— Daniel Copeland
| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 |
In 1800, the theologian William Paley argued that living things were clear evidence of an intelligent creator. If he found a stone lying on the ground, he said, he might suppose that for all he knew it had lain there for all eternity. But if he found a watch there, this account of its presence would be entirely unsatisfactory. The difference is that, unlike a stone, the parts of a watch clearly work together for a purpose, and so it must have had a maker. Analogously, since the parts of living things work together for a purpose, they too must have had a maker.Strictly speaking, he was quite correct. Any living organism you encounter will have been made — by another organism, or pair of organisms, very like it. But that wasn’t what Paley meant. Suppose, he said, that the watch’s finder discovered an unexpected property. As well as telling the time, this watch manufactures other watches like itself as it ticks along. What would he think of his original intuition that it was the work of a Designer?
He would reflect, that though the watch before him were, in some sense, the maker of the watch which was fabricated in the course of its movements, yet it was in a very different sense from that in which a carpenter, for instance, is the maker of a chair — the author of its contrivance, the cause of the relation of its parts to their use. With respect to these, the first watch was no cause at all to the second; in no such sense as this was it the author of the constitution and order, either of the arts which the new watch contained, or of the parts by the aid and instrumentality of which it was produced.
— William Paley, Natural Theology
For some apologists, this is enough. Peter Kreeft says simply: “You can’t get more in the effect than you had in the cause.” Those reading this series in order will recognise Aquinas’ First Cause Argument, which we covered in Part 1. Is there anything about living things that makes it work better here than it does for the universe in general? “Yes,” says our intuition. “Life is more complex than inorganic matter.” Many people have undertaken to calculate the likelihood of life arising by random chance, and have concluded that it is completely impossible. Fred Hoyle famously compared it to the chance of a tornado in a junkyard creating a Boeing 747. Michael Behe says that many biological systems are “irreducibly complex” at the molecular level; irreducibly just means we haven’t yet figured out where the components came from, but complex is right on the money. Any living organism has lots and lots of different bits, and if they don’t all work together exactly right, the organism isn’t going to be able to survive and reproduce. Is intelligent design the only explanation?Let’s try a little thought experiment. You have a large picture puzzle. The long sides have 24 pieces each, not including the two corners. Your task is to take all 24 pieces from one of those long sides, and join them up in the correct order. The catch is this: you have to do it with all the pieces face downward. And this puzzle is cut in such a way that there are no visual clues as to which piece goes where — apart from the corners, of course. Fortunately, since they’re all edge pieces, you can see which way round they were meant to go. Apart from that, it’s down to luck. Additionally, if you put the 24 pieces in some incorrect order, you have to break them up completely and start from the beginning. Finally, let’s suppose you can work fast enough to place one piece every second, so each combination will take 24 seconds altogether.
You have a 1-in-24 chance of getting the first piece right. If you do, the chance your second piece will also be right is 1 in 23. The third piece, once you’ve got the first two, has a 1-in-22 chance, and so on. So it keeps getting easier, right? Only if you get it right the first time! The probability of getting all those first three right is 1 in 24 x 23 x 22; and the chance of putting every single piece in its proper place is
1 in 24 x 23 x 22 x 21 x 20 x 19 x 18 x 17 x 16 x 15 x 14 x 13 x 12 x 11 x 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1.How much is that, exactly?
1 in 620,448,401,733,239,439,360,000.So how long will that take? Well, you might get them all right on the very first try, after just 24 seconds. Or you might do it on the second try, or the third try, or the 2466th try, or the 6,375,544th try... Until you start, all possibilities are equally probable. So the average number of attempts you’re likely to have to make is simply the average of all the numbers from one to 620,448,401,733,239,439,360,000. The average of all the numbers from 1 to any whole number n is (n+1)/2. Multiplying the result by 24 seconds, assembling the correct sequence will take, on average,
235,934,725,914,040 years 45 days 12 seconds.Actually, it won’t, because after about one forty-thousandth of that time the sun will have turned into a red giant, fried the earth, and burned out, rendering the whole concept of “years” and “days” obsolete. But you get the idea.
