by Scott Youngren –
Atheist biologists would have you believe that evolutionary processes are mindless, and purposeless. But the problem for such a claim is that survival is a goal or purpose. There is simply no way around this. If evolution is truly mindless and purposeless, why does it favor survival over non-survival?
Physicist Amit Goswami writes in his book Creative Evolution. A Physicist’s Resolution Between Darwinism and Intelligent Design: “The Darwinian theory of evolution is based on natural selection: Nature selects those organisms that are fittest to survive. In the materialist view, an organism is just a bundle of molecules that are completely specified by their physical and chemical properties.
Nowhere among these properties will you find a property called survivability. No piece of inanimate matter has ever attempted to survive or in any way tried to maintain its integrity under any circumstances. But living bodies do exhibit a property called survivability. Now the paradox. A Darwinist would say that the survivability of the living form comes from evolutionary adaptation via natural selection. But natural selection itself depends on survival of the fittest.”
Survival depends on evolution, but evolution depends on survival!
Circular Argument
“See the circularity of the argument? Survival depends on evolution, but evolution depends on survival! A paradox is a sure-fire sign that the basic assumptions of the paradigm are incomplete or inconsistent; they need a reexamination.”
Atheists cannot have it both ways: Either life is the result of mindless and purposeless processes, or it is not. If the ultimate source of life is particles of matter mindlessly and purposelessly bumping into one another (as atheism alleges), then why does evolution favor survival? How can mindless and purposeless processes favor survival?
How can mindless and purposeless processes favor survival?
Perhaps this is why John Ray, the English naturalist who is considered by many to be the founder of modern biology wrote: “A wonder it must be that there should be any man found so stupid as to persuade himself that this most beautiful world could be produced by the fortuitous concourse of atoms.”
HT: God Evidence
I think you misunderstand the theory of evolution. It’s not that evolution “favors survival”. It’s that evolution operates by the reproduction of the things that did not die. “Nature selects those organisms that are fittest to survive” refers to the fact that if an organism is not well enough adapted to its environment it will die before it can reproduce.
It might be instructive to look at John Conway’s “Game of Life”. Within the rules of this game there are certain shapes that, when operated on by the rules of the game, can either “survive” or “reproduce” themselves. The reason why certain shapes survive is because they posses properties that result in their survival even when acted on by rules that will kill many other shapes with different properties. You could perhaps say that certain shapes possess a property of “survivability” that depends on how they are physically constituted.
An atheist scientist could conceive of an animal as a “bundle of particles”, it is just that this bundle of particles are manipulated in such a way that the particles will eventually “reproduce” under certain conditions. The environment of this “bundle of particles” could via external forces disrupt this process, but bundles that possess internal molecular dynamics (extremely complicated in the case of animals) that can withstand pressure from environmental forces will continue to reproduce.
Note that this is not an endorsement for evolution but rather a critique of this specific characterization of evolution and the specific argument against it.
What I find interesting about those who support Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is that they cannot (or will not) acknowledge that they have no answers for simple things in nature. Take the honey bee for example. The structure of the honeycomb is intricate and must be constructed that way for the hive to survive. How did the honey bee obtain the knowledge or instinct to do this? There is no reasonable explanation from the evolutionist point of view.