Professor of Atheism Richard Dawkins grows increasingly shrill.
His outbursts include the following, not very recent, but
typical:
It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who
claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid
or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).
You can, of course, make any point you like providing you don’t
care about first premises. One thing which evidently fails to enter
Professor Dawkins’ mental universe is the idea — accepted by many
scientists — that the theory of evolution is broadly correct, but
as an explanation of life and the human condition it is
incomplete.
We know life exists. We also know it had to be created by
some process. Biology tells us that that process was evolution. It
tells us nothing about what set that process in notion, created the
Earth we stand on, or created the universe from some unimaginable
pre-Creation state without space or time. The idea that the
Universe created itself out of nothing seems somehow
unsatisfactory.
Whether the Heaven and the Earth, and human life, was
created over 13.2 billion years following the Big Bang, or over six
days as a literal reading of Genesis is interpreted as saying,
actually does not matter.
Of course I accept evolution. I find the Biblical
literalists who claim the Earth was created in six days, and who
believe that we are all descended from a couple called Adam and Eve
Fell who because they were tempted by a walking, talking snake,
tiresome. I am more-or-less aware of the historical reasons why
these fundamentalist beliefs took root and persist in some
communities.
But this does not mean that evolution explains everything,
or that it ought to explain everything.
It is not an explanation, for example, of why human beings
(I am tempted to say some human beings) have brains that are not
only far larger than those of any comparable animals, and far
larger than is needed for mere species’ survival, but are also
qualitatively different. I have, of course, seen various theories
advanced to account for the growth in size of the human brain, such
as that it grew bigger as a result of having to cope with
successive Ice-Ages, but these are not really satisfactory
explanations.
Further, they suffer from the great scientific
disadvantage that they can be neither proved not disproved. Other
animals coped with the Ice-Ages by growing to giant sizes and
saving body heat thereby, such as the mastodon, or did not cope at
all and died out. The succession of Ice-Ages did not produce
intelligent bears or tigers, only somewhat bigger ones. Why did the
ancestors of Homo sapiens adopt such a radically different
solution?
Monkeys and men appear to have a common ancestor. Monkeys,
like men, have hands. But, as Chesterton said, the significant
point is not that monkeys have hands, but that, compared to Man,
monkeys do almost nothing with them. A five-year old child can
paint a crude picture of a monkey. But not the wisest monkey ever
painted a picture of a child. Years of experiments trying to teach
apes language show they cannot form even the simplest
sentences.
If a monkey was born capable not only of gathering nuts
and bananas but also of building cathedrals, writing
Hamlet or flying to the moon, we would see it as a major
objection to the pure theory of evolution. We might even be tempted
to believe that a God had intervened somewhere along the
line.
But Man is born capable of doing these things and
has done them. The fact speaks for itself. Further, as far as
paleontology can tell us, Cro-Magnon Man, the earliest form of
Homo sapiens, had brains as good as modern men —
Cro-Magnon Man simply knew less. We know from cave paintings that
16,000 years ago at least Man had highly developed art.
Why? Art is useless for survival. There is no reason why
evolution should have produced it. It is possible to be reminded of
Gandalf’s cryptic comment in The Lord of the Rings:
“Something else is at work.” (About Neanderthal Man we can only
make guesses from a few ambiguous hints — in at least one
Neanderthal burial, for example, a dead body was found to have been
buried bedecked with flowers. Why did the dead Neanderthal’s
fellow-tribesmen take time off from hunting and gathering food to
do that? Further, there were different types of Neanderthal Man and
the more we discover about them the more complex the picture
becomes.)
The unique quality of the human brain is one of the things
which evolution, and Professor Dawkins, fails to explain. Humanity
is special, and evolution can give no reason for it. Shall we
perhaps be so unkind as to paraphrase Professor Dawkins, and call
anyone who believes these things to be fully explained — with that
explanation being perhaps that they are the result of blind chance
— “ignorant, stupid or insane”?