So let’s adjust the rules a bit, shall we? Same puzzle, same pieces, still face down; but this time, if you find two pieces that fit together, you are now allowed to keep those two together in all subsequent attempts. You still have no way of telling them apart visually. This new task doesn’t involve any more planning or “design” on your part than the previous one; but now, each time you successfully connect two pieces, you have eliminated every potential sequence which lacks that connection. You have introduced a blind selective process. How long will it take now? This time, we have to calculate the average time taken to find each correct connection, and add them up.
2 minutes 42 seconds.The first puzzle, the one that would take you 235,934,725,914,040 years, is equivalent to the scenario where life appears by pure random chance; the second, the one that takes less than three minutes, is random chance plus natural selection. Take a few moments to reflect on the difference. Bear that in mind next time someone tries to impress you with the unlikelihood of life arising “at random”. If their calculations don’t allow for natural selection, they are making at least that big a mistake.
Behe argues that this still leaves too much to chance. After all, natural selection means that those with the wrong combination of parts (the “unfit”) all die; but, as our first puzzle-solving experiment showed us, it’s not remotely likely that anything will have the right combination of parts to begin with — so life comes to a halt. And if the wrong combinations don’t all die, then survival is just down to the vagaries of chance, and natural selection isn’t operating. But Behe errs here in not appreciating the subtlety of natural selection. The unfit don’t, in fact, have to be dying off in great droves for it to work. All they have to do is to have slightly fewer surviving offspring, per individual, than their “fitter” neighbours, and for this to keep happening through generation after generation. Over time the ratio of fit to unfit will slowly but steadily increase. Unless the population is growing, which no population can do indefinitely (since resources like food, water, and space are limited), the unfit will ultimately disappear entirely. That’s all evolution needs. Behe’s argument is without merit.
And the maths works just the same regardless of exactly how complex the creatures involved actually are. They could indeed be no more than molecules. In many chemical reactions, some of the substances involved — catalysts — go full circle and come out just the same as they went in. The chloride ion, for instance, is a catalyst for the reaction whereby ozone breaks down into oxygen. A molecule which catalysed a reaction that made more molecules like itself, or nearly like itself, would behave just like a living creature, multiplying until it reached the limits of its resources and then undergoing natural selection. Research on how life first came to be — abiogenesis — centres on self-catalysing molecules. We may never know for certain exactly how abiogenesis happened; some recent studies point to a prominent rôle for clay minerals. You can excitedly quote Isaiah 64:8 at this point if you want.
According to one variant of the Argument from Design, abiogenesis — and evolution itself, on any large scale — could not have happened unless instigated by a Designer, because life, and specifically DNA, contains enormous amounts of information. Can you have information without a mind to produce it? We must first ask: what is information, anyway? Usually we use the word to mean “something that tells us something”, but that won’t help us much here. A better insight into the question might come from our discussion of cause and effect in Part 1. If we have two events A and B, such that, if event A does not happen, event B cannot happen either, then we say that event A is the cause of event B, and event B is the effect of event A. We must now qualify that slightly. Suppose an earthquake (that’s our event A) causes a stone to fall off a cliff (there’s event B). By calling the earthquake the cause of the stone’s fall, we mean that if it had not happened, and (here’s the new part) if everything else except for the earthquake had been just the same, the stone would not have fallen. But what if all else had not been the same? What if an animal had kicked the stone off the cliff? Then the fall would have happened after all. There are many things that could cause a stone to fall off a cliff; therefore, a falling stone does not hold very much information.
