Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

224 J.J. Haldane
and expansion. One such is my deployment of what were called ‘old-style’
teleological arguments. It has long been supposed that any argument to
design would have to look elsewhere than at the structure and activities of
organisms; because it was assumed that Darwinian theory, or more broadly
natural selection of randomly produced adaptive features, provides a sufficient
alternative hypothesis. The point is not that modern biology is incompatible
with the design hypothesis but that it suggests an alternative naturalistic
explanation, and so refutes the claim that the complexity of living things
and their characteristic activities can only be the result of design. Those who
believed that the universe was created, then looked elsewhere for signs of the
divine mind and believed they saw them in the fine structure of the cosmos
and in the causal regularities of nature, matters which evolutionary theory
did not address.
While agreeing that the latter features are significant and provide the basis
for interesting arguments (see chapter 2, section 6), I am not of the view that
evolutionary theory has put paid to arguments from biology, including its
higher forms such as psychology. Scientific accounts of the origins and evolution
of life leave scope for a design argument if only because mechanistic
explanations do not exclude teleological ones. As reflection on artefacts clearly
shows, the question of how something works is distinct from that of why it
does so, i.e. of what purpose it serves. So if, as I argued, there is irreducible
teleology in nature, and if that calls for some ultimate explanation, then the
fact that natural systems implement their teleologies through mechanisms is
beside the point so far as the truth of their being purpose-driven is concerned.
Apart from that consideration, however, I also argued that theories of natural
evolution do not provide sufficient explanation since they presuppose the
existence at an early stage of self-reproduction, and it has not been shown
that this can arise by natural means from a material base. Even the simplest
of currently existing organisms are far removed from the sort of primitive
forms with which life on earth is presumed to have originated. The question
is how these latter arose. Setting aside theories of extra-terrestrial origins, the
generally favoured view is that life emerged from a long process beginning
with interactions between atmospheric gases, lightning and ultraviolet radiation.
2 The biochemical hypothesis, of which the storm in the primordial soup
forms a part, has been the subject of much research but it faces a number of
difficulties.
It envisages the primordial interactions producing amino acids which then
gave rise to proteins out of which developed primitive, self-replicating cellular
organisms. The steps would be many and every process would take long
periods to establish itself. The problem, however, is not pace or time. It is
rather that cells exhibit a kind of complexity and dependence that makes it
hard to see how they could have evolved from inanimate material. The main