The 6,000 years prophecy

Glenn Morton has on his web-site an article Early Church Fathers on Genesis by John Tobin. The point in this article is that not all the early church fathers didn't believe in a six days creation and a young earth. The article does not deny that some of the ECFs believed in a six times 24 hours creation.

Interestingly, a YEC website, www.creationism.org, has an article named The Early Church Fathers Believed in A Young Earth & Recent Creation, which claims that Origen is the only ECF that maybe interpreted the days of creation as anything but 24 hours days.

And the article begins with a quote from The Epistle of Barnabas:

The Sabbath is mentioned at the beginning of the creation: "And God made in six days the works of His hands, and made an end on the seventh day, and rested on it, and sanctified it." Attend, my children, to the meaning of this expression, "He finished in six days." This implieth that the Lord will finish all things in six thousand years, for a day is with Him a thousand years. And He Himself testifieth, saying, "Behold, to-day will be as a thousand years." Therefore, my children, in six days, that is, in six thousand years, all things will be finished.

The article supplies a few more quotes of similar content.

So, not only did some of the ECFs believe in a literal six days creation, some of them also believed that everything would be finished in 6,000 years; that is, the end of the world would come 6,000 years after the start of the creation.

This is even clearer in a quote given a few paragraphs later. In Against Heresies, Book 5, Irenaeus writes:

For in as many days as this world was made, in so many thousand years shall it be concluded. And for this reason the Scripture says: "Thus the heaven and the earth were finished, and all their adornment. And God brought to a conclusion upon the sixth day the works that He had made; and God rested upon the seventh day from all His works." This is an account of the things formerly created, as also it is a prophecy of what is to come. For the day of the Lord is as a thousand years; and in six days created things were completed: it is evident, therefore, that they will come to an end at the sixth thousand year.

So, origins may for YECs simply be a part of eschatology, and that might explain why it is so important for them that the earth not be much older than 6,000 years old. As I have mentioned elsewhere, Gerald Aardsma, who formerly worked with ICR, had to leave, because he accepted to push the upper limit to 12,000 years, so it's not just a question of Genesis 1; there is clearly more at stake.

And that more might well be that the real question for the YECs is not, how long the earth has existed, but how long it will continue to exist.

However, is this idea supported by the Bible? The Bible does operate with longer cycles that are based on shorter cycles, such as the sabbathical cycle of seven years, a week of years, based on the seven days week, and the jubilar cycle, fourtynine years made up of seven sabbathical cycles. But these are cycles, something repeating itself, not something with a final ending. So, this particular YEC idea of the earth lasting for as many thousand years as the creation in Genesis 1 spanned days would seem not to be supported by the Bible.

Dembski's Law of Conservation of Information

William Dembski provides on p. 8 of the online paper The Conservation of Information- Measuring the Cost of Successful search a definition of his Law of Conservation of Information in the form of a theorem.

However, just to warm us up, we'll do some preliminary definitions first.

Let A and B be two events with probibilty p of A to occur and probability q of B to occur.

The (self-)information or surprisal value of A is defined as

I(A) = − log₂ p

The added information of B to A is defined as

I₊(A : B) = I(A) − I(B) = − log₂ p + log₂ q = log₂ q/p.

Two immediate consequences of the latter definition is

I₊(A : A) = − log₂ p + log₂ p = 0; and

I₊(A : B) = log₂ q/p ≤ log₂ 1/p = − log₂ p = I(A).

The last line implies that the added information of B to A cannot exceed the information of A alone.

What should here be understood is that the information of A is exactly a measure of the surprise of the occurence of A, the smaller the probability, the larger the surprise. Assume you live somewhere, where the probability of rain on any one day is 90%, and the always reliable weather forecast says that it will rain the next day. The weather forecast doesn't really give you much information, since you would anyway expect it to rain, so not much surprise in that case. If instead the weather forecast had said that it would be a clear and sunny day the next day, that would have given you more information, since it would be contrary to expectation, therefore a greater surprise.

What the definition of added information says is basically that you know, what you know, and the more you know, the less will there be to learn.

Dembski's motivation for introducing added information (cf. p. 3) is as follows. During a search, the more samples are taken, the higher will be the probability of a success; but a higher probability corresponds with a lower self-information value, and our intuition says that the more samples taken, the more information generated.

A more efficient search will generate more information per sample; but the problem then is, how to figure out which search is more efficient than a random search, which Dembski uses as the base search strategy.

We can now give Dembski's definition of the Law of Conservation of Information:

Theorem (Conservation of Information). Suppose S and T are searches over a given search space, S being a random search with probability p success in a single query and T being a nonrandom search with probability 1 of success in a single query. Suppose further that U and V are searches over the space of searches in which S and T reside so that U on average locates a search of the original space that with probability no more than p successfully searches the original space and that T with probability 1 locates a search of the original space what with probability 1 successfully searches the original space. Then the information that V adds to U is at least as great as the information that T adds to S, i.e.,

I₊(U : V) ≥ I₊(S : T).

Moreover, by a suitable choice of U, this inequality becomes an equality.

Here U and V are meta-searches; that is, searches for searches. What the theorem therefore says is that is requires at least as much information to figure out how to do a search as to actually do the search itself.

As an illustration, Dembski uses a search for a treasure on an island (cf. p. 6). It may be prohibitive to do a random search for the treasure; but you have a treasure map, so no problem. However, where did you get the treasure map from? You first needed to do a search for that from among all treasure maps. This may have been an even more involved search, which leads to an infinite regress.

In short, information comes at a price, and that price is at least the same amount of information.

Dembski writes p. 9:

According to Douglas Robertson (1999), the defining feature of intelligence is its ability to create information. Yet, if an act of intelligence created the information, where did this intelligence come from? Was information in turn required to create it? Very quickly this line of questioning pushes one to an ultimate intelligence that creates all information and yet is created by none (see Dembski 2004: ch. 19, titled “Information ex Nihilo”).

Here 'Douglas Robertson (1999)' refers to an article "Algorithmic Information Theory, Free Will, and the Turing Test" by Douglas Robertson, and 'Dembski 2004' refers to Dembski's own book The Design Revolution.

The point being that intelligence creates information, which means that intelligence applies some search strategy, and from where does intelligence know about that search strategy? This knowledge is itself information, so there must be an ultimate intelligence.

If not, then, Dembski continues:

On the other hand, if the information is the mechanical outworking of preexisting information, the Conservation of Information Theorem suggests that this preexisting information was at least as great in the past as it is now (this being the information that allows the present search to be successful). But then how do we make sense of the fact (if it is a fact) that the information in the universe was less in the past than it is now? Indeed, our present universe, with everything from star systems to living forms, seems far more information-rich than the universe at the moment of the Big Bang.

The obvious question here is, how do we measure information? If there is more information in the universe today than at the moment of the Big Bang, assuming that to have happened, then we should be able to figure out, what happened all the way back to the Big Bang. The current universe certainly may exhibit more variation than the very early universe; that is, there are more different things to know something about, but is that more information?

All in all, Dembski's main point is that human intelligence might have another source than evolution, which he considers to be a search strategy. Since evolution to produce intelligence must itself have been even more intelligent or guided by something even more intelligent, evolution cannot be a random search. And if evolution is a random search, it cannot have produced intelligence, which must therefore have another source. He does not write this directly; but it's what he is hinting at.

Now, as for Dembski's Law of Conservation of Information, it ignores that we don't always start out with finding an optimal search strategy. Occasional search strategies are made up along the way based on experience. Modern dictionaries are alphabetically ordered, which makes it simple to use relatively efficient searches based on the spelling of a word; in antiquity it was more common to order words by decreasing importance, such that those that corresponded to a more important concept were at the top. However, in antiquity, scrolls were used, so this ordering simply meant that you typically only needed to unscroll a small segment of the scroll. With a book, you can open it anywhere at the same cost. In that way ordering of information and search strategies depend on technology. We simply don't start out with determining the optimal search strategy and then turn everything else around after that.

So, Dembski's theorem may be correct mathematically seen, but he may have wasted his time searching for the wrong solution to the wrong problem.

Decomposing specified complexity

In the paper Specification: The Pattern That Signifies Intelligence (2005), William Dembski has provided his as of this writing latest definition of specified complexity. My purpose with this post is to clarify, what Dembski means by this concept as it is explained in that paper. Of course, my exposition is a personal interpretation, and it may possibly be far from, what William Dembski intended.

Specified complexity
Where's the problem, if anywhere?
Is specified complexity information?
Can specified complexity increase?

The definition of contextdependent specified complexity of a pattern T given a (chance) hypothesis H is given in section 7, "Specified Complexity", p. 21 as:

χ = –log₂[M·N·φ_S (T)·P(T| H)].

We won't worry about the contextindependent version, in which M·N is replaced by 10¹²⁰.

Let T be some observed event, such as the poker hand Ten, Jack, Queen, King, and Ace of the same suite, also known as a Royal Flush. 

The hypothesis H here could be the assumption that the deck of cards was thoroughly shuffled, such that each particular position in the deck could be assigned a probability of 1/52 of holding any particular card, and that each partucular position in the deck with the first card removed could be assigned a probability 1/51 of holding any particular of the remaining 51 cards, and so on.

Subject to H, the probability of being dealt Ten, Jack, Queen, King, and Ace in that order of a specific suite is 1/52·1/51·1/50·/49·1/48, or around 1/3·10^-8. Since there are four suites, we multiply by four, and since the order of the cards makes no difference, we additionally multiply by 5! = 120 to get a probabilty of around 1.6·10^-6, somewhat higher than one in a million.

That is, in the case at hand, P(T| H) = 1.6·10^-6, or at least very close to that value.

If there are M = 20 groups of people playing poker, and each group has played N = 10 games, the probability of at least one Royal Flush having been dealt in the first round of a game is therefore M·N·P(T | H) = 3.2·10^-4. That is, M is the number of independent observers, and N is the numbers of times that each observer checks for an event.

Now, say that a hand with Deuce and Five of Hearts, Nine of Spades, King of Diamonds, and Six of Spades had been dealt. The probability of this is actually lower than the probability of a Royal Flush; but even if such a hand had been dealt, no-one would have noticed, since it's not really any remarable poker hand, although it has a lower probability. If any cheating is going on, we would not expect any increase in the occurence hands like that, but rather in the high value hands, such as Royal Flush and Four Aces.

This leads us to the term φ_S(T), the specificational resources associated by S with T. The subscript S denotes a semiotic agent, which is simply anyone/anything that can communicate using some symbolic language. An event such as our T must conform to some pattern P for S to be able to communicate its occurence, and such a pattern can be described using a string of symbols such as "Royal Flush", "Ten, Jack, Queen, King, and Ace of the same suite", or "Ten to Ace of the same suite". The descriptive complexity or semiotic cost φ'_S(P) of a pattern P is the number of symbols used in the shortest description of P available to S. Conceptually, we can think of it as that S has a dictionary of descriptions relevant to the subject area beginning with descriptions of length one, continuing with descriptions of length two, and so on, and S goes through this dictionary until a matching description of P is found. Assuming S has found a description for P, yet continues to go through the dictionary to the last entry of the same length, the number of descriptions checked is the number of all descriptions with a length shorter or equal to the length of the shortest description of P.

The formal definition of φ_S(T) can be found in section 6, "Specificity", p. 17:

φ_S(T) = the number of patterns for which S’s semiotic description of them is at least as simple as S’s semiotic description of T.

So, it's not actually the number of descriptions available, but the number of patterns, whose shortest description is shorter than or of the same length as the shortest description of T, or, put differently, whose descriptive complexity is at most the same as the descriptive complexity of T.

That is, the patterns Four Aces and Royal Flush have the same specificational resources, and the pattern Poker Hand has the same specificational resources; but these three patterns have different probabilities subject to the hypothesis H.

What is the point in the specificational resources? Dembski's claim is that a simple pattern, that is a pattern with a short description, is a stronger indicator for design than is a complex pattern. The 'complexity' in 'specified complexity' refers primarily to low probability of an event to occur by chance (what Dembski calls 'statistically complex'). A pattern such as Poker Hand is as simple as Royal Flush, but, of course, any poker hand is a Poker Hand, so simplicity of the pattern is not sufficient to say that we have a case of design. A pattern such as Deuce and Five of Hearts, Nine of Spades, King of Diamonds, and Six of Spades has a very low probability to occur; but it's nor really a pattern we are concerned about, if by 'design' we mean 'cheating', although someone might claim that it's not every day you see exactly this poker hand. It's the combination of a simple pattern and a low probability that should arise our suspecion, according to Dembski.

Why the subscript S? Because dufferent observers may not have the same descriptions at disposition; for instance, a person unfamiliar with poker might not know, what a "Royal Flush" is, and not know that it has special significance within the game. Therefore, specified complexity is a subjective measure.

If we look at the product φ_S(T)·P(T | H), then it is an upper bound on the probability of S to observe an event that is at most as descriptive complex as T and has at most the same probability (cf. p. 18).

In short, the whole product M·N·φ_S(T)·P(T | H) is an upper bound to the probability subject to H that at least one of M independent observers during one of N observations will report to the semiotic agent S at least one event that is at most as descriptive complex as T and has at most the same probability.

Converting to binary logarithm reverses the scale and turns the product into a number of bits. If M·N·φ_S(T)·P(T | H) < 1/2, then χ > 1. That is, if χ > 1, it can be considered more reasonable to conclude design than to conclude chance.

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Where's the problem, if anywhere?

First off, to make specified complexity of any use in a given situation, it is necessary to know the value of P(T | H). We don't always do that, nor necessarily do we have much of a way to estimate the value.

Second, as many critics, for instance Elliott Sober, have pointed out: this one-sided approach is not actually used in design detection. There is always an implicit assumption about the capabilities of a designer, and those capabilities are assumed to be the same as those of humans. Especially in criminal cases, also a motive is required for a design conclusion, and again, what can count as a motive depends on assumptions about the designer.

Third, we are dealing with a moving target: what counts as 'design' varies from context to context. If someone writes a book, that's design, and if someone else later writes a book taht is suspeciously similar to the first book, it may be a case of plagiarizing. We here have two designed objects, no matter what; yet, Dembski wants design here to mean that the second author plagiarized the book of the first author.

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Is specified complexity information?

Dembski doesn't anywhere in the Specification paper claim that specified complexity is information – though he has on pp. 11-12 a discussion about Fisher's eliminative approach and algorithmic information theory, also known a Kolmogorov-Chaitin information theory, or simply K-C information theory.

For any event E with probability p, the value I(E) = -log₂(p) can be considered information, by Claude Shannon called the self-information. Not really something much used by Shannon, who instead used the average value of the selfinformation called entropy.

Dembski, however, frequently uses the self-information, so we'll do it here as well.

Now, if M·N·φ_S(T)·P(T | H) < 1/2, then P(T | H) < 1/[2·M·N·φ_S(T)], and therefore

(EQ1) I(T | H) > log₂(M) + log₂(N) + log₂(φ_S (T)) + 1.

Let's use a slightly different way than Dembski's to present part of, what he writes pp. 11-12.

A fundamental result in algorithmic information theory is that for any natural number N there exist bit strings of length N that cannot be compressed to a string of length d < N by the same compression algorithm. We can formulate this as

Theorem 1: For any natural number N and any compression algorithm P there exists a string S of length N such that |P(S)| ≥ N.

Proof: For any natural number d the number of strings of length exactly d is 2^d. The number of strings of length at most d is then

Σ_0≤i≤d 2ⁱ = 2⁰ + 2¹ + … + 2^d = 1 + 2 + … + 2^d = 2^d+1 − 1 < 2^d+1

If d < N, then 2^d+1 − 1 < 2^N, the number of strings of length N. There are therefore more strings of length N than strings of length less than N. It is therefore not possible for P to map every string of length N to a string of length less than N.

In EQ1 there is a clear similarity between the term log₂(φ_S(T)) + 1 and log₂(2^d+1) = d + 1 in the above.

As mentioned, the product φ_S(T)·P(T | H) is an upper bound on the probability of S to observe an event that is at most as descriptive complex as T and has at most the same probability, or, to add some confusion, at most as descriptive complex as T and at least as stastically complex. Let U be any such event. Then we have that

(EQ2) I(U | H) ≥ I(T | H) > log₂(M) + log₂(N) + log₂(φ_S(T)) + 1 ≥ log₂(M) + log₂(N) + log₂(φ_S(U)) + 1.

To give an intuition for, what this means, consider a communication system with M senders that each sends N messages to a receiver S that in turn uses some compression algorithm φ_S to compress all received messages. Let T be some message and assume S to know the probability of receiving any particular message – just as in Shannon's model. Then S discards all messages with a higher probability than T and all messages whose compressed version is longer than the compressed version of T. If any message is kept, it will have a specified complexity at least the same as T.

That is, if any message U is kept, and it satisfies I(U | H) > log₂(M) + log₂(N) + log₂(φ_S(U)) + 1, then a design inference should be triggered; that message is not generated by chance.

While it may be debatable, whether specified complexity itself can be considered a kind of information, information theoretical concepts do enter into it.

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Can specified complexity increase?

