{"id":3465,"date":"2017-11-07T14:48:08","date_gmt":"2017-11-07T11:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=3465"},"modified":"2017-11-07T14:48:08","modified_gmt":"2017-11-07T11:48:08","slug":"paley-was-right-evolution-and-the-argument-from-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/3465\/paley-was-right-evolution-and-the-argument-from-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Paley Was Right: Evolution And The Argument From Design"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents<\/a><\/p>\n

Cf<\/em>. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity<\/a>, at Amazon<\/p>\n

“The ancient covenant is in pieces. Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance.” <\/em>\u2014Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity<\/em><\/p>\n

I<\/strong>N HIS BOOK NATURAL THEOLOGY, <\/em><\/strong>published in 1802, Anglican theologian William Paley made what was regarded for more than a century as an irrefutable argument for the existence of God. “In crossing a heath,” Paley wrote, “suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, <\/em>and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever.” But suppose, Paley continued,<\/p>\n

“I found a watch <\/em>upon the ground, I should hardly think of the answer I had given before.”2<\/p>\n

Paley’s point was that you don’t have to be a horologist to see right away that the watch was intentionally designed. You may not know who designed it, but you know that someone did. Paley proceeded to show, with an intricate tapestry of informed detail, how the earth and its life forms, including human beings, display in their constitution the unquestion- able marks of design. Such design, he concluded, demonstrates the presence of a designer who may be considered the divine “watchmaker” of creation.<\/p>\n

About two decades ago, biologist Richard Dawkins published his book The Blind Watchmaker, <\/em>in which he asserts that Paley was “gloriously and utterly wrong:’ Dawkins argued that Charles Darwin had discovered a way for nature to produce the appearance of design\u2014yes, even minute and complex design\u2014without the intervention of a creator. Dawkins declared the “blind, unconscious, automatic process” of natural selection “the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life…. It is the blind watchmaker.”<\/p>\n

Dawkins’s argument\u2014widely embraced by biologists\u2014has been hailed as a decisive refutation of the argument from design, one of the oldest arguments for the existence of God. Numerous leading biologists now understand and teach evolution in precisely these terms. They see evolution as undermining the argument for God and discrediting the Christian idea of man created in God’s likeness.<\/p>\n

These views are now part of our culture. In his book Revolution in Science, <\/em>a historical account of the impact of science, Bernard Cohennotes that “the Darwinian revolution sounded the death knell of any argument about design in the universe or in nature.” In a recent article in Harper’s, <\/em>David Quammen attributed to Darwin a “big scary idea which contradicted … the whole framework of pious beliefs about mankind made in God’s image.” And Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic <\/em>magazine, is typical of many people who were once Christian but who say they lost their religious faith upon embracing Darwin’s account of evolution.
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\nThe American public is dubious about evolution. A Gallup survey in February 2001 had 45 percent of responding adults agreeing that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time:’ Similar surveys over the past two decades show no real shift in people’s opinions.6 These figures are a source of consternation and distress to many scientists.<\/p>\n

It would be one thing if a few yahoos, what H. L. Mencken termed the “ignorant yokels from the cow states,” stood obstinately against evolution. Some of these people may not yet have come around to accepting that the earth is round. But almost half the American population! Many scientists and others have expressed their bafflement that there are so many “creationists” out there who simply refuse to accept the findings of modern science.<\/p>\n

Creationists come in different shapes and sizes. Most are biblical literalists, who uphold without qualification the biblical claim that God created the earth and all living things in six days. A quite distinct creationist belief\u2014not always shared by those in the first group\u2014is that the earth is only six thousand years old. This figure is derived by tabulating the genealogies listed in scripture.<\/p>\n

Many creationists fight evolution with a desperate intensity, because they fear that if any part of the Bible is proven wrong then none of it will be believed. I respect the dedication and moral fervor of the creationists, although I do not agree with their reading either of scripture or the scientific evidence. Moreover, the broader anxiety about Darwinism in the culture is not simply a product of creationism.<\/p>\n