Lots of different, reasonably plausible, things might well cause a stone to fall off a cliff, but only one kind of thing is likely to create a human footprint: a human taking a step. The footprint, therefore, does contain information about the event that caused it. Generally, the fewer different scenarios that could have caused a given state of events, the more information that state contains. Basically, information is about pruning away alternative possibilities, whether we’re talking about possible past events, like the cause of a footprint, or possible future events, like the growth of an organism, or any other kind of possibility. And, as we’ve just seen, that is exactly what natural selection does; it prunes away alternatives. Natural selection creates information.
Another question arises. If DNA acts purely to copy itself, and “unfit” DNA is eliminated, how is it that there is so much variety in the world? You’d expect one particular set of genes to have dominated the others and taken over. The answer is that from the DNA’s point of view — since molecules can’t anticipate the future — the environment is constantly, and unpredictably, changing. That being the case, no one genome is “fittest” in all circumstances. On the contrary, it makes more sense to have as many different options at one’s disposal as possible. In particular, genetic homogeneity within a group renders all members susceptible to the same diseases. If a new pathogen arrives in a genetically mixed population, at least some of its members will be able to resist it. A homogeneous population lacking that resistance would be brought to its knees, which is why disease spreads so rapidly through domestic herds and crops. For this reason, most complex organisms actively reshuffle and wager their genes in a process known as sex.
A beguiling, but naïve, argument centres around the apparent impossibility of “transitional” forms. You could morph a lizard into a bird with a reasonably advanced graphics program, but the creature that appeared half-way between would have no chance of surviving. It couldn’t walk on its wings, nor fly with them. That animal has never existed, and the idea that evolution demands such half-and-half creatures reveals the flaws of Essentialistic thinking. Archaeopteryx walked on two legs and had feathers like a modern bird, but its front claws, long tail and teeth are very reptilian. The easy distinction between “reptiles” and “birds”, so clear in modern animals, simply did not apply in the Jurassic period. Archaeopteryx did not belong to either category. Nor did it uncomfortably straddle some conceptual gap between them. It was itself, and its descendants are themselves, and that is all that need be said. Some opponents of evolution point out that we cannot identify either Archaeopteryx’s immediate ancestors or its immediate descendants with any certainty. There are still gaps on either side. But suppose we did find the remains of some of those animals? There would still be gaps between the new discoveries and Archaeopteryx, albeit smaller ones. If we fill those gaps, there will be still more, and so ad infinitum. This objection amounts to a demand that we find every single generation before we draw any conclusions. It is precisely equivalent to arguing that, since I don’t know the names of my great-great-grandparents, there is serious doubt as to whether they existed at all.
So no philosophical objection to the theory of evolution stands up to scrutiny. It becomes a matter of physical evidence, and the physical evidence is overwhelming. Rather than even try to enumerate it all, I will simply point you to TalkOrigins.org. (In science, just in case anybody is likely to fall for this old chestnut, the word theory does not mean “something we’re not sure of yet”; that would be a hypothesis or a conjecture. A theory is a systematic explanation for a set of facts.) But what about the moral objections?
The “Social Darwinists” of the nineteenth century, and the Nazis who followed them, saw in natural selection a ruthless ethic whereby the weak must be eliminated so that the strong may triumph. They spoke of survival of the fittest, and meant that “higher” life-forms do, or should, oust “lower” ones in a neat linear progression from weak to strong.They argued that compassion for the under-achiever rots society as a whole. They were wrong. Note again the pernicious influence of Essentialism: in biology, unfit simply means unlikely to reproduce. It is not an innate quality but a description of one’s circumstances, both internal and environmental. Without insulin, for instance, people with diabetes would be “unfit”; they would die early, and the condition would be rare. Supplying insulin does not make the population as a whole less “fit”. It makes diabetics more fit. Social Darwinism is understandably, but wrongly, blamed on Darwin (it was in fact dreamed up by Herbert Spencer). Strictly speaking, the whole idea of “higher” and “lower” organisms — the “Great Chain of Being” with God at the top, down through Man, primates, mammals, reptiles and fish to worms and finally plants — was discredited by evolutionary theory.
