Sermon for 18 September 2005, 1st Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois

EVOLUTION AND/OR DESIGN
Ronald J. Glossop

I. Introduction
A. A critical issue of controversy in this country is whether life on Earth, including the existence of humans, is the result of evolution in accord with purely natural forces knowable by scientific experimentation or whether the order found in nature can be explained only by postulating the existence of some supernatural intelligent designer.
B. Of course, this notion of a supernatural Designer of the Earth and life on Earth is not new to human thought. In fact, in ancient times this was the traditional view. Living things, plants as well as animals, are so amazing that their origin and wondrous features seemed to be explicable only if there were some kind of supernatural intelligent Designer.
C. As far as we know, the first persons to question this general assumption of supernatural gods in control of the world were some ancient Greek philosophers such as Thales and Democritus. As early as the 6th century BCE they began to look for natural causes to explain the changes taking place in the world. Along with their skepticism about the gods also came a skepticism about the existence of immaterial souls and the possibility of life-after-death.
D. In that period when philosophy and empirical observation were just beginning there were other thinkers such as Anaxagoras arguing that the changes taking place in nature, and even the very existence of the natural world, could be explained only by postulating some mental, intentional force. Anaxagoras called this force "Nous," which is the Greek word for "Mind." Heraclitus, who emphasized that everything is in a state of flux, also nevertheless maintained that there is an order in this change, an order which he called "Logos," the Greek word for "Word" or "Order" or "Reason." This idea of the central role of Mind or Reason in ordering the world was also promoted by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
E. The Stoic philosophers such as Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, and Epictetus introduced an interesting perspective which is particularly important for our topic. They continued to emphasize the Logos or Order in nature, but they began to view this order as within Nature itself rather than as something imposed on Nature by a separate supernatural Mind. Unlike Plato, they were materialists who did not believe in immaterial souls or the existence of life-after-death. Nevertheless they considered themselves to be "religious" and continued to speak of "the will of Zeus" (or the gods) as controlling nature. They were pantheists. God was viewed as the guiding force at work within Nature, not something outside of Nature.

II. The culmination of the view of God as Designer of the Universe came with the rationalist view known as Deism in the 18th century. A very good source for understanding this point of view is THE AGE OF REASON by Thomas Paine. Many other of our Founding Fathers in this country such as Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were Deists. This Deist view, often called "The Watchmaker" view of God and the universe, is supportive of belief in God while simultaneously being very critical of traditional Christianity. Supported by Newton's theories in physics, the Deists argued that God created the universe and its natural laws such as the law of gravity according to which the universe operates but no longer intervenes. This Deist view of reality meant that there could be no miracles. There could be no Christian Incarnation and Resurrection. There could be no "chosen people" as the Jews believed.

A. To support their view the Deists argued like this: Suppose there is a God who creates the universe. Does God do this in an inadequate manner so that He must constantly intervene with miracles to get things going in the right direction again? A powerful and omniscient and good God would do it right from the start. He would be similar to a watchmaker who makes such a perfect watch that he does not need to fiddle with it again and again.
B. This Deist viewpoint provided a way for its defenders to deal with a problem that has always bedeviled believers, namely, the Problem of Evil: If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and good, why is there any evil in the world? The Deists argued that God had to act in terms of what would be good in general and in the long run. In such a world there might be some individual tragedies, but they were necessary for the greater good in the long run.
C. In response to the complaint of the traditional Christians that the Deist God seemed to be too indifferent to the concerns of individuals, the Deists noted how unseemly egoistic it would be for individuals to expect the laws of the universe to be changed for their individual welfare. For religious people the only legitimate kind of prayer is, "Thy will be done."
D. I think that you can readily see how this Deist viewpoint fits well into Unitarian and Universalist ways of thinking about religion.

