Darwin against Design - background and motivations

Touching the controversy between Darwin and the intelligent design of life, the following can be said:

1. No one doubts the observations made by Darwin, and by students of nature before him, regarding changes in living beings, nor regarding descent with modification. The great question mark has to do with the scope of such changes, the meaning of the same, the interpretation they may receive.

Darwin himself conceded this point, saying:

"... I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived. A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question; ..."

Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species
by Means of Natural
Selection, 1859, Introduction.

2. Now, due to ideological and sociopolitical circumstances, the general atmosphere of England and in many places in Europe was in expectation of an approach to the origin and development of life that would give rational support to an atheistic or agnostic philosophy, which was already very well spread. But those that maintained this position confronted the weight of the argument as argued in the work Natural Theology, by William Paley (1802), on the evidence of an intelligent design for the forms and functions of life. This meant that atheistic or agnostic philosophy had the great obstacle of the evidence of design in living beings. In fact, one of the main modern proponents of atheism, professor Richard Dawkins, stated that Charles Darwin "made it possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist" (The Blind Watchmaker, p. 9).

We think that the great attractive of Darwin's thesis centres, more than in the rigour of the interpretations proposed by him, in the "deliverance" it offers man with respect to God as a Real Being on Whom he depends. For whatever reasons, ad as it is documented by Michael Denton in his work Evolution, a Theory in Crisis, after a few years Darwinism had passed from an arguable proposal to a dogma massively accepted by the intellectual classes. Darwin's apparently persuasive arguments, plausible for the state of knowledge about the living beings and their relationships in those times of the middle of the XIXth century (or rather due to the great lack of knowledge about it, as a matter of fact) were not supported by the inrush of new data which should lead to such a massive acceptance of Darwin's thesis. Rather, there was a climate of opinion ready to reject Christianity, and to accept the materialistic and atheistic thesis, or at least to reject any thought of a personal God active in Creation and Providence, due to the influence of philosophers like David Hume, and of writers like Voltaire.

Darwin himself reveals occasionally in his correspondence both his background and his motivations. In a letter to his son George he says, amongst other things:

“... Lyell is most firmly convinced that he has shaken the faith in the Deluge far more efficiently by never having said a word against the Bible, than if he had acted otherwise. ...

I have lately read Morley’s Life of Voltaire and he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity (even when written with the wonderful force and vigour of Voltaire) produce little permanent effect: real good seems only to follow the slow and silent attacks.” (October 21, 22, 24, 1873: Cambridge MSS.)

Quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb,
Darwin and the Darwian Revolution
(Chatto & Windus, Londres 1959), p. 320.

Continuing with the matter of background and motivations, Aldous Huxley, the celebrated novelist, brother of Julian Huxley who was the first director of UNESCO, and grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, known as "Darwin's Bulldog", shared these reflections in on of his works:

"... The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is not valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, ...

"I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. ... For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. ..."

Huxley, Aldous: From Ends and
Means: An Inquiry into the Nature
of Ideals and into the Methods
Employed for Their Realization
(Harper and Brothers Publishers,
New York and London,
1937, fifth edition), pp. 314-317.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel, in his book, The Last Word (Oxford University Press, 1997), talks about what he calls "the fear of religion itself." He writes,

"I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."

In his view, this fear may be "responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time." (p. 130)

In these pages it is our purpose to reopen Darwin's challenge, examining it and pondering both sides of the matter. As he himself expressed it: "A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question". Already in Darwin's time, a good amount of studies and arguments appeared expounding the real implausibility of his arguments beyond any superficial appearances. And during the XX century more and more knowledge has emerged which brings home the effective bankruptcy of the Darwinist argument. It is true that a great effort has been made to achieve the synthesis of this knowledge, as the confirmation of the discontinuous nature of the fossil record, the cellular mechanisms, the realities of genetics, construing them and pigeonholing them within the Darwinist or Neodarwinist model. But the build-up of data during the XXth century, and particularly during the last 50 years, due to the inflexibility of facts, shows the breakdown of the old materialism of the XIXth century, which considered all exclusively in terms of matter and movement, or matter and energy. Now we know that all structures of life are organized and ruled by an information which is codified in different ways, and the existence of several information supports, information transcription systems, systems to translate the said information, and to execute this information to form and function in the living beings; also verification systems and systems for the maintenance of this information, and of a dynamic for reproducing these systems. This information involves effectively a whole set of machinery which makes possible reading the same, and to understand it and manifest itself in the phenomena of life, with true and strict mechanisms for timing and for flux control and for identification, of great specificity and of irreducible complexity both upwards and downwards which never could have come by small chance steps with functionality. Because this functionality belongs to the system as a whole.

It is only too true that in our present society there is the barefaced attempt to sideline the thesis of the Intelligent Design of life, as something already refuted by Darwin. But this is not true. Darwin did propose his thesis denying design, and he did propose certain lines of evidence, although, in the words of Darwin, it was clear that "scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived", i.e., the directly opposite conclusions are those that maintain the Intelligent, divine, Design of life. The crystallization of Darwin's proposal as a dogma in his time was more due to the precipitation in accepting arguments that looked plausible, and not to the application of intellectual rigour to ponder these arguments, due to a social and ideological climate which were favourable to them. And the maintenance of this thesis in our time cannot be understood except with reference to the massive propaganda of the mass media addressed to drum-up a dogmatic materialistic approach, which comes uncovered in the candid and recent admission by Richard Lewontin, which we have to give again:

"... we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

Richard Lewontin,
New York Review of Books
(January 9, 1997, p. 31).

Santiago Escuain