Originally Published August 19, 2004
Listen up Pat ! This is why some people are afraid of Intelligent Design taught in schools as science. Three years before his death, William Paley published his Natural Theology: or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of a Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802). In essence this is what is called the teleological argument for the existence of God. An argument from design. It utilizes reason and can thus be refuted. It very much resembles the popular new theory of Intelligent Design. Old Bill Paley had his work published 57 years before old Chuck Darwin had his Origin of Species published in 1859. Chuck's was not an effort to repudiate Mr. Paley. It was a completely rational effort in the face of centuries old dogma.
Pat Buchanan finished his degree in philosophy in 1961. Six years prior to my own birth. The benefit from my vantage point is that when I attended University in the late eighties I read both David Hume and Wallace Matson. Cornell press published Mr. Matson's The Existence of God in 1965. Those who contributed to its editing included Max Black and Thomas Kuhn. Not being a big name dropper or reference pig, I still gotta believe that Old Pat's hard core philosophical edge lost momentum when he started raking in checks for writing speeches and not publishing widely read discourses on Science like Kuhn. WM spends some time dealing with the teleological, ontological and cosmological proofs that have endured about the existence of God. He even deals with the idea of evil in the attempt to deny God's existence. The best that the Occident can muster does not let us reach any definitive conclusion. Never bothered to take the couple extra courses for the degree, when you could read such good stuff outside the nattering demands of testing.
After wasting two paragraphs, let's cut to the chase. The Universe is bound to have the appearance of being designed. There would be no Universe at all if the parts didn't fit together. Life in a relatively fixed environment presupposes order and adaptation. It is reasonable however to adopt an Epicurean hypothesis which essentially states that given a universe with a finite number of particles in random motion, given an infinite amount of time, every combination is possible. Without making analogies to explosions, one can reasonably conclude that it is at the very least, possible. The random order could stabilize even temporarily, perhaps the 10,000 years for all those Creationists. Thus, according to Darwin's theory of the struggle for adaptation, the human eye could have evolved. Perhaps the ozone is less a design so much as a necessity for life to evolve. Evolution is the best theory to fit the evidence the world provides us. It does not attempt to explain the beginning, if that is even reasonable to assume.
Why is the Universe like a watch ? Maybe its more like a big Lobster or an Avocado. What if the analogy to a vast machine is not accurate. Sure, if it is like a human artifact, than there might be proper basis for a sound inference. It will not be achieved by any ultimate deduction that is irrefutable. The Idea's current adherents even accept the possibility that some alien intelligence could be the source of the design. Hume and Descartes picked up on that a long time ago. It does not guarantee an infinitely wise, good and powerful being. An evil genius could be the source of the world as we know it. Spinning 'Darwinism' as a type of fundamentalism or evolution as an 'ideology' and then reaching the conclusion such spurious 'reasoning' justifies its replacement with a choice religious tract is absurd. Perhaps it is not so much fear, but pitiable disgust that has allowed us to forget what was otherwise a good ending to a monkey trial.