It is said that the wife of a London aristocrat, when informed about Darwin’s claim that man is descended from an ape-like creature, responded, “My dear, let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it may not become widely known.” This woman was raising an interesting question: what does it do to man to teach him that he is nothing more than an animal? Perhaps he will start acting like an animal! Consider this disquieting thought. If your neighbor entered your house by force, killed or stupefied you with blows, and then dragged your daughter to his own place to forcibly mate with her, most people would consider that an outrage. But that kind of behavior is common, natural, and expected in the animal kingdom.<\/p>\n

We know that for more than half a century social Darwinists used ideas of “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest” to justify racist and inhumane policies like eugenics, anti-immigration laws, and forced sterilization. William Jennings Bryan\u2014a religious conservative who was also a political progressive\u2014championed the creationist cause at the Scopes trial largely because of his abhorrence of this political program. Today’s champions of evolution are quick to declare social Darwinism a crude distortion of Darwin’s theories. As one of my college professors put it, “They were using science for ideological ends. That’s not going on today.”<\/p>\n

But it is. According to biologist Francisco Ayala, Darwin “completed the Copernican Revolution…. Darwin discovered that living beings can be explained as a result of a natural process\u2014natural selection\u2014without resorting to a Creator.”7<\/p>\n

Biologist E. 0. Wilson writes, “If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, genetic chance andenvironmental necessity, not God, made the species.” Biologist Stephen Jay Gould invokes evolution to show that “no intervening spirit watches lovingly over the affairs of nature … whatever we think of God, his existence is not manifest in the products of nature.” Douglas Futuyma asserts in his textbook Evolutionary Biology, <\/em>“By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of life processes superfluous.” Biologist William Provine boasts that “evolution is the greatest engine of atheism.”
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\nSo there is an anti-religious thrust in Darwinism, and this is the main reason many Americans refuse to embrace it. They view Darwinism as atheism masquerading as science. They also suspect that Darwin’s theories are being used to undermine traditional religion and morality. Many parents are concerned that their children will go to school and college as decent Christians and come out as unbelievers and moral relativists. As we can see from the quotations above, these concerns about contemporary Darwinism are justified. Evolution in the way that it is promoted and taught today seems to promote a social agenda that is anti-religious and amoral.<\/p>\n

But doesn’t evolution contradict the claims of the Bible? Let us look carefully at what the book of Genesis actually says. We read in Genesis 2:7 that “the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” Right away we notice something significant: the Bible says that the universe was created out of nothing but it does not say man was created out of nothing. Rather, it says that man was made or shaped from the existing substance of nature. “Dust thou art and to dust thou shall return:’ So the Bible is quite consistent with the idea that man is made up of atoms and molecules and shares the same DNA found in earthworms, whales, and monkeys.<\/p>\n

It is true, however, that the creation account in Genesis does not prepare us for the discovery that man has about 98 percent of his DNA in common with apes. In his Descent of Man, <\/em>Darwin writes that “man … still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” Our resistance to this is not religious; it is because we sense a significant chasm between ourselves and chimpanzees.<\/p>\n

Of course Darwin is not saying that man is descended from chimpanzees, only that apes and man are descended from a common ancestor. Whatever the merits of this theory, there is no reason to reject it purely on biblical grounds. Christians since medieval times have agreed with Aristotle that man is an animal\u2014a “rational animal,” but still an animal.<\/p>\n

What makes man different, according to the Bible, is that God breathed an immaterial soul into him. Thus there is no theological problem in viewing the bodily frame of man as derived from other creatures. The Bible stresses God’s resolution, “Let us make man in our image.” Christians have always understood God as a spiritual rather than a material being. Consequently if man is created in the “likeness” of God, the resemblance is clearly not physical. When Jared Diamond in his book The Third Chimpanzee <\/em>refers to humans as “little more than glorified chimpanzees.” he is unwittingly making a Christian point.’3<\/p>\n

We may have common ancestors with the animals, but we are glorified <\/em>animals.<\/p>\n

But didn’t the main opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution come from religious people, specifically Christians? Actually, no. Hindus, Jews, and Muslims have never really had a problem with evolution because they have always understood their creation stories as parables. Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb writes that when Darwin published his Origin of Species, <\/em>one group rejected the theory of evolution because of the perception that it undermines Christianity, and another group embraced it for the same reason.<\/p>\n

