Exactly the same way post-Darwinin athiests do. That’s because Darwin’s work addressed absolutely nothing about the origin of life. Simply the origin of the DIVERSITY of life.
Enjoy,
Steven
THIS is the correct answer, and the mods might as well close this thread. Darwin himself believed in god; he wasn’t an atheist. For Darwin, he merely was theorizing on how he thought god’s creation actually worked.
It has properly been pointed out that the question raised is the explanation of biogenesis, and that Darwin may not be relevant. The question still stands. Two answers have thus far been suggested:
-
There need have been no beginning. (This answer also works for the origin of existence).
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A natural process not yet understood.
Have we missed any?
Darwin’s religious views are irrelevant to the question.
By the way, note that while Darwin was the firstSUP[/SUP] to propose a scientifically sound explanation for the mechanism behind evolution, he was not the first to come up with the concept of evolution itself.
To quote a passage from the foreword to my copy of The Origin of Species:
The idea of the evolution of organisms, so far from originating
with Darwin, is a very old one. Glimpses of it appear in the
ancient Greek philosophers, especially Empedocles and Aristotle;
modern philosophy from Bacon onward shows an increasing
definiteness in its grasp of the conception; and in the age
preceding Darwin’s, Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck had
given it a fairly concrete expression. As we approach the date
of the publication of “The Origin of Species” adherence to the
doctrine not only by naturalists but by poets, such as Goethe,
becomes comparatively frequent; and in the six years before the
joint announcement of Darwin and Wallace, Herbert Spencer had
been supporting and applying it vigorously in the field of
psychology.
To these partial anticipations, however, Darwin owed little.
When he became interested in the problem, the doctrine of the
fixity of species was still generally held; and his solution
occurred to him mainly as the result of his own observation
and thinking.
So, even pre-Darwin, an atheist would have been justified to say something like “Well, we haven’t quite figured out all the details yet, but there are some strong indications that there’s a natural, gradual process at the root of it, and I’m confident that we’ll have an explanation in good time.”
(1) Along with a couple of contemporaries who more-or-less independently came up with the same idea at almost the same time, as usually happens with these things…
How would pre-Bible fundamentalists explain the origin of species or life? :eek:
>How would pre-Darwinian atheists explain the origin of species or life?
>Exactly the same way post-Darwinin athiests do. That’s because Darwin’s work addressed absolutely nothing about the origin of life.
Now, wait a minute. The OP clearly includes explaining the origin of species, and Darwin’s work addressed the origin of species directly.
The most likely answer is in post #17 of this thread.
Aaaaaaarrrrrrrggggggghhhh. Make that post #19. Forgive me, I’m tired.
“Origin of species” =/= “Origin of life”
Whence did Homo sapiens originate? From Homo erectus. Whence did Homo erectus originate? From Homo habilis. Homo habilis? Australopithecus africanus. And so on until at some point we go back to some small insectivorous mammal that co-existed with the dinosaurs. Then back to the synapsids. Then back to early amphibians. Etc. Etc. Until we get to a point where we’re not really sure what happened, but we have some ideas. Since soft tissue doesn’t really fossilize well (and even less soft tissue that’s of microscopic stature), “evolution” doesn’t cover this area. Biology doesn’t even cover this area with any authority, and most biologists will acknowledge this without a lot of foot shuffling and mumbled explanations.
Cite?
True, and I probably should have asked for clarification to see if the OP was actually asking two questions(origin of species, origin of life in general) versus just one. The way the OP was phrased seemed to indicate a question about biogenesis, not diversification. Bundling the question about the origin of species with the origin of life in general seems to indicate interest in the origin of the first species, versus the diverse multitude of species we now see. Indeed until Darwin there was no(widely known) reason to believe the species tree had ever been less complex than it was at the time, so if this question were asked of a pre-Darwin atheist they would almost certainly have interpreted it as strictly a question of biogenesis. Common descent was not a widely published/understood model at the time.
Still, in both cases the options would be pretty much as Hoodoo Ulove outlined.
Enjoy,
Steven
Not necessarily. Lamarck is the relevant earlier example of someone who believed that the simplest lifeforms could arise via spontaneous generation and that these had then evolved to produce the observed diversity of species. This is not because Lamarck was himself an atheist - he wasn’t - but rather because Adrian Desmond has argued at length in his studies of early 19th century working-class atheism in Britain (notably in The Politics of Evolution, Chicago, 1989) that this movement tended to be heavily Lamarckian. Such atheists also tended to be republicans and socialists and part of the appeal of Lamarck’s ideas to them was that they could be interpreted as the progressive result of self-help. Seeing nature as filled with species striving to better themselves had a natural appeal to working class men seeking to improve society.
The “pauper press” of the time thus frequently reprinted the likes of d’Holbach’s System of Nature and extracts from French Lamarckians for this audience.
However, it’s not obvious to me that Desmond’s model will also apply outside of Britain. French and German atheists, in particular, probably had their own, different attitudes to Lamarck.
A grotesque oversimplification.
Darwin’s religious views were not static. There were times in his life when he was a rather conventional Anglican who expected to enter the Church. There were times in his life when he questioned the whole notion of an interventionist God. And there was the time towards the end of his life when he consistently described himself as an agnostic.
The area where there’s probably the greatest disagreement amongst his biographers on the matter is his beliefs in 1859 at the time of writing the Origin, not least because this influences how one reads the few religious references in it. Are these essentially the expression of a Deist or a few concessions to the expectations of his intended readership by someone who no longer has a belief in God and would rather avoid the issue? At roughly the same time, there’s the long exchange of letters with Asa Gray on the religious implications of the theory. In these, as he was to repeatedly state when asked thereafter, Darwin states that he sees no necessary conflict between the theory and Christianity and he entirely respects Gray’s hope to reconcile his own beliefs. But he also makes it clear that he personally sees nature as undesigned.
As already noted, once Huxley had invented the term, he consistently described himself as an agnostic. All the major recent biographers - Desmond, Moore and Browne, including in their major joint entry on him in the new Oxford DNB - take this as the best description of him in the last few decades of his life.
[An aside: given that Darwin’s religious views have often been analysied as in tension with his wife’s piety, it’s one of the more striking suggestions in the second volume of Browne’s biography that she argues that Emma may herself have had major doubts, though these faded after his death. ]
And my post was directly relevant to yours. Your demand for a mechanism by which God came into existence is a red herring. And I pointed that out. No explanation for the origin of species has ever required anyone to postulate the existence of God, and the soundness of any scientific theory has zippo to do witht the existence of God. You therefore introduced the irrelevancy in your post, and now that it has been addressed, you claim it was necessary to introduce it. It wasn’t.
I’ll bite, Lib. How does the possibility of God’s existence follow from Peano’s axioms? Or are you saying that they demonstrate that His existence follows from His possibility?
<Anakin/Vader> Nooooooooooooooooooo! </Anakin/Vader>
You’re going to have to explain that one to me as well.
I would contend that in order to prove possibility, you first have to prove necessity, i.e. you have to prove the universe can’t exist without God. If the universe can exist without God (and no reason has ever been shown why it can’t) then God is superfluous, and a superfluous (i.e. unnecessary) God cannot possibly exist.
Of course, even this still leaves out all the usual problems the OA has with trying to define “God” in the first place.
Does the word “watchmaker” ring any bells?
Right. “Pure” atheists were rare and controversial back then. Most would have been Deists, or “doubters”, since "agnostic’ was a term coined around Darwins time.
I’m saying that it is absurd to ask for a cite for a premise. Peano used five of them. Dio now has an opportunity to ask for a cite for each.