BORN TO DIE ?

(Darwin, Evolution, “Intelligent Design” – Creationism in contemporary garb – are, with the quasi-universal belief in an “after-life”, subjects of major importance in a Blog like this.  We will in coming months devote a whole series of reflections to the latter, but for the nonce the subject is “I.D.”  Here’s an appetizer.)

If it is hard to believe that at a given moment in time (which had to be … created), SomeBody – or rather, Some No-Body – after an eternity of no-thing-ness, set in motion, around fourteen billion years ago, the process that would result in our galaxy and the puny, mortal beings who inhabit an infinitesimal part of it, it is even harder to believe in a God who predestined the said galaxy to disintegrate and disappear a mere five billion years from now, whether or not its human inhabitants will have survived that long.  Is this “Intelligent Design” ?

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

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DID YOU , PERCHANCE , SAY . . . “RANDOM” ?

Non-atheists, when they are not using what Richard Dawkins calls “the Argument from Personal Incredulity” (“Surely you don’t expect me to believe THAT !”), often use half-truths, rhetoric in its pejorative sense, and inaccurate, unnuanced language, to defend their opposition to Darwinian evolution and Natural Selection, and their firm belief in a Creator, an Intelligent Designer.  They seem to think that evolutionists attribute evolution to “chance” alone, and define it as a “random” process.

Like William Paley, who so impressed Darwin during his studies of Theology at Cambridge, they believe that, as the Archdeacon wrote in his “Natural Theology” (1802) :  “The marks of design are too strong to be gotten over.  Design must have had a designer.  That designer must have been a person.  That designer is God” (quoted by Richard Keynes in his introduction to “On the Origin of Species” (first edition, Folio, London, fifth printing 2008, pp. xiv and xv).

They may not know that Dawkins, author of “The God Delusion” but also of “The Blind Watchmaker” (B.W.) (originally published in 1986, reprinted by Folio, 2008), which is his answer to Paley and his famous watchmaker argument, and, of course, to contemporary fundamentalist creationists and advocates of “Intelligent Design”, defines Natural Selection as “the Blind Watchmaker, blind, because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view” (p. 21).  But they may be surprised to learn that the Oxford don, brilliant biologist and militant evolutionist and atheist, readily admits that “living things are too improbable and too beautifully ‘designed’ (the inverted commas are Dawkins’) to have come into existence by chance”.  The rest of the paragraph deserves to be quoted in full :

“How, then, did they come into existence ?  The answer is by gradual, step-by-step transformations from simple beginnings, from primordial entities sufficiently simple to have come into existence by chance.  Each successive change in the gradual evolutionary process was simple enough, relative to its predecessor (Dawkins’ italics), to have arisen by chance.  But the whole sequence of cumulative steps constitutes anything but a chance process, when you consider the complexity of the final end-product relative to the original starting-point.  The cumulative process is directed by  NON-RANDOM  SURVIVAL (my capitals).  The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the power of this cumulative selection (Dawkins’ italics) as a fundamentally non-random process.”

Darwin did write that “this Universe is the result of blind chance”, but he immediately added “and of necessity”.  This is the difference between what Dawkins calls “single-step selection” and “cumulative selection” (B.W. p. 47)  —  chance, tiny changes, followed over millions of years by necessary, non-random survival through Natural Selection.

Dawkins’s book deserves reading by anyone seriously searching for the truth and interested in discovering the underpinnings and the implications of Evolution.  Professor Dawkins will, however (I hope), allow us just one more quotation from the final pages of B.W. p. 330 :

“The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.  Whatever is the explanation for life, therefore, it cannot be chance.  The true explanation for the existence of life must embody the very antithesis of chance.  The antithesis of chance is  NON-RANDOM  SURVIVAL, properly understood.  Non-random survival, improperly understood, is not the antithesis of chance; it is chance itself.  There is a continuum connecting these two extremes, and it is the continuum from single-step selection to cumulative selection.  Single-step selection is just another way of saying pure chance.  This is what I mean by non-random selection improperly understood.  Cumulative Selection (his italics), by slow and gradual degrees, is the explanation, the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed, for the existence of life’s complex design”.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

 

A FISH STORY

We used to be fish.  We have come a long way since then.  We ended up on land, developed legs and feet, learned eventually to stand up, to waddle and to walk.

If you have ever wondered about your literally weak knees and that infernal back-ache, scientists (like Neil Shubin, “This Old Body”, Scientific American, January 2009) tell us that the major bones in our knees and backs developed in the aquatic creatures that were our ancestors hundreds of millions of years ago.  No wonder that many of us tear cartilage in our knees and have had to bear pain in our backs ever since we former horizontal fish went vertical.  Maybe this is why some of us feel more comfortable swimming than jogging.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

COULD WE BE WRONG ?

