Darwin's Theory - Does it work without God? (Part 2)

This a comment I received from Paramanand (Pandy) on my posting Darwin's Theory - Does it work without God?:

My take on Darwinism is of course on the side of Darwin. And I find something confusing what you write here. You seem to think that Natural selection is actually some hidden force which actually selects life forms.

However this is not the case. If you have two organisms, then they are not alike in all respects and definitely in some circumstances one will be better at survival than other and it will be selected. There is no force as such as work (or the hand of God).

To take an analogy, you have a sieve and some particles of various sizes. if you throw them all in sieve some will be filtered out and some will pass through. Now the sieve here is the natural environment which includes other organisms like predators, and members of species competing for mate. And in real world the sieve is highly dynamic. So a property which might have been good for survival once in past might be useless in future.

So the selection itself is undirected. But the random mutations which add to survival are preserved and accumulate over the millions and billions of years.

It is this marvellous process of natural selection which integrates (remember calculus) the small luck at each stage and generates blogger.com in 21st century from lifeless matters billions of years ago. What a transition!! Almost unimaginable by the proponents of Intelligent Design.

You can read the works of Richard Dawkins to get further enlightenment on this subject.

Pandy has made some good points but at the same time, I feel, I can write more on what I meant in light of his comments.

The sieve example does model Nature to the extent that the fit survive in Nature, as the smaller stones pass through the sieve. But do the stones that have passed through the sieve carry any memory or information that they passed through the sieve because they had such and such properties? If so, how? In the same manner, the fitter might survive, very well. But how does one explain the fact that the survivors pass on the genetic code (or the information of what made them survive) to the next generation? Nature could have kept on experimenting like this without ever evolving into more complex life forms. Some forms of amoeba and algae could have survived one time and some other forms at other times. There has to be some inherent intelligence that gives a sense of direction to evolution and that prefers survival more than extinction. After all, Nature would not be affected if all life ceased to exist.

Let me take an example. Consider a moulding machine that is used to give a particular shape to molten glass. Each piece of glass that is moulded is of the same shape. Then each piece is pushed on to a treadmill one after the other at the end of which they are collected by a person and packed into boxes. Consider a situation in which the moulding machine has been programmed in such a manner that the glass pieces it makes are very fragile. So fragile that they break when one glass piece touches the other one on the treadmill. If we compare it to the sieve example, the moulding machine is working in the manner it is supposed to work - giving the shape as programmed. However, the glasses are not strong enough and break when they come into contact with each other on the treadmill. Now, in this case, the moulding machine is in no position to change the settings on its own so that the glasses coming out are thicker/stronger and do not break when they come into contact with each other on the treadmill. So, the glasses it produces will continue to break while the machine will never stop making the same glasses. This is something that does not happen. Why? Because there is no transfer of information from treadmill to the machine that the glasses it is producing are too fragile and it needs to change the way it produces them.

Coming back to evolution, if I try to ask the question why the "beneficial" random mutations are preserved by Nature when it does not have to (that is, it is not bound by the laws of physics to) create self-sustaining life, I do not find a ready answer.

Not only has Nature evolved, but it has evolved so much as to produce intelligent beings!! This is something amazing and again not guaranteed by Darwin's theory.

What I tried to say in was that if the existence of God (an invisible intelligent force, if God seems to be too controversial) is not assumed, Darwin's theory seems to leave an unexplained gap. Now, this does not prove that God is enabling evolution but it does mean that there might be something which Darwin and scientific theory has left unexamined.

Chicken Soup for the Soul

Chicken Soup for the Soul - the first thing that came to my mind as I cursorily glanced over the book's title was - it must be something to do with cooking recipes. But, wait, the title says something about the soul... so there must be a spiritual undertone to the book. On reading the book, I found that it contained short stories about normal people going about in their lives. Each story had someone helping the other person showing kindness of the kind that is isn't very common these days. (Not that the people earlier were any kinder!)

Each story about hope and kindness was meant to be some kind of a soup for the soul. Just as a chicken soup makes your body feel good, these stories were meant to make your soul feel better. This was a well-intentioned comparison but it irked me a little. What about the chicken that was killed only to be put into the soup? Didn't that chicken also have a soul when it had life? What about that? Or is a chicken soul so low in the hierarchy of things that it can be sacrificed only to provide some moments of pleasure and a little nourishment to the human body?

