The Hand of God?

Next, I think I'll write Hamlet.

Apparently there is a big scandal going on in the academic word, involving a paper published in a minor scientific journal, PLOS One. The problem is that the paper, by three Chinese and one American scientists, refers to the Creator as the reason for the remarkable abilities of the human hand.

The comments were pretty scathing. One, a fellow editor with the same journal, wrote “The article should be retracted and the handling editor should be dismissed.” An Associate professor at Duke wrote: “This is outrageous. If PLOS ONE does not do something about it, i.e., ask the authors to retract the paper, and in any case, if the paper isn't retracted, my students, collaborators and I will have no choice but to refrain from considering (i..e, reading, reviewing and citing) papers published in PLOS ONE.” Another reader writes “I find the use of religious language in a scietific [sic] paper totally unacceptable.” The authors have backed down, claiming it was all a problem in translation, that they meant to say not “Creator” but “Nature.” Nevertheless, the scandal was such that the paper has since been retracted by the journal. And the authors have not been allowed the chance to resubmit the paper in any amended form.

The journal's retraction notice reads, in part:

“... [T]he PLOS ONE editors ... apologize to readers for the inappropriate language in the article and the errors during the evaluation process.”

To a reader comment, they responded: “A number of readers have concerns about sentences in the article that make references to a 'Creator'. The PLOS ONE editors apologize that this language was not addressed internally or by the Academic Editor during the evaluation of the manuscript.”

For a time, the paper was pulled from the website. Now they have put it back up, without their imprimatur, no doubt by popular demand. They are clearly scrambling, and things are changing minute by minute.

Something is very wrong here. Anyone who is religious believes, as a matter of logical necessity, that the human hand was designed by God. Moreover, the argument from design is a time-honoured means of proving God's existence. The reaction of the scientific community and the journal seems to imply that this sort of statement, regardless of the evidence, is not permitted. This is simple religious discrimination, at the expense not just of religion but of science, which ought to be an open inquiry.

The authors' explanation that they meant “Nature” is bogus. The conclusion makes it clear that they are referring to an entity separate from and guiding natural selection: “the proper design by the Creator for dexterous performance of numerous functions following the evolutionary remodeling of the ancestral hand for millions of years.” The authors' response to one of the first comments objecting to the paper also made this clear. Interestingly, this comment seems to have been deleted. It essentially used the “watchmaker” analogy, pointing out that no human device has yet matched the dexterity of the human hand.

In any case, changing “Creator” to “Nature” does not change anything substantial. If you are going to attribute a design and a will to “Nature,” “Nature” is simply the word you use for God. Interestingly, almost everyone who speaks of the biological sphere without using the term “God” in fact does this. When we speak of evolution moving from simple to complex, or to greater consciousness, or of “the balance of nature,” we are assuming a deity and a design. It is almost impossible not to. The only difference is that if you use the term “Nature,” (or “Earth,” or “Gaea,” or “science”), you are appealing to a pagan formulation of God. You are, specifically, excluding Christ and the concept of redemption. And as an article of faith.

Some argue that the Creator has no part in a scientific argument because God's existence is not itself a matter that is scientifically testable. But it is—the point of the reference in the present article is precisely that the evidence weighs in favour of the existence of God. Moreover, elements of the opposing Darwinian theory are genuinely untestable. How do you demonstrate that something (e.g., “random mutation”) is truly “random.”

William of Okham (i.e., Occam)

Of course, the answer is that neither Darwin nor Wallace meant “random” to be taken in this sense, in the sense that modern anti-religious bigotry seems to take it. They meant, specifically, random with regard to the survival value of the mutation. They did not mean that there was no larger or divine design involved. Wallace expressly believed that there was.

Intelligent design really ought to be a no-brainer. Is a giraffe, say, plausibly, a random collection of molecules? Would Occam accept that shave?

Darwinian Economics

An old joke describes a camper who awoke to see his friend frantically putting on his running shoes as an angry bear approached their campsite. “Why bother?” he asked. “Don’t you know there’s no way you’ll be able to outrun that bear?” “I don’t have to outrun him”, the friend responded, “I just need to outrun you.”

