Darwin’s Dangerous Idea

@Alexander Not only is the sto­ry of his recan­ta­tion whol­ly false (http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/ladyhope.html) and the idea of his “steal­ing” the the­o­ry, whether from Eras­mus (whose “Zoono­mia, or, The Laws of Organ­ic Life” was influ­en­tial on many sci­en­tists and nat­u­ral­ists work­ing in the field, or from Alfred Rus­sel Wal­lace who was work­ing on a com­pet­ing the­o­ry at the same time does not in any way detract from the the­o­ry itself.

Indeed, even if Dar­win had repu­di­at­ed his own the­o­ry, it would have no effect on the the­o­ry itself. Evo­lu­tion­ary the­o­ry meets the cri­te­ria gen­er­al­ly accept­ed by sci­en­tists as defin­ing sci­ence, and thus is testable. Those tests deter­mine the truth or false­hood of a sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ry, not the opin­ion of any­one; you, me, the pro­mul­ga­tor of the the­o­ry, Ted “Come to this restroom often?” Hag­gard, or any­one else. Pure non­sense would be some­thing that can­not be proven, has lit­tle to no chance of being true, and yet is still clung to by mil­lions of peo­ple for no rea­son oth­er than being incul­cat­ed in them when they were young and impres­sion­able.

well said Jon, Alex if you are brave enough to chal­lenge your mind and faith read The God Delu­sion by Richard Dawkins

The view that evo­lu­tion and nat­ur­al selec­tion explains why I can’t have a soul, or be more than a body with a brain, fails entire­ly to account for expe­ri­ences like those of Jacques Lusseyran (“And There Was Light: Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Jacques Lusseyran, Blind Hero of the French Resis­tance”) who should by all means be an inter­est­ing and chal­leng­ing study for any­one deal­ing with ques­tions of the mind. What if you are hal­lu­ci­nat­ing what you think to be real­i­ty, and all of this world is just your own imag­i­na­tion? Would you real­ly want it?

Hanoch,

Muta­tion (or vari­a­tion) may be ran­dom, but there is noth­ing ran­dom about selec­tion. If nat­ur­al selec­tion were ran­dom, ugly girls would get asked to dance just as often as pret­ty ones. As for your “big ques­tion,” if you think it has­n’t been addressed head-on, you haven’t been read­ing much. You’re talk­ing about the First-Cause Argu­ment for the exis­tence of God. Since you say you haven’t heard “any of these (Dar­win­ist-athe­ist) types” address it, I will just quote Bertrand Rus­sell, address­ing this issue in 1927:

“I may say that when I was a young man and was debat­ing these ques­tions very seri­ous­ly in my mind, I for a long time accept­ed the argu­ment of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eigh­teen, I read John Stu­art Mil­l’s Auto­bi­og­ra­phy, and I there found this sen­tence: ‘My father taught me that the ques­tion, Who made me? can­not be answered, since it imme­di­ate­ly sug­gests the fur­ther ques­tion, “Who made God?’ That very sim­ple sen­tence showed me, as I still think, the fal­la­cy in the argu­ment of the First Cause. If every­thing must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be any­thing with­out a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there can­not be any valid­i­ty to the argu­ment.”

So there you have one athe­ist-type, Bertrand Rus­sell, address­ing the issue head-on, in agree­ment with anoth­er athe­ist-type, John Stu­art Mill.

I just have one ques­tion for you, Hanoch, and I would like you to address it head-on: Have you actu­al­ly read Dar­win’s “On the Ori­gen of Species”?

Mike:

Thanks for your com­ment, but I find it unsat­is­fy­ing for the fol­low­ing rea­son.

There is a big prob­lem with posit­ing that if ele­ments require a cause for their exis­tence, then a Cre­ator does too. The for­mer are nat­ur­al objects which can­not cre­ate them­selves. How­ev­er, when one speaks of a Cre­ator of the nat­ur­al world, we are speak­ing of some­thing that is, by def­i­n­i­tion, super­nat­ur­al (i.e. above and out­side the laws of nature) and thus not sub­ject to the same nat­ur­al laws of cau­sa­tion.

More to the point (and entire­ly con­sis­tent with my orig­i­nal state­ment), your Rus­sell quote does not answer the fun­da­men­tal ques­tion I raised, i.e., what caused the exis­tence of the basic ele­ments that began the process of evo­lu­tion? If an athe­ist were to argue that those ele­ments sim­ply exist with­out a cause, then it seems that that leap of faith is prob­a­bly greater (giv­en what we already know about the nat­ur­al world) than the one tak­en by those who posit a Cre­ator to explain their exis­tence.

I guess I can’t post a com­ment with­out mak­ing a typo. In the mid­dle para­graph, it should state that any­one with any intel­lec­tu­al integri­ty or humil­i­ty will admit that he or she does NOT know what the ulti­mate truth of the uni­verse is.

Alban,

What is the evi­dence for your claims about the nature of God? There is a lot of evi­dence about evo­lu­tion, but none that I know of about the nature, or even the exis­tence, of God. In case you want to claim the Bible as the evi­dence: sim­ply because a book claims to be the rev­e­la­tion from God does not mean that it is. Oth­er reli­gions make exact­ly the same claim about their sto­ries. Sim­i­lar­ly, in case you want to claim that you know this to be true based on your own expe­ri­ence, there are innu­mer­able oth­er peo­ple who have “known” about the nature of God based on their own expe­ri­ence. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, most of them have had a total­ly dif­fer­ent belief than you do, and have been just as cer­tain about it.

As to the argu­ment about the source of the mate­r­i­al in the uni­verse, claim­ing that the orig­i­nal cause is super­nat­ur­al does­n’t get you any­where. Even if it were true, that only gets you to a deist view. It would tell you noth­ing about whether a super­nat­ur­al cre­ator cares about us at all. Giv­en the infin­i­tes­i­mal part of the uni­verse — both phys­i­cal­ly and tem­po­ral­ly — in which humans have exist­ed, it seems to me that you would need to have a lot of evi­dence to sup­port the claim that the cre­ator of the uni­verse cre­at­ed all of this just so he could suf­fer and die for us!

In these debates about the nat­ur­al world, it’s aston­ish­ing how the sec­u­lar­ists so con­sis­tent­ly and utter­ly trounce the cre­ation­ists, who always, and quick­ly, wind up say­ing, “I don’t care what you say, it just is as I believe, peri­od.” One ter­ri­ble flaw in the cre­ation­ists’ strat­e­gy is (always, as far as I can tell) to assert that if they can find ANY imper­fec­tion in their oppo­nents’ accounts, ANY as-yet-unex­plained datum, then some­how that PROVES their entire the­o­ry. This is absurd! Ask the cre­ation­ists to offer spe­cif­ic, testable hypothe­ses about their account (when was the world cre­at­ed?, for exam­ple; where?; what was it cre­at­ed from?) and they run off. This makes the entire debate, very quick­ly, bor­ing and proves that it’s not about the nat­ur­al world at all. Yawn, already…or I would yawn if they did­n’t con­tin­ue to insist that chil­dren be taught their “the­o­ry” (which isn’t one).