While not directly related to the Charlie Rose interview I feel that
an interview with Richard Dawkins is relevant to this discussion.
I fully expected Dawkins' to be particularly hard line, to the point of rudeness, about non-theist implications of evolutionary theory. I was pleasantly surprised however by the eveneness of his tone and his readiness to frame the way evolution has affected his own disbelief as a personal matter.
Q:Is atheism the logical extension of believing in evolution?
A: They clearly can’t be irrevocably linked because a very large number of theologians believe in evolution. In fact, any respectable theologian of the Catholic or Anglican or any other sensible church believes in evolution. Similarly, a very large number of evolutionary scientists are also religious. My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
He also makes a much clearer distinction about what he considers random about random mutation than either Wilson or Watson seem to have done.
Q: You said in a recent speech that design was not the only alternative to chance. A lot of people think that evolution is all about random chance.
A: That's ludicrous. That's ridiculous. Mutation is random in the sense that it's not anticipatory of what's needed. Natural selection is anything but random. Natural selection is a guided process, guided not by any higher power, but simply by which genes survive and which genes don't survive. That's a non-random process. The animals that are best at whatever they do- hunting, flying, fishing, swimming, digging- whatever the species does, the individuals that are best at it are the ones that pass on the genes. It's because of this non-random process that lions are so good at hunting, antelopes so good at running away from lions, and fish are so good at swimming.
If anyone could be characterised as a particularly high profile proponent for evolutionary theory and an equally high profile antagonist of religion I would think it is Dawkins, yet even he is not dogmatic on the relationship of evolution to religious belief. Not in this interview anyway, maybe he moderated his tone a bit for 'Beliefnet'.
TTFN,
WK
This message has been edited by Wounded King, 19-Dec-2005 02:05 PM
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