Michael Foster wrote:
As God works in mysterious ways, I can't see why evolution isn't one of them.
Many religious biologists agree. However, by and large scientists and biologists in particular tend to be atheists. The best explication for their reasoning can be found in R. Dawkins, "The God Delusion."
To make a long story very short, his main argument -- which is very ancient -- is that introducing God is a violation of Ockham's razor; i.e. multiplying entities unnecessarily. If the complexity and the origin of life are difficult to explain, it is far more difficult to explain how God might have originated. Furthermore, the laws of physics, chemistry and Darwinian evolution satisfactorily explain all aspects of life (so far anyway), without reference to any motivation, plan or conscious action by any intelligent being, mortal or immortal. In other words, there is no evidence whatever that extraterrestrials seeded earth with the first cells, or that a cosmic intelligence guided the development of life. There is no need to invoke such ideas to explain the phenomena discovered thus far. Perhaps, in the future, some aspect of biology will require such explanations, but I doubt that will happen.
Dawkins restates the argument in another thought provoking way. As far as anyone knows, complexity and intelligence only appear as the end product of natural forces, after billions of years of evolution. There is no evidence that they can arise by any other means. On the other hand, there is ample evidence that the laws of physics were operative from the moment of the big bang on. So the forces that would eventually drive evolution were there all along, but it does not seem physically possible that they were accompanied by or controlled by intelligence.
The Dawkins book has attracted a lot of emotional attacks, but by and large I think it is a quiet philosophical exposition which should not upset any intelligent reader, even a very religious one. All of his arguments have been around since Darwin, and many for thousands of years before that, so any educated believer will be familiar with them. So I can't see why they would upset anyone. I have not read the other best selling books about atheism, but based on reviews and extracts they seem to be more confrontational and emotional.
- Jed