Economist Robert Frank offers a useful corrective to pure free market economics. The pure free market theory is based on the notion that, if everyone simply pursues their self-interest, the result, by Smith's “invisible hand,” will be good for everyone. Looking instead at Darwin's theory of evolution, Frank pointss out that this is usually, but not always, so. Sometimes what works for survival of the individual does not work out for survival of the species. The Irish elk grew antlers up to 3.65 metres wide. This was very useful when competing with other Irish elk in the annual mating competition. It was an advantage for the individual. It was a hindrance when passing therough forested areas, allowing the elk to be trapped by predators. It was against the best intererests of the Irish elk as a species. Granted, the obstructing powerr of the antlers was also a disadvantage to the individual; but the mating advantage of the large antlers more than couinterbalanced this, while doing nothing of advantage for the species.

The Irish elk became extinct 7,700 years ago. In truth, biologists are not sure why it became extinct, but bear with me and accept that it could have been this odd antlerian arms race, for the sake of argument.

For it illustrates something that can surely happen in economics as well, letting the individual good diverge from the common good. Hockey players, if left freee to choose, will almost alsways opt to play without a halmet. It improves their field of vision and gives them a competitive advantage. But they almost all prefer a rule requiring halmets. The problem is, they do not want to get their brains bashed out, but so long as anyone else is not wearing a halmet, they feel they must not to compete.

You can see, then, why regulation of the pure free market may well sometimes be in eveyone's best interests.

The Decline and Fall of Everyone

Not the way it usually works.

Contrary to what you commonly hear, social Darwinism, the idea that survival of the fittest applies to human nations and cultures, was no perversion of Darwin's original theory. Darwin himself was the first social Darwinist. It was the subject of his later book The Descent of Man. Leading pretty directly to the First and Second World Wars.

In Descent, Darwin makes the interesting observation that, when cultures are no longer, for one reason or another, competitive in the evolutionary struggle, they are not necessarily defeated militarily by some neighbouring tribe. They often seem instead to simply lay down and die. Darwin cites a Mr. Sproat, who observed the Native Indians of Vancouver Island, over time, become “bewildered and dull by the new life around them; they lose the motives for exertion, and get no new ones in their place.” (Darwin, p. 542). That sounds, indeed, like what has happened to native cultures in North America generally.

Soon, fertility declines. Darwin tracks the rapid fall in the number of Tasmanian aboriginals. Far from being exterminated by the Europeans, according to Darwin, the Tasmanian government took every effort to keep them going. Nevertheless, the native islanders seem to have simply stopped reproducing. “At the time when only nine women were left at Oyster Cove, … only two had ever borne children: and these two had together produced only three children” (p. 548). Among the Maoris of New Zealand, similarly, Darwin quotes figures that, in 1844, there was one child for every 2.57 adults; in 1858, only 14 years later, there was one child for every 3.27 adults. In Hawaii, after contact with the Europeans, fertility fell to “half a child for every married couple in the whole island” (p. 552).

Last four Tasmanian aborigines, 1860.

I don't think these examples bear out Darwin's theories; they suggest a spiritual instead of a material cause for the rise and fall of nations. Do animal species die out from ennui? But they are of interest in showing how depression works, and that it is primarily a loss of meaning. A culture or an individual, coming into contact with a new culture, is automatically challenged in their prior assumptions. If that new culture is different enough, and seems to offer plainly superior results in some fields, this is necessarily powerfully so. Everything seems, to the individual in the less developed culture, to become pointless, as all the old signposts and destinations seem disproven. This, I suspect, is what African cultures refer to as “loss of soul.”

Hence the shock and depression in these cases almost entirely hits the aboriginal, not the European, culture.

The same effect, not incidentally, can be achieved by surrounding an individual with consistent lies, which challenge his own common sense and experience, as happens in a dysfunctional family. It can happen on a broader, social level when a culture for whatever reason departs generally from common sense and common experience, with or without any outside pressures upon it.

The culture or the individual is then caught between a spiritual Scylla and Charybdis. He dares not leap nor stay behind. There is the same sense of purposelessness as with the “lazy Indians,” or for that matter, the “lazy negroes,” like a car that cannot get into any gear. Hence the lack of interest in sex, which is really a lack of interest in procreation and childrearing. To have a child is a vote that the future will be better, not worse, than the present.

First point: the reality that these things happen disproves the idea of cultural relativism. All cultures are not equal, or culture shock would be more evenly distributed. Second point: such things are not the superior culture's fault. Time to get rid of notions of “cultural imperialism” and “cultural genocide.” Third point: there is a cure to depression, and it is to make the leap.

In other words, broadly, the residential schools were the right idea, and our current drive to resegregate and revive aboriginal cultures will only prolong the problem.

It is also interesting to see that the clearest symptom of this problem on a cultural level is a decline in fertility rates.