The Social Darwinists advocated, and the Nazis actually practised, eugenics, removing undesirables from the gene pool by force. As well as the false, Essentialistic concept of “higher” versus “lower” organisms, eugenics was based on an assumption of genetic determinism: the notion that our genes make us what we are, regardless of what the outside environment might bring, or of what we might personally want or choose. This is abhorrent enough in itself, but it gets worse. Genes act in their own immediate self-interest at all times; they are completely amoral, being, after all, only molecules. The title (but not the content) of Richard Dawkins’ seminal work The Selfish Gene is often alluded to at this point. If genes are selfish, and they control us, surely it follows that we ourselves must be selfish, and that all attempts to be noble or moral are doomed.
As it happens, genetic determinism is another misconception. Within any individual’s lifetime, a gene is simply one molecule among many, and has no more influence than any other. The difference between genes and other molecules is that the genes are passed down from one generation to the next, and so, unlike the others, are subject to natural selection. Does a violin sound the way it does because of how the instrument is made — or because of what the player is doing to it? The immediately obvious answer is “Both, and that’s a stupid question.” Are we the way we are because of our genes, or because of our environment? Again, both, and again, that’s a stupid question. As Dawkins puts it in his curiously seldom-cited essay Genes Aren’t Us,
...think of the body as a blanket, suspended from the ceiling by 100,000 rubber bands, all tangled and twisted around one another. The shape of the blanket — the body — is determined by the tensions of all these rubber bands taken together. Some of the rubber bands represent genes, others environmental factors. A change in a particular gene corresponds to a lengthening or shortening of one particular rubber band. But any one rubber band is linked to the blanket only indirectly via countless connections amid the welter of other rubber bands. If you cut one rubber band, or tighten it, there will be a distributed shift in tensions, and the effect on the shape of the blanket will be complex and hard to predict.
Often, genetic evolution is actually driven by the choices of individuals. Some populations of mice living in old cold-stores have evolved long furry coats to keep them warm. But the reason they live in the cold-stores in the first place is that their ancestors chose to forage there. Similarly, many humans are able to digest milk even as adults (a very rare ability among mammals) because their ancestors chose to include milk in their diets. The most impressive example, however, is the variety of human appearance across the world. Humanity cannot be categorized into separate “races”. Most genetic variation within our species is spread evenly across the planet. Yet those differences which do have a geographical component tend to correlate with easily visible traits, such as skin colour or the shape of the face. Environmental selection pressures (ultra-violet light levels, for instance) can be invoked to explain some of it; but, generally speaking, variation that is highly noticeable and genetically trivial is a tell-tale sign of sexual selection, driven by individuals’ choices of who to mate with. In the human case, this ultimately means that so-called “racial” differences are mainly caused by differing cultural standards of desirability.Even so, wouldn’t any gene or complex of genes that encouraged individuals to help others at their own expense be quickly lost? Short answer: not necessarily. Altruism at the level of the individual organism can be a means by which the underlying genes maximize their reproductive success. Animals are sometimes nice and sometimes nasty, since either can suit genetic self-interest at different times. Much of animal nature is indeed altruistic, co-operative and even attended by benevolent subjective emotions. As Frans de Waal put it in Good Natured, “In the same way that birds and airplanes appear to defy the law of gravity yet are fully subject to it, moral decency may appear to fly in the face of natural selection yet still be one of its many products.” (Long answer: see Part 3.)
