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Deism Debates
We had earlier remarked on the significant affect of Isaac Newton on
Enlightenment thinking. The shift from Augustinian trinity
(Father:Son:HS, intent:action:reception, see his Confessions)
to Newtonian trinity (time:space:matter, no creation/intention: no
purpose/action: no miracle/intervention), left a mechanistic
metaphysic with decidedly materialist leanings. Newton himself
reinterpreted God along mechanistic lines, though he would still view
himself as a Unitarian or Arian Christian. Later Enlightenment
thinkers, following the Continental drifts illustrated by Descartes,
Voltaire, and Kant, argued for an even more rationalist religion with
an even more abstract and mechanical universe. As Brooke points out,
the attacks on orthodox Christianity came from many quarters, it was
not solely a "science vs. religion" battle that was fought in the
Enlightenment, but a confluence of many cultural trends: the
anticlericalism of the French, the mechanization of Newton, the
rebound from the wars of religion, the rise of Deism, the agnostic
skepticism of Hume. We don't have space to do justice to all the
causes at play, but we focus on Materialism because from a 21st
century vantage point we know it was the victor of the melee.
The materialists, who seem to live in every age, siezed these
opportunities to trumpet the even greater rationality of atheism. Thus
the lines were drawn between Deist/Theists and Materialists as to the
proper interpretation of the facts: the proper observation of Nature.
The debates were fierce, and many people despaired of ever arriving at
a conclusion. Hume, and later Kant, even argued that the debate was
intrinsically meaningless because science (observations) could never
lead to or prove religion (faith). Many people bought into this
argument, because it decoupled science from religion, and separated
the combatants. However, again from our 21st century perspective, we
know that the battle went underground, and in the 2 centuries of Cold
War that followed, religion continuously lost ground.
We have mentioned this before, so I will be brief, but Kant's wall
that separated the phenomena (science, facts, observations) from the
noumena (faith, mind, belief) turned out to be the blade of bulldozer
moving in only one direction. Faith was attacked as mere projection of
human wish fulfillment, mind became an epiphenomena of brain
functioning, belief a self-delusion predetermined by sensory
experiences, etc. All of these battles fill the pages of 20th century
scholarship, and while they bring up many interesting questions, are
red herrings in our quest to identify the root of the modern
malaise. Kant really wanted his wall to end the fighting, he thought
he had "made room for faith" in the world of science, but all he had
done was put a wall around the Warsaw ghetto. Knowing now that his
effort failed, we need not argue its fallacies or foundations, which
Jaki ably lists, but return to the problem Kant couldn't
solve.
Can we determine, from the observed facts, whether the world is the
result of a benevolent being, or the random accumulated accidents of
Nature? A Christian apologetic could draw upon Romans 1:18ff
"he wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the
godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their
wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them,
because God has made it known to them. For since the creation of the
world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine
nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been
made, so that men are without excuse.
which would suggest both that man can observe nature and discover
God. Of course, Deists and Theists would disagree what kind of God
they had discovered, which led Augustine and Aquinas to suggest that
there are limits to what we can learn about God from the book of
Nature. Nonetheless, all would agree that Nature leads us away from
atheism and materialism, in what came to be called, Natural
Theology.
The Materialist, despite the offer of safe haven from Kant, preferred
to directly oppose the claims of Natural Theology. Perhaps the logic
of the debate can be made more clear if we choose a less emotional
object. Suppose I claim that there are little green men on Mars, and
infer their existence from observations of canals that bring water
from the polar caps. One could debate (a) the quality of the
observations (b) the necessity of the inference, or (c) the
rationality of the conclusions. Note that the attack need never
present a better explanation of the facts, only that it raise doubts
about the religious interpretation. Nor do these doubts even have to
be internally consistent, as the famous joke about the legal defense
of borrowed pot that was returned broken "There is no pot. The pot
isn't broken. And no one saw him break it anyway."
Following this approach, the Materialist argued that (a) the evidence
we see in Nature is not very clear for the support of God, e.g., for
every example of design, there's an example of mistake, (b) while a
designer is one possibility to explain the world, there are
alternative explanations that do not require a God, e.g., the
planetary orbits arrived from the coalescence of a gaseous nebula, and
not from God's individual creation and placement, (c) the very idea of
God is inconsistent, e.g., a all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God
could not allow preventable evil from existing.
Well naturally, the D/Theist isn't going to take this laying down, so
the counterargument is made, (a')just because we think its a mistake
doesn't make it one, e.g., the appendix may not have a known function,
but it isn't a mistake. (b') Perhaps some alternative explanations for
simple phenomena do not require a designer, but the really, really
complex phenomena reveal a designer is still necessary, e.g., the
human is too complex to ever be explained by an accident, (c') To
argue that belief in a God is irrational is to require the belief in
rationality which is itself a form of "irrational" belief.
Whew! No wonder Kant opted for a wall. Well, point (c') has been made
many times in various forms, perhaps the most ancient form is the
Ontological proof of God's existence dating to the medieval scholar,
Anselm. It goes something like this "Imagine there is a perfect being,
which we'll call God. It is more perfect to exist than to not
exist. Therefore God exists." You are forgiven if the thrust of the
syllogism is not obvious to you, but you should be warned that you
undoubtedly have been contaminated by materialist metaphysics. At any
rate, you should see immediately that this debate was never going to
get resolved this way.
