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A Muslim apostate rejects Darwinism
In his previous essay posted at VFR the other day and in further e-mails he sent me, Evariste told how at age 15, through the influence of Darwinism and Ayn Rand, he became a total apostate from Islam and also an atheist. While in his essay he expressed interest in and sympathy with the God of the Bible, he said that he nevertheless remained an atheist. In a follow-up essay, originally written as a comment at his website then sent to me as an e-mail, he tells about his criticisms of Darwinism. His main idea is that the materialist Darwinian view of things cannot explain the phenomena of life and consciousness, which, he powerfully argues, are not of matter but come from another source. He writes: “Natural selection is about subtraction; it is the universe itself, which tends relentlessly toward greater entropy, increasing its entropy by deleting a living being. Life, on the other hand, is about addition. Increasing in size, increasing in numbers, increasing in forms and varieties and niches of existence.”
In the course of writing down these thoughts, as he explains to me below, Evariste realized that he now (intellectually) believes in God for the first time since he rejected Islam at age 15.
From: Evariste
Subj: The Method of Lawrence Auster
The subject line of this email is obviously paying mischievous homage to your article, “The Method of Charles Johnson.” At the weblog I share with others, Discarded Lies (which is really more of a group discussion site and a community weblog than a traditional single-personality-driven blog), we’ve been discussing my essay you posted, “A Muslim apostate explains his complete rejection of Islam,” which is about the difference between YHWH and Allah and my own apostasy, and a couple of folks asked me questions about you and Darwinism that launched me into writing another essay (at comment #147) in response to them . You’re welcome to post it at VFR if you wish. As with my previous essay, the process of writing this caused me to come up with some new and interesting insights that I did not have before; ones which I think you will enjoy reading. I hope I have not mischaracterized any of your positions.
The following begins with my quotation of two comments I was replying to, by lewy 14 and by joem. Then I launch into my essay.
lewy14 writes:
ev, wow. I’d pieced together some of your bio before but the concise narrative packs substantial poignancy. I agree with LoS above, you should get some college, even if you don’t exactly “matriculate.” FWIW my own current life project is to get an equivalent of an MS in CS without actually going to school. (I hate school).
Oh, and maybe minor in the Philosophy of the Mind. I trust you’ve read Thomas Nagel’s essay on “What it’s like to be a bat.” What’s it like to be an Elephant? What’s it like to be a Cat? It’s like something, eh? The same as us, in interesting ways, and different, in interesting ways. Also google the concept “philosophical zombie,” which is what Kurzeil’s Singularity AI will be IMHO it ever (God forbid) comes about.
I would say your on firm ground when you say Darwinism is incomplete. I don’t think it’s wrong, but it is incomplete—and in that vein, I found Auster’s criticism of Darwinism something of a strawman—who in their right mind thinks Darwinism has anything explanatory power with respect to consciousness? I thought the book is entitled “the Origin of Species,” not “The Origin of Consciousness.”
What do we know empirically, objectively, falsifiably, about the origin of consciousness? Fkall, pretty much. To my mind (pace joem, above, I believe), the two propositions, “Darwinism can explain the origin of species” and “consciousness is a manifestation of and emanation from the Supreme Divine,” are not contradictory at all.
[ don’t know exactly what Dawkins says, but if he says this, he’s nuts. Well, he’s kinda nuts anyway].
joem writes:
Your paragraph:
I never considered the idea that Darwinism could have a vigorous and credible intellectual opposition until I started reading VFR. Every other challenger, such as the preposterous set of beliefs called “creationism” and the desperate and sad American movement called “intelligent design,” seemed totally moronic, and only reinforced my steadfast Darwinist convictions. It was only the vigorous, intelligent, commonsensical confrontation with Darwinian orthodoxy at VFR that left me open to the idea that Darwinism, my rock, could be wrong. If not wrong, perhaps just insufficient. Insufficiently explanatory.
Had me searching the archives, and I found two threads: your own The God of Irreducible Complexity, and LFQ’s The Correct Place for Evolution, that led to very interesting discussions about the topic of how religious thought (specifically Christianity and Judaism) can be reconciled with evolution.
