It's widely believed that Charles Darwin lost his faith when he discovered evolution. And many contemporary atheists proclaim themselves followers of Darwin in this sense. Michael Shermer, for instance, writes that he abandoned Christianity when he learned about evolution; finally he could see how there could be design--or the appearance of design--without a designer. Richard Dawkins writes that it was Darwin who finally made it possible to be an "intellectually fulfilled atheist."
In reality Darwin's atheism had little to do with his discovery of evolution. First of all Darwin was never a very devout Christian. He was raised as a nominal Anglican. It says something about Anglicanism in Britain that a lukewarm Christian like Darwin actually considered becoming a clergyman. What turned Darwin against Christianity, however, was two things.
First, several of his children either died or has chronic illnesses. This was probably heriditary, as Darwin himself suffered for most of his life from one ailment or the other. When Darwin's daughter Annie died at a young age, however, Darwin was inconsolable. Usually a man of the stiff upper lip, Darwin could not stop himself from weeping even in public. Darwin blamed God for Annie's untimely death. This was several years before Darwin published his Origin of Species.
After Annie's death, Darwin began to reflect morbidly on mortality, and during his process he recalled that his own famous grandfather Erasmus Darwin, as well as several other family members and friends, were unbelievers. Since Darwin saw them as good and respectable people, he angrily fulminated against the doctrine of eternal damnation, asking what kind of a God would consign good people to hell just because they refused to accept Christianity? The thought of all these people in hell filled Darwin with such revulsion that he completely jettisoned Christianity.
At the same time Darwin recognized that his theory of evolution was quite compatible with Christianity. When the American biologist Asa Gray wrote Darwin to say that his theory of evolution demonstrated how God created species, Darwin congratulated Gray for being the first one to see the point. In England, the preacher-poet Charles Kingsley argued for the compatibility with evolution and Christianity, and Darwin encouraged his efforts.
True, evolution is inconsistent with the six-day account of creation, but since the earliest days of Christianity, Christian writers like Augustine have had no problem with interpreting the first book of Genesis allegorically. After all the Hebrew word can mean "day" but it can also mean "period" or "epoch." Only a small segment of Christians--mostly fundamentalists--are uncompromisingly wedded to the six-day account.
Evolution, however, says nothing about who or what created the universe. Evolution doesn't even say anything about how life got started. Evolution merely describes how one life form gave rise to another. Somewhat comically writers like Dawkins and Daniel Dennett argue that evolution is a kind of master key that unlocks the universe. It isn't hard to see that atheism is getting in the way of clear reasoning here. If you doubt this, go to Youtube and watch again my debate with Daniel Dennett. Unfortunately I cannot also direct you to my debate with Dawkins, since Timorous Richard doesn't want to get into the arena with me.
Darwin lost his faith over the "problem of evil," an issue that has been coming up in my recent debates, and one that I intend to address in future blog postings. It's time to set at rest, however, the old myth that evolution is a scientific refutation of theism in general or Christianity in particular. Darwin himself knew it was not so, even if his dimmer acolytes haven't figured that out yet.
Reader Comments ( Page 4 of 86)
46. In pati's honor, and since I was asked to on the previous blog that nobody's reading anymore, I'll post this LONGEST of blog entries from me...
Also because I'm sure that Dinesh loves it when I do.
Anyhow, here goes:
The "Big Brain" speculations:
We're the designer
We're the designer. All of us, together, designed this place, by our very attempts to observe and understand it, from time immemorial. We created the dream-reality within which we now find ourselves. It's not solid, dead matter and energy like we think it is; it's all just consciousness. All that exists is consciousness, a vast sea of consciousness in which we are patterns of consciousness within the larger whole.
The world's far from perfect because the designers are far from perfect.
There's no plan, other than seeking for it to make sense. That's why it makes sense. Because we need it to. That's why it looks designed. And the closer we look at reality, the finer detail we provide for us to see. The more powerful our telescopes become, the larger the universe gets. It's all in our expectations and we fix it in place with our logic and science.
That's where creation happens. In our observations and expectations. In our minds. It's all in our minds, but our minds are all one at the deepest level anyhow, so it all agrees. It has to. We're all one.
I know, I need to take my meds, etc... except that, it is not as crazy as it sounds.
Science and evolution guys, I know where you stand as well, but I like to think that your side is at least capable of keeping a truly open mind about it. It's not as if evolution isn't real. It's just that, as it turns out, matter isn't. :-)
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Or, in more detail:
What is this universe, if indeed God does not exist? I mean, weird things sometimes happen that nothing can really explain. Psychic events. Healing through prayer. ESP. Ghosts. Out-of-body experiences. Sightings of the Blessed Mother. Or the devil. Stigmata. Personal "miracles" and occasional contacts with divinity or consciousness or spirit or SOMETHING that leaves us confused or exultant or suicidal.