Assume M people during N rounds toss a coin 100 times and after each round send a message with the resulting sequence to S, who in turn measures the specified complexity of each sequence. Have we any particular reason to assume any increase in specified complexity over time? Not really, since each round simply starts out the same place as the first round.

Now assume instead that after each round, those K people, 0 ≤ K ≤ M, that scored the highest specified complexity copy their sequence to the next round. If K = 0 we have the same as above, and if K = M, nothing new will come up in the remaining rounds, so we assume 0 < K < M; that is in each round after the first, some people will recast their sequence, and some people will retain their sequence. Then, obviously, we can expect the maximum amount of specified complexity to increase.

This isn't much of a model of evolution, of course, but it does illustrate that natural selection with some variation to work with can increase specified complexity, as long as there is neither complete randomization nor complete stasis.

Sure, it can be said that S as the selector infuses intelligence into the game; but S does not employ any particular purpose or anything, only the per round selection of the sequences with the highest specified complexity.

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See also: Dembski vs. Hume

By request: Review of a Chick Tract

An anonymous commenter to my review of Mere Christianity suggested that reviewing a Chick Tract would be more my level. Not the one to disappoint an honest request, I googled 'Chick Tract', and the first link was to the website of Chick Publications owned by Jack T. Chick.

As the name suggests, Chick Publications is a publishing company; that is, it sells books. However, there were some smaller articles online, and I decided to take one of those out for a ride.

The chosen article is: New Definition of Science? by Thomas Heinze from November/December 2005.

Heinze's first paragraph sums up, what it's about like this:

"Evolution is science, so the schools must teach it. Creationism and Intelligent Design (ID) are religion, so they must not be taught!" We have been hearing this kind of rubbish a lot more since President Bush said he thinks intelligent design should be taught in public schools in addition to evolution so the students can understand what the debate is all about.

Should ID be taught in school? I am not a US citizen, so I am not too concerned about school education in the USA; but the question is relevant enough still. I wouldn't mind that ID be taught in higher grades in primary school and in high school. The question would of course be, what exactly should be taught? The problem here is that ID has become connected with origins. Everybody knows that until the Wright brothers actually managed to get a flying machine into the air, scientists had 'proved' the impossibility of such an enterprise. And everybody knows that according to 19^th century aerodynamic theories, bumblebees were unable to fly; except that the bumblebees didn't know about any such theories, so they flew anyway.

Indeed, teaching ID in school might require a new definition of science. As of today, a scientific theory is a human convention; it isn't true or false, but usable or unusable. Using a formal proof to prove that the bacterial flagellum cannot evolve is about as exciting as a formal proof/disproof of the existence of God; that is, it can have some academic interest – but it just isn't science.

Heinze continues:

Mark Bergin in World Magazine lists some of the criticisms: "The Philadelphia Daily News said widespread acceptance of ID could undermine the scientific method. The Washington Post suggested that the president was 'indulging quackery' for political gain. The Los Angeles Times called the comments 'one more example of the extreme right's attempt to create a Taliban-like society." (Mark Bergin, Mad scientists, World Magazine, 8/05,) Evolutionists, who say that Bush wants religion and what they want is science, use a special definition of science that eliminates creation: "Science is the search for natural solutions." Creation by an intelligent Designer is a supernatural rather than a natural solution. By this contrived definition, to be "scientific," you have to be an atheist.

As indicated above, ID could undermine the scientific method, leading away from a science based on observations to a more formal type of science. And as for the "Taliban-like society", while the Discovery Institute denies any connection with Christian Reconstructionism, the occasional hostile anti-Darwinism does indicate some connection. Also the main funder of the Center for Science and Culture is Howard Ahmanson, who is known for Reconstructionist sympathies.

As for the definition of science reported by Heinze, "[s]cience is the search for natural solutions", what else would Heinze suggest? Science is supposed to support technology, that is human interaction with nature (when we talk about natural science, which isn't all science; though you are advised to not tell a natural scientist that ;-)), including prediction of natural events. If vulcanic eruptions are symptoms of the anger of some god, we of course need not worry about science; but not even IDists believe that. Where do we draw the limit? Science is the search for natural solutions, though maybe not everything has a natural solution. But if we do not first search for natural solutions, but give up and ask God to solve our problems, how do we then know that we wouldn't have found a natural solution around the next corner? And what does that have to do with being an atheist? Do theists explain everything as an act of God? If not, where do they draw the limit? Where that limit might be is not a scientific question, because it is a limit to science, assuming that science is the search for a natural solution. So, no, you don't have to be an atheist to be scientific, you only have to know that certain questions are within the scope of science and others are not.

Back to Heinze:

Consider this: The heads of some of America's most famous presidents have been carved from solid rock at Mount Rushmore. If a visiting evolutionist science professor applied the "search for natural solutions definition to these heads, he would have to conclude that they were formed by something natural like weathering and erosion rather than by intelligent design. If he suggested this, he would be laughed out of the classroom.

In this case we happen to know that the heads were carved by humans, so we have a good case for design. Anyway, did the humans that carved the faces use magic or anything like that? I suppose they used chisels and hammers; nothing supernatural. These humans knew something about rocks, such as what kind of tools would be needed to work with the rock. This is perfectly fine natural science supporting technology, that is human interaction with nature. Assuming that only a supernatural being could have achieved something such wouldn't have been all that helpful, would it?

Back to Heinze:

But he does not hesitate to teach his students that the heads of the real presidents who inspired the statues evolved by accident through the blind forces of nature. Is he right when he claims that the real heads of real presidents had no designer? No! Stone cold, dead wrong!

Well, we here happen to have strong indications that the physical traits of humans depend on those of their parents, since they are inheritable. That is, we have a working natural explanation, and no supernatural one is warranted.

But Heinze continues:

The Rushmore heads only show design on the carved surface. The real heads show incredible design all the way down to the atoms. Human heads are made of billions of cells. Inside each cell, wonderful little machines do much of the work of the cell. Every machine known to mankind had an intelligent designer, but these cell machines are so precise and efficient that manmade machines are crude by comparison. Scientists are studying them, hoping to copy them. For example, a miniature motor that spins at 100,000 RPM with almost perfect efficiency is found in some single celled animals that evolutionists consider "primitive." This is just one of the many kinds of molecular motors and other molecular machines found even in "simple" cells. Moreover, the cell's machines are made of some of the most complex and difficult to produce chemicals in the world, such as protein and RNA. These materials never occur in nature except when made by living cells. Yet, evolutionists claim that lucky accidents brought the parts together and assembled them.

Now, we are moving a bit too fast here, aren't we? It isn't in particular evolutionists that consider single celled organisms to be "primitive", actually IDists and creationists are more into that kind of name calling, since they have more of a vested interest in the impossibility of evolution. Actually, the complexity of single celled organisms support evolution in the sense, that if a single celled organism could evolve, the evolution of humans from simian ancestors is no problem at all in comparison.

That "[t]hese materials never occur in nature except when made by living cells" has a natural explanation: the components react with oxygen, and since 21% of the earth's atmosphere is made up of oxygen, proteins and DNA do not occur outside of special environments. Some single organisms even today do not tolerate much oxygen, whereas most other organisms actually require oxygen, and plants produce oxygen from carbon dioxide as a by-product of photosynthesis, while animals inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide.

It is true that abiogenesis – the origin of life from non-life – is far from understood today; but unfortunately, we cannot speculate us to everything from the comfort of an armchair. IDists appear to think that we should; but unfortunately, science progresses mostly through a lot of wrong guesses, and the occasional right guess. As Thomas Edison said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." This quote was picked up from Mike Dunford's post Peer Review at The Questionable Authority. – thanks Mike :-).

The promise of ID to deliver a more rapid turn-around for scientific discoveries is questionable; after all, the scientific output of the ID community is this far rather meagre; see e.g. the above linked post by Mike Dunford.

That "evolutionists claim that lucky accidents brought the parts together and assembled them" is made out of pure straw. Evolution can occur everywhere within an organism; the function of a component such as what now is a flagellum can have evolved, and each part can have its own evolutionary history; maybe Heinze shouldn't rely so much on IDists' misrepresentations of evolutionary theory?

But since Heinze has his inspiration from the IDists, he continues completely off track:

Why would they even consider such a dumb idea? Because their definition of science makes intelligent design "unscientific".

As indicated above, evolutionists do not consider such a dumb idea, so there's really no point in Heinze's "Because ..."

Which makes Heinze's following paragraph pathetic:

Hiding the evidence for intelligent design from our students is a horrible, despicable crime against them. How many students would believe in evolution today if the evidence that God was the Designer and Creator had not been hidden from them?

Counter-question: how many students would believe in creation/ID today if a more thorough understanding of science, including evolutionary thery, had been provided by schools? The main problem with ID is that its proponents exploit that people don't know all that much about, how science works. Maybe scientists should do more out of informing the general public about, how science works? This would certainly give the IDists a harder time; they would have to leave their comfortable armchairs and not only to travel around repeating the same old stuff that has been debunked so many times over and over again. The public deserves better than what the IDists have to offer.

Heinze ends with these words:

You can get more information to help students and teachers find the truth in The Vanishing Proofs of Evolution, In the Beginning Soup? and How Life Began published by Chick Publications.

Since Heinze went completely off track a few paragraphs ago, I'd suspect that these Tracts are just leading even further into the wilderness of misconceptions.

In short, if you need to laugh or cry, reading a Chick Tract might be the way to go; otherwise, just stay away from them.

Review of C.S. Lewis: Mere Christianity

Quotes are taken from C.S. Lewis: Mere Christianity, Fount 1997 (first edition: Geoffrey Bles, 1952).

Having read much acclamation of C.S. Lewis on Internet sites, I decided last year to read some of his books, and I started with The Abolition of Man from 1943 and was actually rather disappointed. To me it was fairly standard conservative propaganda, and I actually gave up finishing reading the book. It was too predictive – not exactly uniteresting, only too predictive. It should be noted that I had just finished writing a paper on a Danish conservative pastor and politician, and there were simply too many similarities for comfort.

Now I have picked up Mere Christianity, which is based on three radio program series from 1942-44 - that is from pretty much the same time as The Abolition of Man. While it is mostly more of the same, Mere Christianity does have a few advantages in that it has a more concrete topic.

According to the Preface, the book explains the common base of Christianity – therefore the title. Lewis had it reviewed by four clergymen, an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, and a Roman Catholic. In general it was accepted by all four, though the Methodist thought Lewis had said too little about Faith, and the Roman Catholic thought that he had gone to far about the unimportance of theories in explaining Atonement. That is, the book should give a reasonable impression of the common base of standard British Christianity in the 1940s.

As mentioned, Mere Christianity is based on radio programs, so it is addressed to 'ordinary' people, it's not a philosophical treatise, and I am aware that therefore it should not be read as if it were a philosophical treatise. Also it was written during the WW II, and that war is clearly present as a shadow behind the book – in its beginning question whether there really is a difference between good and evil. If there is not, how can we then condemn Nazism?

The book Mere Christianity actually consists of four books:

1. Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe;

2. What Christians believe;

3. Christian Behaviour; and

4. Beyond Personality: or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity.

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Book 1: Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe

Here Lewis introduces two different meanings of 'natural law'. The first meaning refers to, what today is usually understood by a natural law: a law such as the law of gravity that is obeyed without volition. If you hold a stone in your hand and let it go, it will fall to the ground – the stone cannot 'choose' whether it will fall or not. The second meaning refers to the idea that most humans recognize certain rules for conduct, rules that at least in earlier times were considered so self-evident that they could be considered an unwritten natural law with the same force as written laws. While the human body is subject to the natural laws – such as the law of gravity – according to the first meaning, it is human behavior that is subject to the second meaning of natural law, and we can choose to obey that law or not in the sense that we do not necessarily follow it.

According to Lewis, this natural law – in the second meaning as a moral law – is not an instinctive behavior, because it is used to arbitrate between instinctive impulses (cf. pp. 8-10) and it can therefore not be one of those impulses itself.

It is this moral law that enables us to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil. That is, according to Lewis, moral relativism is factually wrong.

More importantly, the moral laws, since they do not describe actual human behavior, are not derivable as actual facts of human behavior and must therefore be something above and beyond the descriptive laws, it most be an actual law as something given by a lawgiver (cf. p. 18).

On pp. 18-19, Lewis discusses two views about the universe. One view is the materialist, according to which matter and space just happen to exist, and development is driven by chance. The other view is the religious, according to which there is a conscious mind behind the universe, a mind with purposes, one of which has been to produce creatures that have a mind as well. According to Lewis, these two views actually sum up all the possibilities in that any intermediate view really just is a form of either of these two.

Since there is the moral law, and we cannot deduce it from observations of actual human behavior, yet we know it from within ourself, we can conclude that somebody must have made that law and put it into us, and that somebody cannot be part of the universe.

That is, our conscience, which is supposedly universal (as Lewis claims in The Abolition of Man) is a proof of the existence of a transcendental consciousness.

This idea can also be found in Paul's Letter to the Romans:

Rom 2:14 (for when Gentiles that have not the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are the law unto themselves;

Rom 2:15 in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them);

The law Paul is referring to here is the written law. The Gentiles do not have this law, since it was given only to the Jews; but they are still applying the commandments of the law as witnessed by their conscience. This is the same principle of the universality of the law.

The obvious problem both with Lewis' argumentation and Paul's claim is that this law is something rather fuzzy, it's simply 'the law' without any precise specification of exactly, what the commandments of that law are – though later in Romans 2 it is clear that The Ten Commandments are referred to by Paul. Also, Paul's point is that, while the law was given to the Jews, the descendants of Abraham, to whom also was given the commandment of circumcision, the law is universal, and therefore:

Rom 2:28 For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh:

Rom 2:29 but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.

So, Paul is arguing for a change in the definition of 'Jew' from being applied to a certain ethnicity to being applied universally. Are we therefore to assume that sometime during the first century ce suddenly all non-Jews were supplied with a conscience or what?

How universal are Lewis' moral law? It is diffucult to figure out without more precise knowledge about this law. That all human societies acknowledge some moral law does not on its own prove that it is the same law. Actually Lewis takes this question up half-ways in Book 3, where he mentions the four 'Cardinal' virtues that are common to all civilized cultures, and the three 'Theological' virtues (Charity, Hope, and Faith) that are special to Christianity (cf. p. 63).

Actually, I dare even go as far as to say that within the same society, there can be more than one moral law.

One day, when I was in a supermarket, I - as I always do - first went to the check-out line after having gathered all the (not very many) goods I was to buy. At the back of the line was a shopping cart with goods in it, but no person behind it. However, I placed myself behind the cart, expecting its owner to show up very soon. Customers occasionally leave their carts for a very short term, while fetching the last thing or two on a neighby shelf, and I thought that might be the case here. But no one showed up, and the line in front of the cart moved forward, and of course the cart and I then had to follow. Occasionally shop personnel use carts while putting goods on the shelves and leave them, if they momentarily are called to do something else. Also, occasionally, customers simply abandon their carts and leave the shop, if they get tired of waiting in line. That is, from prior experience I had reason to think that the cart might not be 'standing' in line. Still, I decided to keep my place and see, if the owner of the cart didn't show up. The line in front of the cart then moved one more customer forwards, and since the cart didn't show the least intention to follow, I decided that I had to be an abandoned cart, and I moved to the back of the active part of the check-out line. In that very moment a woman came to the cart and yelled at me: "You were sure quick there!" Apparently, in here mind I was an egocentric exploiting the situation. Since fighting about a place back or forth in a check-out line is very low on my priority list of things I consider worth fighting about, I went back to my old place behind the cart without a word, and the woman pushed the cart up to the back of the line, also without a word.

As this story shows, this woman and I apparently were following very different moral laws. Should I say that the law I followed was superior to hers? Of course, otherwise I wouldn't be following it – but I must assume that the woman also considered her moral law to be superior, so what's the point?

On p. 11, Lewis writes:

We do believe that some of the people who tried to change the moral ideas of their own age were what we would call Reformers or Pioneers - people who understood morality better than their neighbours did. Very well then. The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.

Or maybe you just consider your own moral rules to be the Real Morality and assign to yourself the right to judge other people as if they were subject to your rules. Isn't Lewis here simply claiming that he can overrule everyone else with whatever moral rules he happens to have accepted?

That is, unfortunately it is all just a question of might makes right; if you happen to have the power to coerce other people to play by your rules, you can claim that your rules are universal, otherwise you can't.

In short, I find Lewis' argumentation insufficient to prove anything else than that everyone's a potential dictator; but we hardly need Lewis to tell us that. By the end of the day, morality only serves to justify that some people can use whatever means of force they might have at disposition to control other people. Morality is nothing but power politics. That's the Real World.

In that real world you find out, what is wrong by being punished, and the one that punishes you is therefore morally superior, even if you think it is the other way around. That is, morality is just another name for pecking order. There is in the real world no other crime than to be punished.

Now, Lewis just prior to the above quoted passage from p. 11 writes:

Have any of the changes [in morality] been improvements? If not, then of course there could never be any moral progress. Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality.