[Evariste’s answer/essay begins here.]
I’ll answer both of these comments in a sort of roundabout way, just because it’s a very big topic. Auster’s use of the word Darwinism can be misleading if you only give him an occasional read on the topic. Of course, I haven’t been reading him regularly for that long, so I’m sure my characterization of his views is inadequate and will fall down or be totally wrong in several places. Auster does acknowledge that evolution is an observably real phenomenon!
The problem, as I think he sees it, is that “Darwinists” are engaged in a fight against belief in God, and aren’t content to leave believers alone. They’re not content to have an excellent theory that seems to fit the facts and they’re not happy with doing science; they want to do battle with religion. After a short pause to catch their breath, they’ve turned from the persecuted into the persecuters, and are overplaying their hand. They’re not going to live and let live, but must persuade us to abandon God en masse. Many religions, major and minor, have declared that they acknowledge that evolution is real, including even the Catholic church, but it’s not enough. They are driven to attack, attack, attack God, and make the very concept of being religious as socially unacceptable as they’ve made “racism” or other modern thoughtcrimes. Among scientists, it is already socially unacceptable to be a religious believer. In parts of Europe, too, it is socially unacceptable to believe in God; these public figures want to impose this on the entire globe.
It’s already socially unacceptable among young liberal people in the U.S., by the way. Years ago in my very early twenties, when I lived in a medium-sized city in the Bible Belt, in the heart of the South, in a house with a few friends, I heard that a kid in our social circle named Matt was a Christian, and it was said with such a contemptuous sneer. “Matt? He’s a Christian.” He had a religious epiphany while spending his teens in the typical pursuits of drink and drugs, and believed that Jesus had intervened in his life to save him. This distanced him from almost everyone he knew, and despite being a very nice and personable guy, only a few of his former circle, the ones who’d grown up with him and weren’t ready to abandon him, made any effort to stay friends and spend time together. We’re talking about a city here with a church on every block, and sometimes churches sitting on every corner of four-way intersections, but if you went by my experience, Christianity may as well have been a dead faith.
It is the intellectuals who are the chief apostles of Darwinism in the public square today who are using it as a weapon against the religious traditions of the West. What drove Dawkins to write “The God Delusion,” for instance? And Hitchens isn’t content to say that Allah is a pretty vile character; he writes a book that lumps all religions together and calls them bad. When Auster attacks Darwinism, he is legitimately parrying a very real thrust that has gone unanswered for far too long.
Yes, Darwinian evolution is just a scientific theory about the biological origin of the species, but the modern Darwinist won’t let it be, and wants to make it a Theory of Everything, Everywhere, Ever. If you ask a Darwinist of this kind how they explain X, they won’t preface it with “Well, the theory of evolution isn’t actually about this topic, but here’s what I believe about it.” That’s why Auster is right to point out the embarrassment to Darwinism that Darwinists cannot explain consciousness: he’s just pointing out a basic scope violation. If it was a computer program, Darwinism would constantly be crashing because it won’t keep its filthy hands on its own memory, but insists on trying to access everyone else’s.
Modern Darwinists don’t know how to say such humble phrases as “I don’t know” and “that’s not really my field.” That’s why they can’t leave non-material phenomena like consciousness or the soul or free will alone: every non-material source of meaning is a threat, because non-materiality is itself a threat, and so, too, is meaning. Anything that leaves the door open to non-materialism leaves it open to something higher than Man, and the implications of that constrain Man. This rebellion against restrictions of any kind must be the animating spirit behind the unprecedented, concerted effort to extinguish religion. I guess it must be a form of Liberalism or egalitarianism, because for anything to be higher than matter would be unequal; for Man to be higher than matter leaves all sorts of unsettlingly unequal implications hanging in the air uncomfortably. It must be abolished at any cost.
