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What does all this come to? The only way a recipe for building adaptations can get along with the second law is by employing it. The only recipe that can do that is the process that Darwin discovered: dumb luck variation, one-way filtering, and a very expensive copying machine.

To see how hard it is to build a real alternative consistent with the second law, let’s consider the way the enlightened scientific theist explains the appearance of adaptations. It will turn out that all we need to do to turn the theistic recipe into a Darwinian one is modify it just enough to honor the second law!

YOU CAN’T HAVE YOUR DARWINIAN CAKE AND EAT THEISM TOO

So far in this book, there has been no effort to refute the God hypothesis. Our project is not to provide another argument for atheism, but to explore the God-free reality. Nevertheless, it will be worth showing that the second law makes reconciliation between theism and Darwin’s discovery logically impossible. The demonstration has an added plus. It shows that when you actually try to combine Genesis and the second law, all you get is an extreme version of Darwin’s explanation of how adaptations arise.

There has been a vast industry of attempts to reconcile God and Darwin’s theory. It’s an industry with a gold standard of achievement provided by John Templeton’s 1,000,000-pound prize. Ever since Darwin, people have noticed that his theory makes God unnecessary, and they have jettisoned the hypothesis of God’s existence. But some people also have lots of motives for hanging on to God along with their Darwinism, if they can. Motives, not grounds or evidence, mind you. For some people, chief among these motives is the desire to make science safe from religious fundamentalists—Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. The enlightened way to do that is to show that religion and Darwin’s theory are perfectly compatible. If God and Darwin are compatible, we won’t have to choose between them. We can give unto Darwin that which is Darwin’s, and give unto Abraham, Jesus, or Muhammad that which is his. The budget for medical research will be safe from the troglodytes, and we’ll be able to continue to teach evolution in Mississippi and Alabama, Jerusalem, Cairo, and Jakarta.

The strategy for reconciliation of Darwin and God is well known and well beloved, especially by high school science teachers. Here is how it works: Suppose there is a designer and he (theism pretty much insists on a he) created us, along with everything else, with all the nice adaptations we have. Suppose further that he did it intentionally, on purpose, with malice of forethought. Finally, suppose that he did so by using the mechanism of blind variation and natural selection that Darwin discovered.

Darwin didn’t even mind encouraging this idea—kind of. In the first five editions of On the Origin of Species, there is no mention of God. In the sixth, he finally added a reference to “the creator” in the famous but originally deity-free peroration in the last paragraph of the last page of On the Origin of Species:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed [added in the sixth edition: by the creator] into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

The author of the most controversial theory in the history of science did everything in his power to maximize its acceptance by minimizing its radicalism. He shared credit, conciliated dissidents, and avoided bringing his theory into disrepute in every way possible. He kept his own atheism so quiet that people have been arguing about it ever since. And he sat still for attempts to reconcile the theory of natural selection with conventional pieties, as far as he could.

The reconciliation of deity-design theory and Darwin’s theory of how adaptation happens looks breathtakingly simple