“IN another lecture I took up the design argument. Here,
too, I presented my own ideas couched in views or comments made by various
people during the previous hundred years or so. I made much of Darwin’s
contradictory statements about design and purpose, to say nothing of natural
selection and chance. The topic demanded more space, but it was not for another
twelve years that I had the opportunity to devote a set of eight lectures to
the design argument taken as a particular aspect of the much broader question
of purpose. I have, however, made it clear that, regardless of the defects of
the mechanism of evolution, the fact of evolution had to be held by a theist
even more firmly than by a materialist. For a materialist merely the power of
matter is at stake, whereas for the theist the honor of the Creator as one who
can endow matter with all the power proper to matter.
“Clearly, a notion of a Creator who had to interfere with
natural processes whenever a new species was to arise, had to appear unworthy
of God, who can and ought to be worshiped, and a theology that has such a God
for its object. By evolution I simply meant that the powers of matter are
wholly sufficient to account for any material transformation insofar as it is
observable and measureable, be it the transformation of species. For the
scientist any species as such has to be a strictly material entity. In that respect
the competence of the scientist is unlimited. By the same token, the scientist
cannot argue against some non-material directive force in nature as long as
that force remains non-material, that is, metaphysical. Such a force cannot be
considered non-existent just because the scientific method forecloses it being
observed, weighed, and measured. Philosophy is required to prove the existence
of such a force, though without ever attributing to it any material
characteristic. The scientist may safely ignore it, though to be consistent he
should also say that he cannot observe life. Life is not merely the motion of
bits of matter and the replicating of their configurations. Fully satisfactory
thinking about evolution implies the often frustrating recognition that one has
to handle at the same time two balls, standing for two mutually irreducible
sets of concepts.”
~Stanley L. Jaki: A Mind’s Matter: An Intellectual Autobiography, Chap. 6—The Gifford Lectureship.
~Stanley L. Jaki: A Mind’s Matter: An Intellectual Autobiography, Chap. 6—The Gifford Lectureship.
