Picture a majestic T. rex receiving the tablets of the Ten Commandments in its undersized forelimbs, or an elegant octopus crucified on an old rugged cross with four crossbars instead of one.
Such images are what Kenneth Miller presumably has in mind with his comforting Darwinist thought that intelligent creatures were guaranteed to pop up even in the course of an evolutionary process of purely unguided, purposeless churning. You see, he tells us, evolution was bound to "converge" (as theorized by Simon Conway Morris) not necessarily on a human being but on -- well, as Miller has said, it could have been "a big-brained dinosaur, or... a mollusk with exceptional mental capabilities." Just for fun, let's grant the scientific merit of "convergence" -- though many Darwinists, in fact, do not. My argument here is not with Miller's science but with his imagination.
A Roman Catholic and a Brown University biologist, Ken Miller is one of those theistic evolutionists who want other religious believers to feel there's nothing in Darwin to offend religious sensibilities. He and others (such as Obama's favorite geneticist, Francis Collins) invite us to imagine God being delighted with such creatures, noble and impressive in their way, as the culmination of the evolutionary process that He chose not to guide. But what if the intelligent creature that resulted from all the purposeless churning, and that was intended to reflect God's own image, had been something really horrible.
That's the scenario that an author I enjoy, a committed Darwinist and atheist -- H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) -- allows us to contemplate. In his terrifically imaginative horror stories, most set in a spooky, antiquated New England, the great theme is that humanity is but a tiny, unimportant speck in an unimaginably vast universe that has cast up innumerable varieties of extraterrestrial beings, some of which have colonized our planet. Darwinists love him. If you follow PZ Myers's blog, you'll know PZ linked the other day to an "Unholy Bible" -- Holy Scriptures tweaked along Lovecraftian lines (Genesis 1:1: "In the beginning Cthulhu created R'lyeh and the earth").
Many of Lovecraft's creatures are so repellent that when a human being encounters them, he's as likely as not to die right there on the spot from the sheer terror. Here's a description of one, depicted in the form of a little statue at the beginning of "The Call of Cthulhu":
It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.
"Shockingly frightful"! Lovecraft writes in the opening paragraph of the same story:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
In his biography H.P. Lovecraft: A Life (Necronomicon Press), leading Lovecraft maven S.T. Joshi gives Darwin, Huxley, and Haeckel as Lovecraft's "chief philosophical influences." His reading went back to the Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus, but he got his Darwinism primarily by way of the English science and philosophy popularizer Hugh Elliot and from Darwin's foremost German disciple, Ernst Haeckel.
From Elliot, Lovecraft absorbed "the denial of teleology," of cosmic progress toward any particular goal, and "the denial of any form of existence other than those envisaged by physics and chemistry." Darwin was important for having refuted the "argument for design," thereby guaranteeing man's "comic insignificance."
Play the videotape of evolutionary history back again and Ken Miller imagines you get a charming brainy creature for God to play with -- something lovable and admirable. Lovecraft would have seen that as sentimental nonsense.
In a universe unguided by the intelligent purpose of a just, loving God, there's no reason to imagine that the intelligent creature or creatures that resulted from the endless churning would be nice, cute, or noble. The probability seems reasonably high -- why not? -- that they would be grotesque, obnoxious, loathsome, abhorrent, ghastly. Those are all, by the way, favorite adjectives with Lovecraft. He was big on adjectives, deploying them extravagantly. His fiction, over and over, asks us to consider the possibility that the university is filled with such horrors: "terrifying vistas of reality."
Here is his description of a shoggoth, another monster in his Cthulhu mythos (from "At the Mountains of Madness"):
It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train - a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.
"They were the hellish tracks of the living fungi from Yuggoth," is a characteristic Lovecraftian sentence ("The Whisperer in Darkness").