In any case, it’s a little hubristic to judge the natural world by human moral standards. The universe is not a mere mirror of human consciousness, but an immense whole whose variety and complexity far outstrips that of our own little lives on this planet. Reading political agendas into it is rather like having a grand ocean view from your room, and looking at your window only for the reflection. Some thinkers, including Kreeft, cite the anthropic principle as evidence that the earth has been specially designed for human life to evolve. Actually the anthropic principle draws quite the opposite conclusion: there are many, many planets in the universe, and, statistically, at least a very few of them are going to be suitable for human life. Naturally, if human life arises anywhere it will be on a world that is suitable for it; and to humans, given our ingrained obsession with human-like minds, it will seem that some such mind has designed the planet especially for our purposes. I am irresistibly reminded of the man who didn’t want to adopt a Japanese baby because he couldn’t speak Japanese. Had the earth been different, it might have been lifeless, or perhaps have given rise to a different kind of life that thrives in different conditions.
Notwithstanding the comparative unimportance of the human species, we — specifically, our minds — are the focus of the remainder of this article. The Argument from Reason asks: how can human reason be trusted if it is a purely natural phenomenon? We saw in Part 1 that supernatural explanations don’t help, but then what is the explanation? First we must ask: what do minds do for genetic survival? Minds are invisible. Their effect is seen in behaviour. So what is the behavioural difference between humans and other species? Well, humans are unusually good at thinking of new things to do. What good is that?
A genetically mixed population can survive periods of rapid change, but each gene always risks being lost in the vagaries of sexual recombination. Genes promoting behavioural flexibility can accommodate a wide range of environmental variation while getting the gene pool all to themselves. But in a social species, “the environment” consists very largely of one’s fellows. A society of flexible-behavers is bound to change rapidly — which, in turn, favours flexibility in the next generation... and so on, in a feed-forward cycle. This must have been a highly significant factor in human evolution. It certainly left marks on our bodies.
As a general rule, females invest more energy and resources into each offspring than males do. Consequently, females have to be choosy about who they allow to fertilize them. Males, in response, compete to meet female standards. Which is not to say that females restrict themselves to one partner; it often pays not to put all your eggs in one basket. In some species, male competition happens mainly at the level of the sperm. On the macroscopic scale, mating is indiscriminate and polyamorous. Both sexes will have prominent sexual features, and in particular, males will have large testes to ensure high sperm production. Another strategy is for males to prevent females from mating with anyone else, while themselves getting as many females as they can. Males in such species will be much bigger and stronger than females. A third option is for females to select males on the basis of how much time and energy they are willing to spend on childcare. Males will try to outdo each other in caring and giving; since they are now investing considerable resources into their offspring, the imbalance between the sexes is reduced. Males have reason to be selective about their mates, and consequently females have a motive for competing. Females and males will be almost identical, and long-term sexual partnerships — with varying degrees of faithfulness — will be common.
When this paradigm is applied to humans, a curious hybrid pattern emerges. Humans have prominent features distinguishing women from men (pelvic fat deposits, penis, breasts, beard), and men have comparatively large testes. Cultures which disguise these features generally replace them with artificial gender distinctions in dress. There is also a difference in size and strength, but it is minor compared to that found in, say, orangutans or baboons, where males may be fully twice the size of females. According to the usual model, this would mean that women had access to several men at a time, and some men were managing to get the women all to themselves, and women and men were forming lasting monogamous relationships. How could this be? Today, sexual moralities are highly variable and shaped by local politics, economics and religion. Many cultures insist on monogamy; many allow men to have several wives; many allow women to have extramarital sex in certain circumstances; a few even give women multiple husbands. The only universal features are marriage itself, incest taboos, and sexual privacy (“marriage”, “incest” and “privacy” all being very broadly defined). I would argue that this variability is an ancient feature of our species. We are adapted to work reasonably well with many different reproductive practices because our ancestors kept changing their behaviour patterns, and no single pattern exerted more selection pressure on our genes than any other.
