Question

Hello Rabbi,
In William James's book Pragmatism (page 102 in the Hebrew translation), I came across a paragraph that seems to me to contain the central argument of your book Does God Play Dice.
Is that correct? And if so, maybe it would be worthwhile to give him credit for it? (I don't recall you mentioning him.)
With great appreciation,
Phil
 
Attached is the quotation:
"Darwin opened our eyes to the way random events can create results that are 'adapted' to one another, if only they are given enough time to accumulate. He showed us how wasteful nature is when it brings about the formation of results that are destroyed because they are not adapted. He also emphasized the large number of cases of adaptation which, if they had been planned, would actually point to an evil rather than a good designer. Here everything depends on one's point of view. From the perspective of the worms under the bark of the tree, the excellent adaptation of the woodpecker's organ for catching them could certainly support an argument proving the existence of a satanic designer. Meanwhile, theologians have been laboring over attempts to adopt the Darwinian facts on the one hand and still interpret them as embodying divine intention on the other. Once it was a question of intention versus mechanism, of either this or that: as though we said, 'Clearly my shoes are designed to fit my feet, therefore they cannot have been made by machines.' We know that both are true: they were made by machines that were themselves designed to fit shoes to feet. Theology need only similarly understand God's designs. Just as the aim of a football team is not only to score a goal (otherwise it would simply sneak in at night and put the ball there), but to score it given a fixed mechanism of conditions—the rules of the game and the opposing team—so God's aim is not only, let us say, to create man and save him, but to do so solely through the operation of the mighty mechanism of nature. Without nature's amazing laws and opposing forces, the creation of man and bringing him to perfection would presumably have been achievements too trivial for God to stand behind their design."