggests, appeal to analogies will
not take us very far, since the divine agent is so unlike any other agent with
which we are familiar. But a proposed theistic explanation is constrained
by the presumption of rationality upon which all intentional explanations
rely (3.2.1; Appendix 1.3). It assumes that God will act in a way that is consistent
with his beliefs and desires and that he will act in a way that would
bring about his goal. Just what this means, in the case of a divine agent, is
a question to which I shall return in a moment (5.3).
5.2.2 The Panda’s Thumb
Sober’s neglect of this rationality principle is evident in his criticism of
Stephen Jay Gould’s essay on “the panda’s thumb.” In that essay, Gould
describes his childhood encounter with a panda at Washington Zoo. He
was struck by the panda’s ability to strip the leaves off shoots of bamboo,
apparently with the aid of a fl exible thumb. “This puzzled me,” he
writes, “I had learned that a dexterous, opposable thumb stood among
the hallmarks of human success. We had maintained, even exaggerated,
this important fl exibility of our primate forebears, while most mammals
had sacrifi ced it in specializing their digits.” 18 Then, to his further amazement,
he observed that the panda has fi ve remaining digits. Had the panda
evolved a sixth fi nger? In due course, he discovered that it had not. The
panda’s “thumb” is, in fact, a cobbled together contraption, fashioned by
variation and natural selection from bones and muscles that already existed
in the wrist. It is, as Gould writes, “a somewhat clumsy, but quite workable”
response to a need.
Gould’s point is that arrangements such as this—there are plenty of them
in the natural world—are strong evidence in support of Darwin’s theory of
evolution. As Gould writes,
our textbooks like to illustrate evolution with examples of optimal
design—nearly perfect mimicry of a dead leaf by a butterfl y or of a
poisonous species by a palatable relative. But ideal design is a lousy
argument for evolution, for it mimics the postulated action of an omnipotent
creator. Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof
of evolution—paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a
natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce. No one understood
this better than Darwin himself. 19
I shall refer to this shortly as a “suboptimality argument” against proposed
theistic explanations. What is of interest here is that Elliot Sober
disagrees with this argument.
Gould thinks he knows what God would do if He built pandas, just as
Paley thought he knew what God would do if He built the vertebrate