I do not think modern Darwinism would please Darwin. Poor Darwin, who was himself once a religious believer, but one whose faith gradually dwindled over a very long period of time, has been set up as a Potemkin God by crusading village atheists, eager to remake society. He was never himself a village atheist; he continued to maintain a respectful stance toward religion and believers long after he lost his own faith in the truth of Christianity. In fact, he never became an atheist at all—he insisted that he was only an agnostic, not an atheist. The Wikipedia article on Darwin’s religious views is illuminating if you wish to read more. He was disquieted, alarmed, and unsettled by the very sort of aggressive, angry, forceful people from his own time who, in our time, have taken on a role as the leading public exponents of his theory. What Darwinism needs is a dose of humility, and this is what Auster is administering to it.
The book by Charles Darwin that started all this is titled, in the typical loquacious style of his time, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Let’s discard everything after the comma: the basics are all there in the first ten words. The essence of Darwin’s thesis is right there in the title of his book; as I will explain, this title actually contains the seed of its own undoing. One reason why the theory has such a powerful hold on thinking people is because one of its pillars is a tautology that stands on its own: that which survives, survives. Auster, like any intelligent person, sees this as self-evidently and obviously true, and not even worth remarking on. How can anyone disagree with it? The problem with the theory of evolution is its other pillar, which is the one that pretends to explain the biological portion of Creation. This is the premise that Auster’s thoughtful approach teases apart from the tautology. As it turns out, the other pillar doesn’t look so imposing on its own. Genetic mutations, driven by nothing more than random, blind chance, are supposed to be able to create every astonishing variation in the profusion of lifeforms on our planet. Random genetic mutations do occur, and do suffice to explain many biological phenomena, but the accumulation of random nothing on top of random nothing to create the entire great chain of being is a difficult sell.
Many fascinating traits and characteristics, many thought-provoking wonders and inspiring feats of beautiful design are to be found in nature. Many of these are non-selectable, pointless, and irrelevant in a Darwinian frame, and yet, there they are, plain as day, taunting the overreaching Darwinist.
Why is there something, instead of nothing? Why is there this challenging phenomenon called life, instead of just matter? What defines our universe is ever-increasing entropy. Entropy is a complex idea; I’ve linked to the “standard textbook definitions” section of Wikipedia’s Entropy article to give anyone who hasn’t encountered it a quick flavor of it that should suffice for our purposes. That’s the nature of the energy and matter in our universe; it’s the second law of thermodynamics, and it comes as close to a dogma as science gets. It says that the total entropy in the universe will continue increasing forever, until the maximum possible state of entropy is reached. At that time, the universe will be the ultimate Liberal universe, because everything will be perfectly equal everywhere for all time. Note that entropy can decrease locally; for instance, if you leave your drink out in the sun, it gets warm. Its entropy has decreased because it has absorbed heat energy. If you turn on your air-conditioner in a hot room, the room cools down. This, too, is a local decrease in entropy. But the local increases in entropy were powered by increasing entropy elsewhere in the universe, so the Second Law is still in effect. Both of these examples are of entropy decreasing locally as a result of the actions of a human being, but entropy can also decrease locally by random chance, and often does. What’s remarkable about life itself, and defines the difference between life and inert matter, is that living beings are machines for converting energy and matter into decreased entropy. They don’t violate the Second Law because the total entropic content of the universe is in fact increasing as a result of their actions, but locally, within themselves, they are machines that decrease their own entropy.
Why should this be? Why should all matter have this property that it only experiences decreasing entropy accidentally, randomly, and temporarily, except for some arrangements of matter which, for no reason whatsoever, decide to take it into their own hands to systematically reduce their own entropy, working against the nature of the universe they exist in? And not only does a living thing seek to reduce the entropy within itself, but it has a powerful drive to reproduce itself, too, creating more and more of these audacious little machines. Either fact taken alone is truly remarkable and out-of-place in this universe: the fact of a machine that, unlike all the other matter around it, interacts with matter and energy for a purpose of decreasing entropy within itself at a cost to its surroundings of increasing theirs, and the fact that there should arise self-reproducing machines at all.