Likewise, (a') seemed immune to logic. The Materialist protested that
if good design and bad design alike proved that there was a designer,
then the existence of a designer seemed completely independent of the
quality of the design altogether. No, no, the D/Theist protested, we
really cannot be judges of design, being designed ourselves; the pot
cannot say to the potter "why have you made me thus?" Evidently
clarity is in the eye of the beholder, and it seemed impossible to
agree on some common ground of when the data is "clear enough" to
compell belief.
This left (b') as the one place progress might be made. The D/Theist
argued that given a high quality piece of data, the inference of a
designer was necessary. The Materialist then was put on the spot,
because he had to find at least one counterexample. And he rose to
the challenge. Newton's original design argument about planetary
orbits fell to the nebular replacement of Laplace. Chemistry and its
vital forces had fell to Lavoisier. Only Biology, as the pinnacle of
complexity, seemed unassailable by Newtonian reductionism. Thus the
Natural Theologians rallied around the living organism as their final
defense of a necessary omniscient designer. And their strategy was
sound, for this citadel of divine craft remained secure for nearly 2
centuries. Nevertheless, the Cold War went on, with the sappers
undermining the bulwarks even as the banners of Deism snapped
vigorously in the breeze.
Lamarck
The first notable attack on (b') came from the french zoologist,
Jean-Baptist-Pierre-Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck
(1744-1829), who hypothesized that complexity might arise not by fiat
creation, but as a long accumulation of more and more complex
traits. He did not believe in species, since this accumulation meant
that progeny differed considerably from their ancestors. He recognized
that biological complexity serves a purpose, that the eye is
necessarily complex with no extraneous parts, and that to attack the
design hypothesis, one must address the question of purpose. Lamarck
solved this problem by arguing that it was the living creature, not
the creator, who provided the impetus, the purpose. The overused
illustration illustrating this idea is that a giraffe has a long neck,
not because God designed it to eat the leaves from trees, but because
generations of giraffes strained for those leaves causing a change in
their physiology. Today he is universally despised by neo-Darwinists
who view him as the anathema of evolution, but "methinks the lady doth
protest too much." No less a person than the distinguished 20th
century evolutionary biologist, Ernst Mayr, said of Lamarck
It would
seem to me that Lamarck has a much better claim to be designated 'the
Father of Evolution'. No author before him had devoted an entire book
exclusively to the presentation of a theory of organic evolution. No
one before had presented the entire system of animals as a product of
evolution.
For Lamarck's great contribution was not his theory about organisms
modifying their own genetics, (which, we are told, was disproved by
W..? cutting off the tails of 23 generations of mice without any
noticeable effect on the length of newborn mouse tails), rather, his
contribution lay in moving the stubborn "purpose" of design from
creator to creature, from God to Nature, from "mind" to "matter".
It was this step that cleared the way for Darwin to find an even
less purposeful purpose on which to pin his theory. For even should
Lamarck have gained his objective of removing vitalism from
biology, a D/Theist might say "ahh, but
where did the animals get their purpose, their goals from?" No,
Darwin had to find a purpose so low, so despicable, that even a
Deist would not claim it for God. Strangely enough, he found it
in the work of an Anglican priest.
Malthus
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was one of those unfortunate people
of whose book everyone has heard but no one has read. Marx and Engels
have trashed him, Darwin credits him for inspiring him to view Nature
as a relentless duel to the death, everyone assumes he must have been a
gloomy pessimist with Machiavellian cynicism. Nothing could be further
from the truth.
Darwin
Descent with modification + population pressure = natural selection
Purpose is procreation
Tree of life: Common Descent--> variation =>=>=> natural selection
It was a simple enough theory, and with the willingness to use enormous
amounts of time (millions of years) it *might* just work. Evidence
was thin though. One could look at dog breeding, or the Galapagos
finches. But the source of the variation was not infinite. Rose breeders
would die for a blue rose, for example. Or imagine dog breeders trying
to use that most friendly and helpful of domesticated species, the dog,
as a farm labor assistant. It just couldn't be done. Roses don't come
in shades of blue, and dogs don't get any bigger than Saint Bernards. And all
this had been known since the Neolithic middle east circa 6000 BC when
breeding began.
So what made Darwin famous? He extrapolated to infinity and boldly went where
no man had gone before. Time was on his side. (Lyell & geology.)
Neil Broom writes in How Blind is the Watchmaker? that
So at the very heart of the Darwinian explanation of
evolutionary change was a set of purely material mechanisms that stood
in compellingly clear, scientific rationality over and against the
supernatural claims of both vitalism and religion. Grand design by a
Creator was no longer fashionable. Chance events, acted on by an
impersonal principle of nonrandom death, was now the official doctrine
of scientific orthodoxy. Although Darwin himself never rejected the
need for an ultimate first cause, and although he even went so far as
to express this need in vaguely religious language (...), the
essentially materialistic nature of his theory ensured that the
philosophical framework of the rapidly developing biological sciences
moved quickly toward a thoroughgoing naturalism that had no need of
God.
In his later years Darwin became increasingly uncertain that natural
selection alone could fully explain the process of evolution. His
theory required that a beneficial new trait be inherited by the
organism's offspring. But how this might have occurred seemed beyond
his grasp. Darwin died in 1882 aparently unaware that this problem of
inheritance had been solved by Mendel's discoveryof the fundamental
unit of heredity.
Mendel
Genes
The Neo-Darwin Theory
Finally, the
Cancer Research
Watson & Crick
The Biochemistry Explosion
The