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By Root 632 0

else extant in zoology and botany might well be such a by-product, a side effect, an unintended but foreseen outcome of God’s handiwork in creating us. Elephants and E. coli are by-products, since they were produced, along with us, by natural selection, and natural selection was the instrument, the means, the technique God used to produce his one intended outcome—us. A more ecumenical view might have it that all God’s creatures, great and small, are equally intended outcomes, along with us, and all were produced by the device of blind variation and natural selection, just as the omniscient lord knew they and we would be so produced.

The trouble with this reconciliation is that it doesn’t take Darwin’s theory seriously. It just pretends to. Darwin’s theory tells us that we, along with every other creature that roams Earth, are at best improbable outcomes of natural selection. It’s not just that you and I might not have ever come into existence if different sperm had fertilized different eggs. Rather, sapient—intelligent—life of any kind is an improbable outcome. Indeed, the theory of natural selection suggests that complex life of any sort is an improbable outcome; no wonder we haven’t found it anywhere else in the universe. (The effort—SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—has so far been pretty feeble.) In any case, the odds on finding anything that looks much like us elsewhere in the universe are vanishingly small, at least according to Darwinism.

Natural selection makes us highly improbable. It is therefore a highly unreliable means of making us or anything that looks like us. Indeed, it is an unreliable way of making intelligent life of any sort—or, for that matter, of making life of any sort. Any omnipotent deity (or other powerful agency) who decided to employ natural selection to produce us would almost certainly be disappointed many more than 99 times out of 100 attempts. If God had set his sights lower—say, to just producing any kind of intelligent life, or just any life at all, using the process of natural selection—he could have raised the probability of success a bit. But so long as you rely on natural selection, you can’t raise the chances of ending up with life by very much. An omnipotent agency that employed natural selection to make Homo sapiens would certainly not be an omniscient one. He would have had to be rather dim. Even weak-minded creatures like us know that the combination of blind variation and environmental filtration is not a reliable way of making anything for which you already have a very definite design.

Theism, or at least a theism that makes the Abrahamic religions sensible, is just not compatible with Darwin’s theory. You can’t believe both. But if you are a true believer in theism, you can come close to reconciling them, perhaps close enough to deceive yourself. The trick is to believe that God is powerful enough, smart enough, and present at enough places and times to guide the process of evolution so that it looks like random variation and natural selection to anyone not in on the secret. Suppose God employed a method to obtain us—Homo sapiens—that was so complex, so subtle, and so difficult to uncover that the closest we could come to figuring it out is Darwin’s theory of blind variation and environmental filtration. You might even go further and suppose that the closest any finite intelligence could come to uncovering God’s method is Darwin’s theory. You might even suppose that God designed our cognitive capacities so that the only scientific theory of evolution we could ever conceive of would be Darwin’s. It would be, as Kant supposed of Newton’s theory, the only game in town, not because it is true, but because its falsity is unthinkable by us once we see the evidence for it.

These suppositions would readily explain to a theist why so many smart scientists believe that Darwin’s theory is true. For that matter, it would also explain why the smartest among them are atheists as well, since they recognize that theism and Darwinism are incompatible. But this stratagem won