Doubting Neo-Darwinism...

...the philosophy. Not the scientific theory of Darwinian evolution. The Great Bard of North Western Winds takes down the ideology!

He wonders why so many Darwin devotees refuse to consider the possibility that their theory isn't all inclusive:

Do not under stand me as defending all ID arguments. I'm averse to what has been called "God of the gaps" claims, for example. What I object to is the shutting down of a wide swath of commentary as being simply unworthy of listening to, simply because it does not conform to the political and ideological constructions of a power group. The gate keeping function is legitimate, but not every instance of it will be legitimate.

To help defend his assertion, he looks to Lee Harris:

A humble example may make my point clearer. Suppose that you are given a message that appears to be in cipher, and you are asked to decipher it. You begin to work on the project, but after many hours you begin to wonder if there is really a message to be decoded. You have tried every trick in the cryptographer's book, and yet nothing works. In despair, you go to the person who presented you with the puzzle and you ask, "Are you sure there is really a message here?"

Now imagine your reaction if the person testing you were to say, "To be perfectly honest with you, I'm not really sure. You see we were given two kinds of messages-one that was really in a code, and the other that was simply a string of utterly random letters thrown together arbitrarily."

What would be your response? Certainly, it would come out as something like, "Why in hell didn't you tell me that before I wasted all my time?" And, after all, what is the point of trying to decipher a code that isn't a code at all, but simply a mishmash of random symbols, devoid of any intelligent organizational principle, and hence, by definition, impossible to decode?

And after you discovered that you may well have been given a pointless task, how diligently would you continue to work at deciphering it. Wouldn't it be natural for your determination to flag on learning that even the best college try would yield no results, because no results could be yielded?

Yet that is how Plato viewed the problem of deciphering the code of the universe. There were some parts that made sense; but there were many other parts that didn't, and never could be forced to make sense. They were simply the irrational, and it was pointless for a man of any intelligence to waste his time trying to make sense of this vast domain of irreducible insignificance. Shit happens, and when it does, the pursuer of knowledge stops, and humbly confesses complete ignorance.

The Christian cosmology, founded on the outrageous absurdity of creation out of nothing, asserted that shit doesn't happen and that God doesn't play dice. He made everything-hence everything is rational and designed in accordance with an intelligible plan. What appears on the surface to be irrational is, if examined in sufficient detail, full of hidden reasons. Everything makes sense because everything is the result of intelligent design.

Who could believe such twaddle?

Luckily a vast number of brilliant European scientists could, and because they believed in intelligent design they were able to devise models of the universe that assumed the existence of an intelligent designer. To use our metaphor from a bit earlier, they were all convinced that there was an intelligible code at the basis of the cosmos. They were persuaded that there was nothing irrational about our universe and that every last detail had been prearranged and planned from the beginning of time. They believed that every event that occurred had been ordered in accordance with a divine plan.

The notion that there was an intelligent designer who created absolutely everything from scratch and in accordance with a rational plan is the psychological precondition of the willingness to look for patterns that are hidden to the ordinary gaze. Unless we believe that there is a code to be deciphered, we are psychologically reluctant to devote hours of our life, let alone our life itself, to the pursuit of deciphering it.

Any Questions?

Look. Neo-Darwinism is a most Reasonable philosophy. It attempts to declare as fact the metaphysical ideal of most Reasonable elites. In short, it says there is no God. All life is randomly generated by adaptation and chance. Therefore, there's nothing beyond us. Since that's the case, people are the Absolute. Whatever people want, is.

Neo-Darwinism is very comforting. Can anyone ask for a better philosophy to undergird the Absolute Individual? Hey, it even passes itself off as science!

Only it's not. No one has a valid reason for not concluding that an Intelligent Designer could initiate the random patterns that generate life. Someone used the metaphor of a farmer randomly spreading seed in a field. While the farmer does not plan in minute detail where the seed will fall, he does cast the seeds forth. The fact is, Darwinian evolution offers no evidence either for or against God as the author of creation. Other observations from nature can enable the average person to reach that conclusion.

Zeolous Neo-Darwinists that insist on an atheistic reading of Darwinian evolution are peddling belief, not practicing science. Other ideas should not suffer for their prejudice.