We have such a decline, of course, currently across the West. Our culture generally has strayed too far from common sense and common experience. If it does not correct itself, it will die, as did these others.

But who will replace it? Fertility rates have fallen even more disastrously in East Asia. And they are falling in South Asia (i.e., India). And in the Middle East. In Russia, they have long been alarmingly low. So much for possible competing civilizations. In fact, fertility rates seem to be falling just about everywhere.

All of this is actually prompted by an article from David P. Goldman, “Spengler,” on the demographics of modern Iran. Fertility there has fallen from 7 children per woman in 1979 to 1.6 in 2012. This is a bigger decline than has ever been seen before in a large, developed country.

Clearly, there is something very wrong with the spiritual climate, and there are as yet no solutions in sight.

What Immortal Hand or Eye?

Random collection of atoms.

Did Darwin disrupt the argument from design? New Atheists seem to think so.

The argument from design holds that the order in the universe demonstrates the existence of an intelligence behind it—aka God. The classic analogy is this: if you found a watch lying in a field, it would be obvious to you from the intricacy of the object that it was not randomly produced by the actions of wind and wave, but made intentionally by a reasonable being. Yet a giraffe, say, is in fact far more intricate than a watch. So…

Bu, New Atheists—and old ones too, no doubt—affirm that Darwin has given us an alternate explanation. Darwin, on this view, postulates a mechanism that can, given enough time, randomly produce a giraffe; hence no need for a watchmaker.

But that depends, in the first place, on what you mean by “random.” Darwin himself tends to us the term “chance.” Darwin certainly does not prove, nor can he really believe, that evolution is random in the higher sense: to Merriam-Webster, “an action that happens without order or without reason.” In fact, his theory itself, in presuming to explain how evolution works, presents it as an ordered process (evolution) with a reason (preservation of self and species). Moreover, he is not saying that evolution operates outside the laws of nature, which is to say, the established and accepted order in the universe. Indeed, with or without the giraffe, the fact that science works at all is proof that the universe is ordered and follows a design. If it did not, we would not be able to understand it or find rules behind it. As Einstein said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.”

Determining randomness in the absolute sense is not just beyond the purview of science; it would be a disproof of science. The very point of science is to demonstrate that nothing is random, that everything follows laws.

So it really does seem that, whatever even Darwin himself thought, whatever Darwinists think, and whatever atheists in general think, Darwin’s theory does nothing to refute or reduce the power of the argument from design. A “random” process in the strict sense still did not produce the giraffe, and the process that did, it would seem, has to have been programmed in to the system by some designer.

It is unfortunate that Darwin and Darwinism use the term “random mutation.” They can only have meant “random” in some relative sense, but they themselves seem to have tricked themselves into thinking it is meant in an absolute sense. There are, I think, only two possibilities Alvin Plantinga, quoting Ernst Mayr, argues that the meaning of “random” or “chance” in this context can only be, that said mutations are random in relation to the specific objective of survival of the species. In other words, the words of Sober, “there is no physical mechanism that detects which mutations would be beneficial and causes those mutations to occur.” The mutations occur not randomly, but based on some orderly and yet unknown mechanism other than pure survival value.

No issue here, in terms of the argument from design. God could use a spiritual mechanism to do this directly, and in any case his intentions are surely higher than mere survival of species. Kind of goes without saying from the fact that he allows species to die out.

So the giraffe remains an apparent proof of divine power. We are simply postulating some of the tools the watchmaker might have used.

Did Darwin Destroy Western Civilization?

Western civ has been acting suicidal for some time. It is vital to figure out why this is so, so it can be stopped. As of a few years ago, I thought I knew: it was the sense of futility brought on by the mass dyings of the First World War.

But in this centenary year, the First World War has been getting more attention, and I realize now I was wrong. The First World War, first, was not futile: Kaiser Willie's Germany was well on the way to Nazism already. And, second, the sense of civilizational death began before the war. Not just in Germany's racist notions, but in the arts: Marinetti's nihilist/fascist Futurist Manifesto appeared in 1909; Stravinsky's modernist Rites of Spring was first performed in 1913; Picasso had gone all cubist by 1907. The trauma that felled Europe must have come before the war. Virginia Woolf apparently felt it already in December 1910.

A facinating article in The New Criterion argues that it came with the aesthetic sensibility that gave us kitsch. Nazism, for example, was all kitsch; and kitsch is immoral art. Sounds right. Kitsch is not just aesthetically, but morally offensive: kitsch is art that lies. It denies the realities of the world in favour of an escapist vision that seems more pleasant: puppies with big velvet eyes, sad-faced clowns, smoke from happy chimneys, trees full of pink and blue flowers. This is, not coincidentally, the people's lot as presented by any totalitarian state.

