What Dawkins does not seem to appreciate is that his blind watchmaker is something even more remarkable than Paley’s watches. Paley finds a “watch” and asks how such a thing could have come to be there by chance. Dawkins finds an immense automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that he has completely answered Paley’s point. But that is absurd. How can a factory that makes watches be less in need of explanation than the watches themselves?
For one kind of life to evolve into another may be attributed to the blind forces of nature, but the anthropic principle implies that these forces were set in motion deliberately, purposefully, with a view to producing precisely the living beings that biologists superficially presume to have gotten here by accident. It’s one thing to say that the finch’s beak and the moth’s hue and the human eye all evolved by chance. But the universe that lawfully produces finches, moths, and humans is quite clearly the product of intention and creative design. So Dawkins’s “refutation” of Paley fails gloriously and completely. Paley was right all along.
It should be clear from all this that the problem is not with evolution. The problem is with Darwinism. Evolution is a scientific theory, Darwinism is a metaphysical stance and a political ideology. In fact, Darwinism is the atheist spin imposed on the theory of evolution. As a theory, evolution is not hostile to religion. Far from disproving design, evolution actually reveals the mode by which design has been executed. But atheists routinely use Darwinism and the fallacy of the blind watchmaker to undermine belief in God. Many scientists have been conned by this atheist tactic. They allow themselves to slide, almost unwittingly, from evolution into Darwinism. Thus they become pawns of the atheist agenda.
Christians should not be afraid of the evolution debate, because there is nothing about it that threatens their faith. The Christian position is that God is the creator of the universe and everything in it, and the evolution debate is about how some of these changes came about. For the Christian, the evolution debate comes down to competing theories about how God did it. My own view is that Christians and other religious believers should embrace evolution while resisting Darwinism.
Theists can be champions of science while at the same time exposing the way in which Darwin’s ideas are being ideologically manipulated, just as they were by the social Darwinists a century ago. It is this ideological indoctrination masquerading as science that should be fought in the classroom. Evolution should be taught, but it should be taught without the metaphysics of Darwinism.
Instead of suing to get theories of creationism and intelligent design into the science classroom, Christians should be suing to get atheist interpretations of Darwin out. Through evolution, rightly understood, Christians can affirm that the book of nature and the book of scripture are in no way contradictory. In fact, both affirm the notion of a universe and its creatures that are the product of supernatural design and divine creation.
