Darwin's Legacy - or an atheistic prejudice

During my day out and about on Wednesday, I took the July 2009 issue of Physics World with me to read on the train. I managed to read the article Darwin's Legacy, by Leonard Susskind, of the Physics Department at Stanford University.

Professor Susskind's thesis is roughly as follows. Darwin's idea of natural selection, later combined with the discovery of DNA and the role played by DNA in reproduction of living species, "replaced the magic of creation with the laws of probability and chemistry".

It was the success of Darwinism that forced the issue and set the standard for future theories of origins, whether it be of life or of the universe. Explanations must be based on the laws of physics, mathematics and probability - and not on the hand of God.

Professor Susskind suggests that the mechanisms of mutations and natural selection (Darwin and Wallace) combined with the sheer vastness of the number of possible biological designs offered by different arrangements of base pairs within DNA structures (Crick and Watson) are sufficient to create a human being.

Professor Susskind goes on to argue that modern cosmology contains a completely analagous understanding for the origins, not of life, but of the universe itself. The "strings" of string theory are a kind of DNA of space itself, and determine the properties of the universe; but there are a vast number of possible combinations of this DNA so that, even a universe that is as unlikely in its sheer specificity as the one we experience, can be brought about by quite a number of different combinations. This is combined with a principle of mutability in the inflationary theory of the universe - which allows the creation of new bits of universe to "fill in" as the universe expands. These new bits generally have the same string theory DNA as their nearby sections - but every so often a mutation occurs, the new bit has a different DNA and so a different set of values of physical constants and is effectively a different universe. Like the human being in biological evolution, our universe is just one among a whole vast array of universes, the one that happens to work for us.

The first point to be made in response to this article is that it is an example of scientism. This is the view that it is only explanations from the physical and biological sciences that are valid. This is a quite arbitrary and un-necessary narrowing of the range of action of human reason to just one field, and neglects the possibility of there being other ways in which human reason can validly operate. It is a philosophically un-educated view.

A second point is the use of the words "existence" and "exist"; and the use of the term "create" (with regard to the emergence of human being from the process of biological evolution) or "created" (with regard to the emergence of new bits of space, and with regard to the emergence from expansion of universes capable of supporting intelligent life). These are terms full of philosophical import; they imply the question of what it means to exist or not exist, to be brought into existence or to somehow simply have existence of itself. The resulting discussion is one to which the physical and biological sciences can undoubtedly make a contribution in that they reveal something of the features of existent being (though one must identify the transcendental features therein and not limit oneself to those attaching to the particular current theory of scientific thinking). But it is not a discussion that those sciences are, taken purely in themselves, competent to undertake. Human reason must needs range wider - and be more properly and completely scientific.

As an aside, one suspects that Professor Susskind, if he were re-printing his article, would carefully remove these "offending" words, perhaps replacing "create" with "produce", though I find it more difficult to suggest a replacement for the word "exist". It is thought provoking, though, that, perhaps even by accident, these words do appear in the article, and embed within it the question of existence that opens the way towards God. Removing the words does not abolish the question, it simply hides it. One might also add that William Paley's watch and contemporary notions of "intelligent design" are not by any means the best of thinking with regard to arguing for the existence of God, so Professor Susskind has picked easy targets to shoot down.

I think that one has to recognise an atheistic prejudice (in the academic sense, rather than any moral sense) underlying Professor Susskind's article. It presents as a deliberate project to establish a "natural explanation" of the universe, starting from the presumption that a supernatural creator is already excluded. This review of an earlier publication by Susskind bears this out (his "megaverse" seems to contain as many illusions as does the theory of "intelligent design"). The justification of this from Darwin is certainly spurious now, in the 21st century, whatever the history of thought in the 19th century might suggest.