A common claim made by the Dawkins school of
atheism is that the Theory of Evolution is incompatible with theories of Intelligent Design. It isn’t. Who says so? Charles Darwin, for
one.
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (all quotations from the Collins Clear-Type Press edition, London and Glasgow, no date) must surely be one of the
most beautiful books ever written. The cogency, lucidity and pure logic of its
basic argument make it irresistible. If we follow the example of the eye, Darwin
explains how the organ we know today must have developed from far more primitive
forms, one tiny step at a time. With certain vital reservations, which we will
consider in a moment, there is nothing irrational or unscientific or illogical
in the assumption that complex things may evolve out of simpler ones. The
principle applies to most areas of life, as one generation builds on the
progress of another, and the idea that advantageous changes will survive should
not cause too many furrowed brows even among the religious. But that is the
limit of Darwin’s theory. “How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly
concerns us more than how life itself first originated” (Chapter 6, Difficulties
on Theory). Indeed, he might have added “how a nerve comes to be a nerve.”
Darwin’s theory deals with the origin of species, not with the origin of life or
of organs, and at no stage does he ever pretend that it does more. He is quite
specific on this subject:
“It is no valid objection [to the theory] that science as yet throws no light on
the far
higher problem of the essence or origin of life” (Chapter XIV, Recapitulation
and
Conclusion).
It may come as a shock to many so-called Darwinians to read the final sentence
of this masterpiece:
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been
originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one…”
Dawkins also quotes this magnificent conclusion (p. 12), but takes his quote
from the 1859 edition, which did not contain the words "by the Creator". These
were a later insertion, but one that is difficult to ignore.
It is well known that in later years, Darwin lost his faith, but he himself
maintained that he had never been an atheist. He was an agnostic. And his
open-mindedness manifests itself again and again. Two more examples: “I see no
good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious
feelings of any one.” And “A celebrated author and divine has written to me that
‘he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the
Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of
self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a
fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.’”
Again Dawkins omits to mention such clear indications that Darwin himself kept
an open mind on the subject of origins. Anyone reading The God Delusion would
imagine that The Origin of Species was Darwin’s proof that there was no
designer.
This is not to defend the various concepts attached by different religions to
the term ‘Creator’. It is fair enough for atheists to complain if, for instance,
Creationists want to teach schoolchildren that the Earth is 6000 years old, and
to parade this as a scientific fact. But it is grossly unfair and unscientific
for atheists to claim that Darwinism teaches us that life originated by chance,
or even that Darwinism enables us to dispense with the notion of a conscious
creator.
There are, of course, flaws in the theory – one of which, the “imperfection of
the geological record”, Darwin covers in great detail. Another is his belief in
the even flow of the process, which modern science has cast doubt on, preferring
the concept of “punctuated equilibrium”. The basis of the theory, though,
remains as firm as ever, but since it provides no evidence to confirm or refute
the idea of intelligent design, and since the man who formulated it remained
open-minded on the subject, it should remain precisely where he left it: as
Chapter 2 and not Chapter 1 in the History of Life.
Dawkins is not prepared to leave it there, however. He seizes on the Boeing 747
example attributed to Fred Hoyle (i.e. a hurricane sweeping through a scrapyard
would never be able to create the plane, even if all the parts were available),
and dismisses it as “an argument that could be made only by somebody who doesn’t
understand the first thing about natural selection: somebody who thinks natural
selection is a theory of chance whereas – in the relevant sense of chance – it
is the opposite” (p. 113). Leaving aside the puzzle of what he means by the
“relevant sense”, it is not the process of natural selection that is attributed
to chance here, any more than the people who designed the Boeing would have
thrown the bits and pieces up in the air and hoped for a happy landing. The
chance element lies in the creation and combination of the materials on which
natural selection works. Dawkins (perhaps Hoyle too) is comparing the Boeing to
the animal at the end (so far) of the evolutionary process, but it is the
separate coming into being of the living, self-reproducing primeval organisms,
the hitherto unthought-of even if primitive eye, ear, nose, lung, heart, penis,
vagina, etc., that presents the problem. Darwin himself understood this, and so
refrained from discussing such origins.
Dawkins, however, blithely announces that natural selection explains “the whole of life” (p. 116). Even when dealing with the example of the eye, he tries to make out that something so “apparently designed…was really the end product of a long sequence of non-random but purely natural causes” (p. 116), as if his (not Darwin’s) theory did not depend on an entirely random but immediately effective mutation that gave birth to the primitive light-sensitive nerve on which natural selection got to work.
In this context, however, it also needs to be borne in mind that the very concept of sight did not exist before that random mutation, and yet the various unconscious cells in some mysterious way “knew” that this primitive light-sensitivity could develop further, and so quite spontaneously they were able to develop new nerves and cells which eventually resulted in sight, and then in better sight. And hearing, and smell, and taste, and touch, and so on. Each one the result of an initial random mutation.
