Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism Read Online Free PDF Page A

ignores, for example, is John Locke’s claim that “it is as impossible to conceive that ever pure incogitative Matter should produce a thinking intelligent Being, as that nothing should of itself produce Matter.” 22 Many have concurred with Locke, but Dawkins fails to so much as mention this kind of claim. Nor does he try to show either that there is no such person as God, or that, if there is, it is not possible that he should have somehow set up and directed the whole process. 23 And why should he? After all, he’s a biologist and not a philosopher.
    Instead, Dawkins tries to refute some of the more specific and specifically biological arguments to the effect that unguided naturalselection could not have produced certain of the wonders of the living world—the mammalian eye, for example, or the wing, or the bat’s sonar. He argues that the objectors have not made their case. Here he sometimes stumbles; for example, he apparently confuses the question “What good is 5 percent of an eye?” with “What good is 5 percent vision?”: “An ancient animal with 5 per cent of an eye,” he says, “might indeed have used it for something other than sight, but it seems to me at least as likely that it used it for 5 per cent vision.” 24 But not just any old 5 percent of an eye will produce 5 percent vision; indeed there may not be
any
5 percent of an eye that produces 5 percent vision.
    Just for purposes of argument, let’s concede that Dawkins succeeds in refuting each of these claims of impossibility. Clearly that doesn’t entail that the impossibility claims are false; it shows only that certain arguments for them are not cogent. The question still remains:
is
it possible that unguided natural selection generate all the stunning marvels of the living world? Dawkins puts this question in the following tripartite fashion:
(3) Is there a continuous series of Xs connecting the modern human eye to a state with no eye at all?
(4) Considering each member of the series of hypothetical Xs connecting the human eye to no eye at all, is it plausible that every one of them was made available by random mutation of its predecessor?
(5) Considering each member of the series of Xs connecting the human eye to no eye at all, is it plausible that every one of them worked sufficiently well that it assisted the survival and reproduction of the animals concerned? 25
     
    Compressing things a bit, we could put the question as follows. Imagine a three-dimensional space—“organic space,” as we might call it—where each of the countably infinite points is a possible life form. Then the Big Question is:
(BQ) Is there a path through organic space connecting, say, some ancient population of unicellular life with the human eye, where each point on the path could plausibly have come from a preceding point by way of a heritable random genetic mutation that was adaptively useful, and that could plausibly then have spread through the appropriate population by way of unguided natural selection? 26
     
    A couple of comments on (BQ). First, the human eye is just a stand-in for life forms generally; the question is not merely whether the human eye could have developed in this way, but whether
all
the current life forms could have. Second, we must start with an
actual
(not merely possible) population of unicellular life, a population that did in fact exist: the claim is that human beings (and hence the human eye) could have developed via unguided natural selection from some population of unicellular organisms that actually existed. Third, the other life forms on the path—the ones “between” the population of unicellular organisms and human beings—must be possible, but need not be actually existent. (That is, they need not be actually instantiated or exemplified; it’s enough if they are possibly instantiated.) Dawkins is really asking whether it is
plausible
that the human eye develop in this way, starting from some population of unicellular