This is, of course,  directed against moral relativism – presumably with 'civilised morality' = 'Christian morality' and 'savage morality' = 'Nazi morality'. But that is from the point of view of a British academic, who with the consent of British clergymen is defining the universal moral law and implying that we either accept that moral law or accept to be considered on the level of the Nazis that are universally considered to be bad guys.

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Book 2: What Christians believe

Lewis begins with claiming that "[i]f you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through." (cf. p. 29) This might have been the case for British Christianity; but look to the USA. Such tolerance is not tolerated there: you are either a Christian or completely wrong.

Next Lewis claims that "[i]f you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the world is simply one huge mistake." So, it's the atheists that are intolerant. In my personal experience, there are indeed very intolerant atheists; but maybe Lewis is wrong about, what is the main point in all the religions of the world? I am no expert on religions; but I have taken some courses in the science of religion, and in the course History of Religion, we were told that it was actually a problem to define 'religion', since there was no single thing in common for them, not even the belief in one or more gods. And Buddhism, while acknowledging the existence of (the Hindu) gods, does not assign any significance to them; they are not to be worshipped.

Following the above comments about atheists, Lewis divides humanity into two divisions, the majority that believes in some kind of God or gods, and the minority that does not. Lewis also sees it as Christianity lined up with all other religions against "the modern Western European materialist." The next big division is between those who believe that God is beyond good and evil and those who believe that God is 'good' or 'righteous'. The first view is called Pantheism, the second view is held by "Jews, Mohammedans and Christians."

The obvious problem here is, what kind of sense does it make to say that God is good or righteous? Isn't it merely a definition? If God does it, it is good and righteous? In the Flood story, God almost exterminates all life on earth. That wouldn't be considered a good action, if done by humans; but God isn't measured with the same standard as humans, so the Flood was good, because it was an act of God. A god who is good by definition is a god who is beyond good and evil, isn't it?

However, apparently Lewis sees it differently – but he doesn't tell us, what it means that God is good, so the point appears simply to be that some religions are different from others.

Pantheism, Lewis tells us, also implies that God is part of this world, while the Christian idea is that God is the creator of the universe; like an artist is not part of his products and doesn't die, if they are destroyed. Though God created the world, things have gone wrong in it, and "God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again."

The obvious question here is, how could things have gone wrong, unless God was an incompetent artist? According to Genesis 1, every time God made something, he saw that it was good, and he finished his master piece with creating humans in his own image, leaned back and saw that it was very good, and then he went to take a well-deserved rest – and we know what happened in the mean time. Perhaps God had too high ambitions for his qualifications?

Lewis, while he was an atheist, had asked himself the question, how the world could go wrong, how it could be so cruel and unjust, if it was made by a good god (cf. p. 31). Then he asked himself, from where he had got the idea of just and unjust? Using the idea of just and unjust against God destroys the idea – because if it is only a private idea, the world is not really unjust. That is, by trying to prove that God did not exist, that the whole of relity was senseless, Lewis found one part of reality – his idea of justice – that was full of sense. From this, Lewis concludes that atheism turns out to be too simple.

Well, Descartes did pretty much the same four centuries earlier, so why not? The problem here is that different people may have different ideas about, what is just and unjust, but how many gods are Christians allowed to operate with? During his discussion of Pantheism, Lewis rejects the idea that there could be different moral standards, for example that the older you get, the more you tend to see things from more than one point of view. The Christian idea of just and unjust remains the same and doesn't depend on any personal knowledge – Lewis' idea of just and unjust is absolute, everybody has to bow down to, what Lewis considers to be just and unjust. So Lewis is God? He would have said 'no', I'm sure; but modesty is the true sign of divinity, isn't it?

Not only is atheism too simple for Lewis, but so is, what he calls Christianity-and-water, "the view which simply says there is a good God in Heaven and everything is all right" (cf. p. 33). Besides the good God in Heaven there are also "all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil, and the redemption" (ibid.).

Don't we all know it? First there's all the love-bombing to get us inside the church, but when we have come inside, the door is locked, and the whip is pulled out. What else is new? 

Lewis proceeds to discuss dualism, whereby he means the idea that there are two powers, one good and the other bad. He dismisses this idea with the obvious reason that to determine which is which, you need a standard from an even higher power, so really there can be only one ultimate power. Not that there isn't a dark power in the world, which is in rebellion against God and has occupied this world. In the last paragraph on p. 37, this imagery becomes even more war-like:

Enemy-occupied territory – that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going.

But who is the devil? The Nazis would have been easy targets for a projection back, when Lewis held his radio talks, and that's what he is playing on here. If Christians are always liberators, only bad people can be against them. Lewis makes it not a choice, whether you want to be Christian or not; you are either a Christian or the agent of the enemy.

Who is the devil? The communists? The Muslims? The Liberals? The Darwinists? You? The Nazis were a real threat to Britain back in 1942-44; but the same logic can be used to whip up fear for just about anything and anyone, and as a Christian you need to project the devil somewhere – to avoid having it projected on yourself; either you or somebody else is the enemy. In short, I find it too easy to mis-use Lewis' image of Christians as part of a secret society to liberate the world; but then again, Lewis is only telling, how Christians view themselves. And what else could he do? By definition, Christianity is beyond critique; anyone who criticizes Christians is part of the evil enemy, the Dark Power.

Next up is, of course, how could this evil power have "made himself for the present the Prince of this World"? (cf. p. 39). Oh, we know – it's that free will, and if something's free to be good, it's also free to be bad. God is so adorably good that he has given us a free will, and therefore it's of our own free will that things are as bad as they are. We have just listened to Lewis tell us that being Christian is cooperating with a liberator, and going to church is listening to the secret radio messages from our friends, so we went to church. And the door was locked behind us. And the love-bombing pastor suddenly pulls out the whip and starts yelling and screamimg at us that it's all our own fault: we are ourself the baddies. We killed the dinosaurs, and so on. Makes you wonder, if supporting the Nazis could have been worse, doesn't it? Except that they of course also said "Gott mit uns" ("God (is) with us").

But God couldn't have made it in any other way, because free will is the only thing that makes "possible any love or goodness or joy worth having." (cf. p. 40). Lewis writes (ibid.):

The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.

I warned you against all that love-bombing, didn't I? Anyway, it doesn't work: if there is a 50% chance that a human, given the choice, will sin, even God should have realized it won't work. Have just two humans, and it will go wrong. Anyway, it's not the impression you get from the Bible that God wants us to have "the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to him and to each other"; the impression is that either you join God or you are killed. And since there's a 50% chance that you won't join God, prospects are dire.

How did the "Dark Power" go wrong? Lewis admits – to his credit –  that we cannot give an answer with any certainty to that question; but he can offer a "reasonable (and traditional) guess, based on our own experiences of going wrong" (cf. loc. cit.):

The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first – wanting to be the centre – wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race.

This sin is, what Lewis in Book 3 calls 'Pride' (cf. the chapter "The Great Sin", beginning p. 100). However, as the Bible has it, God created humans in his own image. Since God wants to be God, humans therefore want to be God as well – they were created that way. It's not a sin, but a design flaw – blame the designer. During creation week, God did that which looked good in his eyes, so humans, created in his image (and therefore looking very good in his eyes), could do nothing else but what looked good in their eyes. No reason to guess; the biblical text is actually rather clear here.

On p. 41, Lewis writes:

That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended – civilisations are built up – excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down. They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us humans.

So, Lewis manages to derive an entire world history out of his guess. Running along with this, we might even say that it applies to Christianity, even that must have been corrupted by Satan. The sin of Adam and Eve was that they wanted to become wise as God and know about good and evil – isn't that what any Christian wants to inform us about? That something is good, and something is evil, and which is which. But for some reason, lewis doesn't apply his own guess to Christianity.

Next Lewis gives a small recap of the story of the chosen people, the Jews, up to Jesus, introducing the latter on p. 42 with these words:

Then comes the real shock. Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if he was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time.

It's not quite like that, however. As Lewis points out, for the Jews, God meant "the Being outside the world," so how could Jesus talk as if he was God? Let's us read in the Gospel of Markus:

Mar 10:17 And as [Jesus] was going forth into the way, there ran one to him, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?

Mar 10:18 And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? none is good save one, even God.

Of course, the question here could be rhetorical; but the simple explanation would be that Jesus is not claiming to be God, though perhaps acting on God's authority. Lewis is right that it would have been a rather un-Jewish thing for Jesus to claim to be God, even to be considered to be God; after all, wasn't the sin of Adam and Eve that they wanted to be like God? And the gospels go around this tricky bit very carefully, even to the extent that Jesus' rôle as the Messiah (a title for humans) was to be kept a secret.  And it isn't Jesus that is going to come and judge the world, it's 'the son of man', whoever that was supposed to be. Sure, Jesus is identified as the Messiah, the son of man, the son of God, and all that – but not as God himself in the gospels.

Lewis mentions that "[a]mong Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it." So, maybe the idea that Jesus was God originated among 'Pantheists'? For a more Hellenized Jew as Paul, the idea of a human as God was less strange. And we even see this in the gospels: it is in general Gentiles that have an easier time acknowledging Jesus.

A religion built up on the idea that no human is God, even that no human is good, isn't exactly the religion, in which it makes too much sense to claim to be God or good. Should we say that it is yet another of God's design flaws?

On p. 43, Lewis writes:

You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; ot you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

In a society that only acknowledges God as good, and where God is "the Being outside the world," there is no "Good Teacher" of course, and that's the problem. How can you change that society? It's not possible, because you cannot be good, unless you are God, and God is outside the world, not inside it.

Christians say that we should let Jesus come into our lives; but how can we, if Jesus is God, and God is always outside the world? A lot of speculation has been done to solve that problem. As an aside, being a "Son of God" in the Old Testament doesn't make you a god yourself, this title is used for angels and the kings of the Davidic dynasty; it's simply anyone who serves God and thereby gains divine authority, not someone who's a god himself. Throughout the Old Testament we see these sons of God misuse their divine authority, so it's not as if it's all that promising that Jesus is yet another son of God. Therefore, Jesus must be elevated to be God himself – except that doesn't work, because God is always outside the world. Remember that only a 'Pantheist' can have a god coincide with the world.

Really there is no difference between Christianity and 'Pantheism' – in the eucharist, the believer refuels himself with the god as in all the other mystery cults.

Lewis isn't into speculations either. On p. 46, he treats us to a condensed version of Christianity.

We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity.

So, death is disabled, and pigs can fly.

Lewis next writes about repentance and atonement; but we'll scroll forwards to p. 50, where he again picks up the theme about death:

Now the Christian belief is that if we somehow share the humility and suffering of Christ we shall also share in His conquest of death and find a new life after we have died and in it become perfect, and perfectly happy, creatures. This means something much more than our trying to follow His teaching.

And luckily we won't have to marry in that new life, because we'll be like angels, right? Apparently, Lewis doesn't refer to a physical death here, but to the death of our old self and having a new life in Jesus put into us. It's just that not all Christians see it this way; they take it to be literal, physical death that has been disabled, once Jesus returns. Obviously, physical death wasn't disabled in the first century ce, and 2 Peter comes up with many excuses for that. Apparently, the first Christians believed that if they transformed themself into the image of Jesus, they would be recognized as the good guys on Doomsday, and be taken to heaven and never die physically.

What is this new life after non-physical death then? On p. 53, Lewis writes:

And let me make it quite clear that when Christians say the Christ-life is in them, they do not mean simply something mental or moral. When they speak of being 'in Christ' or of Christ being 'in them', this is not simply a way of saying that they are thinking about Christ or copying Him. They mean that Christ is actually operating through them; that the whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts – that we are His fingers and muscles, the cells of His body.

For Lewis, this earthly body of Christ, through which he operates, is like a secret society with the object of undermining the devil. But that's not the whole story; Lewis writes p. 54:

Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Is it that He is not strong enough? Well, Christians think he is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely. I do not suppose you and I would have thought much of a Frenchman who waited till the Allies were marching into Germany and then announced he was on our side. God will invade.

But we have to prepare the invasion, by doing sabotage actions and so on. This idea of being a secret society preparing for the invasion of the main force has its clear drawbacks, when looking at the world today. It can be used to legitimate Christian subversion of regimes elsewhere, but there is another religion that knows the same secret formula, Islam. And don't forget the feminists; they also want to conquer the world – using the same promises of a return to Paradise. Everybody promises a return to Paradise, and why should the one party be chosen rather than any other? By experience we know that no merchandise lives up to its advertising, so why can't we just say that they are all wrong, and that secret societies are the real Satan?

Lewis ends Book 2 with the words (ibid.):

Now, to-day, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.

See, I told you: first the love-bombing, then the whip – and the door is locked behind you. You can avoid this by not entering in the first round.

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Book 3: Christian Behaviour

On p. 59, Lewis writes:

Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonising the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the conductor of the band wants it to play.

Ok, so morality really is crowd control; but who is to control the crowd? That is, by the end of the day, morality is nothing but a power struggle. In actual practise, morality certainly has nothing to do we fair play and nothing at all to do with harmony between individuals. Morality serves the purpose of allowing some people to yell and scream at others – of course not officially, but we are here talking about actual practise.

Lewis continues discussing these three parts of morality, and concerning the second part, he writes p. 61:

Does it not make a great difference whether I am, so to speak, the landlord of my own mind and body, or only a tenant, responsible to the real landlord? If somebody else made me, for his own purposes, then I shall have a lot of duties which I should not have if I simply belonged to myself.

Yes, let's reinvent slavery. If we are tenants in our own minds and bodies, then we'll be cast out, if we don't pay the rent. If you have lost your job, so you can't pay the rent, you'll be out of your mind and body, and you are even to consider that a blessing. If God made us, that means that he is responsible for us, not only that he can use us as zombie soldiers in his silly war against himself.

Notice, how things work here: first the love-bombing, then the threat that you'll be whipped, if you don't do as commanded, and now that you'll be thrown out of your mind, if you should get the idea to develop one of your own.

Beginning the next paragraph, Lewis writes that "Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever," and he ends it by writing:

If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilisation, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilisation, compared with his, is only a moment.

So, a Christian nation should make no sense; but actually some Christians claim that such a thing exists. The problem is, that even if we live forever, it's not here on earth. Actually, our earthly life becomes of no real importance, if it's just a passing moment before the everlasting life in heaven or hell. This is the kind of stuff that makes suicide bombers.

Over the next pages, Lewis discusses Christian virtues. We won't go into that, except have a small peek at a passage from the chapter on Forgiveness. On p. 97, Lewis writes:

The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of hinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker.

Yes, the devil is really a nice guy, once you get to know him, isn't he? Don't believe all those stories that Christians tell about him. Too bad that the bad guys aren't really bad, and the good guys aren't really good. What happens with the absoluteness of good and evil then? Lewis would probably have said that nothing had happened. It's not the moral standards that are changing, only the assumption about whether some party behaves quite as bad as that party should to become the devil incarnate. But what is the practical difference? Many Christians today consequently focus on negative things to say about Muslims and are not really concerned with to what extent these things are true or not. Islam is the incarnation of the Dark Power, so it must be bad through and through, even if you should happen to know some Muslims that aren't. And let's not talk about Darwinists; not even about OECs (Old Earth Creationists); they have all given in to the Dark Power. Once you have the idea that good and evil are absolutes and identifiable, good will be projected onto your own party and evil onto the opposite party, and evidence will be invented to show that it's the plain and simple truth. But Lewis doesn't mention anything about this.

A little later, Lewis writes (pp. 97-98):

Now a step further. Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment – even to death. If you had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy.

So, the whole point of "love your neighbor" and "love your enemy" is to kill them, whereby you show that you love them. With love like that, who needs hatred? For Christians, apparently, love and hatred is one and the same.

Can you see, what I warned you against? The love-bombing turns into hate-bombing the longer we stay in the church, and remember that the door is locked behind you, once you step into the church.

Christian morality can be used to defend anything – really, literally anything whatsoever.

What's worse is, what Lewis writes a little earlier on p. 96:

Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.

But if you kill a person, you kill a person, not an action. If you flog a person, you flog a person, not an action. If you imprison a person, you imprison a person, not an action.

No wonder that Christians appear cold , arrogant and self-righteous to other people. If you have the right to kill your enemies, you can simply declare anybody your enemy and then kill them. Or, certainly you have the right to kill anybody that is an enemy of God, and who isn't an enemy of God? Anybody that doesn't do as you command them to do? Why is that different from killing the enemies of the state or the enemies of the revolution?

Lewis is aware there's a problem. On p. 98-99, he writes:

I imagine somebody will say, 'Well, if one is allowed to condemn the enemy's acts, and punish him, and kill him, what difference is left between Christian morality and the ordinary view?' All the difference in the world. Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature. We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it. In other words, something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one's own back, must be simply killed.

In other words, Christians are people that do things for no other reason than that they are written in a book, and they do it with cold blood.

A few sentences later, Lewis continues:

Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves – to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good. That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him; wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying that he is nice when he is not.

Within its own strange world, this, of course, makes sense. The life here on earth if of little importance compared to the eternal life in heaven or hell, so loving someone means wishing that they end up in heaven, not doing anything for them here on earth. Except, what's the point in charity then? Why not kill poor people, so they can go to heaven? Or do they go to hell? For being poor?

