Re: Townhall.com – 2/12/2009 – “The Two Faces of Darwin” – Dinesh D’Souza

D’Sousa calls “Darwin the patron saint of modern atheism”, a rather curious statement considering that atheists not only don’t believe in God’s existence but don’t believe in saints either.

D’Souza quotes Richard Dawkins “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”. What Darwin gave atheists was a scientific model to explain the origin of species without necessarily relying on God, but even without Darwin, atheists had at least as valid a model as those who believed God created the species in a big bang event. While prior to Darwin atheists could not explain the creation of species, creationists could not explain why the story of creation in the Bible failed to explain the historical evidence of the time modification of life forms such as were preserved as fossils and as observed prior to Darwin in the selective breeding of plants and animals.

D’Souza says “Atheists say God does not exist while agnostics say they don't know one way or the other”, but what many agnostics really say is that there is no way to objectively determine whether or not God exists, and thus the question “Does God exist?” is moot because it has no possible testable answer. There is really a big difference between ignorance and logical indeterminacy.

D’Sousa quotes E.O. Wilson as saying “If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species”. I am sure there are atheist evolutionists who would agree with Wilson, but evolution itself neither affirms nor denies the existence of God and nobody really believes evolution “made’ anything --- only explains how certain kinds of things change over time. What the theory of evolution says about God is that (1) if God created the species, God did not do it in a big bang but according the laws of evolution, and that (2) God is not a necessary element in the evolutionary explanation of the origin of the species. Nowhere can any evidence be found that God had anything or nothing to do with the creation of the species.

D’Souza spends too much time looking at what Darwin and others believed compared to time considering the scientific and philosophical implications of what Darwin and others discovered. Unlike history, science itself deals with scientific fact and the utility & verifiable correctness of theory. The history of science deals with the scientists as well as the science, and most of what D’Souza has to say is relevant to the history of the theory of evolution but is completely irrelevant to the science of evolution or the philosophical implications of evolutionary science. Whether someone is atheist, agnostic, or theist may be a predictor of possible bias on the issue of evolution but has absolutely no value in determining whether evolution is a good scientific theory, its implications on the philosophy of science, or whether evolutionary theory is or is not useful in the explanation any particular physical phenomena.