“…through the action of random evolutionary forces…
(Biology by Burton S. Guttman (1st ed., McGraw Hill, 1999), pgs. 36-37.)
“It is difficult to avoid the speculation that Darwin, as has been the case with others, found the implications of his theory difficult to confront. “
(Invitation to Biology, by Helena Curtis & N. Sue Barnes(3rd ed., Worth, 1981), pgs. 474-475.)
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These quotes show the difficulty people have with the philosophical implications of Darwinism. However these are not philosophers. Not ever Darwin himself was a very good philosopher, even though he was a first-rate scientist.
What some biology textbooks get wrong is that they are trying to tackle a difficult philosophical problem without sufficient background in philosophy. In particular, the concept of cause and effect is one that can be viewed both scientifically and philosophically. And these two views are so different that they really end up defining two different concepts - not just one concept viewed from two different perspectives.
From a philosophical perspective, cause and effect is complicated, as seen
here. But from a scientific perspective, the discussion is quite different, as see
here.
This is especially significant when speaking about God as an ultimate cause. The way in which God operates is not open to human experimentation and examination. Therefore we hypothesize or take on faith that God is an ultimate cause of many aspects of creation. In particular, it is well within God’s prerogative to cause something, and at the same time to arrange things so that something else appears as the cause, or to make it appear that the cause was random.
This is the case with evolution, where random variation plays a key role. We say random because to our senses it does appear random. And for all scientific purposes of modeling and prediction, it might as well be random. But one may also hold the belief that nothing in the universe is random, but that an all-powerful God could easily have caused everything that we call random.
The problem with theories like “Intelligent Design” is that they go further than philosophical speculation like this, and actually proposes that evidence of a cause and effect relationship from an intelligent designer outside of our physical world is scientifically observable. But when that evidence is examined, it is found to be lacking in conformance to the scientific method, and therefore does not strictly belong to that established field of inquiry. Wild speculation about probabilities abound. There is not common starting point with traditional science.