Kitsch also denies real emotion in favour of sentimentality. And, as Carl Jung once said, awkwardly but accurately, sentimentality is a superstructure concealing brutality. Sentimentality masks a lack of real emotion. Hitler was great with animals and children.

And where did kitsch come from? Seems obvious: the movement called “aestheticism” at the turn of the century. This movement, originally in the high arts, wanted to divorce art from any other considerations: “art for art's sake.” So art had nothing to do with either morality or reality. Or real emotions.

By the way, that sounds a lot like New Age, doesn't it? It also sounds like most "religious" art, sadly: the plaster saints without a blemish.

Could all the horrible consequences of the 20th century, the slow and horrible suicide of Western civiloization, really have come from an artistic movement?

I think it could, and maybe it did. Art is that important.

But where did aestheticism in turn come from? Where did the urge come from to turn away from the real world, shut down our real emotions, and ignore morality? I think the timing fits: it was Darwin. Just as Darwin was the obvious and direct progenitor of the German Imperial/Nazi race theories. Darwin's view of the world was and still is too horrible to look at directly; yet people accepted it in their hearts as true. It is a world of devour or be devoured, where everything else is random.

Unfortunate for us all if Darwin was right.

In the meantime, for all our sakes, we need to reconnect religion with art, and art with religion.

St. Thomas Aquinas on Evolution

Not only did Big Tom believe in evolution from the apes: he deliberately made himself look like a capuchin monkey.

In the recent past, I pointed out that Evolution  was no new idea with Darwin, but had been a live theory since ancient Greece. And I noted that St, Augustine assumed it. Now I discover, thanks to TOF's blog, that St. Thomas also assumed it. The money quote from Summa Theologica:

Species, also, that are new, if any such appear, existed beforehand in various active powers; so that animals, and perhaps even new species of animals, are produced by putrefaction by the power which the stars and elements received at the beginning.

-- Summa Theologica, I.73.1 reply3

Aquinas differs from Darwin only in the mechanism, which he imagines to be "putrefaction." St. Thomas also argues nicely that evolution is the most fitting way for God to create: creating things that can themselves create other things is an intrinsically greater feat and greater good than just creating everything all at once.

The idea that there is some conflict between Christianity and evolution per se is plain wrong. The problem, for some, is with Darwin's proposed mechanism. These two issues ought not to be confused.

Harpur's The Pagan Christ and the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius

It is hard to take Harpur's The Pagan Christ seriously when his own faith seems to be a mix of New Age and scientism, in which evolution is God.

Vasnetsov: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

p. 40: “Significantly, here the King James translation of the ‘end of the world’ has done a lot of harm.” i.e., in making people think it was all about an end of the material world instead of a stage of natural “evolution.” The term translated “end of the world” in KJV can also be translated “end of the age.” There is no important distinction here for Christian theology; either way, you're  getting "a new heaven and a new earth." “Age” just sounds better to a New Ager. But the King James translation could not possibly have done this, since the great majority of Christians cannot read English, and would never have seen this particular translation.

p. 41: “The glow of Christliness—a thing Kuhn describes as at once both chemically radioactive and intellectual—in us.” Our souls are chemical, and radioactive? Makes you wonder just how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

There is no God but man, and Darwin is his prophet.

Harpur’s divine evolution is, apparently, evolving us all into gods, or God. P. 40: “To them [the ancients] salvation meant to consummate the present evolutionary cycle and keep marching on with nature until full divinization was realized.” One problem with this interpretation: the ancients would have had no concept of evolution as a natural process. That was Darwin, and a few before him, nineteenth century AD. The ancients would have no idea what Harpur is on about here.

More of this on p. 87: “In the ancient gnosis , as the soul advances through the scale of evolution, he or she passes through twelve grades of being, … until his or her absorption of the essence of all nature is complete. … the sun’s journey … symbolized the soul’s round of the elements and the acquisition of the twelve intelligences…” This is basically Gnosticism, but “absorption of the essence of all nature” seems to be Harpur’s own idea.

Harpur's vision of the periodic table.

What does it mean to absorb “the essence of nature”? Ah, the elements. Apparently one is supposed to “absorb” the elements. Perhaps by eating them? Or is this like osmosis? But not the elements in the periodic table. Harpur understands the elements as fire, air, earth, and water. Putting science back roughly 2,500 years. This kind of stuff only works on acid.