One reason why consciousness is such an important phenomenon and such a challenge to the Darwinian cult of blind, random chance is that it, too, is a strange machine for the local reduction of entropy—but not the entropy of matter. It’s a machine that reduces information entropy. That’s why it’s so damning that Darwinists just have to shrug and call consciousness a lucky accident; it’s far too compelling of a phenomenon to be an accident. Consciousness is to the informational entropy of the universe as living matter is to physical entropy of matter in the universe. It’s a bizarre thing that does not belong in this universe and has no reason to arise here. It’s totally different, qualitatively different, challengingly different. There is no reason for either type of entropy-reducing machine to arise.
There’s something else very unique about the role of consciousness in reducing information entropy, something qualitatively different than the role which living matter plays in reducing physical entropy. When I think a valuable, useful new thought, I have decreased the amount of information entropy within my own consciousness alone. But if I share the thought, allowing it to escape my lips or pen or laptop, it decreases information entropy within each and every consciousness that encounters and incorporates it. The great trick is that the total information entropy in the universe can decrease locally without increasing more somewhere else. It doesn’t obey the Second Law, but then, since it’s neither matter nor energy but consciousness and ideas, the Second Law never really applied to it.
Every time a living being grows by consuming matter and energy and transforming it into itself, it is behaving like something out of this universe, something that purposefully defies the very nature of the universe, something that, unlike the universe, has an agenda. When it reproduces, whether sexually or asexually, it is behaving like something out of this universe. When I write an essay or stumble my way into a clever algorithm or learn to play a song or make up a word or a joke or figure out how I want to arrange the furniture in a room or figure out a better way to work, I’m acting like something out of this universe. Life just doesn’t belong here, nothing about it does. Purpose and meaning are simply features of life. Rocks and stars and asteroids don’t have purpose and don’t have meaning; they exist until they smash into something or burn themselves out or emit all their energy, just like any other matter. But the tiniest and least-significant lifeform does have purpose and meaning. One amoeba has more purpose and meaning than an entire universe devoid of life.
The improbability of life—not just life, but consciousness too—is a huge problem for those wanting to explain the universe in purely material terms. That they themselves exist, in this universe, makes their theory impossible. If one posits an anti-universe that started off in a state of great entropy, and had a second law of decreasing entropy, a universe that, over time, headed in the exact opposite direction as us, life and consciousness and all they entail become inevitable and would not be surprising in the least. In a universe like that, the question facing a thinking being is “why shouldn’t there be life? Just look at this place!” But in a universe like ours? The inescapable fact of life in our universe is that we are made of the same stuff as the rest of it, but are not of it, and the idea of our arising from nothing more than a series of happy mindless accidents to sit around sipping adult beverages and arguing about God on blogs is just preposterous. We’re in the wrong universe for that.
It’s as if our existence was set up to provoke an ever-more-difficult series of questions to answer about the sheer fact of our existing. “Why should there be a universe?” If you’re willing to shrug and say “because,” then “Why should there be life in it?” If you’re willing to shrug and say “because,” Darwinists, then “Why should there be consciousness?” Matter and energy are against the nature of nothingness; life fights an ultimately losing but valiant and unnatural struggle against the nature of matter and energy; consciousness transcends all of this, as if no rules and no laws of matter and energy apply. The reason Darwinists should be challenged about consciousness and not be allowed just to call it a lucky, accidentally arising epiphenomenon is precisely the fact that they have no satisfying answer.
Natural selection is about subtraction; it is the universe itself, which tends relentlessly toward greater entropy, increasing its entropy by deleting a living being. Life, on the other hand, is about addition. Increasing in size, increasing in numbers, increasing in forms and varieties and niches of existence. The inert matter in this decaying universe is in no position to create the profuse variety of life that exists today and has existed in the past through nothing more than random chance mutations. Darwinian evolution can explain changes in subtypes, the effects of environmental changes on existing populations, and a great degree of speciation and variation when these things arise primarily by the act of subtraction. England’s peppered moth is a famous staple in evolutionary lore, and is a great example of what I mean here. The basic story is that this species of moth was observed for a long time to consist mainly of light-colored individuals, with some darkness in the population indicating the existence of an inborn potential of either coloration for this species. The lighter color served the moths well until the Industrial Revolution, when pollution, soot and grime darkened the moths’ environment and made the lighter ones easier prey. That which survives, survives, and those which where lighter were selected-out and methodically subtracted, so the population evolved into primarily dark moths. Then, with the increased leisure time, living standards, and surplus of wealth that the Industrial Revolution created, the English started caring about the environment, and the situation started returning to that which prevailed prior to the Industrial Revolution, both for the moths and their environment, and due to increased predation of the darker moths which now stood out more, the population is once again primarily light-colored. The only thing that this demonstrates is that a population can be pressured into tending toward one inborn trait or another, but there is no addition here, only subtraction.