What is this place? What is the most logical conclusion, when even science seems suspect, at least in explaining some phenomena?
I say it's all consciousness. Like a dream, if you will. Not a normal dream, but similar. More realistic, of course, for one thing. But a "dream" in whose head? Who is dreaming it?
WE are, silly! In fact, it's a dream without a specific dreamer required, since to think one is required is missing the point. We ALL dream it together. Since we're one. We are the dreamer and the dream.
And since we're the most advanced life form around in this particular dream, we're the best of the dreamers, the most able to construct a complicated dream like this. No god required at all. We did it; as we looked at it, looked FOR it, it all became real. We looked for something, and we dreamt it up as we looked, just in time to see it and think that we had nothing to do with it. The closer we looked, the finer the detail that we created. The farther away in space that our telescopes can see, the more of the dream becomes real, the larger the universe becomes. We find new stars, but were they there before we had the telescope to look? What I’m saying is, incredibly enough, perhaps not.
And it's easy to see why some people think that God is real, since if they believe it hard enough, reality will give them false evidence of it being true due to their preoccupation with it warping their vision of reality.
What would be the simplest explanation for this universe? That would account for the maximum number of observations that we've made of it? I used to ask myself this all the time. I knew it couldn't be something that we'd thought of before, since all of those theories have huge holes in them, even science in a way, though science is the best single one of all so far. But still science sees infinities in time and distance, and quantum paradoxes galore, along with things like the wave-particle duality and entanglement, which are hard to explain. SO I thought and thought, and studied a lot of different sources, and this is what I came up with...
Simplest Explanation for this Universe:
It's all a vast mind, or very similar to one. Now I KNOW that's a hard one for a christian, or most anybody, to ever believe. But give me a chance to explain. Oh, and if you can't follow this, it doesn't mean that it's not true, so perhaps some study would be in order, at least before you dismiss it. Not that you won't.
Imagine it as if we're all complex thought patterns in a vast mind of some sort. We think of ourselves as matter, and the universe as matter and energy and space and time, but if it were all more like a mind, it negates the problems of the infinite. The universe would be as large as we think it is, and as old as we think it is... The more we looked, the more we'd find, but in a mind this is all interplay of consciousness and not the real traversing of space, so infinity is not a problem... We feel as solid matter and a rock feels hard and heavy, but they're consciousness or thoughts too, but since WE are as well, the rock feels heavy and we feel solid to ourselves. As we've developed over the years we've formed this vast mind by our subconscious expectations of it, since it IS us, and all other things as well. Thus it conforms to our expectations of it, follows logical rules, etc. We are individuals, yes, but only at the conscious and near-conscious levels. At the deep subconscious level we all share the same identity, as does everything else, since we're all made of the one thing, mind, in a world of the same. So, the person looking out of your eyes and calling yourself "Me" is, at the deepest level, IDENTICAL with the person that looks out of MY eyes and says the same. God, or the Universe, is ONE, and we're all a part of it, connected at every point. There's only ONE "sense-of-identity" in the universe. That's what that means. We just all have it and think it unique to us as individuals, and it's not. Now if in this vast mind you manage to convince yourself that it's all due to an anthropomorphic God, this reality/mind will accomodate you and give you "signs" that you're on the right track, EVEN THOUGH YOU AREN'T!!! It will give you exactly what you expect it to in your deep subconscious. If I meditate strongly enough, I get the same types of signs, and I'm not a believer in any God, really. Strange coincidences, synchronicities, and actual events taking place that related to my meditation... Even at times, wish-fulfillment... You can produce this with prayers, if you REALLY believe deeply. It won't matter that what you REALLY believe in isn't TRUE, either. You can pray to a big Shoe in the sky, and if you have enough belief, real-world phenomena can and will occurr that seem to be an answer to your "prayers" with no god needed other than this universe, which in it's entirety, can be called God but more accurately is just the mind that we all call home. It's not a human mind, but it's composed of all minds and all things.
Seems simple enough, if you have an imagination. Now tell me why it can't be true. You can't. In fact, it explains EVERYTHING. Not one thing left out. It's the only theory that can even come close to doing that. All scientific problems, the mind-body problem, the placebo effect, miracles, faith-healings, synchronicities, deja-vu, "signs," ESP, clairvoyance, all psychic phenomena including hauntings, and even your belief in your god.
It can’t be proven yet, but it looks like it might be provable in the near future, if it’s true, of course. The beginnings of proof are already there. Look at the quantum realm, with all its strangeness and problems, which vanish if we assume that the universe is all consciousness. But as of right now, it can’t be proven. Neither can your God, or anyone else’s, but since it explains not only your god but all others, and science, and scientific fallacies and paradoxes, and indeed ALL mysteries, and has hopes of being proven in time by science, it’s far superior to any other faith or religion. By Occam’s Razor, it is the most likely to be the correct theory, if you detach yourself from your habitual view of reality and just think of the probabilities from an un-reality-biased perspective.
