by Myers starts out by describing a visit to the National Gallery in Washington DC where he found himself transfixed by a painting:
The painting is by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, a 17th century Spanish artist, and it’s a portrait of two Gallician women. But now imagine, as I stand there enjoying it, that I’m joined by a fellow art lover — someone who thinks exactly as I do, that this is a beautiful painting well worth savoring. But he has a different idea. This painting is so beautiful that it could not possibly have been created by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo — it could only have come into existence by supernatural means, and he says he knows exactly who painted it and what magic was involved, and he’d like to debate me on the subject.
Do I need to paint the similarity to the situation tonight with a broader brush?
Anyway, the correct answer is obvious to me, and I’m curious to see how this person is going to defend his peculiar position. As a minimal necessity, I expect to hear something about the identity of the mysterious True Painter, and something about the True Painter’s methods, and I would hope quite a bit about epistemology — how did my opponent make his case, where did he learn the Truth of this painting?
In this little parable, I am disappointed, as I expect to be tonight. While insisting that everything had a supernatural cause, he dwells on the physicality of the painting: it’s on canvas, the colors come from complex combinations of organic and inorganic compounds, that scientists can bounce lasers off it and determine the proportions of each element in it spectroscopically.
Wait, I say, you’re making my case for me. The painting is a natural object, made of earthly matter, of compounds arranged in a way that is perfectly compatible with all physical laws.
So then he tells me, look, it’s made of hundreds of thousands of precise tiny brushstrokes, each one contributing to whole. It’s incredibly complex. It can’t have been created by natural means.
And I try to explain that complex objects are generated by natural mechanisms all the time — that something is complex is not evidence that it was spontaneously generated by an invisible spirit. We can look at how paintings are made even now, and see equally complex images created without the aid of metaphysical agents.
His reply is to cast doubt on the existence of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. We don’t know his exact birthday — sometime late in 1617. We don’t know whether he was born in Seville or Pilas. Therefore we should question whether Bartolomé Esteban Murillo even really existed, opening the door to the idea that some other mystical agent actually created the paintings.
Then I will be tempted to reply in kind: but we have his baptismal certificate from 1618! We know the names of his parents (Gaspar and Maria)! We know that he studied under Juan del Castillo, and that he was prolific and left a great many surviving paintings!
That’s the temptation, that I respond by deluging you in kind with more and more details, while failing to address the great big void in the room — that despite postulating a supernatural mechanism, despite calling into doubt the existence of the material cause on the flimsiest of excuses, my critic has not revealed who the True Painter is, how he knows its identity, how it placed all those exquisite brush strokes on the canvas, in fact, no positive evidence at all for his hypothesis.
My little story expresses my frustration with these kinds of events, and tells you what I predict....
Continues here:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/ ... more-22586