Darwin’sleading defender, the intellectual “bulldog” Thomas Henry Huxley, belonged to the second group. A lifelong hater of the Catholic church, he acknowledged that he found the new theory appealing because he saw it undermining ecclesiastical doctrine. “One of its greatest merits in my eyes is the fact that it occupies a position of complete and irrec- oncilable antagonism to … the Catholic church.”
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\nBut these “irreconcilables,” as Himmelfarb calls them, were outnumbered by other groups: scientists who raised non-religious objections to Darwin’s theory and religious people who saw no conflict between evolution and Christianity. There were in fact intelligent objections to natural selection raised by British naturalist Richard Owen and Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz.<\/p>\n

Ernst Mayr, a longtime champion of evolution, writes that when Darwin published the Origin of Species <\/em>“he actually did not have a single clear- cut piece of evidence for the existence of natural selection.” Another Darwin enthusiast, Jonathan Weiner, concedes that despite its title, Darwin’s book “does not document the origin of a single species.’<\/p>\n

Then there was the problem of the age of the earth. Renowned physicist Lord Kelvin published thermodynamic calculations that showed the earth was far too “young” to give evolution time to take place along Darwinian lines. Kelvin turned out to be wrong because the physicists of his day had not discovered radioactivity and nuclear processes that generate energy and heat, prolonging the earth’s cooling process. Today we know that the earth is around 4.5 billion years old, giving natural selection more time to produce its transformations. But Darwin and his scientific contemporaries didn’t know that. The best physics of the day seemed incompatible with Darwinism.<\/p>\n

Even so, many Christians rallied to Darwin’s side. The Dublin Review, <\/em>an influential Catholic journal, praised Darwin’s book while registering only minor objections. Darwin’s leading supporter in the United States was Harvard biologist Asa Gray, who saw evolution not as a denial of God’s creation but as a documentation of how He had gone about it.<\/p>\n

Darwin himself wrote that Gray’s interpretation “pleases me especially, and I do not think anyone else has ever noticed the point.” But they soon did, and over the years some of Darwin’s most prominent defenders, like Theodosius Dobzhansky and R. A. Fisher, have been Christians. While a minority of Christians proclaimed evolution a heresy from the outset, most Christian leaders sought to reconcile Darwin’s theory with the biblical story of creation.<\/p>\n

Darwin himself was an agnostic, but when he died he was buried in Westminster Abbey with the approval of the Anglican Church. A few years ago, Pope John Paul II moved the Catholic church closer to an endorsement of evolution by proclaiming it “more than a hypothesis?’ Christian apologist C. S. Lewis had no problem with it. And several of today’s leading evolutionists, such as biologist Kenneth Miller and geneticist Francis Collins, are practicing Christians.<\/p>\n

What, then, are we to make of the furious intellectual battles that we see, both in the courts and in the media, between the Darwinists and the anti-Darwinists? There is now a school of thought that goes by the name of “intelligent design?’ Its leading figures are William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, Michael Behe, and Phillip Johnson.<\/p>\n

Trained in mathematics, biochemistry, and law, these critics are in an entirely different league than the self-styled “creationists?’ And they have raised important questions: How to account for the complexity of the eye? Why was there an “explosion” of new forms of life, entirely unanticipated in the fossil record, during the Cambrian era? Despite a long history ofexperimentation, breeders have never been able to breed across species lines and produce new species, so how can random mutations achieve what carefully orchestrated cross-breeding has failed to do? While the fossil record shows evidence of microevolution (one type of finch evolves into another type of finch), where is the evidence for macroevolution (one species evolves into a different species)?
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\nThe critics have exposed some of the weak points in the theory of evolution. The fossil record is inadequate, as Darwin himself realized. Biologists routinely debate what caused the Cambrian “explosion,” and there are competing theories and much that remains to be discovered.<\/p>\n

On the other hand biologists have shown that a complex eye can evolve and has evolved\u2014actually on several independent occasions\u2014from simpler forms of light- sensitive cells. Once you see how much change can be produced within a species, it’s not hard to see how evolution can transform one species into another. Is it such a stretch to believe that the lion and the tiger evolved from a common ancestor, even if there is no way to see this process occur?<\/p>\n

