Evolution Isn’t Intelligent

1.  The universe we inhabit is vast and beautiful; it is equally terrifying.  We are both captivated by it and captive to it.   

Whether we believe in a creator God or not, the universe is certainly the realm of staggering wonder – micro to macro.  

We maintain a someone, a someone of unimaginable power, glory and intelligence brought it into being. 

Faith in God should fill us with wonder and worship, awe and delight, as much as remind us of our own seeming insignificance, so says the Psalmist.

“When I look at the heavens, the work

of your fingers,

the moon and the stars, which you 

have set in place, 

what is man that you are mindful of

him.” 

But we don’t have exclusive rights to awe as many without faith speak of the universe with words bordering on reverence.  I say ‘bordering on’ as it would be an admittance of defeat for either the agnostic or atheist to believe concepts only ever properly ascribed to God.  Reverence assumes one revered, thankfulness, someone to thank, and awe assumes someone did something, someone in our awe, all of which evolution has nothing to say - no right and no reason.

2.  Evolution is regularly spoken of in terms of some form of deliberative intelligence, a process that is as amazing as it is inevitable, with humankind the remarkable ‘chance’ outcome.  It is hard to watch anything that extols the virtues of evolution without it being spoken of in personable terms, as a purposeful process - a system with selective intelligence, a something and not a nothing.  

I think it may be impossible for us not to believe in something, someone, causing our universe to be, because we find it so hard not to ascribe the personal and a sense of progress to what we see.  Words betray wishes.  

It is as though mechanistic evolution has teleological significance.  But of course, this is impossible as chance has no goal or purpose.  It is just chance – nothing more.  It invites no response, no accolade, and certainly no praise.  

TV programs extoling the universe speak in terms of poetic wonder about the onward and upward influence of evolutionary chance.  Endless ages are mixed with trillions of mutations, most of which are exceedingly harmful, and we are expected to, no we want to, go wow, isn’t that brilliant.  But we have been played by a conjuring trick, the slight of an intellectual hand.  Billions of years isn’t enough for chance to manufacture the world we live in, let alone us – not a hope in hell.  Chance doesn’t build on itself. Chance is utterly random, not progressive, unless you admit to purpose.  Heaven forbid!

3.  Further, how many worlds has evolution had an omnipotent hand in?  This all to help us think we might not be alone.  But the likelihood of evolution putting together (we can’t escape purpose) a world like ours is a vanishingly tiny possibility.  Why?  Chance doesn’t produce the same product – otherwise it isn’t chance.  Why would evolution utilize the same chance economy of action and produce something similar in all the vast reaches of space like this planet?  So why do we persist in a constant and spectacularly expensive obsession to find we aren’t alone?  With religious like fervour purportedly great minds have all but stated we aren’t alone – I mean how can we be, they opine.  But we could be, I opine.  Many already unconsciously accept this hypothesis as though it is true, evolution a master universal planner.  

Can you imagine the hells we would perpetrate were we to populate other planets – near or far.  Do we learn nothing about ourselves?

4.  Why do we talk in terms of evolution having a purpose, an intelligence, a power of its own making?  The self-existent.  Chance doesn’t afford us the right to pronounce about anything; it is nothing, it has no mind, no reason, no purpose, no anything.  

You have to import ethics/reason/purpose from somewhere else as it doesn’t come from survival of the fittest – not with the slickest of intelligent arguments.  Claiming to be wise, they became fools …  

Even survival is not a purpose.  It’s just what happens.  To say then, ‘so what, and who cares?’ is too thoughtful, because it already assumes purpose, and we know that that is impossible.  Aside from, obviously someone cares – you don’t say this sort of thing unless you do.  Methinks thou doth protest …

5.  If there is no God, there is only extinction for the human, for everything, and living is purposeless.  There is nothing intelligent about mechanistic evolution (even the term assumes a mechanism, which is something in place before the process, and we know that is not possible?).