How I Came to Take Leave of Darwin – Discovery Institute

Photo credit: Jannik - JWDShots on Unsplash.

Editors note: We are delighted to host a new series by Neil Thomas, Reader Emeritus at the University of Durham, How I Came to Take Leave of Darwin, of which this article is the first installment.Professor Thomass recent book,Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design, is available now from Discovery Institute Press.

I guess few people with busy personal and work lives have the mental repose required to spend too much time considering the existential imponderables of life, and in my own case I was well in to my retirement years when the realization came to me that nothing I had learned about Darwinism a polite fiction I had allowed myself to accept on trust for decades stacked up logically. In the light of cool analytical thought, it appeared to me that Darwinism was a badly supported and even ludicrous theory. This realization drove me towards what, as a lifelong rationalist, I deemed to be the responsible course of action: researching the whole subject properly, something which, regrettably, I had omitted to do heretofore.

Stephen Hawking once claimed that the world could have formed from nothing at all as the result of the force of gravity, but as Oxford mathematics professor John Lennox briskly counters, [gravity] is not nothing,1adding with pardonable sternness, Nonsense remains nonsense even when talked by world-famous scientists. The stubborn question remains: How did gravity come to exist in the first place?Wholititsblue touch paper? Hawkings speculations were in Lennoxs judgment more in the nature of metaphysics than physics proper. Similarly, in the course of my own researches it became clear that, whether I cared to acknowledge it or not (and I had been a secular humanist for many decades) a form of cosmic intelligence would have been required to initiate and superintend the whole course of lifeandevolution. To simply invoke the notion of a quasi-mystical automatism (glossed variously as chance, self-assembly, a cosmic imperative, or natural selection) now seemed to me absurd.

In logical terms, I felt, there could be no effect without a cause despite the siren counterclaims of such as Hawking, Darwin himself, Richard Dawkins, Nobel Prize-winner Christian de Duve, Peter Atkins, and, notably, Lawrence Krauss, who has defended that position both in written form and in a number of recent cosmology-themed TV programs.2From that point onwards I began to view the very notion ofmindlesscreation/evolution with unqualified skepticism. What I had come to see as the wholly unconvincing attempts made by Darwin and his successors to circumvent the philosophic necessity for a first cause only strengthened my conviction that there must be an almighty (Almighty?) initiator of all things.

I have to confess that I had once assumed that any opposition to Darwin must necessarily be confined to the ranks of such as Biblical fundamentalists. However, my attention was somewhat belatedly caught by some more substantive (and less easily disregarded) opposition arising from the ranks of Darwins latter-day peers in the ranks of scientificacademe whose accumulated evidence could in no way be glossed as stemming from any religiousparti pris. Michael Denton, the pioneering biologist in what later came to be known as the intelligent design community, concluded in his seminal book, Evolution. A Theory in Crisis(1985), that the scarcely conceivable complexity of life could hardly have evolved from the contingent dynamics of natural selection. For him and for other non-Darwinian scientists such as the Americans Michael Behe, William Dembski, and others writing in the 1990s and 2000s, the irreducible complexity of such organs as the eye and human brain provide unarguable counter-indications to any inference that the blunt tool of natural selection could have been the mechanism of their making. Given the interdependent nature of these organs structuring, their component parts could hardly have achieved their exquisitelyharmonizedform and synergetic functionality in an exclusively additive way (since natural selection is of course held to advance randomly by small modifications accumulating over time).

Criticism of the Darwinian model became even more acute, I found, when the unequivocally non-material aspects of life, such as consciousness, thought, and the subjective self, came into the picture. It lacks logical coherence, assert the ID scientists, to suppose thatsentiencecould have evolved template-less from any purely material matrix. How could the entirely random interplay of impersonal forces have all unwittingly been instrumental in the creation of persons? For Denton, the large improbability of intelligent life being shaped by forces bereft of all cognitive capacity themselves provides nothing less than a formal disproof of the whole Darwinian paradigm, famously dubbed by him the great cosmogenic myth of the modern era.

Next, Darwin on Trial (Again).

Excerpt from:

How I Came to Take Leave of Darwin - Discovery Institute