Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

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200 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion sufficiently adaptive. As Darwin saw it, one could regard the process as operating as if the variations sprang up by chance. Modern Darwinians do insist on pure chance. But why? What do they mean by asserting—as a positive fact—that inheritable variations are always random? Essentially they are saying that it does not matter how the variations arise. It is irrelevant. How do they know that? The biologists have no such knowledge of the forces that produce genetic variation. What they have is a tremendous faith that whatever those forces turn out to be, they will have nothing to do with the direction that life actually takes. The difficulty, from a scientific perspective, is that it is very difficult to test such an assertion. As a result, Darwinism dances on the edge of being “unfalsifiable” in Popperian terms. It is easy to describe what a random result might be in a simple system such as the machines that generate lottery numbers with air pressure and numbered Ping-Pong balls. That is because while it is impossible to calculate the trajectory of an individual ball, we can be certain that all the balls are the same and similar forces are acting on all of them. But what if the balls had slightly different weights and shapes? The outcome would still be random in some sense (it could not be precisely predicted), but repeated trials would produce a different pattern of outcomes. Over time, some numbers would be clearly favored over others. But if your observation of these trials is limited to a very few (as it generally is in evolutionary biology), how can you say if a given outcome is the result of “chance”? Or more precisely, how can you “falsify” the assertion that only chance is operating? Monkeys and Typewriters Darwinism does make predictions, although vague, that have been challenged. Several thoughtful, reasoned, and well-informed attacks on natural selection have been made in recent years. Two in particular—Robert G. Wesson’s Beyond Natural Selection and Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis—are notably balanced and informative. 2 Denton looks at Darwinism from the perspective of Kuhn’s dialectic of normal and revolutionary science. His contention is that the Darwinian paradigm is in a state of advanced crisis, the state at which anomalies have become inescapable and obvious, engendering heated debate and passion among those in the profession. But as Kuhn maintains, the old paradigm is clung to no matter how glaring the anomalies become until a new paradigm is offered to take its place. And science has not found a replacement for Darwinism. Like a
The Marriage of Science and Religion 201 volcano on the verge of eruption after gathering energy during a long dormancy, evolution is a theory waiting for revolution. This is not the place to describe the many technical objections to Darwinism that have been raised, but it is easy to describe their general tenor. Most of the difficulties are related to the way chance operates in complex systems. As systems increase in complexity, the chances of finding appropriate or viable variation at random plummets at an accelerating rate. Living organisms are enormously complex systems. Most people who are not mathematically inclined have little grasp of the improbabilities involved. One still occasionally hears the assertion, often attributed to T. H. Huxley, that six monkeys randomly pounding away at typewriters could, given enough time, produce all the books in the British Museum. While this is literally true, the time required would make the age of the universe look like a nanosecond. Let us take an example somewhat less ambitious than the contents of the British Museum or the works of Shakespeare (also cited as a feasible product of simian labor). Consider the following sentence: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This sentence contains seventy-nine discrete symbols, including letters, spaces, and punctuation. Let us say that the total number of choices is thirty: twenty-six letters (ignoring capitals), a space, period, question mark, and comma (for all other punctuation). A computer programmed to select symbols at random would have a chance of one in thirty of getting the first letter right and the same probability for each successive choice. So the chance of getting the first word (two letters) right is 1/30 x 1/30 or 1/900. The probability diminishes exponentially with each new letter so where n = number of letters, the probability of getting the correct combination is: Or in the case of the sentence above: 1 30 n 1 30 79 That gives a denominator, expressed in scientific notation, of 4.93x10 116 . The number of seconds in a year is 31,536,000 or 3.15x10 7 . The age of the universe is presently thought to be about 15 billion or 1.5x10 10 years.
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Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religio
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Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religio
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For Jalma, who made it possible.
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Contents Foreword by R. F. Dietrich
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Foreword “I believe because it is
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Preface Foreword xi The seed of thi
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Preface xiii hope to reach some of
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Introduction Preface xv Here we hav
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Introduction xvii the facts asked i
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o I Foundations of Faith
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Unity 1 A Creed for Living A Faith
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A Creed for Living 5 ticism toward
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A Creed for Living 7 posed to the i
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A Creed for Living 9 ally—at the
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A Creed for Living 11 tions of deat
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A Creed for Living 13 For many the
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A Creed for Living 15 fying faith.
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A Creed for Living 17 We have inesc
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Realism 19 Thus, I blush to add, yo
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Realism 21 evenhanded. Tyndall pres
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Realism 23 no scoundrels. A similar
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Realism 25 sage and confuse and dis
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Realism 27 tific materialism is utt
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Realism 29 of his fellows) is natur
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Realism 31 to be tied down to textb
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Realism 33 as they do not denote an
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Realism 35 women who disparage home
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Realism 37 woven out of words and i
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Consistency 3 The Will and Its Resp
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The Will and Its Responsibilities 4
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II o A Guide to Art and Life
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Dramatic Realism 4 A Playwright’s
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Illusionism Is Not Realism A Playwr
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Contradictions in Scientific Realis
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A Playwright’s Progress 79 view,
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A Playwright’s Progress 81 horror
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A Playwright’s Progress 83 My pla
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A Playwright’s Progress 85 disast
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A Playwright’s Progress 87 Shaw i
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A Playwright’s Progress 89 jectiv
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A Playwright’s Progress 91 suprem
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A Playwright’s Progress 93 certai
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A Playwright’s Progress 95 In cal
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A Playwright’s Progress 97 pishly
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A Playwright’s Progress 99 too
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A Playwright’s Progress 101 woman
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A Playwright’s Progress 103 focus
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A Playwright’s Progress 105 Candi
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A Playwright’s Progress 107 Shaw
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A Playwright’s Progress 109 strug
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A Playwright’s Progress 111 Not t
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A Playwright’s Progress 113 Amiab
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A Playwright’s Progress 115 find
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A Playwright’s Progress 117 sexua
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A Playwright’s Progress 119 culti
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A Playwright’s Progress 121 ing t
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The Organic and the Didactic 5 Majo
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Major Barbara 125 fundamental confl
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Major Barbara 127 picture, but Majo
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Major Barbara 129 acters in a play,
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Major Barbara 131 goes his own way,
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Major Barbara 133 have you ever sav
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Major Barbara 135 gibbet, while Chr
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Major Barbara 137 Moral responsibil
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Major Barbara 139 motto is “Unash
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Major Barbara 141 (this is explicit
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Major Barbara 143 eryone else in th
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Major Barbara 145 which he himself
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Ethics 6 Ethics, Economics, and Gov
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Page 251 and 252: IV o A Peroration
Page 253 and 254: 8 Catching Up with Shaw Shaw procla
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Page 259 and 260: Catching Up with Shaw 241 rialists
Page 261 and 262: Catching Up with Shaw 243 Such goal
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Page 267 and 268: Notes 249 turbing, these attitudes
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Works by Shaw Works Cited Notes 251
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Works Cited 253 Shaw and Ibsen: Ber
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Works Cited 255 ———. Introduc
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Works Cited 257 McRory, Desmond J.
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Works Cited 259 Weismann, August. E
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Aquinas, Thomas, 52 Archer, William
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Saussure, Ferdinand de, 74 Schopenh
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