Around a year ago I was invited to a local Islamic Culture Center, where I was told about Islam. It was quite interesting, and it was pretty much the same as the above. There was a story about the daughter of an emir; she had stolen something and was sentenced to have her right hand cut off, a sentence that was executed despite the high rank of this woman. I was off course told that this severe punishment depended on that it wasn't out of need that she had stolen, and the thing she had stolen had been in a locked room, so it wasn't because she was tempted by the ease of the theft. She had committed a deliberate, unexcusable theft. But that wasn't all: the severe punishment was to spare her for an even worse punishment in the afterlife, so it was actually to her own advantage. Still I found the punishment wrong, though without saying it.

Sure, within this line of thinking, the Christian and the Muslim (they are really the same religion) are right in thinking as they do. It's just that, if they are wrong, they are the cold-blooded instruments of Satan.

C.S. Lewis was borne in 1898, he served as a soldier during WW I, and Mere Christianity is based on radio talks from WW II. I have never served as a soldier, nor lived in a country involved in a war against it, so I am prepared to accept that Lewis' view is formed by experiences that I do not have. In return, however, I will say that building an absolute morality on personal experiences and something that happens to be written in some book is a very shaky foundation.

Continuing on p. 99, Lewis writes:

I admit that this means loving people who have nothing lovable about them. But then, has oneself anything lovable about it? You love it simply because it is yourself.

An alternative way to interpret the commandment of loving others like yourself could be as follows. With yourself you have introspection; you judge yourself knowing why, not only what you did. So to love others like yourself would mean to judge them by the why, not the what. If you cannot find anything lovable by a person, just acknowledge that you know too little about what is really going on inside that person; do not judge outside your understanding. This would, in my humble opinion be more compatible with the gospel texts, even if Lewis' version may be more compatible with standard Christianity.

Lewis ends the chapter with:

Perhaps it makes it easier if we remember that that is how He loves us. Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the things called selves. For really there is nothing else in us to love: creatures like us who actually find hatred such a pleasure that to give it up is like giving up beer or tobacco...

But people have given up beer and/or tobacco. What is wrong in saying that God loves us because he, maybe even better than we self, knows what is inside us? He doesn't love us for our achievements, but for our possibilities that are more likely to come to the surface through love than through hate or neglect. But that is of course based on this life, not the eternal life, so of no interest to Christians.

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Book 4: Beyond Personality: or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity

As the title of this book indicates, Lewis is here introducing the trinity. I don't have anything to say to about this introduction except that it leads up to the idea that Jesus was the first new human (or new man, as Lewis writes, but people have become more gender-sensitive since then), and being a Christian means to let Jesus help you become such a new human yourself by establishing a mutual relationship between you and the Father.

Lewis explains, in my humble opinion, this quite well (just to say something positive for a change). On p. 130, he explains the difference between being 'created' and being 'begotten'. According to the Nicene Creed, Jesus, the Son, is begotten, not created. As Lewis explains it, the difference is that since Jesus is begotten, he is of the same kind as the Father, whereas a created thing would have been of a different kind. Humans can make ('create') various things, such as a wireless set, which isn't itself a human; but humans beget humans. Therefore, this new human the Christian is to become as a son of God is actually to become of the same kind as God.

Lewis ends the book with the words:

Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

Such as punishment and death penalty. I am not buying, but how about you? Remember that once you step inside that church, the door is locked behind you.

Information in RNA codons

m-RNA codons (or triplets) consist of three nucleotide bases, usually identified by their first letter: U(racil), C(ytosine), A(denine), and G(uanine). In DNA, T(hymine) replaces U(racil).

The codons code for 20 amino acids, and three codons function as stop codes. The codon ('AUG') that codes for the amino acid methionine also functions as start code. In short, we can say that there are 21 instructions of the codons: 20 amino acids (including methionine/start code).

The total content of information measured in bits in the instructions is log₂(21) = 4,3923. The maximum capacity of information in a single nucleotide is log₂(4) = 2, since there are four different nucleotides, and the maximum capacity of information in a codon is log₂(4³) = 3*log₂(4) = 6. That is, there is close to 1.6 bits of 'unused' information capacity in the codons, almost an entire nucleotide's worth.

If we look at the first nucleotide in codons, we get this table:

U	7	2.8074
C	5	2.3219
A	7	2.8074
G	5	2.3219
	24

The first column indicates the nucleotide, the second column counts the number of instructions with a codon with the corresponding nucleotide as the first, and the third column shows the residual information needed; that is, the information needed in the remaining two nucleotides to resolve which instruction is coded for. Second column, fifth row counts the four preceding rows. Since some amino acids, such as leucine, have codons with different initial nucleotides, the number of instructions is 24 rather than 21.

Looking at the first two nucleotides, we get this table:

UU	2		1
UC	1		0
UA	2		1
UG	3		1.5850
CU	1		0
CC	1		0
CA	2		1
CG	1		0
AU	2		1
AC	1		0
AA	2		1
AG	2		1
GU	1		0
GC	1		0
GA	2		1
GG	1		0
	25

Explanations are analogous to the above.

As can be seen, in only one case, 'UG', is the residual information greater than 1, and in eight cases, that is in half of all cases, the residual information is 0. This means that the third nucleotide actually carries very little information; none at all, where there's a '1' in the second column above (or a '0' in the third column).

To make this somewhat clearer, let's rearrange the table to have it ordered by the second nucleotide:

UU	2
CU	1
AU	2
GU	1
UC	1
CC	1
AC	1
GC	1
UA	2
CA	2
AA	2
GA	2
UG	3
CG	1
AG	2
GG	1

As can be clearly seen here, the codons whose instruction is fully determined by the two first nucleotides (those with a '1' in the second column above) are those codons, who have a 'C' as the second nucleotide or a C or G as the first nucleotide and a 'U' or 'G' as the second nucleotide. Put differently, if a codon has a 'C' as the second nucleotide, or it has a 'C' or 'G' as the first nucleotide and the second nucleotide is not an 'A', the third nucleotide does not add any information.

This suggests that the RNA/DNA codes have themself evolved, from an original two-nucleotide code based on 'C' (a pyrimidine) and 'G' (a purine), or simply only distinguishing between pyrimidines ('C' and 'U'/'T') and purines ('G' and 'A').

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Acknowledgements: When I originally wrote this post, I had not noticed that there are two groups of serine, and I therefore counted 21 amino acids. I posted a part of this post at TheologyWeb, and user Roy made me aware of the error.

Non-monotonic Search

In monotonic logic, the following implication always holds true:

(1)	if A Þ B, then A Ù C Þ B

That is, no additional information can invalidate an already established conclusion.

In non-monotonic logic, of which monotonic logic is a special case, implication (1) does not necessarily hold true.

Consider an example: most apples that you know about are red, so if your always reliable friend Bill tells you that he has an apple, you will assume that it is a red apple, that is

(2)	Bill has an apple Þ Bill has a red apple

Now, Bill tells you that it is a yellow apple, so you readjust your conclusion from this additional information. That is you get:

(3)	Bill has an apple Ù Bill has a yellow apple Þ Bill has a yellow apple

Let us consider a more complicated example. You are driving towards town C, when you come to a crossroad, where the road splits into three, one road leading to town A, the second road leading to town B, and the third road leading to town C. You are running low on gas, and you can't reach town C without refueling. Luckily, you have been told that there is a gas station in one of the towns A and B, and you have enough gas left to reach at least one of these towns. You just can't remember, which of A and B has a gas station.

That is, we have

(4)	There is a gas station in town A or in town B, but not in both

Your problem is to pick one of the towns to drive to.

Scenario 1:

You have enough gas to drive to either of the towns, back to the crossroad, and then to the other town. That is, no reason to panic, just pick either of towns A and B. When you arrive there, you'll have the answer to which town has a gas station.

We can formulate this as that your current information allows for two possible worlds: one in which town A, but not town B, has a gas station, and one in which town B, but not town A, has a gas station. Since town A is the nearest, and you want to minimize the minimal distance you have to drive, you pick town A. That is, you apply some rule to prefer one of the possible worlds as the real world.

That is, we have

(5)	(4) Ù A is the nearest town Þ there is a gas station in A

However, when you arrive at town A, you find that it does not have a gas station. From this you can safely conclude that there is a gas station in town B. That is, even though you made a wrong guess, you anyway ended up gaining information, which you wouldn't have done, if you hadn't made any guess at all.

We now have

(6)	((4) Ù A is the nearest town) Ù there is not a gas station in A Þ there is a gas station in B

Luckily, a premise for this scenario was that you have gas enough to drive back to the crossroad and then to town B for your refueling.

Scenario 2:

As above, except that you do not have enough gas left to drive to both towns; you need to pick either, and if it's the wrong one, you're stuck. However, notice that even in this case, assuming you go through the same reasonings and actions as above, implication (6) still holds. You cannot get a refuel, but you have gained information through at least making a choice and acting accordingly. Assume you have enough gas left after reaching town A to drive back to the crossroad - though you cannot continue to town B. Then you can draw a gas station symbol on the road sign to town B and thereby make you information available to other drivers that then will not have to go through what you have been through.

The main point here is that in case of a disjunction, monotonic logic is a show-stopper, while non-monotonic logic at least allows you to proceed by making a choice and acting according to that choice, and by that you may gain information to dissolve the disjunction.

Materialism, naturalism, and atheism

On the blog for The Christian Cadre, contributor BK has written a post, Dawkins' Dilemma, in which BK refers to a post by Pastor Dustin S. Segers on Segers' blog Grace in the Triad, which asks, how a materialist atheist like Richard Dawkins can view the god of the Old Testament as a monster. From where does Dawkins derive his standards?

Now, I am no expert on Dawkins; but while I know that he is a self-declared atheist, I do not know that he has declared himself to be a materialist. Actually from BK's quoting of Segers, I can say that Dawkins doesn't quite fit the bill.

BK quotes Segers for the following two syllogisms:

Syllogism One:

1. Material things are extended in space.
2. Objective moral laws are not extended in space.
3. Therefore, objective moral laws are non-material.
4. Materialism posits that non-material entities do not exist.
5. Therefore, objective moral laws do not exist.

and

Syllogism Two:

1. Objective moral laws are universal entities that apply to all people, places, and times.
2. Materialism holds that only particular entities have ontological existence.
3. No material thing is a universal entity.
4. Objective moral laws are not material things.
5. Therefore, objective moral laws do not exist.

I can positively say that Dawkins does not adhere to the materialism implicitly defined by these two syllogisms.

On p. 127 of The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins writes:

DNA gets the best of both worlds. DNA molecules themselves, as physical entities, are like dewdrops. Under the right conditions they come into existence at a great rate, but no one of them has existed for long, and all will be destroyed within a few months. They are not durable like rocks. But the patterns that they bear in their sequences are as durable as the hardest rocks. They have what it takes to exist for millions of years, and that is why they are still here today. The essential difference from dewdrops is that new dewdrops are not begotten by old dewdrops. Dewdrops doubtless resemble other dewdrops, but they don't specifically resemble their own 'parent' dewdrops. Unlike DNA molecules, they don't form lineages, and therefore can't pass on messages. Dewdrops come into existence by spontaneous generation, DNA messages by replication.

That is, while DNA molecules are material, genes = DNA patterns are not, though each concrete instance needs to exist in a material form. Genes therefore violate premise 2 of Segers' Syllogism Two. DNA molecules are particular entities; but DNA patterns are not.

Therefore, Dawkins is not a materialist, at least not according to Segers' definition.

Materialism should be distinguished from naturalism, according to which no supernatural consciousness is actively operating in the universe. Dawkins uses the word meme in analogy to gene, where a meme is a thought pattern, not some assembly of neurons - two persons can share a meme, but they don't share neurons. A meme can be something like 'you shall not cause suffering', which most people accept. Such memes, while not material, can still be completely natural, because they need not be impressed by direct operation by any supernatural, conscious entity, and they can be 'inherited' by social interaction.

Now, the Sixth Commandment (Deuteronomy 5:17) says "You shall not kill". Assume this to be an objective moral law. Then, according to Segers, it "appl[ies] to all people, places, and times". In 1 Samuel 15:1-3 we have this interesting passage:

1Sa 15:1 And Samuel said unto Saul, Jehovah sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of Jehovah.

1Sa 15:2 Thus saith Jehovah of hosts, I have marked that which Amalek did to Israel, how he set himself against him in the way, when he came up out of Egypt.

1Sa 15:3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

It is the prophet Samuel telling King Saul to slay — that is, kill — all the Amalekites, "both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." It is even a divine commandment, Samuel is passing on the words of Yahweh, though not an absolute moral law, because it is specifically addressed to Saul. As reason for this commandment is given that Yahweh "ha[s] marked that which Amalek did to Israel".

But if the Sixth Commandment, "You shall not kill", with Segers' words, "appl[ies] to all people, places, and times", then it applies to Saul and can not be circumvented with any excuse, not even revenge.

That is, even (some) theists allow for exceptions to supposedly objective moral laws, so what's the whole point of such laws? Once you allow for a supernatural, conscious entity to intervene with human affairs, you allow for any specific commandment to preempt the supposedly objective moral laws.

Objective moral laws, if such exist, allow for no exceptions, not even exceptions imposed by the lawgiver. Note that Saul doesn't completely follow the instructions in that he doesn't kill the Amalekite king Agag and also keeps the best of the animals. Samuel then kills Agag; but even that doesn't finish off the Amalekites. They pop up again from time to time.

Possibly God has here been caught by his own laws; the Amalekites cannot be killed because of the Sixth Commandment? No matter how much God tries to finish off the Amalekites, not even he can do it.

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See also:
The sad, but true story of the Amalekites
Reconstructing a murder case

Reconstructing a murder case

This post is a follow-up to my previous post The sad, but true story of the Amalekites.

In God’s Law and Society: Foundations in Christian Reconstruction a number of Christian Reconstructionists answer a number of questions about the glorious future that will come when all nations on earth have become Christian. All this is to be accomplished simply by having people obey God's Law, whereby is meant the 10 Commandments. Occasionally it is mentioned that the other Mosaic Commandments - apart from ceremonial and dietary laws - are part of God's law as well. But we are assured that only the 10 Commandments are necessary, no further laws will be needed, and people are even allowed to be non-Christians - in their own homes. But then there are those other Mosaic Commandments that must be obeyed as well, because they are the words of Jesus. So all that's demanded is that you obey the 10 Commandments - and all the others.

But, we ask, what kind of punishments will there be in this glorious society? According to p. 73, there will be capital punishment:

Taking presuppositions that there has been a revival, that the nation has in fact turned to God, that there has been national repentance, that there has been some kind of reformation and return to sola scriptura—it is the final authority in all matters that it addresses. Murder is murder. Coming back to where we are today, it unnecessarily muddies up the water of the debate about abortion. People would say, “If we had a Christian nation, should we execute abortionists?” I believe it will happen. We will have that kind of Revival and Reformation. Then the laws about murder will apply.

So, murder is murder. But where do we enter that circular definition? What is murder?

In 1 samuel 15, God orders the total destruction of the Amalekites, including children and animals, to King Saul. Is God ordering murder here? God is ordering a deliberate killing of people, some of which could hardly have committed a worse crime than belonging to the wrong nation.

On p. 50 we have this interesting paragraph:

So we are not talking about Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran. We are not talking about Islamic law. We’re talking about biblical law. If we go back and we look at the Commonwealth of the Hebrew Republic, before the kings, we see a very decentralized system of government. Many people have the notion that Moses was a dictator, but that was only in the initial stages of the Exodus, which was primarily a military operation. Soon after that we see that Moses was going to wear away the people and God not only gave 70 elders, but princes and captains of fifties and tens.

No, I haven't ever heard about the "Commonwealth of the Hebrew Republic" before either. Moses was only a dictator in the beginning, we are told. Does that mean that the author finds it ok to begin a republic with a dictatorship?

But let's look a bit more on that republic before the kings. On p. 42 we read:

No matter how good the system, unless it is under the aegis and covering of God’s Law, any system can revert to tyranny. It can be the tyranny of the majority of paganism, of humanism. Even in Israel, in the Hebrew Commonwealth, when they began to apostatize and fall away from God’s Law, what did they begin to cry out for?—a tyrant, a king “like all he [sic] other nations” (1 Samuel 8:5). They paid the price for it in terms of wars, tyrannical suppression and taxation, and ultimately in the division of their nation in two separate entities and then the invasion of foreign pagan powers to bring them under the enslavement of their anti-God ways. So they ultimately paid the price and we will too if we don’t turn back to God’s Law.

As for wars and tyrannical suppression, Judges tells of nothing but that, so no change there in the kingdom. Also there didn't seem to be much of a Commonwealth, the tribes apparently operating independently with only the occasional judge gathering a few tribes together for a battle. As for taxation, if there really was a republic, there also was taxation. The latin word res publica literally means 'the public affairs' such as building and maintaining roads, bridges, and water supplies. Unless there were no public affairs and hence no republic, there was taxation.