Among the several Austerian themes I enjoy that poke at Darwinist foibles is his frequent skewering of the just-so narratives that Darwinists are prone to proferring to explain how such-and-such came about, most of them liberally sprinkled with ascriptions of purpose, will, and intent to the evolving creatures—all of which they themselves are trying to eliminate from the ultimate explanation. As if creatures are consciously directing their own evolution; I thought it was all just natural selection and random, chance mutations? It’s funny because it shows that even the people who are trying to eliminate the role of purpose and meaning in life cannot stop themselves from assuming it and imputing it to natural creatures.
Less entertainingly but more substantially, Auster criticizes the Darwinian narrative on grounds of the sheer improbability of some manifestations of life having evolved from Darwinian selection and natural evolution. A couple of examples that I read about at VFR recently:
- bizarre genitals and reproductive practices in certain species which would have had to have appeared simultaneously as a result of a random mutation in both a male and a female at the same time for it to have been possible for a population of this species to arise. If one male evolved it by chance, he would have died out without breeding. If a female did, she likewise would not have had offspring. There had to have been an Ur-couple, an Adam and an Eve, of this species, who both, at the same time, had the same random mutation causing them to have totally alien genitals. They also had to be so lucky as to have this happen in such a way that they were proximate and could encounter one another and reproduce.
- the many complicated and unlikely life-cycles of parasitic life forms that spend each stage of their existence in a different host species, burrowing into different specific organ systems in each host, having crucial timing requirements for the environment into which the host sheds them at each stage of their development, etc. What random chance mutation or accumulated series of them would lead to such a bizarre life sequence, such a strange, fragile, multivariately-dependent chain of existence?
In conclusion: what’s a nice atheist Darwinist boy like me doing reading a crazy traditionalist coot like Larry Auster? What’s so different about Auster’s writings on Darwinism from the many articles I’ve read in the past by religious people or open-minded ones, discussing the reconciliation of modern scientific theory with religion? Just that Auster is not trying to reconcile with science, and his religious understanding is not threatened by anything science can come up with; he doesn’t have to figure out how to reconcile with the big bang. He’s fighting an intellectual battle against an intellectual movement that has little to do with science, and everything to do with a project to remake society and kill God, using Darwin as a tool. His target is not the noble and sober scientific project to increase mankind’s knowledge and understanding, but the pretensions of the scientists and public intellectuals and elites who are abusing science and stretching it out of shape for the sake of their radical project. I have never read such intelligent, persistent, and powerful criticism and delineation of the Modern Darwinist project’s intellectual output, premises, inconsistencies, lapses, and expressive or explanatory limitations as his, and it’s very compelling stuff. He’s the only opponent of Darwinism I’ve read that did not insult my intelligence, but rather, exercised it and provoked it.
LA replies to Evariste:
Thanks very much for this. I don’t disagree with any particular point you make in summarizing me. However, I would not say that my primary purpose is to attack Darwinism over its attack on religion. My primary purpose is to show that Darwinism can’t be true. Yes, exposing the ideological aspect of Darwinism—that it seeks to destroy religion—is also part of what I am doing, and is important, but that is a distinct question from the question of whether Darwinism is true.
