Q&A: Does evolution refute the premise of the physico-theological argument?
Does evolution refute the premise of the physico-theological argument?
Question
Hello.
A difficult question occurred to me, and I’m surprised I never thought of it until now.
After all, the second law says that something complex does not arise from something simple by chance, whereas evolution seems to show that it does.
Obviously, evolution requires very precise initial conditions (laws of nature and a first living chain), but once those are in place, the process that leads from a simple cell to a human being is completely random—meaning the mutations are completely random (not in the sense that it is truly random as in quantum phenomena, but in the sense that you do not need meticulous planning to determine exactly which tiger will prey on which sheep for the process to succeed. If you let a living cell run on 10 parallel Earths, even though on each one a different tiger would prey on a different sheep, still, on the micro level, after billions of years we would arrive at something very complex), and together with the tautological law that the fittest survives, a clear direction toward complexity emerges here, without a guiding hand operating within the laws.
Doesn’t this refute the premise that the simple does not become complex randomly? Haven’t we found here that logic comes and directs reality?
It seems to me that this is what Gould meant: within the laws of physics, evolution is completely random, and yet there are constraints that guarantee the final result. Those constraints are the logical law that the fittest survives, which gives evolution a clear direction.
Gould showed that you do not always need intelligence in order to arrive at a clear and predefined direction.
Does the Rabbi think that even within the evolutionary process God intervened?
Answer
No. But that is an argument that takes place within the laws, whereas the proof is outside the laws. I explained this in my article and in the third booklet.
Besides, logic does not direct reality; the laws of nature direct it.
Discussion on Answer
Indeed, within the laws the simple can become complex. That is what the laws do.
1) Why view the laws as what gives direction to evolution? Natural selection creates the direction; the laws only make it possible for the biological system not to fall apart?
2) After all, many systems of laws will turn the simple into the complex! Any value given to the force of gravity will cause distant masses to gather into one lump, and thus something simple has quite randomly become complex and order has arisen out of disorder. Even if the gas-particle container in the third booklet were located far out in space, gravity would gather the gas particles together and create a unique state, and the premise of the argument would be refuted.
With all due respect, I’m exhausted. These are simple matters, and I already explained them. If you want to study thermodynamics, then it needs to be learned in an orderly way.
I wasn’t understood properly, because of the title I gave it. I’m not speaking from the standpoint of the proof for God itself, but from the standpoint of the premise itself. God can in any case be proven from outside the laws. (=True, we found a particular case in which the premise does not hold, but it is still reasonable in the other cases, and also in the case of the laws, because there is no evolution of laws.)
The Rabbi always gives examples showing that the simple does not become complex randomly using examples that are *within* our world (broken flowerpot shards do not turn into a flowerpot, a messy room will not become more organized by randomly moving an object, and so on), and now, right there within the laws, reality slaps us in the face with a case where the simple does become complex completely randomly. Of course this does not refute God, since everything proceeds within rigid laws from which God is proven, but once those already exist, evolution plays a completely random game and yet its results are predictable in advance. This is a classic case of flowerpot shards turning into a flowerpot within a framework of minimum-threshold laws that merely *allow* this and do not rule it out (allowing a complete flowerpot [=the anatomy of a living creature] to exist).