Evolutionary explanations of sexual behaviour are often criticized — though, strange to say, not generally by creationists — for leaving out same-sex couplings. It’s a reasonable criticism; though many gay people do have children, they have fewer children, on average, than straight people, and in theory that’s all evolution needs to eliminate a gene. Unlike most forms of non-reproductive sex (sex during pregnancy, for instance), many other species besides humans engage in same-sex mating. In male mammals, at least, mitochondria and Y-chromosomes may be responsible. Y-chromosomes are passed from father to son only, whereas mitochondria are passed from mother to child (of either sex). Mitochondria have no reproductive interest in sharing a body with Y-chromosomes, and are quite ready to prevent them from propagating if they can. However, this does not explain female same-sex preference, or any same-sex coupling in non-mammal species which do not have Y-chromosomes. For now, the question remains open.
Having a mind may well make you highly adaptable, but the question of how a biological system can have one still remains. We must go back to the concept of information: this time, sensory information. Remember, information is about pruning away alternative possibilities. Living things need highly specific physical and chemical conditions to function properly. Consider a bacterium in a pond. Some possible responses to its environment will be helpful, some will not. If it swims towards its food, it will thrive; if it swims away from its food, it will probably starve. It needs to eliminate the unhelpful options. Natural selection will strongly favour any biochemical mechanisms that react to tiny fluctuations in the amounts of nutrients in the water. Thereafter, any improvement in the ability to sense food, danger, or mates will enhance genetic survival (provided the organs involved don’t slow it down, get in the way, or use up too much metabolic energy). In animals light, pressure, temperature, movement, and particular chemicals all cause the appropriate nerve cells to react in highly specific ways, just as a foot’s pressure on mud creates a distinctive footprint.
Now let’s look specifically at the human brain. Over the first few months of life, it receives a deluge of information. Brain-cell connections — synapses — that are often used grow stronger, which allows them to be used still more often. Some stimuli are more important for survival than others, and the brain is pre-strengthened to receive them. If you want a helpful analogy for what’s going on, think of a landscape. Water trickles over it, avoiding bumps and flowing down hollows. As it flows, it washes away the soil, deepening the hollows and turning them into channels, until its shape is firmly fixed; but a strong flood may wash away what was once a hill, and change the whole pattern. Thus concepts which were once unfamiliar become obvious, and movements which were once awkward become automatic. Eventually, when we hear the word “apple”, it fires up a system of brain patterns that were originally formed by the sight and taste of apples: a phenomenon known as association. We’re going to need a different analogy for what happens next, because water doesn’t do this: if one network of cells is firing in a particular pattern, nearby networks tend to fall into the same pattern. Particularly insistent patterns copy themselves, multiply, and compete, just like... why, just like organisms evolving. In the democracy of the brain, the majority pattern at any given time (to over-simplify somewhat) is what we are conscious of. When we are awake, that’s usually the one that matches the input from the senses. But when we sleep, or if some other pattern is especially persistent for some reason, alternatives thrive, and then we have dreams or hallucinations.
When you see a moving red bus, the features “moving”, “red” and “bus” are separated fairly early in the brain’s analysis of the scene... and they don’t just get put together again to synthesise your mental picture. Instead, your picture is synthesised from lots of clues, lots of bits, and nearly all of what you “see” as you look around the room is only “there” in your brain. It’s not at all like a TV picture. It is not picked up instantly and updated, but nearly all of that “detailed” surround is invented as a kind of wallpaper around the little bit that has your attention. Most of the details are not present as such in your mind at all, but that’s the illusion that your mind presents to you.
— Terry Pratchett et al., The Science of Discworld II: The Globe
(ellipsis and emphasis original)
The physical environment is not the only outside force that confirms or contradicts belief; our cultural milieu is equally important. The most obvious example is language. I cannot look at a printed English page and see meaningless black shapes — the text arrives in my consciousness as words and phrases. It is perhaps less intuitively clear that the same applies to all sorts of other cultural constructs too. Most of us today see nothing much remarkable in Edouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. We know quite well that these arty types often paint pictures of young wimmin in the nudd, and the fact that the blokes have suits on is merely a little odd. But in 1863 it was scandalous. Nudes were supposed to be idealized, mythical figures. Putting them in the same frame as modern gentlemen tore the curtain of fantasy that kept real physical bodies at a safe distance. Manet might just as well have undressed and paraded about the Salon naked himself. From the breadth of public outrage, it seems the boundary he had transgressed was not just some esoteric artists’ cypher, but a near-instinctive visual taboo. His contemporaries saw, directly, the blatant sexuality which eludes us.