I am not a biologist, but what impresses me is that virtually every biologist in the world accepts the theory of evolution. While the debate goes on, it seems improbable that the small group of intelligent design advocates is right and the entire community of biologists is wrong. Consider what two leading Christian biologists say about evolution. Kenneth Miller writes, “Evolution is as much a fact as anything we know in science,” and Theodosius Dobzhansky famously said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”<\/p>\n

The great strength of evolution as a scientific theory is that it makes sense of two huge facts about life. On the one hand, all living things from trees to cats to humans are formed from the same genetic material. Beyond this, it is evident that many groups of organisms show similar characteristics. So there is a unity to life.<\/p>\n

At the same time, living creatures exhibit incredible diversity There are literally millions of living species with widely varying characteristics. Evolution accounts both for the similarities and the differences. It accounts for common characteristics by positing that the creatures possessing them descended from the same ancestor. It explains differences by suggesting that creatures evolved new traits over a long period of time under the pressures of survival.<\/p>\n

One of the strongest proofs for evolution is that the geological record, for all its imperfections, shows a single invariant trajectory. The oldest rocks contain only single- celled creatures. Later strata show the appearance of invertebrates. Then we see the first fishes, then amphibians, then reptiles, and finally mammals. Man appears latest on the scene. The fossils are found in exactly the places and at exactly the times that we would expect if Darwin’s theory is correct.<\/p>\n

Not a single fossil has ever been found in a place where it is not supposed to show up. If we ever discover the fossil of a single reptile in a rock so old that fishes had not yet arrived, or if we find human skeletons at the time when dinosaurs also lived, then Darwin’s theory will be proven false and biologists will have to come up with a new one.<\/p>\n

Until this happens\u2014and I don’t think it will\u2014evolution remains the best and most persuasive account of our origins. It is impossible to deny the theory’s explanatory power. Evolution by natural selection helps us to explain why pesticides and antibiotics frequently result in the pests and bacteria developing new strains more resistant to human efforts to wipe them out. In a word, they evolve.<\/p>\n

Without evolution it would not be easy to understand features of living creatures that seem poorly designed or serve no functional purpose. We see snakes with tiny legs buried inside their skins and flightless beetleswith wings. We humans possess an unnecessary appendix. How to explain these vestigial organs? Evolution says it is because snakes, flightless beetles, and humans are all descended from creatures that needed those organs to survive.
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\nStill, evolution remains a theory with clear limits. When Dawkins subtitles one of his books “How the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design” he shows no awareness of these limits. When Dennett invokes evolution as an all-purpose explanation in cosmology psychology culture, ethics, politics, and religion, he too goes way beyond the evidence.<\/p>\n

Here we must distinguish between the empirical and metaphysical aspects of evolution. Dawkins and Dennett are metaphysical Darwinists. Biologist Stephen Jay Gould once termed them “Darwinian fundamentalists.” He faulted them, as I do, for using a powerful but quite circumscribed theory to account for phenomena that fall entirely outside its biological reach. Consider three massive features of life that evolution cannot account for.<\/p>\n

Evolution cannot explain the beginning of life. Darwin didn’t even try. He assumed the first living thing, and then he tried to show how one living thing could be transformed into another. In 1953 there was considerable excitement when Stanley Miller generated amino acids by sending an electrical discharge through a combination of water, hydrogen, methane, and ammonia. This excitement subsided when it was subsequently established that the atmosphere of the early earth was mostly made up of carbon dioxide and ammonia.<\/p>\n

So Miller’s experiment was not relevant to showing how life could have arisen out of non-life through random chemical interactions. Moreover, life involves a lot more than the generation of amino acids. The biggest problem is taking simple chemicals like amino acids and generating proteins and other essential components of life. The origin of life, biologist Franklin Harold confesses, is one of the “unsolved mysteries in science.”<\/p>\n

