| One of the things that has gotten a bum rap in the history of philosophy is the argument from design. If we were to come upon an elaborately fashioned clock on the beach, we would suppose that a human being had left it, and it had ultimately been wrought by craftsmen. We would not say that over the millennia, incremental changes would lead to the clock. In that instance, in fact, we know they would not, that no such refinements are possible arising from the brute forces that would shape the landscape. We fool ourselves into thinking that the organic character of evolution makes it more likely that the complex architecture of the various creatures would arise, that they have a self- shaping mechanism, but the forces are still blind and clumsy, and it is dizzyingly unlikely that organic life started in the first place, or that cell differentiation occurred, and resulted in specialization, or that anything emerged from the ocean. In fact, the only reason that anyone would believe in mechanistic evolution is that the possibility of design had been excluded at the beginning, and therefore whatever theory, however fantastic, that was left had to be true......... |