On p. 103: Harpur writes of the story of Isis fishing Horus out of the water with a net: “This was a cosmic symbol of life first coming out of the water as part of the evolutionary process. … The meaning is profound.” However profound Darwin’s theory of evolution might be, once again, it was unlikely to have been known to the ancient Egyptians. Why would they have thought life evolved out of the water? If they did, why should they place some religious significance on this?

p. 104: “From an evolutionary point of view, we humans move from the mineral stage to the vegetative stage to the animal stage; accordingly, it is in the middle of the fourth phase … that incarnation … takes place.” Even given the impossible premise that the ancients already knew about Darwinian evolution, this is a nonsensical way to divide speciation. Harpur leaves out several billion years, the vast majority of evolutionary history, during which life was limited to various unicellular forms, neither plant nor animal. Nor did animals evolve from plants.

A schema of speciation.

p. 124: Harpur is speaking of the various miraculous births of the Hebrew patriarchs: “Each is a type, or symbol, of the evolutionary process. The mineral stage is followed by the vegetative, and that in turn is followed by the animal. Halfway through the age of the animal kingdom… the stage of incarnation… raises the animal to the human.” … “The late birth of singular heroes such as Isaac, Samuel, and John the Baptist symbolizes the fact that our evolution as rational … animals has come well on in God’s overall ‘plan’ for this cycle of eon.” Hmmm—then Jesus’s early birth, to a young virgin, must mean he came very early in God’s overall plan. Yet he came after these patriarchs… how does this work again?

And how exactly does Harpur know that the appearance of man came “halfway” through the animal stage? He must have a solid date for the end of the world that he’s not telling us. And why is it that the appearance of plants was a new age, and the appearance of animals was a new age, but the appearance of man is not a new age, but a halfway point in the age of animals? Isn’t this division rather arbitrary?

Harpur laments that apparently purely imaginary sackings by Christian mobs of an ancient Druid college at Arles might have burned imaginary books that “might well have completely illumined our understanding of the mysterious rock monuments at Stonehenge” (p. 61). Rather unlikely. Stonehenge predates the Druids and the Celts; it was built by the Beaker People. The Druids would have been no more clued in to its true meaning than we are. If it is really that important; Stonehenge probably owes most of its fame to being within a day trip from London.

Stonehenge.

p. 121: “Kuhn even unlocks the meaning of the patriarch’s name, A-Brahm, arguing it is a combination of the alpha privative … and Brahm.” His problem here, as in almost all of his etymology, is that Harpur is claiming to see Indo-Aryan roots in Semitic languages. This is an impossible etymology for a Semitic name like Abraham. It has, on the other hand, a perfectly proper Semitic etymology as “Father of Nations.”

p. 127: “Stars don’t ‘stand’ over houses or stables, and they don’t lead people west.” They sure do, if you know anything about astrology. Harpur should at least know this, since otherwise he is so New Agey. Stars move through houses, and they can stop there or even move backwards (in retrograde). The three wise men were “magi”—astrologers.

What the Dawkins?

Could this have been randomly generated?

I've been reading an article by Richard Dawkins titled “The Improbability of God.” I presume it is an essential statement of his case for atheism. If so, there is nothing new there, and nothing very thought-provoking.

He begins, predictably, with the standard “religion causes wars” opening everyone must by now be familiar with: “Much of what people do is done in the name of God. Irishmen blow each other up in his name. Arabs blow themselves up in his name.”

Okay--Arabs, perhaps. Any member of the IRA is blowing people up in the name of Marx and scientific socialism. Still, so what; if someone tries to pass a cheque in my name, am I responsible? And consider, for balance, what has been done in the name of science: science was the stated justification for Hitler's holocaust, Stalin's holocaust, Mao's holocaust, Pol Pot's holocaust, Kim Il-Sung's and Kim Jong-Il's holocaust. When Turkey went from religion to science as the justification for its existence, in the early years of the 20th century, the immediate result was a holocaust of Armenians and Greeks. Science—eugenics, environmentalism, demographics—has been used to sanction abortion. Religion could not. If the existence of Al Qaeda is an argument against religion, that it can be misused to justify killing people, Dawkins must accept that there is a far stronger argument of this sort against science.

In his listing of the evils done in God's name, Dawkins goes on to make one surprising specific claim: “Jewish shohets cut live animals' throats in his name.”