Also, you give me much too much credit when you say that others have not made thought provoking criticisms of Darwinism. I stand on the shoulders of major writers on the subject like Arthur Koestler, Francis Hitching, and others. However I do agree with you wholeheartedly that the Intelligent Design people are BORING. They have no real exploratory minds, they just keep saying, “This couldn’t happen without design.” True, but BORING. They keep repeating endlessly one or two examples, mainly the bacterium flagellum. BORING. They’re not looking in an open, interested way at the whole problem of life. They make evolution boring, and they make God boring.
As I’ve written, the IDers’ big mistake is that are trying to prove intelligent design, rather than disprove Darwinism. Also, their claim that ID is science is patently wrong and discredits them in my opinion. ID is a logical criticism of Darwinism. It is not science, since it offers no specific hypotheses. Saying, “Such and such had to happen as result of design,” is a general proposition, it is not a scientific hypothesis. So I feel that ID is a silly enterprise, though of course I agree with their main idea that the main phenomena of evolution are the work of intelligence.
On another point, lewy 14 is offbase when he acts as though Darwinists don’t seek to prove consciousness, and that consciousness can just come from some other plane, even as Darwinism is true! He sounds like the most thoughtless kind of “theo-Darwinist” who has no grasp of what Darwinism is really about and imagines that Darwinism is compatible with God. Of course Darwinists claim that Darwinism explains (or at least explains away) consciousness, since consciousness or sentience is an aspect of living things, and Darwinism purports to explain EVERY ASPECT of living things.
Evariste replies to LA:
Got it. I’m glad I didn’t mischaracterize you too terribly, other than that; I did want to draw attention to the separate and substantial issues of, one the one hand, Darwinism’s weaknesses on its home turf as a scientific theory, and on the other hand, the overreaching political agenda that is advocated by prominent Darwinist public intellectuals. I’m glad I asked you! It’s also possible that my short readership has misled me by not giving me a large-enough sample; you’ve been you your whole life, but I’ve only been reading a few months.
“Also, you give me much too much credit when you say that others have not made thought provoking criticisms of Darwinism. I stand on the shoulders of major writers on the subject like Arthur Koestler, Francis Hitching, and others.”
It’s not too much credit because of the qualifier is that yours is the first that I’ve read. I’ve never heard of any of these names, or if I did, they didn’t stick. Again, keep in mind my very short career to date as a regular member of your audience.
Of course, I never had much interest in anti-Darwinian thought before, so I had no reason to seek them out; instead, I only encountered the IDers and the creationists. Likewise, it’s possible that these are the only people who get any mainstream attention is that they’re much easier to discredit and therefore no threat, and because their idiocy is telegenic, while substance isn’t.
lewy14 is a software developer and a thoughtful guy; like me, he’s a product of his time, and like me, he does probably have some daffy ideas about Darwinism. But he is an intelligent fellow with whom I’ve been friends for a long time and whose serious question deserved an equally serious reply, and he did indeed inspire what I thought was something very worthwhile. I didn’t say it out loud in the essay, but somewhere during the powerful argument I stumbled into about entropy, the nature of the universe, and how life is out of place here and qualitatively different, I ended up realizing I’d just convinced myself of God’s existence. I wasn’t sure while I was writing it because I wanted to rush through and finish writing it so I could get to sleep, but on rereading it, the logic that God put life in the universe is inescapably true. A funny parallel: when I first decided I didn’t believe in Allah, I didn’t even dare think it, let alone say it out loud. Allah knows what you’re thinking, of course, and I was terrified he would notice my apostasy. I know that sounds ridiculous, I was so terrified of the God I no longer believed in that I didn’t even dare to think about it in the privacy of my own mind lest he hear me, but it’s true. It took months before I scrounged up sufficient courage to say it out loud by myself. Well, it didn’t take me that long this time, but it did take me quite a while to accept that I’d just proven to my own satisfaction the necessity of a God to explain the existence of life. So I hesitated to disbelieve in God after encountering Darwin, and I hesitated to regain my belief after writing an essay against Darwin.
Like your own youthful belief in Jesus, I still don’t feel this in my gut, but it’s a big step for me to believe it intellectually, and it’s a start, right? Now that I believe in God, I have to figure out what else this implies.
