Posted by
JDComments on Tuesday, August 29, 2006 12:30:30 PM
Evolution is a hot bottom item for liberals for a number of reasons, but historically its importance was that it allowed the movement which had begun with the Encyclopedists and the Enlightenment and blossomed with the French Revolution and its condemnation of Religion to finally remove God from the last area in which His Presence had seemed to be needed, Creation. The question of how the multitude of living things had come into existence had finally been answered: random chance! Let the Church Bells [oops...old habits die hard] ring!
However, aside from the fact that Darwin was never unequivocal in advocating this view of his theory, which really was an explanation of why animals change to fit their environment [because the changes that take are good for their survival, something which seems kind of self obvious today], the real question is: how do you prove all the changes are random? You can observe from now until the end of time, and you will never be able to say definitely that all you have seen was just random, non directed, a spin of the dice. How do you prove randomness? Its like trying to prove a negative, which a logician will tell you is impossible. In fact, Liberal belief in the randomness of change, as opposed to a belief in evolution, or the gradual change of living things to suit their environment, is a matter of FAITH [I can hear the proclamations of shock and protestations from the Left as they read this]. Evolution can be observed, and proved , but the ultimate WHY behind it is, like all fundamental questions, impossible for science to answer. As Aristotle realized in the area of Knowledge which came to be called Metaphysics, there are things science cannot answer, because they are not subject to observation and measurement and cause and effect. Why is there gravity, and how come it works inversely to distance and proportional to mass? How come atoms can share electrons and form new substances [compounds] with brand new properties? How come the Big Bang produced a Universe with exactly those substances [Hydrogen and Helium] and the force needed [Gravity] to create stars which could then create both the energy and heavier elements which were required for life? These are questions which a scientists will tell you are unanswerable through his discipline, and which we can only answer with theories in which we have Faith. Yes, Science does answer superficial questions of "why" which really turn out to be "how", but there exists fundamental truths which will never be discovered by observation and experiment. For these, faith is the faculty nature has imbued us with to seek the answers. There is a famous law named Godel's Incompleteness Theorem which says all self contained logical systems have to contain axioms. That is, certain facts which are given, and non provable by use of the logical system itself. In other words, they are taken at faith. Thus, in geometry, parallel lines never meet- this is a basis for everything that follows, but it cannot be proven by geometry. Life is just such a system- there is much that our brains can prove with observation and reason, but there are certain things, some would say the really important things, that are outside the scope of empirical proof. For these "why's", faith is the only answer.