Or maybe it’s not actually random to begin with?
Perhaps the watchmaker is not as blind:link-icon: as Richard Dawkins would have us believe?
“The discovery answers an age-old question that has puzzled biologists since the time of Darwin: How can organisms be so exquisitely complex, if evolution is completely random, operating like a ‘blind watchmaker’?” said Chakrabarti, an associate research scholar in the Department of Chemistry at Princeton. “Our new theory extends Darwin’s model, demonstrating how organisms can subtly direct aspects of their own evolution to create order out of randomness.”
The first assumption here is that evolution is completely random: as far as I can tell, we don’t know that it is. Moreover, we don’t know if what appears, from our viewpoint, to be random is actually random, or is the wholly predictable response of the system to some outside influence we cannot perceive — the proverbial watchmaker, whether teleological in nature or not.
And supposing the existence of said watchmaker, teleological in nature or not as it might be, the second assumption made is that said watchmaker is “blind,” or substantially disconnected from the watch it is manufacturing. As far as I can tell, given the lack of information about the watchmaker which we are operating from anyhow, we certainly know nothing of its blindness, or lack thereof.
Which makes both assumptions statements of faith, after a fashion, and gets back to the previously discussed issue of what happens when the evidence begins to pile up against the atheist argument: “[if] the conclusion that God may have had something to do with it is too much to swallow, you propose a wild scenario without any empirical evidence.”
Note: I’m not actually disagreeing with this new study or its supposition that organisms can influence their own evolutionary course. Coming from the assumption that the Universe, and all life within it, reflects design, and in the understanding that this design has been effected through an ordained and sustained evolutionary process
Indeed, that dovetails rather nicely with certain other theological notions of the Christian faith.
No, I’m simply objecting to the creeping dysteleology that is evident in the base suppositions of the scientist quoted in the article. Because it’s not science that he’s talking about at that point.
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