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The
Atheist Devotional: Timeless Meditations for
the Godless by M. Moore
Copyright ă 2008 M. Previous: Reading Number 12: Dawkins: The Selfish--But Very Confused--Gene
-Reading Number Thirteen -
Dawkins: Faith and Miracles, Scientific-Style
Excerpted from: Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, Chapter 7*
Remember Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories”? “How the Camel got his Hump,” and all the rest? Well, they’re not dead. In fact, evolutionary literature is full of them!** Dawkins treats us to some in his book.
“...Margulis's theory is that mitochondria and chloroplasts, and a few other structures inside cells, are each descended from bacteria,” bacteria that joined together as parts of a more complex cell. They wound up being “so thoroughly integrated...that it has become almost impossible to detect the fact, if indeed it is a fact, that they were once separate bacteria.”
That’s the fun thing about evolution. You can make up all kinds of imaginative stories without worrying about whether they’re true or factual—and then call them “science”! For example, did you hear the one about the gazelle and the cheetah? You’ll love this one:
“...We have seen that a very important part of a gene's environment is the other genes that it is likely to meet in successive bodies as the generations go by... This is where we come to the second major theme of this chapter, 'arms races'...” Arms races are what make organisms get better and better at what they do. The fastest cheetahs are the fittest for survival. But the cheetah’s prey, "gazelles, no less than cheetahs, are subject to cumulative selection, and they too will tend, as the generations go by, to improve their ability to run fast, to react swiftly, to become invisible by blending into the long grass.” As the gazelles evolve to run faster, so do the cheetahs in order to keep up.
Of course, Dawkins has not yet demonstrated that any of this is possible, but that’s not how belief in evolution works. You just take it on faith.
“...As it stands so far, the arms-race idea seems to suggest that cheetahs and gazelles should have gone on, generation after generation, getting ever faster until both travelled faster than sound. This has not happened and it never will.” Let’s take a moment to clarify a few things. “The first qualification is this. I gave an impression of a steady upward climb in the prey-catching abilities of cheetahs, and the predator-avoiding abilities of gazelles. The reader might have come away with a Victorian idea of the inexorability of progress, each generation better, finer and braver than its parents. The reality in nature is nothing like that.”
Well, the “reality” that we imagine with the eye of faith, that is. We’ve never observed any of this stuff.
“...The 'improvement', moreover, is far from continuous. It is a fitful affair, stagnating or even sometimes going 'backwards', rather than moving solidly 'forwards' in the direction suggested by the arms-race idea. Changes in conditions, changes in the inanimate forces I have lumped under the general heading of 'the weather', are likely to swamp the slow and erratic trends of the arms race, as far as any observer on the ground could be aware. There may well be long stretches of time in which no 'progress' in the arms race, and perhaps no evolutionary change at all, takes place. Arms races sometimes culminate in extinction, and then a new arms race may begin back at square one.”
So anything can happen, backwards or forwards or in any direction. And there’s no “inexorable” law of progress guaranteeing that complex adaptations will evolve. Yet it just happens to occur over and over. At least Darwin had his leap of faith that natural selection guarantees “improvement” and “advance in organisation.” Dawkins has done away with that quaint “Victorian” idea, and (whether knowingly or not) put everything back in the realm of mere happenstance. I guess we can regard this as the scientific version of belief in miracles. And you thought science had no room for miracles. Speaking of which...
[From Chapter 9] ”...The coelacanths were a large group of 'fish'...that flourished more than 250 million years ago and apparently died out at about the same time as the dinosaurs. I say 'apparently' died out because in 1938, much to the zoological world's astonishment, a weird fish, a yard and a half long and with unusual leg-like fins, appeared in the catch of a deep-sea fishing boat off the South African coast.” It turned out to be a coelacanth. “It is a 'living fossil', in the sense that it has changed hardly at all since the time of its fossil ancestors, hundreds of millions of years ago.”
So even by evolutionists’ own dating schemes, some species remain the same for hundreds of millions of years! And yet others have (supposedly) gone through “arms races” and gained all kinds of sophisticated biological machinery as a result. But which is more likely, no change over millions of years, or an arms race? *Big shrug* We have no way of knowing, because we’ve never observed complex new features evolving by means of a biological arms race. But if we don’t know which is more likely, how can we assume that so many millions of complexities in the biological world evolved through arms races? “Well,” you might say, “arms races have to be very likely, because look at all the complexities that have evolved in the world!” This is good logic—good, faith-based atheist logic. It goes like this:
Premise 1: Biological complexities evolve through arms races. Premise 2: There are millions of species that have evolved biological complexities. Conclusion: Therefore, arms races must have happened millions of times, making them a very likely and common occurrence.
And if someone asks us, “How do you know Premise 1 is true?” we will say, “We simply take it by faith, because it sounds good to us, and we can’t stand the alternative idea of creation.”
[Back to Chapter 7] “...Nevertheless, when all this is said, the arms-race idea remains by far the most satisfactory explanation for the existence of the advanced and complex machinery that animals and plants possess.”
Yep, very satisfactory! Especially if you don’t want to have anything to do with that creation stuff! We’re atheists here, after all.
“...In the living world too, we shall expect to find complex and sophisticated design wherever we are dealing with the end-products of a long, asymmetric arms race in which advances on one side have always been matched, on a one-to-one, point-for-point basis, by equally successful antidotes...on the other.”
Sure, it makes perfect sense...even though Dawkins has not answered questions like how we know that enough of the right kind of mutations will arise, or why those mutations will be favored (especially when the needed co-mutations haven’t occurred yet), or why arms races have occurred over and over and over again when there’s no law dictating that they have to happen. But if you rule out creation from the start, ignore all the problems with evolution and then take the rest on faith...why then yes, the evolutionary view makes perfect sense!
“...This [the evolution of the brain] is a particularly pleasing parallel with human armament races, since the brain is the on-board computer used by both carnivores and herbivores, and electronics is probably the most rapidly advancing element in human weapons technology today.”
And if this thought occurs to you: “Maybe all these striking similarities between human weapons and biological adaptations exist because the biological organisms are products of intelligent design just like the human weapons”...well...just try to put that thought out of your mind.
* “Excerpts” are paraphrased, except for “words in quotation marks and italics,” which are direct quotations from the excerpted work. ** I am indebted to Stephen Jay Gould for pointing out the similarity.
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