For me, I was the agnostic almost-atheist that loved science and the scientific method, was completely skeptical of anything that even smacked of the paranormal, then at about age 36 started to get 'signs' or more accurately perhaps jungian type synchronicities in my day-to-day life, synchronicities that I soon realized always related to thoughts expressed when I was in an emotionally excited state, such as when I was joking around with friends. Oh, and since the friends involved saw them too and thought that they were creepy, I know that it wasn't just a delusion. All of this worldview of mine that I have expressed above came about in my mind as a RESULT of my having these experiences and then investigating them with various thought experiments as my tools, all subjective of course, but compelling nonetheless. Very compelling.
Godless Heathen Brian at 10:36AM on May 5th 2008
47. Man_in_Wilderness,
Whenever you guys would describe politicians as "socialists", I always thought you were diving in the Socialism=Communism=Nazism=Satanism trap that jingoists proudly boast, if for no other reason, to prove their Patriotism. When you described socialism as simply government controlled distribution of ownership, and used the modernized Grasshopper story, I finally get what you're trying to say.
GHB,
Yesterday I had this interesting thought. I once described a conceptual depiction of God as a ball covered with eyes on stalks, and we are the eyes. Yesterday I was thinking we are God. This is more like Big Mind, but if we pretend we have a centralized consciousness, everything you experience God experiences, and our lives are not simply "islands" of experience. e.g. If you beat a little kid up, the central consciousness feels the kid's embarrassment and your asshole sense of superiority at the same time. If you have sex, God is having sex. Doesn't that sound like a nice thing to do for God?
Mokele Mbembe at 10:38AM on May 5th 2008
48. GHBrian, where are the footnotes, where are the citations from previous blog pages?
JefFlyingV at 10:41AM on May 5th 2008
49. Yes it is, mokele...
I've heard it analogized as Indra's Net...
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Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infintely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra%27s_net
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Also the concept of maya is a useful one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_%28illusion%29
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But I've often thought is it in a similar way to your view there. That we're God's senses, and God (the central intelligence, if that's even the case) experiences it all through is. But I tend to lean more toward the idea that we are god, in the sense that we are the creators of all this. So no central intellignece, except that, when we die, we return to gestalt intelligence, as in, our viewpoint goes from the "I" to the "We"..... See, we have the "we" viewpoint already, but only in our deepest cubconscoius mind, which is shared by all of us. It's more of a "group I" rather than a "we" come to think of it. So when we LOSE our overlay of personal identity at death, what's left to us is that group mind. And from it, new beings come into manifestation, so one would think that we (group I) must in some way get to contribute to the new manifestations. To call it central seems wrong, since it's everywhere. But come to think of it, "everywhere," as in the entire known universe, is quite possibly maya or illusion, and space doesn't really exist either, so perhaps to even speak of "everywhere" is a mistake. Two correllated particles can become entwined and transcend all distance in their reactions to the spin changes of the other. If distance itself is an illusion, that's easily explained.
Do you have brain cramps yet?
Godless Heathen Brian at 10:53AM on May 5th 2008
50. 47. GHBrian, where are the footnotes, where are the citations from previous blog pages?
JefFlyingV at 10:41AM on May 5th 2008
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Not sure what you mean, jeff. On the previous blog I added a bunch of NEW posts at the end that I wrote today, but they're back there.
Godless Heathen Brian at 10:57AM on May 5th 2008
51. This Just In........ And it doth suck profusely.
10,000 dead in Myanmar. Another 3000 missing. Cyclone.
I am heartbroken here. So sad. Seriously. This sucks.
I guess you christians can pray for their souls, but they're probably all buddhists, and you KNOW where THEY go...
Hey... Where DO Buddhists go in Christian theology? Tell me not to hell... If you really believe all these people are going straight to hell, or that Myanmar deserved this somehow for it's "sins..." I'll retch all over my keyboard, I swear I will...
Godless Heathen Brian at 11:03AM on May 5th 2008
52. Excerpt from the "MAYA ILLUSION" page, link posted above...
The goal of enlightenment is to understand this — more precisely, to experience this: to see intuitively that the distinction between the self and the Universe is a false dichotomy. The distinction between consciousness and physical matter, between mind and body (refer bodymind), is the result of an unenlightened perspective.