Let’s admit, for a moment, the Archdeacon’s argument.  William Paley will continue to impress, as he did initially Darwin himself, and countless others over the last two centuries, with his bit about watches and watchmakers, design and a Divine Designer.  It is, indeed, pretty hard to believe, as I look at my garden in the twilight and the magnificent sky above it, that all this happened by chance, that everything, including life, just evolved, without any Intelligent Design or purpose.  How many atheists like me are tempted by the flesh-pots of biblical, or at least religious, certitudes ?  Science, everyone agrees (for once), cannot explain the meaning of human existence.  This is the readily assumed rôle of religion(s).  The short-cut is tempting.  Unless you have checked in your brain at the cloak-room, it is not hard to recognize that evolutionists, not to say atheists, are asking a lot in expecting believers to admit that it all just happened.  This, of course, is why the debate will continue.  Darwin was right.  But his opponents have millions of people (not to say the generous Templeton Foundation, as well as Harun Yahya, pseudonymn of the wealthy Turkish Muslim preacher, Adnan Oktar, for whom ” the theses of Darwin explain both Nazism and terrorism”, and his widely distributed “Atlas of Creation”) behind them, who continue to refuse Darwin’s evidence, corroborated by paleontology and especially by the scientific data of contemporary genetics (the fact that birds and fish, in quite different separate parts of the world, share the same genes, should surely give pause for thought to the non-atheist who refuses to recognize the common ancestry of living beings).    They want to believe, and will continue to believe, in an Intelligent Designer.  “Up the long ladder and down the short rope.  God bless Paley and God bless the Pope, and if that doesn’t do, we’ll tear ’em in two and send ’em to Hell, Charles Darwin and crew !” (with apologies to the Clancy Brothers in Carnegie Hall).

It’s an uphill battle, proposing to people comfortable with their religious certitudes, a vision of life that has no purpose, an end but no finality.  Nevertheless I will continue to invite them to recognize and accept the reality.  “From dust we came, and unto dust we shall return”.  More to the point, “from nothing we came and to nothing we shall return”.  I am convinced of this, but I can appreciate why many refuse to agree with me.  They think they are right.  I think – no, I know – they are wrong.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

POST 900 ! ” POINTLESSNESS “

Most men are attracted by women’s breasts, but we men never wonder about our own.

Apparenty human mammals are all conceived partially female, but 50% of us develop a penis and testicles while retaining useless breasts in the form of more or less impressive pectoral majors.  We males are examples of evolution’s muddling and its hit-and-miss efforts to assure survival, even if it involved giving half of humankind breasts we don’t need and can’t use.

An intelligent God surely would never have made such a mistake.  But stupid, mindless evolution could and did.

Gentlemen, next time you take a shower, admire the living proof of evolution in your flat, pointless paps.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

 

Comments on the post “The Personal Evolution of Charles Darwin”

For reasons unknown and beyond my control, just at the moment I was about to publish that post, I lost Internet connection.  When connection was restored, I found the “Comments Off” notification.  So I invented this way of giving you a chance to speak your mind.  Post your comments here !

THE PERSONAL EVOLUTION OF CHARLES DARWIN

I never studied Theology at Cambridge.  Darwin did.  I did mine in Melbourne and Paris.  He later became an agnostic.  I went the whole hog and became an atheist.

You have to have a truly thick hide, coupled with a seriously swollen head, to compare yourself with Darwin.  But the comparison stops there.  It may however be useful, in my attempt to explain, if not justify, my itinerary from Catholicism to atheism, to reflect for a moment on that of Darwin from Christian faith to agnosticism.

Charles bottled up his convictions for more than twenty years after the Beagle expedition.  He felt that to reveal his discoveries, his new certitudes, would be the equivalent of “confessing to murder”.  “Chaplain of the Devil”, as he once described himself, he was particularly conscious of the effect on his wife, Emma, whom he loved dearly, of his loss of Christian faith and his new-found convictions about Natural Selection and a universe into which “life” – as he added in the second edition of “On the Origin of Species” – “with its numerous powers, had been breathed by the Creator in a single or several forms”.  It is hard to believe that Darwin really meant what this … afterthought would imply.  Had he been “forced” to soften the blow ?  Be that as it may, “God”, “the Creator”, for Darwin, had no part in evolution and in what, in the 5th edition, he calls “the survival of the fittest”.

