Misrepresenting Darwin (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, September 12, 2009, 14:18 (5550 days ago) @ George Jelliss

George has changed the title of this thread, but I am unwilling to do so, since his title diverts attention from my main point.-George compares the elegance and clarity of human artefacts with the structures of Nature, which he finds "messy, untidy, illogical, inelegant, tangled, in short complex". He regards the latter as "characteristics to be expected of something that has been produced as the result of chance and chaotic process, i.e. has evolved."-I know you hate mechanical analogies, but there is no escaping the fact that Nature's mechanisms work, and we have so far proved unable to emulate them. We can't manufacture life, reproduction, thought, consciousness etc. How do we know what kind of design is necessary in order to produce these phenomena if we can't produce them ourselves? There is simply no point of comparison. All that we know is that living things function, and no matter how messy, untidy, illogical etc. you may find them, all of your adjectives are subjective judgements. The objective truth is that the structures work. If a system works, and you can't fathom out how it came into being, maybe it's your concept of design that is faulty. -I wrote that the theist evolutionist argument was that "the whole process was set in motion by a designer (and perhaps on occasions the designer may have intervened)." You say that such a designer "is not a Designer at all, merely a lighter of the touch-paper, or setter off of avalanches." Then let me be more precise. This concept of a designer entails his/her/its devising the original molecules which were not only able to replicate, but also bore within themselves the potential for adaptation and beneficial, reproducible mutations. This potential was so enormous that eventually it led from relatively simple unconscious organisms to the astonishing complexities that go to make up the human body and mind. The latter process is acknowledged as the path followed by evolution, but for a theist it is simply not credible that those original molecules with their vast potential for change could have come into being by chance. Therefore they must have been designed. Therefore there must have been a designer. -Darwin wrote that he was 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." You say this = Deism not Theism. Fair comment, and I should perhaps have said that evolution is not incompatible with theism or deism. My point was that "over and over again, atheists imply that design and evolution are somehow mutually exclusive", and I also pointed out that "the nature of such a designer is outside the parameters of the argument." A deist God is still a designer.-You quite rightly point out that we have learnt an enormous amount about the evolution of the universe and about the chemical structure of living creatures, and you say all this is part of the "ultimate truth". Again, I should have been more precise. By "ultimate truth" I mean whether there is or is not a designer/God/universal intelligence of some kind. Science has got no nearer to answering this question. All its discoveries could be interpreted as showing how Nature works, or how God works.-You agree that Darwin was an agnostic (you are hardly likely to call him a liar), but "this doesn't mean that modern followers of Darwin's ideas in their modern context have to be agnostics too." Of course it doesn't. Again, the point I was making was that Darwinism should not be associated with atheism, since he himself saw no contradiction between evolution and design. You evidently do, which is why you wrote: "Life is far too complex to have been designed. It could only have evolved." I was merely quoting Darwin in support of my contention that the two theories are compatible.