2 of 4
The paradox is easily resolved by clarifying Davies's conception of God. Davies nowhere endorses a transcendent personal God who freely creates the world and then acts freely within it. Nor for that matter does Davies endorse a deistic watch maker God who creates the world, winds it up, and then sits back. God's relation to the world for Davies is not causal (i.e., God does not create the world or act in it) but ontological (i.e., God gives the world its being). Davies's God is the God of Spinoza, Schleiermacher, and the ancient Stoics. Consequently, traditional theistic ideas about God as a causal agent in the world all need to be reinterpreted.
Consider, for instance, how Davies makes sense of teleology. Within traditional theism, there's a telos or end to the world because God in wisdom freely created the world to fulfill certain purposes. Davies, on the other hand, finds teleology not in the freely chosen purposes of a personal transcendent God, but in nature having certain built-in ends, which it ineluctably fulfills. Thus, in describing the origin of life, Davies will write: "If life is somehow inevitable, accidents of fate notwithstanding, a particular end is certain to be achieved; it is built into the laws. And 'end' sounds suspiciously like 'goal' or 'purpose'—taboo words in science for the last century, redolent as they are of a bygone religious age." Davies's God, in sum, is not a designing intelligence but rather a system of natural laws by which nature operates.
Given his understanding of God, Davies has but two options for explaining the origin of life: either life results from brute contingency, or life is the determined end of laws built into nature. Davies rejects brute contingency. To suggest that life, and in particular intelligent life, arose simply through the toss of a coin is to trivialize the grandeur of the cosmos. In stead, Davies wants us to see "the laws of the universe" as having "engineered their own comprehension." Davies expatiates:
This is a breathtaking vision of nature, magnificent and uplifting in its majestic sweep. I hope it is correct. It would be wonderful if it were correct. But if it is, it represents a shift in the scientific world-view as profound as that initiated by Copernicus and Darwin put together. It should not be glossed over with glib statements that water plus organics equals life, obviously, for it is far from obvious.
Whether this vision is as breath taking as Davies's purple prose suggests is perhaps decidable on aesthetic grounds. The interesting question here, however, is why this vision should represent a profound shift in the scientific picture of the world. Either life is a brute contingency or it is the determined outcome of universal natural laws. Philosophically this be comes a forced choice as soon as one excludes intelligent design. But what is there here to alter fundamentally the scientific picture of the world? We explain some things as brute contingency (e.g., a meteor slamming into the earth). We explain other things as following deterministic natural laws (e.g., water freezing when its temperature is sufficiently lowered). For the emergence of life to fall into either of these categories is perfectly acceptable to scientific orthodoxy. Why, then, does Davies think he is onto something big?
share this page
RSS Feed
