12 Evolution and Rationalism

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12Evolution and Rationalism
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• Evolution and religion
• The growth of evolutionary theory had provided a
  fatal injury to the pretension of religion.
• Experience the existence of things should be
  grounded on experience/science.

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• An entity that intervenes in space and time (as
  God should have done when he created the universe
  and sent his son to earth) provides empirical
  evidence for its existence.
• Yet we have no empirical evidence for the
  existence of deities. All claims that there exist
  deities is devoid of evidence.

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• But we have evidence for evolution (e.g.
  physiological, fossils and biogeography).
• 1. Physiological evidence
• Evidence of related structures
• E.g. the structure of mammalian forelimbs. The
  wing of the bat, the flipper of the whale and the
  human arm all share the same bones organized for
  different functions.

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• 2. Fossils
• They can be dated and show sequences of
  organisms from currently unknown forms to
  familiar forms.
• 3. Biogeography
• I.e., the geographical relationships between
  organisms of different kinds (e.g. Darwin finches
  who have been blown to different places and in
  the absence of competitors evolves differently).

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• Prior to the development of a convincing theory
  of evolution there was an argument of sorts for
  the belief in God and an argument that could be
  seen to have meet the naturalistic standards.
• Rationalists like Descartes, Arnauld, Leibniz,
  had some good (scientific) reasons to posit the
  existence of God. They need the Ghost in the
  machine.

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• The argument from design
• Roughly, the argument goes as the world or some
  of the things in it show unmistakable mark of
  design therefore there must be a designer (i.e.
  God).
• Even if it succeeds in showing that the world
  must have a designer, it has little or no power
  to disclose what the designer is like.

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• If the existence of an ordered object requires
  the hypothesis of a designer, it is difficult to
  see why God himself by being supremely ordered
  doesnt require a designer.

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• Moral
• The argument from design only specifies the
  theoretical apparatus so vaguely that it becomes
  meaningless.
• All it explains is the presence of some order or
  structure. It gives not a single detail of the
  actual structure found in the world.
• There is no possible comparison with the
  richness of explanatory power of evolution
  theories.

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• Since it is difficult to separate the question
  from whether there are any Gods from how things
  are and stand in the world, Darwinism undermines
  any good reason to believe in God.
• For if science is the only discipline licensed
  to say how things stand, although we have no
  reason to say that God doesnt exists, we got no
  evidence that God exists.
• Science doesnt contradict religion. But it
  makes it increasingly improbable that religious
  discourse has any subject matter, let alone a
  scientific impact.

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• Big gap
• The remaining big gap religion may try to bridge
  concerns the origins of life.
• If the inspection of the world we inhabit give
  us no reason for believing in a supreme being, it
  doesnt make much sense to posit one to explain
  the beginning of life.

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• The intervention of a divine being to initiate
  life would be the best explanation only insofar
  as we already proved its existence.
• The deepest implication of evolution is that it
  should ultimately make clear that we neither have
  nor need an all-powerful father figure to take on
  the task that seem presently beyond us (cf.
  Chomskys mysteries/ problems distinction).

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• Humans and other species
• The distinctiveness of humans are language,
  thought and culture.
• But language is basic, for without it there
  would be no thought and no culture.
• This shouldnt be surprising, for each species
  presents some distinctive, species-specific,
  feature (e.g. the beaver is the only mammal
  digesting wood).

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• The limits of a creatures consciousness are
  linked to its particular set of capacities
• E.g. a dog is conscious of the scent of a
  rabbit who happened to be there.
• Language provides us with an extraordinary
  enhanced set of capacities and consequently with
  an enhanced realm of consciousness.

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• Language and evolution
• 1. Human language, like the giraffes neck or
  the peacock's tail, has evolved to a state that
  can easily be seen as different in kind from
  related features of any of its relatives.
• Nothing, though, suggests that these features
  didnt evolve naturalistically.

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• 2. The evolution of human language allowed the
  possibility of other changes in human life that
  wouldnt have been possible without language.
• These changes profoundly distanced our species
  from the others.