This alone rather discredits Dawkins as a serious thinker. The man has no sense of irony—even if the point of what the shohets do were to kill more animals, just how many lab animals have been sacrificed for science? And the point of the shohet's work is not to kill an animal, but to ensure that it be killed humanely. The same animal would have died, at the same time, with or without the shohet. It is killed for food, not religion. Not so for lab animals.

All of this, though, is mere poisoning of the wells, mere ad hominem. Even if Dawkins' points were legitimate, they would not be arguments against the existence of God, only against the moral character of his opponents, or perhaps an argument that God's existence is unfortunate or inconvenient. So might mine be, but I still exist.

On this, the supposed “improbability of God,” Dawkins seems to have only one bullet in his magazine, and it is a very old, worn one. He addresses only the “watchmaker analogy” of William Paley, a now relatively obscure 19th century Anglican cleric. Obviously, even if Dawkins manages to effectively disprove Paley's argument, he has done nothing at all to disprove God's existence, only to disprove the proof—absence of proof is not proof of absence. And, of course, there are dozens or even hundreds of other well-known proofs of the existence of God that Dawkins does not even address, by such rather better-known thinkers as Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Aquinas, Anselm, Pascal, and so forth. If, after all, monotheists believed in God solely because of this analogy proposed in the early 19th century, what kept them going over the three millenia or so before Paley evolved; let alone the century and three quarters since Darwin?

Rev. William Paley

Yet Dawkins actually asserts that there is no other known argument for God's existence, except for the claim of personal revelation. This is either deceit on his part, or a shocking and almost necessarily wilful ignorance of the entire history of Western thought. It is also a straw-man argument, as no prominent theist has ever proposed personal revelation as proof to anyone but themselves.

This itself is ad hominem, and entirely aside from the present argument, but I cannot help but think: if this is the best and the brightest that contemporary Oxford has to offer, it is strong evidence that the entire academic edifice in the Western world has become a house of cards.

To summarize Paley's teleological argument: Paley argued that, if one came across a pocket watch lying in a field, even if one had never seen a pocket watch before, one would easily be able to deduce, from its complexity and its orderliness, that the watch was not something that happened spontaneously, but was deliberately designed by some intelligence. Just so, if we look at things in nature, and find them on inspection to be equally orderly and complex, we can reasonably deduce from this that they, too, must have been deliberately designed by some intelligence. He cites biological organisms as the obvious example—any one of them is more complex and well-ordered in its parts than a pocket watch.

Dawkins then asserts that this proof of God's existence is rendered “superfluous” by Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Not disproven, actually—only that there is a possible alternative explanation.

And that's it? That's all he has to back his own faith? That it is a possible explanation? That it _could_ be true? Yep—that's it. He then simply appeals to Occam's Razor, saying that Darwin's concept is a simpler one than positing a God, and the simpler explanation is generally to be preferred.

But he merely asserts it to be simpler; this does not make it so. In fact, to either the average person or the average great philosopher, certainly including William of Occam himself, Darwin's theory is a good deal more complex, and requires a good many more assumptions, than Paley's alternative. Berkeley demonstrated that the entire material world need not be assumed to exist, so long as God does.

What is worse, Dawkins is wasting our time. There is nothing here that has been news for the past century and a half. Paley invented his analogy of the watch in 1802; Darwin's counterargument appeared in 1838. The matter was all debated out in public by Huxley and others at the time—at the Oxford Union, in the newspapers, in many books, all now in the public domain.

Perhaps, nevertheless, it is interesting to look at Paley's theory in light of Darwin for ourselves. Does Darwin's theory really disprove Paley's theory? Only if one assumes that the process Darwin describes is purely random, and not itself guided or originally crafted by some higher intelligence. On this assumption, most Christians have never been particularly troubled by Darwinism, and Dawkins, if he were both knowledgeable on the subject and honest, would have needed to address this possibility.

Indeed, the elegance of the process described by Darwin, and what it has managed to produce, if the theory is true, in itself could just as easily be seen to argue for a designer behind it. Darwin, if right, simply came across one more beautiful pocket watch. To show that this is not so, Dawkins would have to be able to prove that the process was genuinely “random,” in an absolute sense. This is well beyond anything that science can do, and is counter to the entire thrust of scientific enquiry. The fundamental assumption on which science is based is that matters are never random, but can be discovered to follow regular, comprehensible laws. Every time science succeeds, it reinforces Paley's claim.