The simplest living cell is one of the most complicated structures on earth, containing within it more information than multiple sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica. <\/em>“The genetic code.” writes Richard Dawkins, “is truly digital, in exactly the same sense as computer codes.” As Dawkins shows, each DNA molecule is an algorithm in biochemical code with a built-in capacity for transcription and replication.<\/p>\n

Harold remarks that even a bacterial cell “displays levels of regularity and complexity that exceed by orders of magnitude” anything found in the nonliving world. Besides, “A cell constitutes a unitary whole, a unit of life, in another deeper sense: like the legs and leaves of higher organisms, its molecular constituents have functions…. Molecules are parts of an integrated system, and in that capacity can be said to serve the activities of the cell as a whole.”<\/p>\n

The cell, in other words, shows the marked signature of design. It is crucially important to recognize that this basic template of life, with all its intricate machinery of RNA and DNA, came fully formed with the first appearance of life. Evolution presupposes cells that have these built-in capacities. And scientists have found that the first traces of life go back between 3.5 and 4 billion years, only a short time after the earth itself was formed.<\/p>\n

Is it even reasonable to speculate that random combinations of chemicals could have produced so marvelously complex and functional a thing as a living cell? That’s like positing that chance combinations of atoms could have assembled themselves to produce an airplane. “However improbable the origin of life might be,” Dawkins writes, it must have happened this way “because we are here.” It takes a lot of faith to believe things like this.
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\nNor can evolution explain consciousness, which illuminates the whole world for us.We know as human beings that we are conscious. Other creatures, such as dogs, also appear to be conscious, although perhaps not quite in the same way that we are. It does seem incredible that atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and so on can somehow produce our capacity to perceive and experience the world around us. So what is the evolutionary explanation for consciousness? What adaptive benefits did it confer? How did unconscious life transform itself into conscious life?<\/p>\n

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker admits there is no explanation. In How the Mind Works, <\/em>he writes, “Virtually nothing is known about the functioning microcircuitry of the brain…. The existence of subjective first-person experience is not explainable by science.” So baffling is the problem that Daniel Dennett has “solved” it by declaring consciousness to be a cognitive illusion.<\/p>\n

Finally, evolution cannot explain human rationality or morality. This was a point first made by Alfred Russel Wallace, who proposed simultaneously with Darwin a theory of evolution by natural selection. Here I don’t want to be misunderstood. Evolution can account for how brain size got larger and conferred survival benefits on creatures with larger brains. But rationality is something more than this. Rationality is the power to perceive something as true.<\/p>\n

We can include in rationality the unique human capacity for language, which is the ability to formulate and articulate ideas that comprehend the world around us. People in the most primitive cultures developed language as a means of rationality, while cats cannot utter a single sentence. Evolution provides an explanation for how creatures develop traits that are useful to their survival. As Steven Pinker puts it, “Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth.”<\/p>\n

So where did we humans get this other capacity to figure out not only what helps our genes to make it into the next generation, but also to understand what is going on in the world? To put it another way, what is the survival value of truth itself? Philosopher Michael Ruse, a noted Darwinist, confesses that “no one, certainly not the Darwinian as such, seems to have any answer to this.”<\/p>\n

Humans have not only a rational but also a moral capacity. In his Descent of Man, <\/em>Darwin admitted that “of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is the most important.” Morality speaks to us in a different voice: not what we do but what we ought to do.<\/p>\n

Frequently morality presses on us to act against our evident self-interest. It urges us not to tell lies even when they benefit us and to help people even when they are strangers to us. In a later chapter, I address how evolutionists seek to account for morality in Darwinian terms. Here let me say something that most of them would agree with: there is much inventive speculation but no good evolutionary explanation for these basic human capacities.<\/p>\n

Do you see now why the arrogance of Darwinists like Dennett and Dawkins is entirely misplaced? These fellows seem to think they are armed with some master theory that provides a full explanation for the universe, and for our place in it. Yet their cherished evolutionary theory cannot account for the origin of life, the origin of consciousness, or the origin of human rationality and morality. Any theory that cannot account for these landmark stages can hardly claim to have solved the problem of origins, either of life or of the universe. It can take credit only for elucidating some transitions along the way. Evolu- tion seems right as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far.
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\nTrue, one day science may provide us with better answers. I am not making a “God of the Gaps” argument that says because science cannot explain this, therefore God did it. But neither do I want to succumb to the “atheism of the gaps” that holds that even where there is no explanation, we should be confident that a natural explanation is forthcoming. Yes,science has made huge strides in explaining some things but in other areas science has not markedly advanced since the days of the Babylonians. Our best bet is to go with what we know so far and draw conclusions based on that. As of now, evolution is a useful theory but one that falls well short of accounting for the kind of life we have in the world.<\/p>\n