And, talking about Judges, what does it say about the kingless period? There is a particularly nasty story in Judges 19-21, where all the other Israelite tribes wage war against the tribe of Benjamin. We won't go into the background here, but skip to, where the tribes apart from Benjamin go to ask God for advise:

Jdg 20:18 And the children of Israel arose, and went up to Beth-el, and asked counsel of God; and they said, Who shall go up for us first to battle against the children of Benjamin? And Jehovah said, Judah shall go up first.

But Judah is beaten, 18,000 men killed.

So they try again:

Jdg 20:23 And the children of Israel went up and wept before Jehovah until even; and they asked of Jehovah, saying, Shall I again draw nigh to battle against the children of Benjamin my brother? And Jehovah said, Go up against him.

But the children of Israel are beaten, 18,000 men killed.

So they try again:

Jdg 20:26 Then all the children of Israel, and all the people, went up, and came unto Beth-el, and wept, and sat there before Jehovah, and fasted that day until even; and they offered burnt-offerings and peace-offerings before Jehovah.

Jdg 20:27 And the children of Israel asked of Jehovah (for the ark of the covenant of God was there in those days,

Jdg 20:28 and Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, stood before it in those days), saying, Shall I yet again go out to battle against the children of Benjamin my brother, or shall I cease? And Jehovah said, Go up; for to-morrow I will deliver him into thy hand.

This time it works, and in the end only 600 Benjaminite men manage to flee to the Rock of Rimmon. Rather than chasing them, the other Israelites go on a massacre in Benjamin's territory:

Jdg 20:48 And the men of Israel turned again upon the children of Benjamin, and smote them with the edge of the sword, both the entire city, and the cattle, and all that they found: moreover all the cities which they found they set on fire.

After that with only the 600 Benjaminite men who fled to the Rock of Rimmon left of the whole tribe, the men of Israel again ask God:

Jdg 21:1 Now the men of Israel had sworn in Mizpah, saying, There shall not any of us give his daughter unto Benjamin to wife.

Jdg 21:2 And the people came to Beth-el, and sat there till even before God, and lifted up their voices, and wept sore.

Jdg 21:3 And they said, O Jehovah, the God of Israel, why is this come to pass in Israel, that there should be to-day one tribe lacking in Israel?

God doesn't answer.

There's more to the story, but we'll skip to the very end:

Jdg 21:25 In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

Apparently the morale is that without a king there will be war, even massacres, and even the high-priest and God himself will take part in this.

This is the kind of things that happen in a "republic" under God's Law.

Let's look at how it all started, not all the details, just a summary as told by one of the main characters:

Jdg 20:1 Then all the children of Israel went out, and the congregation was assembled as one man, from Dan even to Beer-sheba, with the land of Gilead, unto Jehovah at Mizpah.

Jdg 20:2 And the chiefs of all the people, even of all the tribes of Israel, presented themselves in the assembly of the people of God, four hundred thousand footmen that drew sword.

Jdg 20:3 (Now the children of Benjamin heard that the children of Israel were gone up to Mizpah.) And the children of Israel said, Tell us, how was this wickedness brought to pass?

Jdg 20:4 And the Levite, the husband of the woman that was murdered, answered and said, I came into Gibeah that belongeth to Benjamin, I and my concubine, to lodge.

Jdg 20:5 And the men of Gibeah rose against me, and beset the house round about me by night; me they thought to have slain, and my concubine they forced, and she is dead.

Jdg 20:6 And I took my concubine, and cut her in pieces, and sent her throughout all the country of the inheritance of Israel; for they have committed lewdness and folly in Israel.

It all started with one murder that was not ordered by God, but subsequently God was taking part in orders that led to the killing of several thousand people, including the almost extermination of the tribe of Benjamin.

Of course, we can say that the story illustrates that for God one murder is as serious as any number, and that all will be punished for it. But we can also say that the story illustrates that revenge is not a solution to any problems since it simply leads to even more violence, it's just yet another crime.

There is of course a clear difference to the Amalekite case, namely that the Benjaminites were Israelites, and special rules apply to family. The Amalekites were strangers, or were they? As mentioned in the prior post, the Amalekites were actually Edomites since they were descended from Esau and therefore also close relatives that were not to be abhored. Luckily they were descended, not only from Esau, but also from his Hittite wife, which made it more acceptable to wish them dead. There's always a bad excuse, an apologetic, isn't there? If nothing else, there's alway the excuse that God told you to do it, isn't there?

The Sixth Commandment says "Thou shalt not kill" (Exodus 20:13), where the word used for 'kill' literally means 'shatter in pieces'. That is, there is nothing with "unless God commanded you to kill", not even "except to defend yourself or your family".

That Christian Reconstructionists defend capital punishment under God's Law is just one of many examples that tell that they don't even have a case.

Concerning how to build up this reconstructed Christian society, we find this on p. 78:

You start with a group of serious Christians who are obedient and who are willing to die for the cause—to die for Jesus, the brethren and the Truth. If we don’t have that, we can’t make headway in any century, but particularly at a crisis point in history like we have now—the coming collision course between Christian philosophy and anti-Christian philosophy. We must have people willing for martyrdom and holy living.

In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler writes:

The Pan-German Movement could hope for success only if the leaders realized from the very first moment that here there was no question so much of a new Party as of a new Weltanschauung. This alone could arouse the inner moral forces that were necessary for such a gigantic struggle. And for this struggle the leaders must be men of first-class brains and indomitable courage. If the struggle on behalf of a Weltanschauung is not conducted by men of heroic spirit who are ready to sacrifice, everything, within a short while it will become impossible to find real fighting followers who are ready to lay down their lives for the cause. A man who fights only for his own existence has not much left over for the service of the community.

Slightly different words, but exactly the same content.

Sure, there is no anti-Semitism Christian Revonstructionism, and everything is to follow democratic rules. But assume the US economy worsens, what then?

Pre-Darwinists (6) Erasmus Darwin

Erasmus Darwin

Introduction

Zoönomia

The Temple of Nature

Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), paternal grandfather of Charles Darwin and maternal grandfather of Francis Galton, had a medical degree from Edingburgh Medical School and practiced as a physician. In the beginning with little success, but later Darwin became quite successful, and King George III even offered him the position as Royal Physician, but he declined.

Darwin wrote extensively about medicine and botany, invented several mechanical devices, including a minute, artificial bird, and he even wrote evolutionary poems.

No wonder that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in the Preface to Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (1818) could write:

The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it develops; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.

The gory details about Erasmus Darwin's love life can be read on the Wikipedia page.

Darwin was a member of the Lunar Society, which according to the Wikipedia article was a "discussion club of prominent industrialists, natural philosophers and intellectuals who met regularly between 1765 and 1813 in Birmingham, England". Antoine Lavoisier and Bemjamin Franklin frequently corresponded with members of the society, and all in all, the society was very influental in promoting Enlightenment ideas in England.

While an evolutionist, Darwin maintained God as the first cause, and in the poem The Temple of Nature, Nature is described as the daughter of God and just like God's Wisdom in Proverbs 8, she is the actual creator, an expression of divine Love and Sympathy. More precisely, God had established the natural laws, by which not only nature, but also human society was regulated, and, therefore, by studying nature, we can learn how to improve society.

The same idea was put forth in the earlier work Zoönomia, where Darwin employs an analogy between the development of a living organism from a 'living filament', which grows by absorbing nutrients from its environment, and the origin of life from an original living filament, from which new forms have grown successively and in the process changed their environment; that is Darwin sees geological history as a result of biological history.

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Zoönomia

Erasmus Darwin's most important scientific work is Zoönomia; or the Laws of Organic Life (1794-96), called Zoönomia for short.

It is dedicated to "the candid and ingenious Members of the College of Physicians, of the Royal Philosophical Society, of the Two Universities, and to all those, who study the Operations of the Mind as a Science, or who practice Medicine as a Profession". As this dedication together with the subtitle of the book indicate, psychology was for Darwin part of physiology.

In Section XIV, "Of the Production of Ideas", Darwin writes:

Some philosophers have divided all created beings into material and immaterial: the former including all that part of being, which obeys the mechanic laws of action and reaction, but which can begin no motion of itself; the other is the cause of all motion, and is either termed the power of gravity, or of specific attraction, or the spirit of animation. This immaterial agent is supposed to exist in or with matter, but to be quite distinct from it, and to be equally capable of existence, after the matter, which now possesses it, is decomposed.

Note here the interesting mentioning of the "power of gravity" together with the "spirit of animation", where by the latter is meant, in dualistic metaphysique, the soul that moves the physical body around, but it is also the receiver of sensual impressions. That is, the soul is both moved by and the mover of the body. That the spirit of animation can exist separate from the body is supported by analogy:

Nor is this theory ill supported by analogy, since heat, electricity, and magnetism, can be given to or taken from a piece of iron; and must therefore exist, whether separated from the metal, or combined with it. From a parity of reasoning, the spirit of animation, would appear to be capable of existing as well separately from the body as with it.

Darwin then proceeds to say that all these powers might not be immaterial, but may consist of matter of a finer kind, and that only God, the ultimate cause of all motion, need to be immaterial, so he clarifies:

By the words spirit of animation or sensorial power, I mean only that animal life, which mankind possesses in common with brutes, and in some degree even with ve3getables, and leave the consideration of the immortal part of us, which is the object of religion, to those who treat of revelation.

That is, for Darwin science and religion are, what have come to be known as "non-overlapping magisteria". They are still integrated, though, since the object of science is to discover the natural laws, impressed by God on nature, and therefore, the status of God as the first mover is not questioned.

Material bodies cannot exist at the same time at the same place. Darwin uses the example of pressing an ivory ball between his hands; the ball will resist being compressed. Since the spirit of animation is able to move physical objects, such as limbs of animals, and it is itself moved by matter such as light and odour, the spirit of animation must have the property of solidity, at least be able to assume that property; otherwise it would simply pass through or be passed through:

If the spirit of animation was always necessarily penetrable, it could not influence or be influenced by the solidity of common matter; they would exist together, but could not detrude each other from the part of space, where they exist; that is, they could not communicate motion to each other. No two things can influence or affect each other, which have not some property common to both of them; for to influence or affect another body is to give or communicate some property to it, that it had not before; but how can one body give that to another, which it does not possess itself?—The words imply, that they must agree in having the power or faculty of possessing some common property. Thus if one body removes another from the part of space, that it possesses, it must have the power of occupying that space itself: and if one body communicates heat or motion to another, it follows, that they have alike the property of possessing heat or motion.

That is, if the spirit of animation displaces a physical object, it must itself be able to occupy the now vacant space. By the same principle, Darwin concludes that the spirit of animation must be able to possess other material properties:

Hence the spirit of animation at the time it communicates or receives motion from solid bodies, must itself possess some property of solidity. And in consequence at the time it receives other kinds of motion from light, it must possess that property, which light possesses, to communicate that kind of motion; and for which no language has a name, unless it may be termed Visibility. And at the time it is stimulated into other kinds of animal motion by the particles of sapid and odorous bodies affecting the senses of taste and smell, it must resemble these particles of flavour, and of odour, in possessing some similar or correspondent property; and for which language has no name, unless we may use the words Saporosity and Odorosity for those common properties, which are possessed by our organs of taste and smell, and by the particles of sapid and odorous bodies; as the words Tangibility and Audibility may express the common property possessed by our organs of touch, and of hearing, and by the solid bodies, or their vibrations, which affect those organs.

That is, the spirit of animation must have the ability to take on the properties of the external stimuli. The point here being that our senses do provide a reliable impression of the external world - assuming it exists, that is. Because we can experience all the same impressions without any immediate external stimuli, such as in dreams; however, Darwin states, in our waking hours we can compare the impressions from one sense with that of others:

Thus if the idea of the sweetness of sugar should be excited in our dreams, the whiteness and hardness of it occur at the same time by association; and we believe a material lump of sugar present before us. But if, in our waking hours, the idea of the sweetness of sugar occurs to us, the stimuli of surrounding objects, as the edge of the table, on which we press, or green colour of the grass, on which we tread, prevent the other ideas of the hardness and whiteness of the sugar from being exerted by association. Or if they should occur, we voluntarily compare them with the irritative ideas of the table or grass above mentioned, and detect their fallacy. We can thus distinguish the ideas caused by the stimuli of external objects from those, which are introduced by association, sensation, or volition; and during our waking hours can thus acquire a knowledge of the external world.

That is, when we are awake, an imagined stimulus from one sense will not be combined with associated stimuli from other senses, because there are external stimuli for those sense, and these take precedence. With the example given, we may imagine tasting the sweetness of sugar, but seeing the green grass instead of white sugar tells us that there really is no sugar. Again, this appears to be based on the same argumentation of solidity as above, at least by analogy. The stimulus of the green grass pushes away the associated whiteness of the sugar.

In Section XV, "Of Classes of Ideas", Darwin writes about free will:

In respect to freewill, it is certain, that we cannot will to think of a new train of ideas, without previously thinking of the first link of it; as I cannot will to think of a black swan, without previously thinking of a black swan. But if I now think of a tail, I can voluntarily recollect all animals, which have tails; my will is so far free, that I can pursue the ideas linked to this idea of tail, as far as my knowledge of the subject extends; but to will without motive is to will without desire or aversion; which is as absurd as to feel without pleasure or pain; they are both solecisms in the terms. So far are we governed by the catenations of motions, which affect both the body and the mind of man, and which begin with our irritability, and end with it.

The point here is the analogy between a physical sensation such as feeling pleasure or pain, which must have been excited by the senses, and the will as dependent on desire or aversion; that is, the will is dependent on emotions.

In Section XVI, "Of Instinct", Darwin writes:

But all those actions of men or animals, that are attended with consciousness, and seem neither to have been directed by their appetites, taught by their experience, nor deduced from observation or tradition, have been referred to the power of instinct. And this power has been explained to be a divine something, a kind of inspiration; whilst the poor animal, that possesses it, has been thought little better than a machine!

The irksomeness, that attends a continued attitude of the body, or the pains, that we receive from heat, cold, hunger, or other injurious circumstances, excite us to general locomotion: and our senses are so formed and constituted by the hand of nature, that certain objects present us with pleasure, others with pain, and we are induced to approach and embrace these, to avoid and abhor those, as such sensations direct us.

That is, instinct is not a "divine something" that controls a machine (the body); instinctive behavior is provoked by certain stimuli and consists in certain reactions to them. Just as David Hume, and, for that matter, Aristotle, Darwin operates with the "hand of nature" in a creative rôle without here giving any precise description of, how that hand has operated. With Richard Dawkins we might today say that it is the hand of The Blind Watchmaker; but Darwin doesn't go into any details here. In The Temple of Nature, however, he gives some more details about that hand of nature.

In Section XXXIX, "Of Generation", Darwin writes:

I conceive the primordium, or rudiment of the embryon, as secreted from the blood of the parent, to consist of a simple living filament as a muscular fibre; which I suppose to be an extremity of a nerve of loco-motion, as a fibre of the retina is an extremity of a nerve of sensation; as for instance one of the fibrils, which compose the mouth of an absorbent vessel; I suppose this living filament, of whatever form it may be, whether sphere, cube, or cylinder, to be endued with the capability of being excited into action by certain kinds of stimulus. By the stimulus of the surrounding fluid, in which it is received from the male, it may bend into a ring; and thus form the beginning of a tube. Such moving filaments, and such rings, are described by those, who have attended to microscopic animalcula. This living ring may now embrace or absorb a nutritive particle of the fluid, in which it swims; and by drawing it into its pores, or joining it by compression to its extremities, may increase its own length or crassitude; and by degrees the living ring may become a living tube.

Notice here that this "living filament", as Darwin calls it, is supposed to be an "extremity of a nerve of loco-motion," that is, it obeys the laws of motion described above and is therefore "endued with the capability of being excited into action by certain kinds of stimulus." As the embryon acquires new organs, it also acquires new sensibilities to stimuli and therefore a new mode of action:

With every new change, therefore, of organic form, or addition of organic parts, I suppose a new kind of irritability or of sensibility to be produced; such varieties of irritability or of sensibility exist in our adult state in the glands; every one of which is furnished with an irritability, or a taste, or appetency, and a consequent mode of action peculiar to itself.

That is, this living filament, first produced by the male parent, changes dependent on the nutrive particles in the fluid, wherein it is inserted, thus acquiring new organs that in turn may respond to new stimuli. This leads Darwin to suggest that life might have a similar origin, from such a living filament. It is not quite common descent, since Darwin doesn't assume that there was only one, but maybe a few of them that crossed with each other, and from these hybrids the many species now existing have come.

Darwin mentions other ways for organisms to aquire properties, both before and after their birth, and that even those acquired after the birth are inherited. Adding to that the great age of the earth again leads Darwin to suggest that life might have arisen from a few living filaments, originally endued with the ability to acquire news parts:

From thus meditating on the great similarity of the structure of the warm-blooded animals, and at the same time of the great changes they undergo both before and after their nativity; and by considering in how minute a portion of time many of the changes of animals above described have been produced; would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!

