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COMMENTARY
August 15, 2007
Unmoved mover
I should like to add today, a footnote to the column I wrote on Sunday, in which I again confessed to being a heretic in the holiest shrine of scientism, where random mutation and natural selection are worshipped by the high priests, and from whose ivory towers we hear the academic chant: “There is no God, but Darwin.”The human mind is a marvellous thing, both for what it is able to perceive, and what it is able to ignore. Philology, it has been said, is "the art of reading a text without understanding it," and has wormed its way into the black heart of our universities, where the sounder sort of philosophical thought is supposed to happen. Arguments are conducted merely with words, or today with computer models, that are connected with reality only in the most tenuous and mechanical way. The ability to look at things, and ultimately, at the nature of things, is withering, together with our ability to sustain ourselves both materially and spiritually as a civilization. For no civilization can survive the loss of its faculties for direct observation. What struck me, hard, in reading so much more apoplectic rubbish about Darwinism, which I drew down on myself with my Sunday column, was the refusal to look at the key, the hinge, of the whole argument. For I wrote: “We can now roughly date the origin of our universe, and 15 billion years more-or-less is proving much too short a time for random processes to produce a non-random result. Verily, 15 billion times 15 billion years is still not nearly enough time.” This, in a nutshell, is the insuperable problem with random mutation, and natural selection, so far as they are taken not as factors in an evolutionary development, but as the determinants of it. There is simply more to nature than that. You may grasp this by looking into the eyes of any animal (Redmond O’Hanlon advises against trying this with a gorilla), or at the lilies of the field, that neither toil nor spin. They are purposeful. They are not purposeless. Time and again it is said that the “God thesis” is not proven, while Darwin’s thesis is supported by an immense accumulation of biological research. But read almost any current biology text, and you will find that after ritual obeisance to Darwin and Darwinism in prefatory remarks, the rest of the book hardly mentions them, and the author(s) will keep slipping into the irresistible vocabulary of design, while trying to communicate how an organism works. Res ipsa loquitur, as we say in Latin. (“The thing speaks for itself.”) The “God thesis” is slam-dunk, incidentally, and long before any born-again Christians had arrived, to add their coloratura, Aristotle had adequately demonstrated the basic concept. Alas, even the people who read his argument from an “unmoved mover” in college (see the Metaphysics, book lambda) have it pass over them because they are distracted by questions of philology that make no never mind, and usually by their professor’s sneering at an author who is the ultimate dead-white-male. To them, the whole idea of an “unmoved mover” sounds like a reduction. It isn't a reduction. It has the strength of the law against the perpetual motion machine. There MUST be an unmoved mover, because, of its own, we can't have motion. Not just can't have some motion, but, can't have ANY motion. And that "motion" includes the primal urge to life, as Aristotle spells out, and even the ordering impulse. Aristotle’s god is today described as passive, but cannot be passive. For the universe unfolds in a way that is not “random.” It is rather shaped, and governed by law -- and has produced in the course of ages, creatures conscious of themselves, including one that is sentient, when it wants to be. (There are several other demonstrations of the absolute inevitability of God the Creator, but this one will do just fine. See, if you are curious and puzzled, the commentary of Thomas Aquinas on Aristotle's Metaphysics. He actually reads the thing, and explains, instead of trying to explain away. I discovered the old Henry Regnery edition in the London Library 32 years ago. It changed my life.) Why, oh why, would I dwell on such a subject, which only earns me scrolls of abuse? Because I perceive that a wrong idea about the nature of the universe lies beneath wrong ideas on many other things, and one has the charitable duty to root out error. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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