The real alternative to design (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, January 24, 2008, 12:45 (6146 days ago) @ kylie2002

Thank you for this. It is a new thread, and it gets to the very heart of the discussion. Dawkins has summed it up far better than I can (p. 137): "Once the vital ingredient ... some kind of genetic molecule ... is in place, true Darwinian natural selection can follow, and complex life emerges as the eventual consequence. But the spontaneous arising by chance of the first hereditary molecule strikes many as improbable. Maybe it is ... very very improbable, and I shall dwell on this, for it is central to this section of the book." It is also central to my own doubts. - Dawkins uses the "anthropic principle" and statistics to reduce this degree of improbability to a level that he himself finds acceptable. If you also accept it, I can't argue, but that belief has nothing to do with natural selection. I agree with you totally about evolution, and have tried to make it clear in my text that I also regard evolution as a proven fact. My problem lies in the nature of Dawkins' "first hereditary molecule", and in my sections on evolution I have tried (obviously unsuccessfully) to explain why this is not as simple as Dawkins makes it out to be. The thing has to come alive first and then, when it reproduces itself, it has to be capable of all the changes and adaptations that drive evolution. What you call "the most rudimentary detection of light and shade" is an astonishing development. You talk of "myriad accidental improvements" (presumably the mutations that bring about these rudimentary new organs), but accidents are chance events, and once more the implication is that chance can bring about miracles. "Rudimentary" again makes it sound all too simple. Sensitivity to light is a huge advance from total inanimateness. If you tell me that chance could create something that came to life, I might believe it. If you tell me that chance created something that came to life and also reproduced itself, I begin to have my doubts. But if you tell me that chance created something that simultaneously came to life, reproduced itself, and was capable of an infinite variety of changes and adaptations, I flounder. This is why I argue that atheism depends on an initial act of faith ... in the ability of chance to produce this extraordinary "molecule". Natural selection follows ... no problem! But it is Chapter 2, not Chapter 1. - The difficulty that I then come up against is: if I don't believe chance could create such a complex mechanism (not the eye, but the mechanism that gave rise to the eye), I have to consider all the alternatives. And that leads to design. These speculations will be of no interest to anyone who has decided that chance was the prime mover, but I have not, and presumably other agnostics haven't either. The theory of design is also fraught with problems: for instance, you argue that no-one seeking to design the perfect eye would come up with what we have ... but that presupposes the absolute perfection of the designer. I find the whole concept of a perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing God as difficult to believe as that of creative chance. Not believing one thing does not mean believing the opposite. - I do hope this thread will attract more comments, as it is so fundamental. Thank you again for starting it.