One can, on the other hand, see other, philosophical, objections, to Paley; objections that Dawkins does not seem to be aware of. The fundamental problem with Paley's analogy would seem to be that we have no basis for comparison. If there is a God after all, everything that exists is designed, the wildflowers of the field as much as the pocket watch. This being so, and we having no experience of an absence of design, how can we make any distinction, between the pocket watch and the blades of grass or stones among which it fell?

But then, by the same token, if there is no God, nothing can really have been designed, including the pocket watch; because the human intelligence behind it, must itself be purely random. There can then be no purpose or orderliness to anything; if there seems to be, this is an illusion.

And here, I think, the human mind must rise in revolt, and side with Paley. To suppose that human thought, human consciousness, and the laws of nature, mathematics and logic are themselves perfectly random, and could as easily have been something else, is literally inconceivable. What could be more obviously nonsensical than, for example, saying that 2+2 could just as easily equal any given random number? But that is what such a claim must assume. It makes nonsense of the process of human thought itself, and therefore of itself as a thoughtful assertion. It is, accordingly, that grail of philosophy, an a priori, to assert that consciousness, thought, order, and logic, really do exist. If they do not, we cannot think in the first place.

And this in itself proves the existence of God, though it is a different proof from Paley's; it is the “proof from universals.” It also, I think, makes any naturalistic understanding of Darwin, a Darwinism without God controlling the process, a genuinely “random” evolution, pretty much nonsensical—as Darwin's co-discoverer, Wallace, himself pointed out. Because if it really is random, Darwin's theory itself must be random, itself being the ultimate product of such a process, and so cannot really explain anything. The Origin of Species might as well have been produced by an infinite number of monkeys sitting at typewriters over an infinite length of time. Its relationship with any reality outside itself can be nothing more than random.

So the assumption that God does not exist and that even the pocket watch is random is simply not tenable. On the other hand, there is indeed a possible explanation for why some things seem to be profoundly ordered and complex, and others simpler and less organized, on the premise of theism. It could well be so, if there is a God, and he has created the physical universe more or less as a language through which he is communicating with us. If so, he is drawing our attention to things with displays of profound order or beauty. These are the words in which he speaks to us. The less-ordered elements are the silences between the words, making them audible.

A very Christian conception, by the way: the order of the universe is the Logos, the Word of God, who became flesh as Jesus of Nazareth.

No; it all works only if, when we become aware of some order underlying the visible phenomena of the universe, as scientists do, or some great beauty underlying it, as artists do, we understand this as a deliberate communication of mind to mind, a dialogue between soul and God.

In defense of his Darwinian/scientistic faith, Dawkins surprisingly goes on to assert, on a rather lower plane of debate, that “Not a single fossil has ever been found in any place where the evolution theory would not have expected it, although this could very easily have happened: a fossil mammal in rocks so old that fishes have not yet arrived, for instance, would be enough to disprove the evolution theory.”

This is a powerful claim; and one heard from Darwinians many times before. Unfortunately, it is not true. There have been hundreds of fossils found in places where they should not be; a quick search on the Internet can turn up many such claims. A variety of explanations have of course been used to reconcile these with Darwinian assumptions; and this is a trivially easy thing to do. If nothing else, one can simply revise one's estimates of when the given species first appeared, or when it became extinct. The core assertions of Darwinism are actually invulnerable to such evidence.

Accordingly, while these explanations for “misplaced” fossils may be true, Dawkins cannot rely on the fossil record to prove Darwin. Perhaps there is some other way to prove or disprove Darwin; but Dawkins does not offer it. The Creationists have been saying for over a century that the essential claims of Darwinian evolution do not really seem to be vulnerable to falsification by evidence in any way. If so, this means it is not a scientific theory, but a philosophical position; or perhaps an article of faith.

In fact, as one would expect of a religious person, Dawkins wants to extend the workings of Darwinian evolution beyond the bounds of biology, to cover all existence—to explain life, the universe, and everything. He claims the same random evolutionary process in the Big Bang and the subsequent history of all matter and energy. “There must have been some earlier hereditary system,” he says; an “original kind of natural selection.”

He does not explain, at least in the present article, how this can be so—how, for example, non-living things can reproduce, let alone mutate, let alone grow systematically more complex as a result. It is all covered by that one word, “must.” My guess is that he cannot; he is simply expressing a kind of emotional conviction—a statement of faith. Does it seem impossible by the known laws of physics? That is not, it seems, to Dawkins a concern.

Whatever forms the basis of his beliefs, it is not philosophy, and it is not science.

