Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Atheism and Theism 95
the failure of mechanistic evolutionary theory. However, to say that it does
not leaves it unexplained how reproduction could emerge out of successive
non-reproductive events.
Admittedly, there are many conceivable circumstances in which chance
forces act upon something in such a way that the effect is the production of
things like the first. Imagine, for example, the improbable but not impossible
situation in which three pieces of slate fall in succession and at different
angles on to a cube of clay cutting it into eight smaller cubes. Interesting as
this might be, it is not the exercise by the cube of a power of reproduction.
Similarly, the mere sundering of organic matter into several pieces is not
a form of asexual reproduction, and nor is it made such by repetition. Certainly,
if a number of distinct individuals of relevantly similar sorts participate
in processes that systematically give rise to the existence of further individuals
of the same sorts, which in turn lead to more of the same or similar and so
on, then it becomes reasonable to attribute powers of replication. But this is
not an explanation of reproduction; it is a description of it. And if to avoid
this conclusion one says that each successive stage is really like the first, not
reproductive but ‘reproductive’ or ‘protoreplicative’, i.e. the product of chance,
then not only does evolutionary biology have no account of systematic reproduction,
which is the basis of its theory of speciation, but what was an initial
improbability is now multiplied unimaginably many millions of times over.
On this account anything could result from anything at any time. It is not
even that one would be saying that the reproductive process can sometimes
go wildly wrong. The idea of ‘going wrong’ presupposes a background of
operational normality, and the idea of a reproductive process is that of something
different in kind from a mere statistical pattern. Certainly, it is not
logically impossible that every single step of evolutionary history should have
been a biological accident in the radical sense now envisaged, as if falling
slates kept quartering cubes here, there and everywhere, many millions of
times. No contradiction is involved in this supposition. Nonetheless it is
incompatible with a realist interpretation of general biology, let alone special
evolutionary theory; and to borrow a delightfully low-key phrase from Richard
Swinburne it is ‘not much to be expected’; or as a Scot might say (with greater
effect, if perhaps less accuracy) ‘nae chance’.
I am not arguing the case for ‘creationist science’, the not logically impossible
but foolish view that there is nothing to evolution; that God made the
world as we find it today, a few thousand or a few hundred thousand years
ago, complete with the fossil record. Early in chapter 1 Jack Smart writes of
how his beliefs about reality are formed in the light of total science. As would
be expected, I cannot agree that this is a wholly adequate methodological
principle (at least as he interprets it). Yet I certainly think that reason supports
the claim of the empirical sciences to be a major source of our knowledge