Perhaps, then, for a moment we might pause to imagine precisely how this process might work. Let us picture the primitive, pregnant oojah lying beneath a tree when a bolt of lightning strikes beside it. Perhaps, in order to boost the chances of probability, there is a herd of pregnant oojahs. As a result of the shock or the powerful electrical discharge, the mini-oojahs emerge with a genetic mutation: they have a primitive, light-sensitive nerve. For some reason, this primitive nerve provides them with an advantage over the oojahs that haven’t got one, and enough of them are lucky enough to survive and pass on their light-sensitive nerve to a new generation of oojahs. Then what happens? Neither oojahs nor their nerves have the slightest concept of vision, and even if they did, no amount of straining would enable them to develop new structures that would result in a change to their light-sensitive nerve. No matter how many generations of oojahs and light-sensitive nerves you count, by what means did they develop the additional, hugely complex structures that lead, even step by step, from light-sensitivity to vision? The atheists’ scenario, as their creatures climb Dawkins' Mount Improbable, is of a “continuous and shallow slope", evolving "by slow (or even, maybe, not all that slow) gradual degrees." (p. 124). It's a very plausible image, but it only explains what happens and not how or why it happens. Where did the mechanism of physical change spring from? The initial random mutation – a colossal miracle in itself – which Dawkins attributes to luck, is followed by a long chain of inexplicable additional mini-miracles as each new generation of oojahs…does what, exactly? They can’t consciously change what they have, any more than I can change the degree of my myopia; what they pass on is only what they already have. At what point, allowing for the gradual improvements, does a light-sensitive nerve turn into vision? How and, since vision did not exist as a concept, why? How did the new connections, nerves, muscles form themselves? In this context of physical change, natural selection explains nothing, because although it tells us why beneficial changes survive and are perpetuated, and indeed why organs will improve over time, it does not explain the mechanism that enables such changes to take place. For an atheist, "luck" brought about life, the ability to reproduce, random mutations that proved meaningful, and the ability to change. For an agnostic, the degree of improbability (a favourite weapon of Dawkins) is so huge that it is impossible to “dismiss” the idea of design.
There is one further anomaly in the Dawkins’ theory of evolution. What he calls the “jackpot or nothing fallacy”: “Either the eye sees or it doesn’t. There are assumed to be no useful intermediates. But this is simply wrong. Such intermediates abound in practice” (p. 122). He goes on to describe the eye of the flatworm as “less than half a human eye”, and of the nautilus as halfway between the flatworm and the human eye. But eyes at the "intermediate stage" can still see. They would be useless if they couldn’t. The miracle lies in the original, primitive, light-sensitive “nerve”, which if it did not already provide some degree of advantage – even 0.0001% of human vision – would not have survived. This may have been “simple” by comparison with later eyes, but it remains inexplicable.
Furthermore, neither Dawkins' nor Darwin’s theory solves our problem of physical changes. How and why did successful, individual oojahs – for even over thousands or millions of years, the process can only develop through individual animals – transmute themselves into floojahs, then flatjahs, then flatwoohs, and then flatworms? Even if we accept the idea that one particular oojah suddenly decided that it would go and live under the earth, and this oojah was so successful that it spawned more, where did its adaptability spring from? Once again, we return to the miracle of the beginning, for now we find that Darwin’s original few forms (or one) were simultaneously brought to life, endowed with the ability to reproduce themselves, and – crucially for evolution – able to adapt themselves to changing conditions and also to pass on their adaptations. All this achieved at a stroke by sheer chance.
The design argument thus relates to four
things: 1) origins, 2) heredity, 3) adaptability, and 4) the hugely complex
nature of all the organs that we know of. Natural selection goes some way
towards explaining only the fourth of these, in so far as nature will favour the
survival of those creatures endowed with certain advantages. It is true that
most areas of our existence show that once the initial mechanism is in place,
complexity may develop from comparative simplicity, but it is precisely this
initial mechanism that is the problem. We know that change happens. The codes
have been cracked. But could chance have created the codes? Maybe it could, but
you need an act of faith to believe it.
To put these miracles in perspective, let us conclude by drawing an invented
parallel. The camera is our nearest mechanical equivalent to the eye. The
conscious, human mind has created an instrument that can perform most of the
eye’s functions. And yet for all our conscious ingenuity, we are still not able
to invent a camera that is capable of spontaneously replicating itself, of
spontaneously repairing its own defects, of spontaneously improving itself, or
of spontaneously passing on any improvements made in itself. We are not capable
of such engineering brilliance but, in the atheist view, chance is.
Dawkins’ misrepresentation of the design argument reaches its apogee in a
typical combination of two favourite themes: “Design is not the only alternative
to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative. Indeed, design is not a
real alternative at all because it raises an even bigger problem than it solves:
who designed the designer?”
(p. 121) He always falls back on this non sequitur when other arguments fail.
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