III. The influence of Deism came before the 19th-century's new ideas about evolution. Deists still had a human-centered view of the universe. God created the universe for human beings. Deists even argued that one reason the universe had to be law-guided so that humans could more adequately exercise their free-will. What Darwin's ORIGIN OF SPECIES did in 1859 was to raise the question about how unique human beings are and whether other life forms existed only as preliminary steps to the development of human beings.
A. No doubt some evolutionists still think in terms of other life-forms being merely steps on the way to humans, but they don't comprehend the radical nature of Darwin's theory: that evolution takes place by chance variation and natural selection over a long period of time.
1. Chance variation means that the offspring of living organisms are not designed by a Designer to be better adapted to life. Polar bears are not white because a Designer calculated that they would have a better chance of surviving in a snow-covered environment. By chance some bears are albinos. If they happen to be in a snow-covered environment, they have a better chance of surviving and of producing offspring which are more likely to also be albino. Over a long period of time, the proportion of white offspring will steadily increase as long as they are living in a snow-covered environment. In other environments, being an albino is not an advantage so the proportion of white offspring remains low.
2. The Darwinian theory of evolution also raises a question about the place of humans in the totality of living beings. The famous British biologist J. B. S. Haldane was asked the question, "What characteristic of the deity do you chiefly discern in the design of creation?" His terse response was, "An inordinate fondness for beetles." In line with this comment, contemporary biologist Jan Marks wrote, "The creationists claim that we may come to know the creator by deducing Him from his work of Earth. Well, we know that there are 750,000 species of insects now alive. Anyone who has ever had a conversation with an entomologist knows what a deadly dull lot those fascinated by insects can be. To envision the creator expending his divine energy on three quarters of a million different, meticuloulsy crafted bugs necessitates an image of Him as a dismal, insufferable, comic bore!."
3. Expanding on this line of thought, our own Jim Elliott, knowing that he would not be able to be with us today, sent me this e-mail message: "I think the fact that disease-causing critters mutate to overcome our antibiotics is a good example of evolution. And can we really think there was an intelligent designer that gave the virus this capability? Or is there a malevolent designer out there too?"

4. So you can see how the Darwinian theory of evolution raises the Problem of Evil in a new deeper way. If there is a Designer who designed the mechanism of chance variation and natural selection, that Designer will be responsible for all the bad things that come as a result of chance variation and natural selection as well the good.
B. The fact that Darwin's theory makes humans more completely part of the animal world raises uncomfortable questions for traditional religion. If humans are evolved from other primates such as chimpanzees who share so much genetic material with us, on what grounds can one hold that humans have a soul which lives on after death while chimps do not?
C. The Darwinian theory of evolution also does something even more relevant to our topic today. Evolutionary Design does a better job of explaining the apparent design we find in living organisms than does "Intelligent Design."
1. Evolutionary Design explains why we have apparent design but not perfect design, which one might expect from an Intelligent Designer. For example, a favorite example of design advocates is the human eye. Here we have a very intricate organ with fantastic capabilities which until recently were completely beyond what a man-made camera could do. Consider, for example, how our eyes automatically change the focal length of their lens so that we can see things very far away and then instantaneously things very close without even thinking about how to change the focal length of the lens.
2. But our eyes are not perfect, and not just because we often need to wear glasses to assist in getting the right focal length. In one basic respect our eyes are not as well designed as the eyes of an octopus or a squid or other cephalopods. In the eyes of mammals the light must pass through the nerves and blood vessels before it reaches the retina. For cephalopods this is not the case. The nerves and blood vessels in their eyes are on the side of the retina away from the light. An additional advantage of this arrangement is that the cephalopods do not have a blind spot where the optic nerve enters the eye as we do. For the Intelligent Design advocates this situation presents a difficult problem (unless they want to argue that for some reason God wanted cephalopods to have better designed eyes than humans and other mammals). But for advocates of Evolutionary Design there is no problem. Organisms with different histories have evolved different "designs" to deal with similar problems.
3. The Intelligent Design view also has another problem. It assumes that there is some disembodied mind that is somehow influencing what happens in nature. When we deal with humans, we can understand how their ideas can be converted into actual things in nature. Humans have physical hands and fingers which they can use to manipulate objects in nature. Even if there is a disembodied mind which has ideas about how to create objects, how could these ideas be implemented? Besides, in all of our experience minds are not disembodied things but dependent on physical brains. The notion of a mind which is not the product of a brain, is something which is completely outside of our experience. The notion of a mind without a body may be the basis of some interesting myths about gods and spirits but it is not something that we have experienced as a reality.

IV. Going back to Stoicism, let us note the possibility of understanding the Evolutionary Design found in living organisms in another way, though this observation will not apply to Intelligent Design. Maybe there is some kind of "divine force," something working for good, within Nature. Maybe it is not just an accident that we live in a world where apparent design occurs and where progress appears to take place (although we must constantly remind ourselves not to generalize too quickly from our very limited experience on one small planet in a huge and expanding universe). In the past I have said that a good definition of "God" is "a force working for good." I have noted that at least sometimes there seems to be a force working for good in humans, that is, that "God" exists in humans. For me it is still an open question whether there might also somehow exist a force (but definitely not a disembodied mind) working for good from within the non-human physical universe.

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