Darwin and Creation

A Close Look at the Boxtops

So what do we do about these two contradictory boxtops? We can say good things about each camp by pointing out the virtues that their adherents see in them, and we can also see the bad that each fears and dislikes in the opposing viewpoint.

The Picture on the Mechanistic Boxtop

The mechanists yearn for an orderly, thoroughly comprehensible world. They love the apparent certainty of hard, cold fact. They are repelled by what they see as wishful thinking and seek assurance in rigorous observation and testing. They reject the world of the theists as a dishonest illusion of fairy tales and magic. They are comforted by the image of the universe as a gleaming, predictable, well-oiled machine.

The theists, by contrast, look on that picture with horror. For them, the mechanists are robbing the world of all meaning; they are killing its soul. While there are doubtless many more varieties of theism than of mechanistic determinism, the theists all share a desire for a universe infused with meaning and purpose, for a cosmos with a spirit.

It is easy to sympathize with the seekers of compromise who are impressed with the astounding success of modern material science and share the mechanist's respect for logic and observation yet are repulsed by the notion that the cosmos is nothing but a meaningless machine. But how do they get around that intractable contradiction mentioned above?

They could start by exposing the contradiction that results from equivocating the myth of science — the open, ever-skeptical, ever-doubting scientific method — with the dogmatic doctrine of mechanistic determinism, for if examined carefully these reveal themselves as logical poles apart. They have little in common but the name “science.”

The mythical scientific method is ready to admit that even its most deeply held beliefs may one day be proved false and that even what can be thought of as present knowledge is filled with huge gaps, that there are oceans of ignorance separating islands of knowledge. It recognizes vast areas that are open to all sorts of cosmic (but unscientific) speculations, including theological ones. It embraces ignorance, like a lunatic.

That is why sane people cannot bear to accept it by itself, unadorned. To make it endurable, they must conflate it with the certainty of scientism. Scientific determinism is satisfyingly contemptuous of such wishy-washy tolerance of the unknown. In the mechanistic view, not only does science produce certain knowledge, but it creates the only knowledge there is. Nothing exists that science does not explain. All else is swept into the void of superstitious delusion.

Scientific mechanistic determinism, not atheism as such, has always been the true enemy of traditional religion. Atheism by definition is just the denial of God, a negative doctrine. Most people — even atheists — prefer to believe in something positive, and ever since the Renaissance, that something has usually been mechanistic determinism. But until the mid-nineteenth century there had always been an apparently insurmountable obstacle to the doctrine of mechanistic determinism: living things. Life defied mechanistic explanation.

That is why Darwinism, from its inception right to the present moment, has been regarded by atheists as (you will excuse the expression) a blessed godsend. From the moment Darwin's The Origin of Species appeared in 1859 Darwinism has been seen by the mechanists as the hammer that drove the last nail into God's coffin. Darwinism is still aggressively promoted as the final and conclusive refutation of traditional religion.

Have you noticed those “evolve-fish” symbols on the backs of some cars? The ones showing the Christian fish-symbol having grown legs and a label that reads “Darwin” or “Evolve”? Those people are declaring to the world that Darwin means evolution and evolution means that God is dead.

And then they are Oh so surprised that some religious people are hostile to evolution! Those same people accuse the opponents of evolution as ignoramuses who stupidly reject science, but if there is a war between “science” and traditional religion, it is not the church-goers who were the original aggressors.

It is true that neither what I have called “scientific” Darwinism or the mythical science of doubt and skeptical enquiry are incompatible with religion. But the mechanists maintain that science really does logically lead to scientism and that metaphysical Darwinism (they do not call it that) is the inexorable destination of those who seek the truth and have the courage to follow the facts. They do not distinguish, as I have done, between scientific and metaphysical Darwinism. They insist that one must either accept evolution, which means accepting Darwinism and the “unity of science,” or you reject science and embrace Creationism.