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

The detectability of Intelligent Design

What is considered as unacceptable — that Intelligent Design may be detected objectively.

This is the true battlefield in the controversy of Darwinism against the thesis of the Intelligent Design of the structures of life and of organisms as an integrated whole. In Romans 1:18-20 we are told clearly that those that deny the reality of the Creator God as the source of life, do it denying the evidence itself ("so that they are without excuse"). The world will tolerate "religion" provided it is considered as a leap of faith without any contact with objective reality or with historical truth. In such case it will be considered harmless. What the world does not tolerate nor will tolerate is the approach of a rational faith (in contradistinction to "rationalist"), founded on realities, the realities of God being present, with the obvious testimony of His works, and that God has acted in an effectual way in the midst of History, that God has spoken, and that God has brought this revelation to its fullness in that the Son of God became man in a supernatural Incarnation, and was manifested also in the midst of the time and space of this world, partaking of our blood and of our flesh. And the world does not tolerate either that this manifestation may have the support of an undeniable testimony. This sober and well-grounded position is attacked with epithets like "religious extremism" and branded as "dangerous" from many worldly quarters. In fact, this position collides openly with watered down versions of a falsely understood Christianity which ends up denying or relativizing the Word of God, and which is accepted by the world —the world will accept all that which pertains to itself, but not that which comes from the God revealed in Christ Jesus, who was fully rejected by the world.

This rational faith, grounded on the truth of a God made evident by the things that are made, and this to the point that those that deny him "are without excuse" (Romans 1:20), and in the reality of a God that has manifested Himself in many ways and manners through the history of men, until He was manifested in a full way in Jesus Christ (Hebrews 1:1-4), is a threat to incredulity. This faith has the true arguments which leave without answer those that show themselves as adversaries of God. This rational faith is the true enemy of incredulity.

A merely "mystical" faith in God, dissociated from reality, is well tolerated. A faith in the Word of the God that manifests Himself in an undeniable way in His works attracts the hostility of the materialists. It bears repeating the words of Richard Lewontin, the famous Harvard geneticist and avowed materialist, who said openly:

"... 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."

New York Review of Book(9 de enero de 1997, p. 31).

Thus, the argument of Design and of an Intelligent Design of the Universe and of the structures and forms of life is, for materialism, the great enemy to beat. And the collision with (neo)darwinism as the explanation proposed from the materialistic viewpoint as the explanation for the origin and development of the different structures and forms of life is necessarily direct. And emotional. Materialists and atheists have always been around. It is only necessary to remember the Greek Democritus (ca. 460 B.C. — ca. 370 B.C.) and the Roman Lucretius (1st. century B.C.), which shows it is not a recent phenomenon due to the enlightenment provided by science. In fact, the proposals of Darwinism were welcomed eagerly by a big public educated in the Enlightenment, led by an elite educated in the rejection of a God that intervenes and that acts in a sovereign way. The apparent plausibility of the mechanism of Natural Selection, given the state of ignorance of the true nature and sources of variability in the living beings, gave wings to the materialists, who believed that Natural Selection was the great motor for that evolution in which they believed ever since the times of the ancient Greek philosophers. What the materialists were lacking was a mechanism that would justify their belief in this origin of all living beings by chance and natural law, without any divine intervention. And it was the Natural Selection proposed by Darwin which seemed to be at the time this plausible mechanism. And this is how Richard Dawkins, who is amongst the most militant of materialists and atheists of our time, could say that "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist" (p. 9 of The Blind Watchmaker).

In fact, and from the very beginning, Darwin did not feel himself very sure about his own theory. He was emotionally very attached to it, but when he was confronted by arguments like the one of the complexity of the design of the eye itself, and of other structures, he even says that "With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind...?" [Letter 13230 — Darwin, C. R. to Graham, William, 3 July 1881.]

And the proposal and the rigorous justification of the Design inference and of the need of a deliberate design, both on the basis of what was already known in the times of Darwin as well as —and in an overwhelming way— due to all the knowledge piled up through the last 60 years about all the mechanisms of the working and of the reproduction of the cells and of the coordination of the different tissues in the biological processes of the multicellular organisms, again leaves materialists void of that apparent justification which they thought they had with the mechanism proposed by Darwin for the origin and development of the life-forms. Objectively, we are back to the pre-Darwinian situation. Materialists accept and believe there has been an evolution, but the mechanism of this evolution, which for a time it was believed that had been solved by Darwin, is at present a matter of heated polemics. Scientific research has unveiled the fundamental structure of life, and that this constitution, control and reproduction are based on systems of filing, treatment, transcription and expression of Information, of a nature and of a complexity that give evidence that are the embodiment of the purpose of a Super-Intelligence. The big problem facing materialists is the origin of the information that appears in the background of all organic systems and of the make-up of all the nanomachinery performing the cellular functions. Materialists are holding to their paradigm of chance and natural law as a necessarily sufficient explanation for the origin of the forms of life and of their mechanisms, but this paradigm is really void of a true answer to this question: What is the origin of biological information?

Pierre P. Grassé, a distinguished French zoologist, reflected the following with reference to this problem, back there in 1973:

"When we consider a human work, we believe we know where the 'intelligence' which fashioned it comes

from; but when a living being is concerned, no one knows or ever knew, neither Darwin nor Epicurus, neither Leibniz nor Aristotle, neither Einstein nor Parmenides.

An act of faith is necessary to make us adopt one hypothesis rather than another. Science, which does not accept any credo, or in any case should not, acknowledges its ignorance, its inability to solve this problem which, we are certain, exists and has reality.

If the search for the origin of information in a computer is not a false problem, why should it be when it is a matter of the information contained in the cellular nuclei?"

(Grassé, P. P., L’Evolution du Vivant,
Éditions Albin Michel: París, 1973, p. 15)

Thus, it is not only a matter of the evidence proceeding from structures of great perfection, not only from the eye, or in general of all the structures of life which give evidence of an intelligent design governed by a Purpose that expresses the wisdom and the power of God. We have much more. At present the evidence has piled up of a whole cybernetic system in the basis of life itself and of all its expressions. And this fact of this information built-in in magnitudes that go beyond all measure brings us to an unavoidable fact:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life ..." (Gospel of John, 1:1-4)

Santiago Escuain