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In fact, one clear implication of this stratagem is that Darwinism is false. Darwinian theory tells us that evolutionary outcomes are the result of probabilities—chance reproduction, chance variation, chance environmental events operating on low population numbers. But the theist thinks that the process God chose was fiercely complicated and absolutely certain to have produced us. As such, the theist is committed to Darwin’s theory being wrong, false, mistaken, erroneous, incorrect. Darwinian theory is false but just looks correct to smart people trying to figure out what caused adaptation. Saying it’s false is no way to reconcile the truth of a theory with theism. Of course, the ways of God may be so far beyond our ken that the smartest and most knowledgeable of us mistakenly think adaptation is the result of natural selection. But that wouldn’t reconcile theism and Darwinism. At most it shows how to be a theist and to treat Darwin’s theory as a useful fiction, one that gets the mechanism of evolution completely wrong.

Actually, there is one way to reconcile second-law probabilities with theism. And maybe it will impress the prize-givers at the Templeton Foundation if they don’t look too closely.

In the seventeenth century, an Irish theologian named Bishop Ussher, using the Old Testament, dated the creation of the world to October 23, 4004 bc. Later calculations by a Cambridge theologian refined this dating to 9:00 am (Greenwich mean time?) on that date. Suppose they were right. Suppose that on that day, at that time of the morning, the entire Earth and everything in it, including our biblical ancestors as described in the Bible, spontaneously appeared, through no cause at all, as a quantum singularity. Call it the “Ussher event.” That event would only be a little less probable than the sudden and entirely coincidental aggregation of matter into a Boltzmann brain somewhere in the universe (recall this possibility from Chapter 2). The sudden accidental, uncaused, spontaneous emergence of that much order in one place and time would satisfy physics, since it would have resulted from a state of the universe without any prior adaptation in the universe bringing it about. And all the “begetting” thereafter described by the Old Testament would have permitted the blind variants so created to pass through a certain amount of subsequent environment filtration.

The crucial thing to notice, however, is this: what we have imagined is really another case of the process Darwin discovered. Of course, it’s just fantastically more improbable than the scenario that starts with a first tiny, minimal sliver of an adaptation appearing as a thermodynamic improbability. But the Ussher event is at least physically possible. And it would reconcile Genesis with natural selection. This would be a good thing for the Bible, since, given the second law, Darwinism is the only game in town. Can I have the 1,000,000 pounds now, Mr. Templeton?

NEWTON EXPUNGED purpose from the physical world 350 years ago. Darwin did it for the biological realm 150 years ago. By now you’d think the message had gotten out. What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What purposes are at work in the universe? Same answer: none.

Scientism means that we have to be nihilists about the purpose of things in general, about the purpose of biological life in particular, and the purpose of human life as well. In fact, wherever and whenever there is even the slightest appearance of purpose in the universe, the scientist’s task is to figure out natural selection’s sleight of hand. Take any biological process that looks like it’s such an intelligent and flexible response to changes in the environment that it must be driven by a purpose, plan, or goal. Behind that appearance will be found some engine of blind variation and a filter passively screening for fitness, whether it’s the building of the brain, navigating a freeway interchange, or keeping up your end of a conversation. We could fill a book with what is already known about how physics