Godless Heathen Brian at 11:09AM on May 5th 2008
53. Its amazing how much time and energy people spend on hating and critcizing others beliefs or lifestyles. This world is big enough for all of us.Lets start behaving like human beings for a change.This world would be CHOAS without basic order
or respect for life. That comes from tradition, mainly religion. Whatever you call yourselves,
atheist, theist, christians, jews, buddist, we all
follow some form of higher standard. Keep it real.
somegirl at 11:13AM on May 5th 2008
54. "Its amazing how much time and energy people spend on hating and critcizing others beliefs or lifestyles. "
Yeah, Maybe it should be budgeted to 20 min a day. It still has to get done. You'll know what I mean if you pay attention to the things people believe.
Mokele Mbembe at 11:22AM on May 5th 2008
55. e.g. If you beat a little kid up, the central consciousness feels the kid's embarrassment and your asshole sense of superiority at the same time.
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Well, I guess you're thinking of the central consciousness like I do the "Group 'I'"
Because I've had this same thought, only it was a murder I was thinking of as an example. So the group mind experiences both the terror of the victim and the twisted zeal of the maniac killing him. Yes. That seems right.
It is even possible that the group mind experiences time very differently. Perhaps all at once, even. So it can experience your birth, first orgasm, and death all at once. Irrelevant of whether the last part has even happened yet here. Since time is also an illusion, a necessary one for us to have experiences in this 'matter-energy' format. Experiences as solid beings, I mean.
Godless Heathen Brian at 11:23AM on May 5th 2008
56. It is very difficult to read some of the stuff people write here. It is weird how people can consider anything DD says as a total insult to atheists but have no problem with calling him all sorts of colorful adjectives in the same breath. The language of hate is cussing, and if you think cuss words add any intellectual hight to a conversation maybe you haven't been around non-educated people lately. But cuss words are all they use in order to express their frustrations. It has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Just becuase you are free to do something, that doesn't mean it is appropiate for every occasion.
Most of the atheists who write comments to this blog only know some theological perspectives some barely know any. But, many are just blatently not interested in knowing anything other than what they know now. When people aren't interested in listening and only interested in hearing the sound of their own ideas (or reading their own words) you will get the contradictions that we see all the time on this blog. How is it possible to call DD hateful and in the same breath call him D'idiot! Hmmm. If indeed DD is hateful I can tell you he is not alone.
I have been reading this blog almost daily for the past year and what I have seen is a bunch of people who think they are intellectuals just because they dont believe in God and know what a Strawman argument is by definition (but maybe not in practice). To say things like "DD is not considered a scholar" is totaly out of line considering that ever other scholar considers him worthy of debate (except of course Dawkins). Also it is important to understand that just because your not in agreement with someones opinion that doesn't make the other a liar. Please remember that the way we process information and believe in concepts is not understood by everyone. You can process all sorts of stuff and never believe in any of it but you will only believe in that which has influenced your life. And influence requieres some degree of relationship. That means that your beliefs are never totally rational but are based also on the type of relationships you have and the emotions you are experiencing when you receive the information. As an example: If a policeman were to show up at my door at 8:00 AM to tell me that he wants to arrest my wife because she killed 3 people last night, I would tell him he is making a mistake. If that officer were to show me evidence that "proves" that my wife was the killer, I still wouldn't believe him. If the policeman were to ask me why I didn't believe him over my wife I would tell him that the relationship I have with my wife gives me a unique perspective, and that perspective let's me know that my wife couldn't have killed those people. Now, I could be wrong about the murders, but my perspective on the situation will never be the same as those who are looking at the situation as cold hard facts.
Everybody who writes on this blog has a vested interest to some degree in seeing their belief prosper in some form. This makes us all parcial and doubtful when it comes to listening to someone who doesn't share our same beliefs. The only way any of us will ever make a dent in the belief system of one another is to treat each other with respect and dignity. Even if we aren't in agreement we can still be cordial and at the end of the day some of us might even wind up becoming friends who disagree. That's much better than wasting our time trying to convince each other that the other point of view is pointless and stupid.
shiningstarxport at 11:26AM on May 5th 2008
57. GHB.....you should watch "What the BLEEP" if you haven't already....definitely supports the "we are one" theory
Strados at 11:38AM on May 5th 2008
58. Every time I hear someone using the archaic and childish word "cussing" I think of Leave It To Beaver. "Gee Wally, dad said that we shouldn't cuss..."
I won't "cuss" in your church if you don't pontificate on my blog... You're not my father. You act like my mother, but you're not her either. So, do I really have to tell you what I think of your attitude? Just read the blog and post, don't appoint yourself policeman.
Godless Heathen Brian at 11:39AM on May 5th 2008
59. Actually, EVERYONE should watch that movie if they haven't already.
Strados at 11:40AM on May 5th 2008
60. GHB- actually my high school students use the word cuss all the time....it's probably turned into an urban thing
Strados at 11:41AM on May 5th 2008