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

The Marriage of Science and Religion 205
moving along. Denton observes: “Just how such an utterly different respiratory
system could have evolved gradually from the standard vertebrate
design is fantastically difficult to envisage, especially bearing in mind that
the maintenance of respiratory function is absolutely vital to the life of an
organism to the extent that the slightest malfunction leads to death within
minutes” (211–12). The logic of the paradigm demands gradual changes,
but the facts suggest large leaps. Everywhere researchers look in the family
tree of life, they see complex systematic transformations that demand
explanation, yet they insist on chance as the sole determinant of new
variations and consequent gradualness of change.
As Kuhn predicts, the evolutionary biologists who study the question
make no attempt to subject Darwinism to “falsification.” They are interested
only in “articulating” the paradigm, finding ways to show how it can
be made to account for various biological phenomena. Attempts to demonstrate
the failure of the paradigm are greeted with angry denunciation, not
with thoughtful appraisal of the facts and arguments. If science actually
worked the way the myth declares it to work, the scientific consensus
would be that while there are serious flaws in the argument for Darwinism,
the truth cannot presently be known: too much about the nature of
genetic variation and how it arises is not known. The intransigence of liberal
Darwinists like Gould can be understood in Kuhnian terms: they simply
wish to preserve their central paradigm, to which they have devoted
their careers. But from their point of view, committed Darwinists like
Dennett and Dawkins actually do have reason to believe that Darwinism is
inescapable and necessary regardless of the evidence. Given their mechanistic
materialistic assumptions, they reason that Darwinism must be the
case. No alternative seems possible. Since they “know” the universe to be
nonteleological, the fact that life appears to be teleological can be explained
only by Darwinism. Shaw’s quarrel was thus not really with Darwinism as
such but with the metaphysical basis of Darwinism, or more precisely with
the metaphysical system Darwinism purports to justify.
The mechanists see Darwinism as the linchpin of their philosophy, but
it may be its Achilles’ heel as well. They maintain that the laws of physics,
more or less as they are presently understood, are sufficient to account for
every event in the universe. There is no “higher,” teleological causation.
But how can physics account for consciousness and, in particular, the consciousness
of value? If the laws of physics and chemistry account for all of
biology, it is hard to see why consciousness would even be necessary. Science
rejects the idea that, for example, gravity can be understood as a