The Aristotelean idea here of a first cause, when that is thought of as a deity, that had set it all in motion is also called providentionalism referring to that the deity by its providence has set up conditions that would lead to the intended purpose without further intervention from the deity. The opposite idea is thus called interventionalism referring to that the deity directly controls events from time to time.

Darwin refers to David Hume's posthumous book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779):

The late Mr. David Hume, in his posthumous works, places the powers of generation much above those of our boasted reason; and adds, that reason can only make a machine, as a clock or a ship, but the power of generation makes the maker of the machine; and probably from having observed, that the greatest part of the earth has been formed out of organic recrements; as the immense beds of limestone, chalk, marble, from the shells of fish; and the extensive provinces of clay, sandstone, ironstone, coals, from decomposed vegetables; all which have been first produced by generation, or by the secretions of organic life; he concludes that the world itself might have been generated, rather than created; that is, it might have been gradually produced from very small beginnings, increasing by the activity of its inherent principles, rather than by a sudden evolution of the whole by the Almighty fire.—What a magnificent idea of the infinite power of the Great Architect! the Cause of Causes! Tarent of Parents! Ens Entium!

In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume writes:

But what is this vegetation and generation of which you talk? said Demea. Can you explain how they work, and lay out the details of that fine internal structure on which they depend?

I can do that, replied Philo, at least as well as Cleanthes can explain how reason works, or lay out in detail the internal structure on which it depends! But I don’t need to go into all that: it is enough that when I see an animal, I infer that it arose from generation, and am as sure of this as you are when you infer that a house arose from design. The words ‘generation’ and ‘reason’ serve merely to label certain powers and energies in nature. We know the effects of these powers, but have no grasp of their essence; and neither of them has a better claim that the other to be made a standard for the whole of nature.

...

Now it can’t be denied that order in nature is found by experience to come from vegetation and generation, as well as from reason. It is for me to choose whether to base my system of cosmogony on the former rather than on the latter. The choice seems entirely arbitrary. And when Cleanthes asks me what the cause is of my vegetative or generative faculty, I am equally entitled to ask him what causes his reasoning principle. We have agreed to pass up these questions on both sides, and in our present context it is in his interests to stick to this agreement. Judging by our limited and imperfect experience, generation has some privileges over reason: for we see every day reason arise from generation - for example, my reason, which has in its causal ancestry my parent’s begetting of me - but never see generation arise from reason.

Demea and Philo together with Cleanthes are the participants in the dialogues (or trialogues, as they would then more properly be called), where Philo most represents Hume himself. Philo's point here is that our experience cannot tell us whether the universe was caused by reason or by generation; but at least he can claim that his own reason arose by generation, while we never see generation arise from reason.

Also Philo, even if accepting the universe to have come around by divine design, claims that this does not imply the existence of only one god:

And what shadow of an argument, continued Philo, can you produce, from your hypothesis, to prove that God is onebeing? A great many men join together to build a house or ship, to found and develop a city, to create a commonwealth; why couldn’t several gods combine in designing and making a world? This would only serve to make divine activities more like human ones. By sharing the work among several gods we can reduce still further the attributes of each one of them; we can get rid of that extensive power and knowledge which we have to suppose the one God to possess (if there is only one) - that extent of power and knowledge which, according to you, serves merely to weaken the argument for God’s existence. And if such foolish, vicious creatures as men can often unite in forming and carrying out one plan, how much could that be done by those gods or semi-gods whom we may suppose to be quite a lot more perfect than we are?

So, Hume might not have been the best choice as a supporter of Darwin's theory. However, Darwin is not concerned with such argumentation and therefore proceeds:

For if we may compare infinities, it would seem to require a greater infinity of power to cause the causes of effects, than to cause the effects themselves. This idea is analogous to the improving excellence observable in every part of the creation; such as in the progressive increase of the solid or habitable parts of the earth from water; and in the progressive increase of the wisdom and happiness of its inhabitants; and is consonant to the idea of our present situation being a state of probation, which by our exertions we may improve, and are consequently responsible for our actions.

Hume might not have agreed quite with this; but Darwin's idea is that God is made even greater by being "the cause of causes", than if he had created everything directly, and he sees an analogy between this and "the improving excellence observable in every part of the creation", and he even derives personal responsibility from it: "our present situation being a state of probation, which by our exertions we may improve, and are consequently responsible for our actions". That is, evolution for Darwin is also moral evolution, whereby is meant that we have the choice to improve our state of probation and therefore are responsible for that state ourselves.

Recapitulating this section, Darwin writes:

1. A certain quantity of nutritive particles are produced by the female parent before impregnation, which require no further digestion, secretion, or oxygenation. Such are seen in the unimpregnated eggs of birds, and in the unimpregnated seed-vessels of vegetables.

2. A living filament is produced by the male, which being inserted amidst these first nutritive particles, is stimulated into action by them; and in consequence of this action, some of the nutritive particles are embraced, and added to the original living filament; in the same manner as common nutrition is performed in the adult animal.

That is, the nutrition of the "living filament" is produced by the mother, but the filament itself is produced by the father. Therefore, Darwin claims, it is primarily the father that determines the form of the new animal. However, he ackowledges some exceptions from this rule:

5. In some cases by the nutriment originally deposited by the mother the filament acquires parts not exactly similar to those of the father, as in the production of mules and mulattoes. In other cases, the deficiency of this original nutriment causes deficiencies of the extreme parts of the fetus, which are last formed, as the fingers, toes, lips. In other cases, a duplicature of limbs are caused by the superabundance of this original nutritive fluid, as in the double yolks of eggs, and the chickens from them with four legs and four wings. But the production of other monsters, as those with two heads, or with parts placed in wrong situations, seems to arise from the imagination of the father being in some manner imitated by the extreme vessels of the seminal glands; as the colours of the spots on eggs, and the change of the colour of the hair and feathers of animals by domestication, may be caused in the same manner by the imagination of the mother.

Talk about a fertile imagination!

In General, therefore, the living filament begins with the propensities of the father; but these may be modified by the nutrition from the mother:

6. The living filament is a part of the father, and has therefore certain propensities, or appetencies, which belong to him; which may have been gradually acquired during a million of generations, even from the infancy of the habitable earth; and which now possesses such properties, as would render, by the apposition of nutritious particles, the new fetus exactly similar to the father; as occurs in the buds and bulbs of vegetables, and in the polypus, and tænia or tape-worm. But as the first nutriment is supplied by the mother, and therefore resembles such nutritive particles, as have been used for her own nutriment or growth, the progeny takes in part of the likeness of the mother.

Some hereditary propensities can be produced in one or two generations, though Darwin is not here clear about how that comes around:

Other similarity of the excitability, or of the form of the male parent, such as the broad or narrow shoulders, or such as constitute certain hereditary diseases, as scrophula, epilepsy, insanity, have their origin produced in one or perhaps two generations; as in the progeny of those who drink much vinous spirits; and those hereditary propensities cease again, as I have observed, if one or two sober generations succeed; otherwise the family becomes extinct.

And then there's the imagination that can alter the filament:

This living filament from the father is also liable to have its propensities, or appetencies, altered at the time of its production by the imagination of the male parent; the extremities of the seminal glands imitating the motions of the organs of sense; and thus the sex of the embryon is produced; which may be thus made a male or a female by affecting the imagination of the father at the time of impregnation.

In its further development, the filament, as a fetus, may be affected by the nutrients and oxygen supplied by the mother, as it acquires the organs for them:

7. After the fetus is thus completely formed together with its umbilical vessels and placenta, it is now supplied with a different kind of food, as appears by the difference of consistency of the different parts of the white of the egg, and of the liquor amnii, for it has now acquired organs for digestion or secretion, and for oxygenation, though they are as yet feeble; which can in some degree change, as well as select, the nutritive particles, which are now presented to it. But may yet be affected by the deficiency of the quantity of nutrition supplied by the mother, or by the degree of oxygenation supplied to its placenta by the maternal blood.

The point here being that the development of the filament is dependent on the quantity and quality of the available nutrition, including oxygen.

What goes for this filament, goes for life in general:

9. As the habitable parts of the earth have been, and continue to be, perpetually increasing by the production of sea-shells and corallines, and by the recrements of other animals, and vegetables; so from the beginning of the existence of this terraqueous globe, the animals, which inhabit it, have constantly improved, and are still in a state of progressive improvement.

That is, the habitable parts of the earth are increased by life itself, and likewise life inhabiting the earth has improved progressively. Life is here seen as one organism, a first great egg made living by divine love:

This idea of the gradual generation of all things seems to have been as familiar to the ancient philosophers as to the modern ones; and to have given rise to the beautiful hieroglyphic figure of the προτον ωον, or first great egg, produced by NIGHT, that is, whose origin is involved in obscurity, and animated by ερος, that is, by DIVINE LOVE; from whence proceeded all things which exist.

Darwin's Aristotelean way of thinking, of course, pops up again in the Conclusion of the section, where he states that "Cause and effect may be considered as the progression, or successive motions, of the parts of the great system of Nature." This chain of cause and effect leads bavk to God as the first cause:

6. This perpetual chain of causes and effects, whose first link is rivetted to the throne of GOD, divides itself into innumerable diverging branches, which, like the nerves arising from the brain, permeate the most minute and most remote extremities of the system, diffusing motion and sensation to the whole. As every cause is superior in power to the effect, which it has produced, so our idea of the power of the Almighty Creator becomes more elevated and sublime, as we trace the operations of nature from cause to cause, climbing up the links of these chains of being, till we ascend to the Great Source of all things.

Darwin, therefore, is not denying a creator, only that the creator has specially created all species right from the start. This in turn leads him to reject that it is blind chance that has constituted the material world, since the Creator has endowed matter with the properties necessary to form the combinations:

Hence the modern discoveries in chemistry and in geology, by having traced the causes of the combinations of bodies to remoter origins, as well as those in astronomy, which dignify the present age, contribute to enlarge and amplify our ideas of the power of the Great First Cause. And had those ancient philosophers, who contended that the world was formed from atoms, ascribed their combinations to certain immutable properties received from the hand of the Creator, such as general gravitation, chemical affinity, or animal appetency, instead of ascribing them to a blind chance; the doctrine of atoms, as constituting or composing the material world by the variety of their combinations, so far from leading the mind to atheism, would strengthen the demonstration of the existence of a Deity, as the first cause of all things; because the analogy resulting from our perpetual experience of cause and effect would have thus been exemplified through universal nature.

That is, God is indeed designer or architect, but he has designed the world so it will assemble itself without his continous direct intervention.

Darwin ends the section with quoting Psalms 19:1-5 and 104:24:

The heavens declare the glory of GOD, and the firmament sheweth his handywork! One day telleth another, and one night certifieth another; they have neither speech nor language, yet their voice is gone forth into all lands, and their words into the ends of the world. Manifold are thy works, O LORD! in wisdom hast thou made them all. Psal. xix. civ.

For Erasmus Darwin therefore, nature was still seen as the handywork of God, though indirectly: God as the architect or designer and Nature as the implementer of the divine architecture according to God's laws impressed upon Nature.

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The Temple of Nature

The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society: a Poem, with Philosophical Notes (1802) is a poem in four canta with additional thirteen "philosophical notes".

According to the Preface, the aim of this poem is "simply to amuse by bringing distinctly to the imagination the beautiful and sublime images of the operations of Nature in the order, as the Author believes, in which the progressive course of time presented them". The style of the poem mimics classical Greek poetic style, which the Preface explain by "[i]n the Eleusinian mysteries the philosophy of the works of Nature, with the origin and progress of society, are believed to have been taught by allegoric scenery explained by the Hierophant to the initiated".

Accordingly, Canto I, "Production of Life", starts with:

I. By firm immutable immortal laws
Impress'd on Nature by the Great First Cause,
Say, Muse! how rose from elemental strife
Organic forms, and kindled into life;
How Love and Sympathy with potent charm
Warm the cold heart, the lifted hand disarm;
Allure with pleasures, and alarm with pains,
And bind Society in golden chains.

Here we again meet the Great First Cause, who has impressed "firm immutable immortal laws" on "Nature" - nature here thought of as a being, a goddess. And we also meet the keywords 'Love' and 'Sympathy'.

A few stanzas later we enter the garden of Eden:

II. Where Eden's sacred bowers triumphant sprung,
By angels guarded, and by prophets sung,
Wav'd o'er the east in purple pride unfurl'd
And rock'd the golden cradle of the World;
Four sparkling currents lav'd with wandering tides
Their velvet avenues, and flowery sides;
On sun-bright lawns unclad the Graces stray'd,
And guiltless Cupids haunted every glade;
Till the fair Bride, forbidden shades among,
Heard unalarm'd the Tempter's serpent-tongue;
Eyed the sweet fruit, the mandate disobey'd,
And her fond Lord with sweeter smiles betray'd.

This mixture of biblical and Greek mythology may certainly not be to the amusement of everybody. Still, the biblical story of the Garden of Eden is certainly not denied, just enhanced with a few embellishments. A note to the fourth line says, "Cradle of the world, l. 36. The nations, which possess Europe and a part of Asia and of Africa, appear to have descended from one family; and to have had their origin near the banks of the Mediterranean, as probably in Syria, the site of Paradise, according to the Mosaic history." Darwin continues saying that this "seems highly probable from the similarity of the structure of the languages of these nations, and from their early possession of similar religions, customs, and arts, as well as from the most ancient histories extant." So, again, Darwin accepts the biblical account.

Two stanzas later begins the description of The Temple of Nature:

Here, high in air, unconscious of the storm
Thy temple, Nature, rears it's mystic form;
From earth to heav'n, unwrought by mortal toil,
Towers the vast fabric on the desert soil;
O'er many a league the ponderous domes extend,
And deep in earth the ribbed vaults descend;
A thousand jasper steps with circling sweep
Lead the slow votary up the winding steep;
Ten thousand piers, now join'd and now aloof,
Bear on their branching arms the fretted roof.

The Temple of Nature is, of course, nature herself, not a part of nature and not something outside of nature. The steps of the temple is the tracing backwards of the progression of Nature, both inorganic matter and life, all the way back to the first cause.

The altar of Nature is set in Eleusis, which is of course neither biblical nor scientific, but part of the poem.

Addressing the muse, the hierofant Urania says:

"First, if you can, celestial Guide! disclose
From what fair fountain mortal life arose,
Whence the fine nerve to move and feel assign'd,
Contractile fibre, and ethereal mind:

"How Love and Sympathy the bosom warm,
Allure with pleasure, and with pain alarm,
With soft affections weave the social plan,
And charm the listening Savage into Man."

That is, she asks the muse to explain how mortal life began, how nerves, muscle fibres, and mind came around, and how "Love and Sympathy" weave the social plan turning savages into civilized humans.

The muse begins her answer with:

"God the First Cause! — in this terrene abode
Young Nature lisps, she is the child of God.
From embryon births her changeful forms improve,
Grow, as they live, and strengthen as they move.

This is the same story as in Zoönomia; but there are a few details worth noticing. In Proverbs 8 we read the story of Wisdom:

Pro 8:23 I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, Before the earth was.

Pro 8:24 When there were no depths, I was brought forth, When there were no fountains abounding with water.

Pro 8:25 Before the mountains were settled, Before the hills was I brought forth;

Pro 8:26 While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, Nor the beginning of the dust of the world.

Pro 8:27 When he established the heavens, I was there: When he set a circle upon the face of the deep,

Pro 8:28 When he made firm the skies above, When the fountains of the deep became strong,

Pro 8:29 When he gave to the sea its bound, That the waters should not transgress his commandment, When he marked out the foundations of the earth;

Pro 8:30 Then I was by him, as a master workman; And I was daily his delight, Rejoicing always before him,

Pro 8:31 Rejoicing in his habitable earth; And my delight was with the sons of men.

The pre-existing Wisdom, possibly the inspiration of the Logos Hymn in the Gospel of John, is also the child of God, and as v. 30 states, she was the "master workman", when God created the world. It's the same idea that Darwin employs, just in a more modern setting - whereby I refer to the evolutionary ideas, not his sensual romanticism.

The priestess continues:

"Ere Time began, from flaming Chaos hurl'd
Rose the bright spheres, which form the circling world;
Earths from each sun with quick explosions burst,
And second planets issued from the first.
Then, whilst the sea at their coeval birth,
Surge over surge, involv'd the shoreless earth;
Nurs'd by warm sun-beams in primeval caves
Organic Life began beneath the waves.

This is also from the beginning, before time began, though else the description is different. Darwin operates with more than one sun, and from each sun "with quick explosions burst[s]", and from that first planet other planets are issued. I don't know, if that was the common cosmogonical theory of the time; but apparently it's what Darwin accepted for some reason. And he has life beginning "[n]urs'd by warm sun-beams" "beneath the waves".

The priestess continues her story:

"First Heat from chemic dissolution springs,
And gives to matter its eccentric wings:
With strong Repulsion parts the exploding mass,
Melts into lymph, or kindles into gas.
Attraction next, as earth or air subsides,
The ponderous atoms from the light divides,
Approaching parts with quick embrace combines,
Swells into spheres, and lengthens into lines.
Last, as fine goads the gluten-threads excite,
Cords grapple cords, and webs with webs unite;
And quick Contraction with ethereal flame
Lights into life the fibre-woven frame. —
Hence without parent by spontaneous birth
Rise the first specks of animated earth;
From Nature's womb the plant or insect swims,
And buds or breathes, with microscopic limbs.