If there’s one thing the human brain is uniquely good at doing, it’s combining patterns in novel ways to produce new behaviours. That’s arguably the core of creativity; it’s also what we’re doing when we reason — linking together different concepts in a way we hadn’t thought of before. The difference is that, with reason, we take the rules we already use to tell correct beliefs from incorrect ones, and rigorously apply them to the new ideas. And herein lies the hook of the Argument from Reason: how can we trust a mere collection of cells and chemicals to tell correct beliefs from incorrect ones?
The answer lies, as usual, in natural selection. A creature that consistently based its actions on incorrect beliefs would quickly die. We have evolved to be able to reason, just as we have evolved to be able to see, because we need correct information to decide what to do. It shouldn’t be surprising that concrete problems about getting on in the world are easier to solve than abstract logic puzzles — that’s what thought is for. No one act of reasoning is infallible, but it doesn’t have to be, because we can always go back and check. Each time we do that, we reduce the chance that mistakes will remain in our conclusion. In calculating the number of years and days for the puzzle-piece experiment at the beginning of this article, I must have come up with a dozen different answers (my computer’s spread-sheet program didn’t have enough digits). I finally went with the one which was the same when I figured it out several times over, and also gave me the right answer when I reversed the process. The ability to go back and check is what saves us.
But isn’t there another problem? As we saw in Part 1, all knowledge is provisional. And provisional things, by definition, tend to change. So it’s inevitable that human groups won’t all have the same beliefs as time goes on. Now traditions, being self-copying patterns, are subject to the law of natural selection, so any culture which has managed to survive for thousands of years must be doing something right. Take the Hindu reverence for the cow, for instance: a farmer who keeps his cow alive in the face of strong temptation to slaughter her for meat preserves a valuable long-term source of milk. Or the pre-Christian Celtic sacred oak: acorns are perfectly edible, indeed nutritious, but oak trees cannot in practice be cultivated. A grove of oaks could save lives in the event of a crop failure, provided the farmers of previous generations had somehow been persuaded not to cut them down. But there is no guarantee whatsoever that the beliefs on which the traditions are based are the true reasons why they have survived. And since we learn not only what we know, but even how to know, from our culture, it would seem that all science, evolutionary biology included, is just a Western cultural construct.
Well, of course it is; in precisely the same sense that the world I see and feel and hear is “just” a construct of my brain. What assurance do we have that it is reliable? Simply that its hypotheses, though generated out of a Western cultural world-view, are tested against real-world data before they are accepted, just as the brain tests its thought-patterns against sensory input. Nor is Western science by any means the only tradition that does so. The Pacific Islanders used empirical data just as rigorously as any scientist to locate previously unknown islands in the ocean. Forager cultures have used equally rigorous, equally empirical techniques since time out of mind to find not only food and shelter, but also medicine, in the wild. Reason and empiricism are not European prejudices; they are applications of an ancient, universal wisdom. If science is unique, it is only because it dares to apply that practical wisdom to the big questions of the universe.
Our criterion for accepting arguments for God’s existence is that they must be more compelling than the Problem of Evil, and at this the Argument from Design falls flat. Life on Earth, and every instance of it, even human reason, can be explained by natural selection alone, without recourse to a Designer. Of course, the Argument from Design never attempted to solve the Problem of Evil, merely to out-shine it. But I can hear the ghostly voices of a million theistic readers quietly insisting that without God there can be no morality, and hence no Evil, and therefore the problem does not exist after all. So it’s high time we turned our attention to the Argument from Conscience.
| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 |
Last updated: 21 March 2007