LA replies:
You write:
I didn’t say it out loud in the essay, but somewhere during the powerful argument I stumbled into about entropy, the nature of the universe, and how life is out of place here and qualitatively different, I ended up realizing I’d just convinced myself of God’s existence. I wasn’t sure while I was writing it because I wanted to rush through and finish writing it so I could get to sleep, but on rereading it, the logic that God put life in the universe is inescapably true.
Evariste, are you saying that as you were writing it, or re-reading it, you realized that you believe in God?
Can you point me to the passage you were writing or re-reading when you realized this?
Evariste replies:
The argument for God that I stumbled into was best embodied in these two passages, the basic point being that the nature of life is not anything like the nature of the universe it’s in, not anything like the matter and energy that it’s made out of, but completely different and self-evidently of foreign origin:
Why should this be? Why should all matter have this property that it only experiences decreasing entropy accidentally, randomly, and temporarily, except for some arrangements of matter which, for no reason whatsoever, decide to take it into their own hands to systematically reduce their own entropy, working against the nature of the universe they exist in? And not only does a living thing seek to reduce the entropy within itself, but it has a powerful drive to reproduce itself, too, creating more and more of these audacious little machines. Either fact taken alone is truly remarkable and out-of-place in this universe: the fact of a machine that, unlike all the other matter around it, interacts with matter and energy for a purpose of decreasing entropy within itself at a cost to its surroundings of increasing theirs, and the fact that there should arise self-reproducing machines at all.
and, skipping a couple of paragraphs making side-points about consciousness that aren’t essential to why I think I proved to myself that God exists,
Every time a living being grows by consuming matter and energy and transforming it into itself, it is behaving like something out of this universe, something that purposefully defies the very nature of the universe, something that, unlike the universe, has an agenda. When it reproduces, whether sexually or asexually, it is behaving like something out of this universe. When I write an essay or stumble my way into a clever algorithm or learn to play a song or make up a word or a joke or figure out how I want to arrange the furniture in a room or figure out a better way to work, I’m acting like something out of this universe. Life just doesn’t belong here, nothing about it does. Purpose and meaning are simply features of life. Rocks and stars and asteroids don’t have purpose and don’t have meaning; they exist until they smash into something or burn themselves out or emit all their energy, just like any other matter. But the tiniest and least-significant lifeform does. One amoeba has more purpose and meaning than an entire universe devoid of life.
The improbability of life-not just life, but consciousness too-is a huge problem for those wanting to explain the universe in purely material terms. That they themselves exist, in this universe, makes their theory impossible. If one posits an anti-universe that started off in a state of great entropy, and had a second law of decreasing entropy, a universe that, over time, headed in the exact opposite direction as us, life and consciousness and all they entail become inevitable and would not be surprising in the least. In a universe like that, the question facing a thinking being is “why shouldn’t there be life? Just look at this place!” But in a universe like ours? The inescapable fact of life in our universe is that we are made of the same stuff as the rest of it, but are not of it, and the idea of our arising from nothing more than a series of happy mindless accidents to sit around sipping adult beverages and arguing about God on blogs is just preposterous. We’re in the wrong universe for that.
As I was writing this, I was thinking to myself that I should put something in about how I think I just proved that God exists, but I didn’t want to say it until I was sure, and I didn’t want to stop writing and think or reread, I wanted to get all my thoughts down before they had a chance to slip away.
LA writes:
You wrote:
“A pox on both [Charles] Johnson’s and ID’s houses,”
I’d like to understand the source of your harsh condemnation of ID. They are not bad or dishonest people, they’re not hurting anyone or speaking lies.
Evariste replies:
Well, after reading you, I do feel cheated by them. I wish someone other than them had had the media exposure and public attention that they’ve garnered. Someone with intellectually vital criticisms of Darwinism, rather than a weak candidate that is hemmed in on all sides and can’t stand on its own two feet, but insists that it’s as legitimate as any science! I regret their relative prominence and wish they’d fade away. ID’s weakness and lameness, combined with its prominence, discredits intelligent anti-Darwinists before they get a chance to open their mouths. If I hadn’t lucked into your website, I would never have suspected the existence of serious, credible opposition to Darwinism that an intelligent, thoughtful person can respect!