This is a description of abiogenesis. As elsewhere, Darwin here gives a poetic description of his concepts, such as heat, repulsion, attraction, and contraction. A note to the first line says:

First Heat from chemic, l. 235. The matter of heat is an ethereal fluid, in which all things are immersed, and which constitutes the general power of repulsion; as appears in explosions which are produced by the sudden evolution of combined heat, and by the expansion of all bodies by the slower diffusion of it in its uncombined state. Without heat all the matter of the world would be condensed into a point by the power of attraction; and neither fluidity nor life could exist. There are also particular powers of repulsion, as those of magnetism and electricity, and of chemistry, such as oil and water; which last may be as numerous as the particular attractions which constitute chemical affinities; and may both of them exist as atmospheres round the individual particles of matter; see Botanic Garden, Bol. I. additional note VII. on elementary heat.

Heat is here correctly associated with motion, and all the other concepts are motional concepts, in concert with Darwin's general idea of translation everything into motion.

Darwin's description of abiogenesis isn't quite the current one; but since cells were first discovered in the 1830s, we should not expect too much anyway.

Interestingly, abiogenesis can be considered compatible with Genesis 1:

Gen 1:11 And God said, Let the earth put forth grass, herbs yielding seed, and fruit-trees bearing fruit after their kind, wherein is the seed thereof, upon the earth: and it was so.

...

Gen 1:20 And God said, Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

...

Gen 1:24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind, cattle, and creeping things, and beasts of the earth after their kind: and it was so.

That is, God tells the earth and the waters to bring forth life. No evolution appears to be implied, though - but neither is it ruled out.

The priestess continues with the development of organs, and Darwin even claims that land is formed by life dimishing the water:

So Life's first powers arrest the winds and floods,
To bones convert them, or to shells, or woods;
Stretch the vast beds of argil, lime, and sand,
And from diminish'd oceans form the land!

A note to the secons line says:

And from diminish'd oceans, l. 268. The increase of the solid parts of the globe by the recrements of organic bodies, as limestone rocks form shells and bones, and the beds of clay, marl, coals, from decomposed woods, is now well known to those who have attended to modern geology; and Dr. Halley, and others, have endeavoured to show, with great probability, that the ocean has decreased in quanitity during the short time which human history has existed. Whence it appears, that the exertions of vegetable and animal life convert the fluid parts of the globe into solid ones; which is probably effected by combining the matter of heat with the other elements, instead of suffering it to remain simply diffused amongst them, which is a curious conjecture, and deserves further investigation.

This is quite interesting - the idea of organisms changing their own environment. This is, of course, still an important point in evolutionary theory; for instance that the atmosphere of the earth originally was oxygen-free, but early bacteria exhaled oxygen, which enabled oxygen-dependent life. It isn't quite this darwin writes about here, only about deology; but still the interaction between organisms and their environment is an important factor in evolution - environments are not established once and for all.

After this, the priestess moves to the mind:

"Next the long nerves unite their silver train,
And young Sensation permeates the brain;
Through each new sense the keen emotions dart,
Flush the young cheek, and swell the throbbing heart.
From pain and pleasure quick Volitions rise,
Lift the strong arm, or point the inquiring eyes;
With Reason's light bewilder'd Man direct,
And right and wrong with balance nice detect.
Last in thick swarms Associations spring,
Thoughts join to thoughts, to motions motions cling;
Whence in long trains of catenation flow
Imagined joy, and voluntary woe.

Again, it is the Zoönomia in poetic form.

The priestess recaps the whole story all the way to man:

Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.

"Thus the tall Oak, the giant of the wood,
Which bears Britannia's thunders on the flood;
The Whale, unmeasured monster of the main,
The lordly Lion, monarch of the plain,
The Eagle soaring in the realms of air,
Whose eye undazzled drinks the solar glare,
Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,
Of language, reason, and reflection proud,
With brow erect who scorns this earthly sod,
And styles himself the image of his God;
Arose from rudiments of form and sense,
An embryon point, or microscopic ens!

Despite the irony in the last three lines, it should be clear that Darwin's point is not to attack God, only to show that as all organisms, even oaks, whales, lions, eagles and humans, have started out as "[a]n embryon point," so why shouldn't life as such have started out that way?

Pre-Darwinists (5) William Paley

William Paley

Introduction

Paley's Natural Theology

Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker

William Paley (1743-1805) was an English clergyman and philosopher, best known for his watchmaker analogy in his book Natural Theology. Paley was far form the first to point to nature to prove the divine existence, neither was he even the first to use the watchmaker analogy; however, the Natural Theology has become the seminal work in the Intelligent Design versus evolution controversy, whether this controversy be considered a scientific controversy or not.

Charles Darwin was a convinced Paleyan as he embarked HMS Beagle in 1831, but when he left it, he had his doubts.

Richard Dawkins, in The Blind Watchmaker, acknowledges the relevance of Paley's argumentation in the Natural Theology, its distinction between simple things like a stone and complex things like a watch and an organism.

William Dembski, in his books and his articles, frequently refers to Paley. Interestingly, Dembski claims that it was from reading The Blind Watchmaker that he got the idea that specification and complexity "was the key to eliminating chance and inferring design" (cf. Specification: The Pattern That Signifies Intelligence., p. 31).

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Paley's Natural Theology

An obligatory part of the curriculum, when Charles Darwin studied theology at Cambridge was Paley's Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802). Quotes are from the electronic version of the 12^th edition (1809) published by the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative.

The Natural Theology begins with this famous passage:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone? Why is it not as admissible in the second case, as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, viz. that, when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e. g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that, if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any other order, than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it.

Any later work within Intelligent Design and origins is a mere footnote to this passage.

However, we may here notice a minor point; namely that Paley writes "nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer" concerning the answer that "it had lain there for ever" to the question about, how the stone had come to be, where it is. Just as a watch in a heath doesn't simply pop up, a stone doesn't either. Some stones are important in geology for tracing movements of glaciers, and, of course, radiometric dating of stones and rocks are of high importance, even for biology.

We'll ignore this, however, and return to Paley's argumentation:

To reckon up a few of the plainest of these parts, and of their offices, all tending to one result:-- We see a cylindrical box containing a coiled elastic spring, which, by its endeavour to relax itself, turns round the box. We next observe a flexible chain (artificially wrought for the sake of flexure), communicating the action of the spring from the box to the fusee. We then find a series of wheels, the teeth of which catch in, and apply to, each other, conducting the motion from the fusee to the balance, and from the balance to the pointer; and at the same time, by the size and shape of those wheels, so regulating that motion, as to terminate in causing an index, by an equable and measured progression, to pass over a given space in a given time. We take notice that the wheels are made of brass in order to keep them from rust; the springs of steel, no other metal being so elastic; that over the face of the watch there is placed a glass, a material employed in no other part of the work, but in the room of which, if there had been any other than a transparent substance, the hour could not be seen without opening the case. This mechanism being observed (it requires indeed an examination of the instrument, and perhaps some previous knowledge of the subject, to perceive and understand it; but being once, as we have said, observed and understood), the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.

The keyword here is purpose, the parts of the watch are not chosen at random, but each has shape, size, and material chosen for an overall purpose, and, according to Paley, it is from this observation that we conclude that the watch must have had a maker.

Paley follows up with eight comments that can be summed up as follows

1. Design can be detected based on recognized purpose alone. It is not needed to know, how an object is actually made, certainly not to be able to make it oneself, and neither is it needed to know, where or when the object was made, and most importantly: no assumptions about the nature of the maker are needed.

2. Design can be detected, even if an object doesn't fulfil its purpose completely.

3. Design can be detected in an object, even if there are a few parts whose contribution to the overall purpose is not understood, and even if there are part that do not appear to be needed for the overall purpose.

4. A design conclusion is not invalidated by the argument that the designed object could be merely one out of several possible combinations of the same parts that could have formed naturally.

5. A design conclusion is not invalidated by the argument that there exists in the parts "a principle of order" that put them into the form of the designed object.

6. A design conclusion is not invalidated by the argument that the recognized purpose is not real, only a motive to induce the mind to think so.

7. A design conclusion is not invalidated by the argument that the designed object is formed by a law of nature, since a law of nature is not an agent and therefore cannot act, only establish the order by which an agent acts.

8. A design conclusion is not invalidated by the argument that the person making the conclusion doesn't know anything about the matter. As Paley writes: "He knows enough for his argument: he knows the utility of the end: he knows the subserviency and adaptation of the means to the end. These points being known, his ignorance of other points, his doubts concerning other points, affect not the certainty of his reasoning."

As is easy to see, comments 2-8 are really just elaborations on comment 1: Design can be detected based on recognized purpose alone.

This rules apply for recognizing a watch or similar object as designed, where we wouldn't really question a design concluson anyway. The big jump is of course to transfer the logic to apply to organisms.

And for this purpose, Paley begins chapter 2 with:

Suppose, in the next place, that the person who found the watch, should, after some time, discover that, in addition to all the properties which he had hitherto observed in it, it possessed the unexpected property of producing, in the course of its movement, another watch like itself (the thing is conceivable); that it contained within it a mechanism, a system of parts, a mould for instance, or a complex adjustment of lathes, files, and other tools, evidently and separately calculated for this purpose; let us inquire, what effect ought such a discovery to have upon his former conclusion.

This is followed by five comments that boil down to that this second discovery can only enhance the design conclusion, not weaken it. Even if the watch in question might be the direct product of another watch, there must still be a first watch that was designed.

To argue otherwise is, according to Paley, atheism. As he begins chapter 3:

This is atheism: for every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater and more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation. I mean that the contrivances of nature surpass the contrivances of art, in the complexity, subtility, and curiosity of the mechanism; and still more, if possible, do they go beyond them in number and variety; yet, in a multitude of cases, are not less evidently mechanical, not less evidently contrivances, not less evidently accommodated to their end, or suited to their office, than are the most perfect productions of human ingenuity.

That is, if we accept Paley's design arguments concerning the watch, we cannot deny that there is design in nature.

Paley then proceeds with a comparison between an eye and a telescope:

I know no better method of introducing so large a subject, than that of comparing a single thing with a single thing; an eye, for example, with a telescope. As far as the examination of the instrument goes, there is precisely the same proof that the eye was made for vision, as there is that the telescope was made for assisting it. They are made upon the same principles; both being adjusted to the laws by which the transmission and refraction of rays of light are regulated. I speak not of the origin of the laws themselves; but such laws being fixed, the construction, in both cases, is adapted to them. For instance; these laws require, in order to produce the same effect, that the rays of light, in passing from water into the eye, should be refracted by a more convex surface, than when it passes out of air into the eye. Accordingly we find that the eye of a fish, in that part of it called the crystalline lens, is much rounder than the eye of terrestrial animals. What plainer manifestation of design can there be than this difference? What could a mathematical-instrument-maker have done more, to show his knowledge of his principle, his application of that knowledge, his suiting of his means to his end; I will not say to display the compass or excellence of his skill and art, for in these all comparison is indecorous, but to testify counsel, choice, consideration, purpose?

Paley provides more details about the eye, the ear, and so on; but we'll skip to chapter 12 about astronomy:

My opinion of Astronomy has always been, that it is not the best medium through which to prove the agency of an intelligent Creator; but that, this being proved, it shows, beyond all other sciences, the magnificence of his operations. The mind which is once convinced, it raises to sublimer views of the Deity than any other subject affords; but it is not so well adapted, as some other subjects are, to the purpose of argument. We are destitute of the means of examining the constitution of the heavenly bodies. The very simplicity of their appearance is against them. We see nothing, but bright points, luminous circles, or the phases of spheres reflecting the light which falls upon them. Now we deduce design from relation, aptitude, and correspondence of parts. Some degree therefore of complexity is necessary to render a subject fit for this species of argument. But the heavenly bodies do not, except perhaps in the instance of Saturn's ring, present themselves to our observation as compounded of parts at all. This, which may be a perfection in them, is a disadvantage to us, as inquirers after their nature. They do not come within our mechanics. And what we say of their forms, is true of their motions. Their motions are carried on without any sensible intermediate apparatus; whereby we are cut off from one principal ground of argumentation and analogy. We have nothing wherewith to compare them; no invention, no discovery, no operation or resource of art, which, in this respect, resembles them. Even those things which are made to imitate and represent them, such as orreries, planetaria, cœlestial globes, &c. bear no affinity to them, in the cause and principle by which their motions are actuated. I can assign for this difference a reason of utility, viz. a reason why, though the action of terrestrial bodies upon each other be, in almost all cases, through the intervention of solid or fluid substances, yet central attraction does not operate in this manner. It was necessary that the intervals between the planetary orbs should be devoid of any inert matter either fluid or solid, because such an intervening substance would, by its resistance, destroy those very motions, which attraction is employed to preserve. This may be a final cause of the difference; but still the difference destroys the analogy.

The interesting point here is, of course, that it is the simplicity of cœlestial mechanics that makes Paley reject astronomy as a medium to prove the agency of an intelligent creator, and that an earthly model cannot work by the same mechanics (gravity). Traditionally it was arguments from astronomy that supported the design argument, not references to plants and animals. The idea being that the heaven was perfect, while the earth was not. To be a fallen star, that is, to have fallen from heaven to earth, wasn't a good thing.

Another problem that Paley sees:

Our ignorance, moreover, of the sensitive natures, by which other planets are inhabited, necessarily keeps from us the knowledge of numberless utilities, relations, and subserviences, which we perceive upon our own globe.

That is, Paley assumes the existence of "sensitive natures" on other planets; but since we have no knowledge about them, we cannot use them in any design arguments.

For Paley, therefore, what is admirable in astronomy is the precision of astronomical predictions, and "all this is wonderful, whether we refer our admiration to the constancy of the heavenly motions themselves, or to the perspicacity and precision with which they have been noticed by mankind."

And furthermore:

Nor is this the whole, nor indeed the chief part of what astronomy teaches. By bringing reason to bear upon observation (the acutest reasoning upon the exactest observation), the astronomer has been able, out of the mystic dance,and the confusion (for such it is) under which the motions of the heavenly bodies present themselves to the eye of a mere gazer upon the skies, to elicit their order and their real paths.

That is, the most admirable is that the astronomer has been able to find order in the apparent chaos.

Therefore, the intelligent agency in the cœlestial world is to be seen in choice, determination, and regulation:

Our knowledge therefore of astronomy is admirable, though imperfect: and, amidst the confessed desiderata and desideranda, which impede our investigation of the wisdom of the Deity, in these the grandest of his works, there are to be found, in the phænomena, ascertained circumstances and laws, sufficient to indicate an intellectual agency in three of its principal operations, viz. in choosing, in determining, in regulating; in choosing, out of a boundless variety of suppositions which were equally possible, that which is beneficial; in determining, what, left to itself, had a thousand chances against conveniency, for one in its favour; in regulating subjects, as to quantity and degree, which, by their nature, were unlimited with respect to either.

Paley then continues with examples of this, such as the proof of choice that there is only one sun, and it is placed in the middle.

Basically, all this can be boiled down to that intelligence changes probabilities. If Paley had known anything about DNA, he could have used exactly the same argumentation there.

Charles Darwin, in The Origin of Species, chapter 6, "Difficulties on Theory", writes:

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.

So, it's not that Darwin rejects Paleyan type argumentations - but the key phrase is changing conditions of life. What Paley assumes in his argumentation is that there is a designed, unchanging order to things; basically that everything stays the same, unless the creator intervenes. However, take away that assumption and see, what happens.

Later in the same chapter, Darwin writes:

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case.

This is a key paragraph, the first sentence of which has given rise to the irreducible complexity mania. Darwin's gradualism here is not only caused by a lack of a known source of variation, but also caused by arguments such as the one in the beginning of Natural Theology, where Paley stated that any change in size or order of parts would prevent either motion or imply a different motion.

Darwin even co-opts Paley to supply an argument (ibid.):

Natural selection will never produce in a being anything injurious to itself, for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each. No organ will be formed, as Paley has remarked, for the purpose of causing pain or for doing an injury to its possessor. If a fair balance be struck between the good and evil caused by each part, each will be found on the whole advantageous. After the lapse of time, under changing conditions of life, if any part comes to be injurious, it will be modified; or if it be not so, the being will become extinct, as myriads have become extinct.

That is, for Darwin, extinction is not caused by an catastrophe, but by lack of adaption to a changed environment. Paley himself does not enter the subject of extinction.

Paley writes in Natural Theology, chapter 26, "The Goodness of the Deity":

The same argument may be proposed in different terms; thus: Contrivance proves design: and the predominant tendency of the contrivance indicates the disposition of the designer. The world abounds with contrivances: and all the contrivances which we are acquainted with, are directed to beneficial purposes. Evil, no doubt, exists; but is never, that we can perceive, the object of contrivance. Teeth are contrived to eat, not to ache; their aching now and then is incidental to the contrivance, perhaps inseparable from it: or even, if you will, let it be called a defect in the contrivance: but it is not the object of it.