To the end, he would literally cry, with real tears, over the pain which his scientific certitudes and his abandonment of the Christian faith caused his devout wife : “I was led gradually to lose my faith in a … divine revelation”;  “I did not want to abandon my belief”.  Fortunately for mankind, he nonetheless published “On the Origin of Species”.  Here was a man.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

 

EYES IN THE BACK OF MY HEAD ?

Opponents and proponents of Evolution have for years debated the conclusions that can be drawn from the complexity of animal and human eyes.  Long before Darwin, Leibnitz attacked Descartes and Spinoza, whom he described as “philosophers who imagine that the eye has been created to see”.  Henri Atlan, contemporary opponent of Intelligent Design and eloquent defender of the concept of nature’s “self-organization”, demolishes the metaphor – for it is only that – of our being “programmed” or “wired” : “Nature, in reality, does not function with programs; it is moved, which is to say, pushed, by efficient causes, not drawn forward by final causes” (“Le Monde s’est-il Créé Tout Seul ?”, collective work, Ed. Albin Michel, Paris, 2008, p.175; reference to the eye, p.181).

I still have at least one thing in common with St Francis of Assisi : we both like birds.  Saw one this morning, a common pigeon, in the guttering of my house, needing to drink but obviously wondering whether it was safe to lower its head, and thereby not be able to keep a watch out for possible predators (including me).  I literally looked him in the eye, without budging a limb or a muscle.  His eyes, strategically situated on the side of his head – unlike ours, stuck in front, with little lateral vision and zero rear vision – were able to watch out for danger from any direction.  Why don’t we have eyes in the back, or better, on the sides of our heads ?  (At least our ears are in the right place, to allow us to wear glasses).

Apparently Evolution got just so far, and settled for frontal vision.  Frankly (what else ?), I would have preferred a broader view.  You never know who or what is behind you, or even over there, on your right or on your left.  My bet is that, given enough time over the next – our last … – five billion years which we have left, Evolution will correct our limited vision.

Would that that would include not just increased physical visual acuity, but the ability to see that nature is self-organized and in no way the product of so-called Intelligent Design.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

INTELLIGENT DESIGN OR PROGRESSIVE ADAPTATION ?

We … naturally select one or the other.  But the possibility of choice did not exist just a century and a half ago.  The year we call 1859 could be designated 1 A.D. (Anno Darwini).  Before “The Origin of Species”, it was self-evident to the vast majority of humankind that God had conceived and created each species separately.  In spite of the Darwinian thesis (today no longer a theory), the vast majority still considers creation the work of an intelligent divine Designer.

The current end-products of three billion years of evolution, including you and me (although, as a famous American baseball coach said, “It ain’t over till it’s finished”) are, however, the result not of any design, but of multiple hits and misses.  François Jacob (op.cit. p. 58) describes Natural Selection as “a mixture of chance and competition in reproduction”.  He uses a French word, difficult to translate but easy to understand, in speaking of evolution as a “bricolage”.  A “bricoleur” is not an engineer but a handyman, a do-it-yourselfer, given to fixing and making things by patching disparate elements together.  He is the sort of person who finds it difficult to throw anything away.  “You never know, it may come in handy some day”.  His garage is a bric-a-brac (even we use the French word).  It may look like junk, but, sure enough, one day he finds a use for some of it, in ways he could never have foreseen.  Jacob borrows an example from Ernst Mayr to compare Natural Selection’s fashioning of the lung of terrestrial vertebrates from a piece of a fish’s oesophagus, with making a skirt out of Grandma’s curtains !

“If first you don’t succeed, try, try again”.  This maxim was inculcated into us as children, but Natural Selection is its perfect embodiment.  Darwin insisted constantly on the imperfections in both structure and function in the world of the living.  As Jacob says, “he never ceased underlining the bizarre, strange solutions that a reasonable God would never have used” (op.cit. p. 64).  He went on to point out, as evidence of the hits and misses of Natural Selection, that if there are several million animal species alive today, at least five hundred million have become extinct.  “Bricolage” indeed.  Intelligent Design ?  Hardly.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

NURSERY NONSENSE AND NATURAL SELECTION

“An inquisitive Cock Sparrow Asked every man in Wales, Why Parrots had long noses, and Foxes had long tails.

“Some said that Foxes used their tails In winter for a muff; And Parrots’ noses all were long, Because they all took snuff.

“But the reason, it seems to me, As perhaps it will to you, Is that they once had short tails, And short tails wouldn’t do.”

“Cock Sparrow”, a nursery rhyme taken from D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s “Nursery Nonsense”, or “Rhymes without Reason” (1864), is neither nonsense nor without reason.  Darwin, had he read it, would have smiled approvingly.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO