Tuesday, November 2, 2010
The Relevance of the Origin of Species
One important scientific development unavailable to David Hume or any of his fictional interlocutors is the theory of evolution. For many people today, both theists and atheists, religious believers, scientists and intellectuals, the truth of evolution is bound up with the truth of theism. So what is the significance of evolution for the design argument? Does is it provide evidence for either side of the debate? On this 151st anniversary of the publication of Darwin's seminal Origin of Species, it is fitting to ask: where might a discussion of Darwin have fit into Hume's Dialogues?
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If evolution is true, all that means is that God did not create the world as it exists right now. Theoretically, God might have created primitive lifeforms knowing that they would evolve into more complex life forms. Alternatively, God might have created matter and then done nothing but watch as the matter turned into DNA-based life. We have just as much reason to think that these things occurred naturally as we do to think they were caused by God, but neither side is disproved by evolution.
ReplyDeleteHowever, evolution does disprove Cleanthes' design argument. According to Cleanthes, nature must be a machine created by God. He says this because everything works together so perfectly that it must have been intelligently designed. This would only apply if God had created the world as it is right now, as otherwise this world was not intelligently designed. It is also possible that God created primitive life-forms since he knew that those life-forms would turn into more advanced life-forms, but this brings into question why God would choose such a method. If God is omnipotent, God is clearly capable of creating advanced life-forms without first creating primitive life-forms. No greater good is accomplished by creating primitive life-forms first; the end result is that advanced life-forms exist either way. Unless one can come up with a reason why God would choose such an indirect method, evolution disproves the design argument for God's existence.
If evolution is true, that means that God did not create the world as we perceive it. In my opinion, this disproves the theory of intelligent design. If God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, then he would have created a perfect world from the beginning in order to minimize the suffering of living in an imperfect world. However, because the world had to evolve to reach this point of specialization, this is not true. If God was omnipotent, he should also have been able to create a perfect world from the start. Others may say that God designed the world to slowly reach perfection through evolution for reasons that we can’t comprehend. However, evolution doesn’t mean that we’re evolving towards perfection. In evolution, animals adapt to their environment. This means we end up with often with imperfect designs. For example, a giraffe’s baby has to fall five feet onto the ground to get out of its mother.
ReplyDeleteWhile I do think that evolution disproves the theory of intelligent design and the possibility that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, I do not think it disproves the possibility that there is a God who is not either omnipotent, omniscient, or omnibenevolent. If God was not one of these, then the arguments above wouldn’t apply and its possible that God could exist, according to evolution.
The thing about evolution is, as has been said, it eliminates completely the idea of a god that has all three omni qualities (omniscience, omnibenevolence, omnipotence). If God is all three of these, then God would have been able to create a perfect universe right fro the get-go because he would be able to and would want to.
ReplyDeleteEvolution means that if there is a god, then they created an imperfect universe. This means that this god would either be limitedly benevolent (unwilling to make it perfect) or unable to. However, it does not eliminate the idea of a god completely.
One particular religious system that comes to mind that I've studied is deism - the idea that God created the universe, then sat back and watched it operate. With deism, evolution could make sense because it would just be the way the universe happened to turn out. Again, as has been said, this god would not be omnibenevolent and omnipotent because in that case they would have made the universe instantly perfect. However, deism comes with another assumption - that God (or something) existed forever. If God existed forever, there would theoretically always be another time to create the universe - so any time that it was created would be entirely arbitrary. This arbitrariness seems to contradict omnibenevolence (there would always be a better time) and omnipotence (God would have had no reason not to do this earlier).
So essentially, the concept of evolution does not disprove a god entirely, but it does disprove our modern conception of God. Since the argument presented in Hume's book is intended to prove such a god, it is refuted by evolution.
If we accept evolution to be true, humans and our universe in general might not have been created as perfect and by an omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent God like the church tells us but by pure chance. Evolution proves to be a major road block in theism's claim of intelligent design. Not only does Darwin claim that we're constantly changing because of "survival of the fittest" and that we may live on a completely ordinary planet that just happened to develop life, but Darwin doesn't suggest that we're edging closer to the idea of perfection. We're just changing to adapt to our climate and, more or less, to find the easiest way to biologically exist. In addition, evolution is more and more widely being accepted as truth according to the huge amounts of supporting data that we are finding.
ReplyDeleteThis is a huge problem for judeo-christian theists. Evolution and intelligent design cannot coexist, or at least an omnibenevolent, omnicient, and omnipotent God can't exist if evolution exists. If evolution exists, we weren't created in our modern form/perfect form and we only evolved because of survival of the fittest. But a judeo-christian God can't be omni-everything if he created imperfect beings, if imperfect people exist God must either be evil or inept.
In a lot of ways, Hume's argument from the mouthpiece of Cleanthes in part VI was way ahead of its time. Darwin's idea of evolution is so famous because it was the first concrete and scientific idea that we might not be created in our perfect form because of survival of the fittest etc etc etc. Although Cleanthes' objection to the idea of God creating the world because infinite succession is crazy and therefore there must be an ultimate God, the definite undertones that exist under the ideas are remarkably close to Darwin's idea of evolution.