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We hope you enjoy this bonus excerpt from the July edition of The Worldview Bulletin. Dr. Paul Copan explains why it’s so difficult for science to avoid the idea of design, which points to a Creator.
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Paul Gould’s explanation of the meaning of “Art,” and why many definitions fall short.
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Dr. Edgar Andrews on why it’s possible to talk about a “biblical worldview,” despite the Bible’s diversity.
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The Inescapability of Design in Science: Part I
by Paul Copan
“Darwinian natural selection can produce an uncanny illusion of design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant.” [1] —Richard Dawkins
Dawkins, Darwin, and Keeping Up Appearances
From what certain scientists tell us, we should believe that design or goal-orientedness (teleology) has nothing to do with science; rather, science is all about what Aristotle called “efficient” (or productive) causality (think cue sticks and billiard balls). For instance, zoologist Richard Dawkins defines biology as “the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”[2]
According to him, Darwin made certain things possible—for instance, that we “can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that—an illusion.”[3] In fact, this “illusion of design” is so powerful, that “it took humanity until the mid-19th century to realise that it is an illusion.”[4] In the end, however, “the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning”—such as the aerodynamic elegance of the bird.[5] We’re not picking on Dawkins, but we single out his “apparent design, not real design” view as representative of other naturalistic scientists as well as philosophers like Michael Ruse and Daniel Dennett.
However, agnostic philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny claims that this is too hasty. Why not teleology (from the Greek telos, meaning “goal” or “end”), though without a Creator or Designer? His view is much like Aristotle’s: a goal-orientedness is immanent in—bound up within—the very structures of, say, plants and animals. Kenny sees a teleology operating at ascending levels of development and that nature has a self-organizing capacity all its own.
Kenny writes this about Aristotle’s teleology without God:
Teleological explanations of activity, in Aristotle, have two features. First, they explain an activity by reference not to its starting point, but to its terminus. Secondly, they do their explaining by exhibiting arrival at the terminus as being in some way good for the agent whose activity is to be explained. Thus, Aristotle will explain downward motion of heavy bodies as a movement towards their natural place, the place where it is best for them to be. Similarly, teleological explanations of structures in an organism will explain the development of the structure in the individual organism by reference to its completed state, and exhibit the benefit conferred on the organism by the structure once completed: thus, ducks grow webbed feet so that they can swim.[6]
Darwin and Design
Back in 2017, I was privileged to have lunch with Anthony Kenny in Oxford, while I was on a five-month sabbatical there. Among other things, we talked about his view of teleology without a Creator—unlike Darwin, who rejected both. I had just read his fascinating autobiographical book What I Believe.[7] I noted that one of his reasons for not embracing atheism is the evidence for the beginning of the universe. There he writes:
It is not the existence of the universe that calls for explanation, but its coming into existence. At a time when philosophers and scientists were happy to accept that the universe had existed for ever, there was no question of looking for a cause of its origin, only looking for an explanation of its nature. But when it is proposed that universe began at a point of time measurably distant in the past, then it seems perverse simply to shrug one’s shoulders and decline to seek any explanation. We would never, in the case of an ordinary existent, tolerate a blithe announcement that there was simply no reason for it coming into existence; and it seems irrational to abandon this principle when the existing thing in question is all pervasive, like the universe.[8]
In his earlier book on Aquinas’s arguments for God, he wrote: “A proponent of the [big bang] theory, at least if he is an atheist, must believe that matter came from nothing and by nothing.”[9] In light of this and Kenny’s Aristotelian teleology, I suggested to him that perhaps the beginning of the universe and the teleology within the universe are deeply—indeed, integrally—connected. That is, the Creator of the universe more simply explains both these features. It seems far less likely that these are two independent phenomena we just have to accept as simply being there and that’s all.
But let’s get back to Darwin briefly. From all indications, Darwin eventually disowned belief in a benevolent Creator and design within nature.[10] Despite his evolutionary views, he did make room for a “Creator,” who “impressed on matter” certain laws and who “breathed…into a few forms or into one” not only “life” but also “its separate powers.”[11] Along these lines, Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga insists that “there is nothing here, so far, to suggest that this whole [evolutionary] process was unguided; it could have been superintended and orchestrated by God.” [12] So while unguided natural selection is incompatible with Christianity, this isn’t the case with a divinely-guided evolution, which would include God’s oversight of chance mutations, culminating in humans made in God’s image.[13] Plantinga recognizes that pitting “creation” against “evolution” is unfortunate. How God created or how long he took to create are peripheral in contrast to the basic question of God vs. no God, theism vs. naturalism.
So when Sir Francis Crick—along with Dawkins, Dennett, and the like—insists that “biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved,”[14] this is simply a false alternative. Why not guided evolution, as Plantinga allows? My point here is not to defend evolutionary creationism—though evangelicals such as John Stott, J.I. Packer, and Timothy Keller have expressed sympathy for this view. My emphasis here is to keep the main thing the main thing and to avoid such false dichotomies—especially as we are communicating the gospel with others.
In the next Worldview Bulletin, we’ll look in more detail at Dawkins and his implicit belief in purpose or design.
Notes
[1] Richard Dawkins, “Big Ideas: Evolution,” New Scientist (September 17, 2005): https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18725171-500-big-ideas-evolution/.
[2] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1986), 1.
[3] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Mariner Books, 2008),
[4] Dawkins, “Big Ideas: Evolution.”
[5] Dawkins, Blind Watchmaker, 1.
[6] Anthony Kenny, A Brief Illustrated History of Western Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 337.
[7] Anthony Kenny, What I Believe (New York: Oxford, 2015)
[8] Anthony Kenny, What I Believe (New York: Oxford, 2015), 28-29.
[9] Anthony Kenny, The Five Ways (New York: Schocken, 1969), 66.
[10] See Paul Johnson, Darwin: Portrait of a Genius (New York: Penguin Books, 2012).
[11] Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, published in 1859 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, n.d. [corrected ed.]).
[12] Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 16.
[13] Ibid., 11-14.
[14] Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit (New York: BasicBooks, 1988), 138.