Misrepresenting Darwin (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, September 11, 2009, 08:31 (5362 days ago)

George commented under "Nature's IQ" that life "is far too complex to have been designed. It could only have evolved."-Why complexity should preclude design I really don't know. If anything, I would reason the reverse, but the remark set me thinking about this constant misrepresentation of evolution and indeed of Darwin. Over and over again, atheists imply that design and evolution are somehow mutually exclusive, so that theists are automatically seen as anti-science. This is true of fundamentalists, but one should not confine rational discussion to knocking down the fundamentalists. Nor, for that matter, should one equate querying aspects of Darwin's theory with rejection of the whole. The fact is that evolution is NOT incompatible with the concept of design, and hence with theism. The theist evolutionist argument is that the whole process was set in motion by a designer (and perhaps on occasions the designer may have intervened). The nature of such a designer is outside the parameters of the argument, which is based on the difficulty of attributing such complexity to chance. -This was also Darwin's point, and he knew a thing or two about evolution. In his autobiography (1876), for instance, he says that when writing The Origin, he had a strong conviction of God's existence because of "the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man and his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look at a First Cause having an intelligent mind ... some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist." So much for design versus evolution.-How might it all work? He wrote the following to Asa Gray (1860): "I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance." However, he continues: "Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton."-There is always a point at which the atheist will remark that science has moved on since Darwin, and we now know a vast amount more than he did, e.g. about genetics. This is obviously true, but the progress of science has not taken us any further in the quest for the ultimate truth about life's origins. It is a distortion of Darwinism to claim that it has, and to associate it and him with atheism. He denied ever having been an atheist, and generally referred to himself as an agnostic. As always, though, he was scrupulously fair in his appraisal of the difficulties (both with his theory and with the question of God's existence). Here is an extract from a letter that was written in 1873 but is just as relevant today:-"I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide. I am aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came and how it arose. Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world. I am, also, induced to defer to a certain extent to the judgment of the many able men who have fully believed in God; but here again I see how poor an argument this is. The safest conclusion seems to be that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect; but man can do his duty."-I find the last remark intriguingly cryptic, but would like to think that our duty entails continuing the quest even though the ultimate truth may be beyond our reach. Combine these quotes, and I think you have as clear a summary of the agnostic's position as you could wish for. Where, though, is the conflict between evolution and design?