In his Introduction to The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (Penguin Classics), S.T. Joshi reminds us that Lovecraft has to be appreciated "in the context of the philosophical thought that he evolved over a lifetime of study and observation. The core of that thought...is mechanistic materialism." Lovecraft dealt not with the supernatural but with the "supernormal," as Joshi puts it -- the unrealized side of material reality. The terrible possibilities he raises follow from that philosophy.
Sure, they're just stories -- and often kind of silly ones at that, though wickedly entertaining. Yet after reading him, you can't comfortably go back to the naïve Ken Miller way of thinking that Darwinian evolutionary was somehow certain to provide God with children over whom He would approve with the Biblical formulation, "And behold it was very good."
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Unfair, Gabriel. Surely you must know that requiring evidence is a materialist (Hitlerian, Soviet, whatever) plot to destroy religion, and that only atheists (or people who claim to be religious but believe in materialism) have to provide evidence. Like Dembski wrote:
See, they don't need to do science. Lying for Jesus is ok, while doing honest science is just wrong.
So they never have to provide evidence for their claims. Or anyway, they never do, at least not proper evidence.
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Only people who deliberately decide to be ignorant, refuse to study the complexity being revealed by the ID research, and then seriously consider the implications.
Darwin knew that he didn't have the evidence for the intermediates, particularly considering the numerous small steps he was advocating. He was staggered by the human eye, and couldn't imagine how it could form by numerous small steps.
He imagined some small primordial pool with chemicals, with heat and lightning etcetera, forming some self replicating chemistry, that eventually formed the first living cell.
The scientists of the time opposed him as chemistry research was far enough advanced to know that this could not happen.
"But as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?" Charles Darwin
"No one has found any such in-between creatures and there is a growing conviction among many scientists that these transitional forms never existed." Niles Eldredge
The only reason evolution became popular was because humanists and atheists saw it as an excuse to ignore God, and His morals, and they promoted it for their own unscientific reasons.
Millions of people have fallen for the fable and researchers have wasted millions of hours and billions of dollars trying to prove that the lies of evolution are instead true.
Now the ID movement is providing clear proof of intelligent design, as opposed to random unguided mutations, and anyone who refuses to read up on the evidence of complexity remains wilfully ignorant.
I see that many of you have fallen for the lies of evolution even though science is showing it is impossible for life to form itself from chemicals and produce elegant improvements by blind chance, and you are promoting it as if evolution is true, in spite of the evidence.
Not that using authorities constitutes a proper way of argumentation (it's a fallacy, though not if it is simply used as a example of the scientific consensus--which the Eldredge quote is not), but kernestm, as usual, fails even to properly use Eldredge. Eldredge likely was discussing species transitions there, and never denied that transitionals exist in certain cases.
Here's Eldredge responding to such misquotation:
As for the rest of what kernestm wrote, well, it reveals the same level of scholarship which misquoted Eldredge.
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
http://ncseweb.org/cej/2/4/misquoted-scientists-respond
Niles Eldredge:
So, as usual, the creationist has taken a scientist's word out of context, and not been the slightest bit curious about the truth of what the scientist actually says (merely copying and pasting from some dreadfully dumb creationist source), nor about what the evidence actually indicates.
The usual reaction, of course, is for the creationist to go back to the same highly dishonest sources, and come back with some other mangling of thought, logic, and sources. Wouldn't it be something if we were surprised just once?
Well, don't hold your breath, you're likely to die waiting.
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
"But what if the intelligent creature that resulted from all the purposeless churning, and that was intended to reflect God's own image, had been something really horrible."
You mean like a human? The exterminator of entire species, murderer of tens of millions in religious and ideological wars, formed in the image of the God of the Old Testament which he so readily emulates.
"And behold it was very good."
Yes, the OT God said that, then he went on to destroy his "very good" creation in a global flood. I guess it wasn't good enough to suit him--or he's fallible. Then what was left of his creation is mindlessly creating a new not very good creation by the "mechanistic materialistic" process of procreating themselves into oblivion, or at least to a lower quality of life.
How different is God from Human, and Human from Cthulhu?
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