Not quite indifferent
From Stephen I Hayhow Sir: One point regarding Mary Wakefield's article 'The mystery of the missing links' (25 October). The problems with Professor Dawkins's views are philosophical as well as scientific. For example, in River out of Eden he says:
In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to be lucky, and you won't find rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference . . .
He concludes, 'DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, And we dance to its music.'
Now this is all very well until you really think about what it means. For if everything is 'nothing but blind, pitiless indifference' then so are Professor Dawkins's scientific pontifications; in fact so is all science, all discussion, and just about everything else besides. The problem is that Dawkinsian evolution is self-contradictory and therefore logically inconceivable. In the end, we start to wonder why the professor is so passionate in his defence, and so dismissive of his enemies. Indeed, we start to believe that he cannot live out the implications of his hard doctrines.
Stephen J. Hayhow
London E4
From Dr John Lamont Sir: Followers of St Thomas Aquinas like myself find the Intelligent Design movement objectionable on two grounds. The first ground is that the arguments are just not good ones, This can be shown by a simple illustration that Spectator readers can meditate on as they make vinaigrette. If! pour oil into vinegar, I find that the oil floats to the top. The odds against this happening by chance are trillions to one against; however, I do not conclude from this that God must have miraculously intervened to separate the oil from the vinegar. Instead, I conclude that there must be some physical mechanism that explains why the oil does this. This is just what the Darwinists do in the case of evolution. In some cases they succeed in finding the physical mechanism, just as chemists have found out why oil floats on vinegar, and in other cases they have yet to do so. Supporters of Intelligent Design are not entitled to assume that there cannot be a physical explanation for some aspects of evolution just because no physical explana lion has yet been found, any more than they would have been entitled to see divine intervention in the making of vinaigrette before the development of chemistry.
The second reason for objecting to Intelligent Design is that it presupposes deism. Deists think that the universe has a sort of independent existence. They believe that although it was originally created by God, after it came into being it had the power to continue existing under its own steam. St Thomas, on the other hand, thought that the universe has to be continually sustained in existence by God, somewhat as a note must be continually sustained in existence by the persons singing it. If you are a deist, you need to have examples of God's miraculously intervening in the world — say by creating new species — in order to have reasons for believing that He exists. Without such miraculous interventions, God becomes a dispensable hypothesis. This deist idea is clearly behind the Intelligent Design movement. For St Thomas, however, the mere fact of things existing — whether they were brought into being the way the Darwinists claim or not — is a result of God's direct action, and hence provides reason for believing that He exists. Followers of St Thomas will thus be unhappy with Intelligent Design, because it presupposes a pernicious understanding of God.
John Lamont
University of St Andrews, Scotland
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