LA replies:
Well, this has been my whole complaint. Before ID came along there was a growing school of Darwin critics in the ’70s and ’80s. These critics didn’t have any common agenda other than to look at evolution and see the inadequacies of Darwinism as an explanation for it. This anti-Darwinist tendency was intellectually alive and the anti-Darwinians did a lot of very valuable work that had a major influence on me.
But then ID came along, as an organized movement, and, even before I could articulate why, even though I formally agreed with their central idea, they never did anything for me, I was unmoved by the whole enterprise. Why? Because they had just that one, contentless, BORING idea. And I always felt vaguely guilty because I was not more into ID, not reading them enough, not supporting them enough.
It now occurs to me that ID is to anti-Darwinism as neoconservatism is to real conservatism. ID reduces something rich and multidimensional into a single, contentless, abstract idea. And that’s why the mainstream conservative movement has adopted ID.
LA continues:
I neglected to say it to Evariste in our e-mail exchange, but how wonderful it is that thinking about the phenomena of life and consciousness made him realize that there has to be a God. I told him that when I criticize Darwinism, my purpose is not to make a case for God, but to show that Darwinism can’t be true. And that is a sincere statement. However, at the same time, it is also obviously the case that the only alternative to materialist Darwinism is some sort of ordering intelligence in (or outside) the universe. This ordering force doesn’t have to be the God of the Bible, but whatever it is, it is something non-material and intelligent.
- end of initial entry -
Ian B. writes:
I wanted to respond to that comment by lewy14:
I would say your on firm ground when you say Darwinism is incomplete. I don’t think it’s wrong, but it is incomplete—and in that vein, I found Auster’s criticism of Darwinism something of a straw man—who in their right mind thinks Darwinism has anything explanatory power with respect to consciousness? I thought the book is entitled “the Origin of Species,” not “The Origin of Consciousness.”
Isn’t consciousness a feature that some species possess, and which Darwinism must then explain if it is a correct theory of origins? Lewy14 seems to be trying to distinguish between the origins of species and the origins of features of species, and hold Darwinism responsible only for the former. But, I don’t see how this can work. I mean, if we take this position consistently, then Darwinism doesn’t need to explain eyes, hands, digestive systems, bacterial flagellums, or any other biological structure for that manner! And if you subtract all those things, what on earth is left? Lewy14 seems to be saying that Darwinism can be correct without actually explaining much of anything at all!
Maybe he means that Darwin’s theory is meant to account only for speciation itself—ie, how one sub-group of organisms loses genetic compatibility with other organisms that descend from the same group, thus establishing a new interbreeding group.
However, despite its title, Darwin didn’t really even try to explain how this happens, and we still don’t have a good general theory of it. Probably most Darwinists would put it down to random genetic drift within geographically isolated members of a species over time. The primary explanatory tool Darwin introduced—natural selection—really has nothing to say about this.
The actual reason he introduced natural selection was as a means of explaining away the appearance of design that the features of organisms display. To design something is simply to cause it to come into being intentionally. In other words, Darwin was trying to explain the intended-looking features of organisms in such a way that actual intention was cut out of the picture. That’s why he named his mechanism natural selection. Selection is normally a teleological term: to select something is to choose it intentionally. Darwin was trying to offer a “natural” (ie non-intentional) substitute-selector—something that could appear to select things without actually, intentionally selecting them. This is also, by the way, why Darwinism is incompatible with theism: If God uses evolution to bring about features he wants, then the explanation for the appearance of intent in those features is actual intent rather than “natural” selection.
So, Darwin’s real focus was on explaining the features of organisms, not speciation. All of the examples and arguments he presented bear this out. Hence, an inability to explain a major feature of organisms, such as consciousness, is a failure of Darwinism as a theory of origins, not a mere “incompleteness.”
Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 03, 2008 07:44 AM | Send
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