Please don't think that I am some kind of a propagator of vegetarianism or one of the founding members of PETA. I am neither. In fact, I enjoy eating chicken (and without feeling guilty, if I might add!). Then, why, you might think, am I making such a big deal of the issue? Chicken Soup for the Soul makes me think about the larger issue of how human society divides things into moral and immoral, ethical and unethical. Most people in the West are non-vegetarian and chicken forms one of the items of daily consumption. So, in the West, there is nothing wrong per se with killing a chicken to eat it. It was always meant to be this way. And in that sense the book conveys its meaning pretty well. However, in India, there are many vegetarians. Most of these people do not consume meat because it comes from killing an animal (that has a life and a soul) and is therefore considered a sin. Now, try explaining to any such vegetarian in India that Chicken Soup for the Soul is a book that is meant to make you feel good by teaching good morals and you will get weird looks. The title would be so contradictory. Something like - Adolf Hitler's Essays on Benefits of Non-violence!

So the dichotomy is clear. While most people in the West easily understand the meaning the book's title delivers, the same is not so obvious to a large number of Indians who are vegetarian. In general, in India, I do not think such a title would strike a direct chord with the people. The point is that there is a difference in the way different people consider what is ethical and unethical - even when living in the same age. Now, let me make things dirtier. Morals and ethics, to most people, are ways of walking the path that God has told them to walk on. It is the right way of doing things. Most people in the West and in India believe in some God - I can't cite a source right away but I read somewhere that a survey concluded so. Also, in most religions, not doing something that God preaches brings you one step closer to hell. This means while Indian vegetarians do not eat chicken so as not to disobey their ethics (and their God), many in the West do so regularly without ever feeling so -- implying that their ethics do not consider it wrong. Now, how can one God consider something wrong (punishable by hell) while the other choose to remain neutral, if not positive?

I guess there is something wrong somewhere. Either morals are not given to us by God or most people in the world are deliberately committing sin each day of their lives by consuming meat! If the latter is not the case it means morals are man made. And they might have been conceived by "wise" people who have already thought of the consequences the society would have to face in the absence of these morals.

Darwin's Theory - Does it work without God?

Before going through this post, you might want to go through my earlier related post How God Makes Lives Easier...

Charles Darwin seems to be the ideal victim of all religious philosophers' ire for proposing the Theory of Evolution. Such people believe that, by proposing the theory, Darwin went against the premise that God created the Universe, the Earth, all life on Earth and so on. Before taking sides with Darwin or God (or more important to find whether they actually form a part of opposite teams!), let us see what the theory says:

Darwin's Theory of Evolution - The Premise
Darwin's Theory of Evolution is the widely held notion that all life is related and has descended from a common ancestor: the birds and the bananas, the fishes and the flowers -- all related. Darwin's general theory presumes the development of life from non-life and stresses a purely naturalistic (undirected) "descent with modification". That is, complex creatures evolve from more simplistic ancestors naturally over time. In a nutshell, as random genetic mutations occur within an organism's genetic code, the beneficial mutations are preserved because they aid survival -- a process known as "natural selection." These beneficial mutations are passed on to the next generation. Over time, beneficial mutations accumulate and the result is an entirely different organism (not just a variation of the original, but an entirely different creature)
Source: http://www.darwins-theory-of-evolution.com/

Notice the use of words "beneficial" and "preserved". The first question that comes to mind is who decides what is beneficial for the organism's genetic code and what is not? Who "preserves"? The process is conveniently called "natural selection". Now, what is nature? Does nature have a will? Is nature intelligent? After all, if, as Darwin proposes, mutations occur randomly AND nature did not have a will (or intelligence) sufficient to decide whether a particular kind of genetic code is good enough to be passed on to the next generation, we could find in nature a large number of organisms with different genetic codes - both beneficial and non-beneficial and that too in varying degrees. However, that, clearly, does not happen. Nature controls the number of bad or non-beneficial species by eliminating them - by blocking that genetic code from passing on to next generations of the same species. This means, there is a force that works behind the scenes to increase chances of survival of a species and helps life to evolve!!! This force might be something that is commonly called God or Nature. So, Darwin's theory may need the presence of God to work as it does.

This conclusion is perplexing to me. It really makes me think if Darwin actually did presuppose (even though unknowingly - I do not know of his actual stance on the existence of God/Nature) the existence of an intelligent force in order for life to survive and evolve on earth.

This further prompts a look at the theory of Intelligent Design that proposes: "while evidence pointing to the nature of an "intelligent cause or agent" may not be directly observable, its effects on nature can be detected."

Even though the theory of Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory because it is not based on experiments, we ought to keep our minds open to the idea that the currently accepted scientific theories of evolution might not be sufficient to explain the evolution of life on earth.