Darwin's Dangerous Idea Read Online Free PDF Page B

of scientific approval: Look round the world. Contemplate the whole and every part of it: You like a mathematical theorem, its denial is supposedly impossible to conceive.
    will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions to a degree And so it seemed to many brilliant and skeptical thinkers before Darwin.
    beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these Almost a hundred years after Locke, another great British Empiricist, David various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each Hume, confronted the issue again, in one of the masterpieces of Western other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have philosophy, his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).
    ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles, exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance—of human design, thought, wisdom, and 4. HUME'S CLOSE ENCOUNTER
    intelligence. Since therefore the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble, and that the Natural religion, in Hume's day, meant a religion that was supported by the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man, though pos-natural sciences, as opposed to a "revealed" religion, which would depend on sessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work revelation—on mystical experience or some other uncheckable source of which he has executed. By this argument a posteriori, and by this argu-conviction. If your only grounds for your religious belief is "God told me so ment alone, do we prove at once the existence of a Deity and his similarity to human mind and intelligence. [Pt. II]
    in a dream," your religion is not natural religion. The distinction would not have made much sense before the dawn of modern science in the seventeenth century, when science created a new, and competitive, standard of evidence Philo, a skeptical challenger to Cleanthes, elaborates the argument, setting for all belief. It opened up the question:
    it up for demolition. Anticipating Paley's famous example, Philo notes:
    "Throw several pieces of steel together, without shape or form; they will Can you give us any scientific grounds for your religious beliefs?
    never arrange themselves so as to compose a watch."5 He goes on: "Stone, and mortar, and wood, without an architect, never erect a house. But the Many religious thinkers, appreciating that the prestige of scientific thought was—other things being equal—a worthy aspiration, took up the challenge. It is hard to see why anybody would want to shun scientific confirmation of one's creed, if it were there to be had. The overwhelming favorite among 4. William Paley carried the Argument from Design into much greater biological detail in his purportedly scientific arguments for religious conclusions, then and now, was 1803 book, Natural Theology, adding many ingenious flourishes. Paley's influential version was the actual inspiration and target of Darwin's rebuttal, but Hume's Cleanthes one version or another of the Argument from Design: among the effects we catches all of the argument's logical and rhetorical force.
    can objectively observe in the world, there are many that are not (cannot be, for various reasons ) mere accidents; they must have been designed to be as 5. Gjertsen points out that two millennia earlier, Cicero used the same example for the same purpose: "When you see a sundial or a water-clock, you see that it tells the time by they are, and there cannot be design without a Designer; therefore, a design and not by chance. How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is Designer, God, must exist (or have existed), as the source of all these devoid of purpose and intelligence, when it embraces everything, including these arti-wonderful