Wednesday, July 16, 2008
On this day:

Does belief in evolution make the idea of God less plausible?

Last week, the Discovery Institute's John G. West wrote the following at NRO:

If it really is a “fact” that the evolution of life was an unplanned process of chance and necessity (as Neo-Darwinism asserts), then that fact has consequences for how we view life. It does not lead necessarily to Richard Dawkins’s militant atheism, but it certainly makes less plausible the idea of a God who intentionally directs the development of life toward a specific end. In a Darwinian worldview, even God himself cannot know how evolution will turn out — which is why theistic evolutionist Kenneth Miller argues that human beings are a mere “happenstance” of evolutionary history, and that if evolution played over again it might produce thinking mollusks rather than us.
This is just plain wrong, both in its premise and in its conclusions, as NRO's Jim Manzi artfully explains here. I wish that the proponents of Intelligent Design would at least try to design their arguments a little more intelligently.