Well, it may be questioned, if Darwin is using Paley's argumentation quite as intended. And if quite as intended, natural selection then becomes "[t]he Goodness of the Deity". Natural selection, as least as used by Darwin, is in analogy to artificial selection such as performed by breeders and cultivators. However, while Darwin operates with a creator, he doesn't believe the creator is concerned about the minutiae of creation. The problem being, if Paley is right, why are there then extinct species? It is, among other factors, this extinction that suggests that things work differently than claimed by Paley. In The Origin of Species, chapter 14, "Recapitulation and Conclusion", Darwin writes:

Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual.

That is, while Darwin accepts that the creator has set up natural laws, it is this same that makes him reject that production and extinction of species are due to divine edicts. The natural laws should be sufficient to bring about whatever purpose the creator might have had without additional micro-management.

Darwin continues:

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity.

While The Origin of Species does not deal with humans, it is certainly possible that these sentences are meant to apply to humans as well. In the "Conclusion" of Natural Theology, Paley writes:

Again; if there be those who think, that the contractedness and debility of the human faculties in our present state, seem ill to accord with the high destinies which the expectations of religion point out to us, I would only ask them, whether any one, who saw a child two hours after its birth, could suppose that it would ever come to understand fluxions (Note: See Search's Light of Nature, passim.); or who then shall say, what farther amplification of intellectual powers, what accession of knowledge, what advance and improvement, the rational faculty, be its constitution what it will, may not admit of, when placed amidst new objects, and endowed with a sensorium adapted, as it undoubtedly will be, and as our present senses are, to the perception of those substances, and of those properties of things, with which our concern may lie.

For Paley, of course, this promise of a grand future is to come true by a divine act; certainly not by evolution. Darwin shares the hope of a grand future, but maybe he thought that the creator had set up laws that would make that future come true without direct intervention.

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Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker

In 1986 Richard Dawkins published the first edition of The Blind Watchmaker. This title refers to Paley's analogy between a creator and an unseen watchmaker in Natural Theology with the extension that not only is the watchmaker unseen, he is even blind. In chapter 1, "Explaining the very improbable", Dawkins writes:

Paley's argument is made with passionate sincerity and is informed by the best biological scholarship of his day, but it is wrong, gloriously and utterly wrong. The analogy between telescope and eye, between watch and living organism, is false. All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

Unlike Paley and Darwin, Dawkins is an atheist, so while for Darwin, natural selection is a mechanism established by the creator to serve a purpose, Dawkins reifies natural selection to become the creator itself. However, a creator with no purpose, no foresight, not even a mind, in which to have purpose or foresight.

Dawkins follows Paley closely in the distinction between uncomplex things, such as a stone, and complex things, such as a machine or an organism. However, he elevates machines to the status of living things for the sake of argument. Therefore he can write (ibid.):

With the exception of artificial machines, which we have already agreed to count as honorary living things, nonliving things don't work in this sense [actively to maintain disequilibrium]. They accept the forces that tend to bring them into equilibrium with their surroundings. Mont Blanc, to be sure, has existed for a long time, and probably will exist for a while yet, but it does not work to stay in existence. When rock comes to rest under the influence of gravity it just stays there. No work has to be done to keep it there. Mont Blanc exists, and it will go on existing until it wears away or an earthquake knocks it over. It doesn't take steps to repair wear and tear, or to right itself when it is knocked over, the way a living body does. It just obeys the ordinary laws of physics.

The "laws of physics" referred to here are the same as Darwin's natural laws, obeyed by as well organisms as by inorganic matter, since the former are composed of nothing but the latter; only organisms exhibit a higher level of complexity. Therefore, while Paley started out with recognizing purpose before going into the details of interaction of parts, Dawkins turns things the other way around:

Is this to deny that living things obey the laws of physics? Certainly not. There is no reason to think that the laws of physics are violated in living matter. There is nothing supernatural, no 'life force' to rival the fundamental forces of physics. It is just that if you try to use the laws of physics, in a naive way, to understand the behaviour of a whole living body, you will find that you don't get very far. The body is a complex thing with many constituent parts, and to understand its behaviour you must apply the laws of physics to its parts, not to the whole. The behaviour of the body as a whole will then emerge as a consequence of interactions of the parts.

In other words, while the scientific investigation may proceed from the whole to the parts, this is not a retracing of the mental processes of a creator, because what is perceived as an overall purpose only emerges "as a consequence of interactions of the parts". That is, Dawkins replaces Paley's top-down process with a bottom-up process.

Arthur de Gobineau: Essai sur l'Inégalité des Races Humaines

Arthur de Gobineau: Essai sur l'Inégalité des Races Humaines, 1^st edition 1854.

Quotes are from the Editions Pierre Belfond version, 1967.

DISCLAIMER: my knowledge of French is basically limited to, what I learned years ago in high school, so I cannot issue any guarantee that my reading of Essai sur l'Inégalité des Races Humaines is anywhere near beyond reproach, only that I have attempted as best I can to figure out, what Gobineau meant with the parts of the book I have picked down upon.

The book is dedicated to King George V (1851-66) of Hannover, and Gobineau opens the dedication with these words:

SIRE,

J’ai l’honneur d’offrir ici à Votre Majesté le fruit de longues méditations et d’études favorites, souvent interrompues, toujours reprises.

Les événements considérables, révolutions, guerres sanglantes, renversements de lois, qui, depuis trop d'années, ont agi sur les Etats européens, tournent aisément les imaginations vers l’examen des faits politiques. Tandis que le vulgaire n’en considère que les résultats immédiats et n’admire ou ne réprouve que l’étincelle électrique dont ils frappent les intérêts, les penseurs plus graves cherchent à découvrir les causes cachées de si terribles ébranlements, et, descendant la lampe à la main dans les sentiers obscurs de la philosophie et de l’histoire, ils vont demander à l’analyse du cœur humain ou à l’examen attentif des annales le mot d’une énigme qui trouble si fort et les existences et les consciences.

That is, Gobineau presents to his majesty the fruits of his speculations and studies into the hidden causes of the "revolutions, bloody wars, and lawlessness" that have been going on in Europe through many years. The picturesque language employed here with expressions such as "descendant la lampe à la main dans les sentiers obscurs de la philosophie et de l’histoire" ("descending with the lamp in hand into the dim passages of philosophy and history") sounds more like something from a gothic novel than from a scientific text.

Gobineau wasn’t himself a scientist either, he was a French diplomat; but he does rely on the scientific books of the time to make up his case. But, of course, the idea of white supremacy wasn't Gobineau's invention, neither was the warning against racial mixture, or any other single element. What is unique is the forging of all this into an attempt to make a theory of social renewal.

Later in the dedication, Gobineau writes:

Les hommes d’aujourd’hui seraient même en droit de faire, devant lui, trophée de qulques mérites qui lui manquent. Mais, si, pour repousser leurs accusations, il vient soudain à évoquer les ombres grandioses des périodes héroïques, que diront-ils? ...

That is, in an unheroic time, if you ask the grand shadows of the past heroic times, what will they answer? Gobineau continues:

Rien, sinon que toutes les belles choses, tombées dans le silence, ne sont pas mortes et qu’elles dorment; que tous les âges ont vu des périodes de transition, époques où la souffrance lutte avec la vie et d’où celle-ci se détache, à la fin, victorieuse et resplendissante, et que, puisque, la Chaldée trop vieillie fut remplacée jadis par la Perse jeune et vigoreuse, la Grèce décrépite par Rome virile et la domination abâtardie d’Augustule par les royaumes des nobles princes teutoniques, de même les races modernes obtiendront leur rajeunissement.

That is, you need to make it happen, not hang around and wait for it to happen to you. The young, vigorous, virile, noble races have won over the older races, when these had lost the qualities that had made them winners in the first place.

All in all, Gobineau reaches the conclusion that ethnicity is the most important question in history:

C’est alors que, d’inductions en inductions, j’ai dû me pénétrer de cette évidence, que la question ethnique domine tous les autres problèmes de l’histoire, en tient la clef, et que l’inégalié des races dont le concour forme une nation, suffit à expliquer tout l’enchaînement des destinés des peuples.

That is, the inequality of races that make up a nation are sufficient to explain how the destinies of peoples are linked together.

The rest of that same paragraph shows the diplomat coming to the fore; Gobineau mentions, just as an example, that by the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Great Britain a new strength came about that ruled some of the peoples of that island by the sword of the illustrious ancestors of his majesty, and now in one August Person, two branches of the same nation have been united in one royal house, which draws its glorious throne rights from distant sources of a most heroic origin.

In 1714, prince-elector (Kurfürst) George of Hannover becomes king of Great Britain, and the personal union between Hannover and Great Britain remains until the accession of Queen Victoria to the British throne in 1837. Hannover itself is occupied by the French in 1803; but the electorate is restored in 1813, and in 1814 Hannover is made a kingdom. During 1849-50, Prussia proposes a plan to construct a central-European union under Prussian leadership. Hannover first supports the plan, but Austrian pressure makes Hannover join a coalition hostile to the union. The plan is finally abandoned, as the Russian Czar Nicolai supports Austria against the union plan. However, in 1865 Prussia and Austria come to disagree over how to distribute the spoils gained from Denmark in the war of 1864, and in 1866 a war breaks out. Hannover like all the other major German states joins Austria. And with the Prussian victory, Hannover is made a Prussian province.

Back to Gobineau, who proceeds with:

Après avoir reconnu qu’il est des races fortes et qu’il en est de faibles, je me suis attaché à observer de préférences les premières, à démêler leurs aptitudes, et surtout à remonter la chaîne de leurs génálogies. En suivant cette méthode, j’ai fini par me convaincre que tout ce qu’il y a de grand, de noble, de fécond sur la terre, en fait de créations humaines, la science, l'art, la civilisation, ramène l’observateur vers un point unique, n’est issu que d’un même germe, n’a résulté que d’une seule pensée, n’appartient qu’à une seule famille dont les différentes branches ont régné dans toutes les contrèes policées de l’Univers.

That is, Gobineau has found out, which races are strong, and which races are weak, and for the former,  traced their genealogies. From this he has convinced himself that all human creations, science, art, civilization, lead to one single point, namely that these are not descended from the same germ, not from the same thought, and not come from a single family which through different branches has ruled all the countries of the Universe.

Now, this is in 1854, where George V supports Austria, the arch-enemy of France. It is a clear possibility that these words in particular refer to the Habsburg dynasty, whose branches once ruled, if not the Universe, then quite a large part of the earth. Now, of course, just as scientists and others in the Renaissance wrote dedications to princes, kings, and popes in order to buy goodwill, or perhaps a well-paid position, we need not necessarily put more into this dedication than that Gobineau clearly wasn't supporting the Habsburg dynasty. That is, we need not assume that Essai sur l'Inégalité des Races Humaines was written merely to annoy the Austrian emperor, only that the various events in Europe around 1850 actually did have some importance for the book.

In the preface to the 2^nd edition, Charles Darwin and Darwinism are given a couple of favorable mentions, and the same goes for Henry Thomas Buckle. Apparently Gobineau thinks that Darwin and Buckle are dependent on him:

De là [that social progress and decline are caused by racial mixture] fut tirée la théorie de la sélection devenue si célèbre entre les main de Darwin et plus encore de ses élèves. Il en est r´sulté, entre autres, le système de Buckle, et par l’ecart considérable que les opinions de ce philosophe présent avec les miennes, on peut mesurer l’éloignement relatif des routes que savant se frayer deux pensées hostiles parties d’un point commun.

...

Darwin et Buckle ont créé ainsi les dérivations principales du ruisseau que j’ai ouvert.

Ernst Haeckel, in return, is given a less favorable mention:

A dater de cette réforme indispensable on enlèvera enfin les haches de silex et les couteaux d’obsidienne aux main des anthropoïdes de M. le professeur Haeckel, gens qui en font un si mauvais usage.

(Henry Thomas) Buckle (1821-1862) mentioned together with Darwin was a British historian, who wrote a History of Civilization, volume I published in 1857, and volume II published in 1861. It is true that also Buckle considered society ruled by laws as fixed as those of physics, wherefore he relied on statistics rather than on individual history, and it is also true that Buckle considered Europeans to be the most culturally advanced. However Bockle had been writing on his History before Gobineau published his book. As for Darwin, I fail to see much similarity between anything Darwin wrote and Essai sur l'Inégalité des Races Humaines.

The Essai sur l'Inégalité des Races Humaines comprises six volumes, the first of which carries the title "Considérations Préliminairies; Définitions, Recherche et Exposition des Lois Naturelles qui Régissent le Monde Social"; that is, "Preliminary Considerations; Definitions, Research and Exposition of the Natural Laws that rule the Social World", quite a positivist title. But unlike Auguste Comte, Gobineau appears not to believe that a common culture can be established. As he writes at the end of the preface:

Aujourd’hui on aime les grandes unités, les vastes amas où les entités isolées disparaissant. C’est ce qu’on suppose être le produit de la science. A chaque époque, celle-ci voudrait dévorer une vérité qui la géne. Il ne faut pas s’en effrayer. Jupiter échappe toujours à la voracité de Saturne, et l’epoux et le fils de Rhée, dieux, l’un comme l’autre, règnent, sans pouvoir s’entredétruire, sur la majesté de l’univers.

That is, it is a never-ending battle, not the final victory of the one over the other, to become the majesty of the universe.

Since I do not have the time and qualifications for a closer examination of the book itself, I will here limit myself to a few points that I have found of particular interest.

In Vol I, chapter 11, "Les différences ethniques sont permantes" ("The ethnic differences are permanent"), Gobineau writes:

Qu’Adam soit l’auteur de notre espèce blanche, il faut l’admettre certainement. Il est bien claire que les Ecritures veulent qu’on l’entendre ainsi, puisque de lui descendent des générations qui incontestablement ont été blanches. Ceci posé, rien ne prouve que, dans la pensée des premiers rédacteurs des généalogies adamites, les créatures qui n’appartenaient pas à la race blanche aient passé pour faire partie de l’espèce.

That is, "Adam is the originator of our white species", and creatures not part of the white race are not part of that species. It should here be understood that Gobineau operates with three main races: white, black, and yellow. The biblical division into Hamites, Semites, and Japhetites is for Gobineau a division within the white race. What should be noticed here, in particular, is that Gobineau considers the Bible to be a reliable source of actual history.

Vol I, chapter 16, the final chapter of that volume, carries the long superscript "Récapitulation; caractères respectifs des trois grandes races; effects sociaux des mélanges; supérorité du type blanc et, dans ce type, de la famille ariane", or, in English, "Recapitulation; respective characters of the three great races; social effects of [racial] mixtures; superiority of the white type, and within that type, of the Aryan family". Gobineau claims that there have been no more tahn ten great civilizations, and that they have all been started by the white race. These civilizations are:

1. The Indian civilization - built around a branche of the white Aryan nation. Note: actually there was an Indian civilization before the Aryan invasion.

2. The Egyptian civilization - founded by an Aryan colony from India. Charles Darwin writes in footnote 5 of The Descent of Man, chapter 7, "On the Races of Man" the following:

   With respect to the figures in the famous Egyptian caves of Abou-Simbel, M. Pouchet says ('The Plurality of the Human Races,' Eng. translat., 1864, p. 50), that he was far from finding recognisable representations of the dozen or more nations which some authors believe that they can recognise. Even some of the most strongly-marked races cannot be identified with that degree of unanimity which might have been expected from what has been written on the subject. Thus Messrs. Nott and Gliddon ('Types of Mankind,' p. 148), state that Rameses II., or the Great, has features superbly European; whereas Knox, another firm believer in the specific distinctness of the races of man ('Races of Man,' 1850, p. 201), speaking of young Memnon (the same as Rameses II., as I am informed by Mr. Birch), insists in the strongest manner that he is identical in character with the Jews of Antwerp. Again, when I looked at the statue of Amunoph III., I agreed with two officers of the establishment, both competent judges, that he had a strongly-marked negro type of features; but Messrs. Nott and Gliddon (ibid. p. 146, fig. 53), describe him as a hybrid, but not of "negro intermixture."

   So, it's not as if it is all that easy to determine the racial status of the ancient Egyptians.

3. The Assyrians - to which are attached other civilizations such as the Jewish and the Phoenician. According to Gobineau, these are Hamites and Semites. Gobineau places the Iranian civilizations here, but mentions that they are Aryans.

4. The Greeks - originally Aryans, but with Semitic elements.

5. The Chinese civilization - like the Egyptian founded by an Aryan colony from India.

6. The old civilization of the Italian Peninsula - became a mosaic of Celts, Iberians, Aryans, and Semites.

7. The Germanic races transforme in the 5^th century the western spirit - they were Aryans.

8. The Alleghanian civilizations in America.

9. The Mexican civilizations in America.

10. The Peruvian civilization in America.

In Vol VI, chapter 7, "Les indigènes américans" ("The native Americans"), discusses the racial status of the native Americans and ends up suggesting that at least the royal families of the three American civilization groups mentioned above (8.-10.) were white, even Aryans of Scandinavian origin.