Peter Hitchens (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, February 21, 2013, 16:32 (4294 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The believer of the Hitchens brothers pokes holes in Darwinism and points out how nastily any criticism is rejected. All of this is the last half of his current blog:-http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/evolution/-HITCHENS: "First, what do these two gentlemen think my position is on the theory of evolution by natural selection? I will re-state it, yet again. It is that I am quite prepared to accept that it may be true, though I should personally be sorry if it turned out to be so as, it its implication is plainly atheistical, and if its truth could be proved, then the truth of atheism could be proved. I believe that is its purpose, and that it is silly to pretend otherwise."-I do sometimes despair. Here is a theist, angrily countering atheist attacks on him, and yet unable to see what Darwin himself made abundantly clear: namely, that evolution is NOT plainly or even implicitly atheistical! It merely removes the religious dogma that God created every living creature separately after its "kind". Instead, the theist can argue that God created the mechanisms which led to every living creature after its "kind". -HITCHENS: It is an elegant and clever explanation for the current state of the realm of nature. But it is a theory. Personally, I have no idea how the realm of nature took its present shape, or how life began, and I don't think anyone else does either.-Darwin's theory that all living creatures are descended from one or a few forms, and that nature determines which forms do and don't survive, fits in with all the evidence we have. In that sense, it explains how nature took its present shape, but it does NOT explain the mechanisms by which earlier forms have been able to develop in so many different ways ... Darwin's gradualistic process of random mutations and subsequent refinements seems highly dubious. Nor does it even attempt to explain how life originated. Atheists can therefore opt for chance, and theists for God, but they can both believe that evolution happened.