Let us now return to the claims by Dawkins and others that Darwin’s theory of evolution has decimated Paley’s argument from design. Actually, Paley’s argument has never been refuted. I am not talking of the specific details that Paley cited, but about his general case for design. That case is actually much stronger today than when Paley made it two centuries ago.<\/p>\n

Dawkins is too blinded by anti-religious prejudice to see it, but his argument in The Blind Watchmaker <\/em>actually supports the design argument. To see why, consider the example of a computer. A computer is like Paley’s watch: it shows clear evidence of design. No one could seriously contend that the computer somehow “evolved” through the forces of natural selection. Someone made it and someone programmed it. Now let’s assume that this is not the case with a certain type of software. Let’s assume that this software operates in a kind of “open source” mode. It accepts random changes and somehow the most useful and adaptive programs survive.<\/p>\n

Let’s posit that the process here is evolutionary; it is guided by no one. My question is the following: would the fact of evolution in the case of the software in any way undermine the fact of design in the case of the computer? Obviously not. The software may evolve but someone still had to make the computer and install in it the original programming.<\/p>\n

Now apply this analogy to the universe. I have in previous chapters offered strong evidence that the universe is the product of design. The universe could not have evolved through natural selection, as the universe makes up the whole of nature. Someone made the universe and prescribed the laws that govern its operations. Now within the universe there are innumerable life forms that correspond in our analogy to the software programs. These life forms are the product of evolution, and Darwin and his successors have elegantly elucidated the modes of transition. But evolution has no explanation for the origin of the universe or its laws. So how can evolution undercut the argument from design as it applies to the universe itself and the laws that govern it? Clearly it cannot. In this case, as with the computer, the evolution of the part in no way refutes the deliberate design of the whole. The overwhelming evidence is that someone planned the whole thing.<\/p>\n

If the laws of physics did not have their finely tuned features in line with the anthropic principle, stars like the sun would not burn in the slow and steady way that they do, giving life in general\u2014and human life in particular\u2014time to evolve. Evolution itself requires a finely tuned designer universe. John Barrow and Frank Tipler argue that physics has supplied a new “design argument remarkably similar to that proposed by Paley.” Biologists who insist that evolution operates according to principles of time and chance often forget that it also depends on the laws of a universe that is not the product of time and chance.<\/p>\n

Even if God did not override the laws of nature in order for mankind to emerge, who programmed the cell with its digital code? Who gave it the capacity to make copies of itself? Who made a universe with the laws that could produce mankind? What is the ultimate explanation for why reality is structured in this way?
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\nPhysicist Stephen Barr writes: When examined carefully, scientific accounts of natural processes are never really about order emerging from mere chaos, or form emerging from mere formlessness. On the contrary, they are always about the unfolding of an order that was already implicit in the nature of things, although often in a secret or hidden way. When we see situations that appear haphazard, or things that appear amorphous, automatically or spontaneously “arranging themselves” into orderly patterns, what we find in every case is that what appeared to be haphazard actually had a great deal of order built into it….<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, at Amazon “The ancient covenant is in pieces. Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance.” \u2014Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6702,6707],"tags":[7282,7404,7405,7310,7284,6772,7406,1888,7407,7408,722,7409,4902,7410],"class_list":["post-3465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thechrist","category-studies-thechristcontents","tag-argument-from-design","tag-biologists","tag-blind-watchmaker","tag-charles-darwin","tag-dinesh-d-souza","tag-existence-of-god","tag-horologist","tag-human-beings","tag-immensity","tag-jacques-monod","tag-natural-selection","tag-natural-theology","tag-richard-dawkins","tag-william-paley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}