Darwin and Mein Kampf

Among the lies we are all taught in school is that bit about “Social Darwinism.” You remember it, don't you? As we were solemnly taught, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were cursed with an unfortunate pseudo-scientific misapplication of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, the idea that humans and human societies continue to develop along the lines of natural selection. But of course, this is wrong, right? Evolutionary pressures no longer apply in human society, right?

In fact, it is not a misapplication at all. It is an integral part of the original theory, as argued by Darwin himself. In The Descent of Man, Darwin claimed in so many words that “social qualities” were acquired through natural selection, in a competion of tribe against tribe, race against race, natio n against nation.

Darwin accordingly asserted with the perfect scientific objectivity of history's greatest biologist that the “western nations of Europe ... immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors and stand at the summit of civilization.” He also assumed that “at some future period, not very distant ... the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”

A rather brutal concept of Empire, surely. Obviously, for Darwin himself, evolutionary pressures continued. But the picture was a bit more complicated than it might first appear. As a Briton, Darwin was no doubt at least a bit concerned by the thought that victory was not always to the most civilized per se, but to the fittest. Civilization had its obvious benefits, but it could be carried too far—in fact, Darwin argued explicitly against allowing evolutionary pressures to cease to apply to human society, on the grounds that any human society that permitted this would eventually be doomed.

“If we do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men,” he warned, “the nation will retrograde.” A younger, more vital, less principled nation might supplant it. Continued advancement required that human beings “must remain subject to a severe struggle.”

The fact of Darwin's own “social Darwinism” has been suppressed, of course; as well as his arguments for it, which unfortunately seem to meet in advance the arguments against natural selection applying in human society: if they do not for one society, so much the worse for it in the end!

This, of course, is because it is only too obvious that Darwin's theory leads directly to the Nazi and Fascist theories of racism, amorality, and the virtues of war and conquest. Everything they asserted, believed, and did, follows directly from Darwin. Germany, Italy and Japan saw themselves as just the sort of young and vital nations to take out the old, “decadent,” “plutocratic” England and France in the evolutionary struggle. Hitler's “Kampf,” as in “Mein Kampf,” was a Darwinian reference. The future belonged to them, of a scientific certainty—unless, that is, they let the Slavs develop far enough to jump them from behind.

Hence an obvious problem for the powers that be: it would seem that either a) Hitler was right, or b) Darwin was wrong, and not just about Social Darwinism, but Darwinism itself. Not wanting to accept either contention, they have essentially suppressed the issue, looked away, chucked the relevant evidence as much as possible down the memory hole.

It was, for example, not because of some fervent belief in a literalist interpretation of Genesis that William Jennings Bryan fought Clarence Darrow over the teaching of evolution in the Scopes “monkey trial.” Bryan, after all, was a politician, not a preacher. He feared that the general acceptance of Darwin's views would destroy liberalism, not Christian fundamentalism—though Bryan quite rightly understood that liberalism depended on a Judeo-Christian foundation.

And Bryan was proved dramatically right, within just a few years.

Unfortunately, the attempt to simply suppress and ignore the issue inevitably leads to the same deductions from Darwin being made all over again, over time. Elements resurface in such movements as feminism, postmodernism, and the new atheism; given enough time, on this path, a full-blown rerun of Nazism is probably inevitable.

But there is another way to look at it. Arguably, World War II itself tended to disprove Darwin. Certainly, there were too many variables to make the experiment truly valid, but Hitler and his allies did everything Darwin suggested they should, and the result went decisively against them.

More broadly, Darwin's fears about the future decay of developed “decadent” nations in which more or less everybody survives and breeds have been proved wrong in an important way. In the absence of survival pressures, the more so with modern social security and health care, according to Darwin, each subsequent generation in the most developed countries ought to be a little less intelligent, and a little less physically able, than the last. “The rich get richer and the poor get children.”

Yet what has actually been happening? Leaving aside the performance of schools, which has apparently been generally declining for independent reasons, we discover that the average IQ, in the most developed countries, has been increasing in recent times by about three percentage points each generation. Meantime, Olympic and other sports records have been falling at regular intervals over the past hundred years, most often to athletes from more developed countries.

This is the opposite of what Darwin's theory predicts. Without natural selection, this general tendency towards physical and mental improvement (i.e., survivability) of the species and the tribe ought to have stopped, then reversed. Darwin's theory, and Darwinian evolution, the idea of “natural selection of random mutations” has thus been demonstrated not to be predictive. In proper scientific terms, it has been proved false.

These data argue instead for an intelligent design: an evolution that is not random, and is not powered by a struggle of all against all.