From World to God?. Richard L. Sturch

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      leslie

      I said I’d try and outline some of the arguments from special features of the world. The most celebrated used to be that associated above all with Archdeacon Paley in the 18th century: the comparison of living things, and the organs that make them up, to artefacts like watches, and hence the conclusion that they, like the watch, must have a Designer. Paley himself was, of course, only one in a tradition of apologists which began long before and went on long after. Indeed, perhaps its finest flowering was in the Bridgewater Treatises, in which some of the best scientists of the early 19th century found evidence of design not just in biology but in other disciplines too, such as geology and astronomy.

      myra

      Let’s leave geology and astronomy out of it, for the time being at least. Biology will keep us going for the present. For you still meet apologists who point to things like the human eye as evidence of design.

      Design and Evolution

      geoffrey

      Which is ridiculous, so long after Darwin and Wallace. We do not need a Designer to explain facts that natural selection will account for.

      myra

      But natural selection does not mean that there was no Designer: only that He designed the whole process.

      geoffrey

      It does not disprove the existence of a God. But it does make it impossible to argue for his reality in the way that Paley and the Bridgewater Treatise authors hoped to do. And what sort of a God does it give us anyway? In the first place, he seems to be rather remote. He is more the God of eighteenth-century Deism than of Christianity: a God who gets the world started and then leaves it to its own devices. And in the second place, a God who leaves things to chance: for it was by no means inevitable that human life should evolve. Our ancestors might have been wiped out by a disaster like that which wiped out the dinosaurs; or, alternatively, the dinosaurs might not have been wiped out, so that our ancestors remained insignificant; and so on. The “Cambrian explosion” of life-forms, 500 plus million years ago, produced not only all the main groups of animals that survive but others as well, which became extinct—and it might quite easily have been they who survived and our ancestors who died out. It was largely a matter of historical luck. We are not the crown of creation but a by-product of accident.

      myra

      Surely “by-product of accident” is putting it too strongly. The word “chance” can be misleading. It can mean “not predetermined, not produced purely by laws of nature”; in human terms the toss of a coin or the turn of a card is a matter of chance in this sense.

      leslie

      But they aren’t really undetermined.

      myra

      Very likely not, but as far as we are concerned they can be treated as if they were. And quantum phenomena surely are. Now evolution may be a chance process in this sense. On the other hand, “chance” may mean something more like “unplanned, unintended,” like that time you and I met on a street in Stockholm without either of us knowing the other was going to be there. And I don’t think it is legitimate to argue from the first to the second.

      geoffrey

      I see the distinction, but is it relevant? The two overlap, and surely if a thing is “chance” in the first sense it will be “chance” in the second as well. If the human race did not evolve inevitably from the beginnings of life, I don’t see how its emergence can have been planned by God.

      myra

      Because СКАЧАТЬ