Maybe some did. Maybe some left because they got tired of being called atheists or told their faith was insufficient because they accepted the theory of evolution. Others because they didn't like being called followers of Marx and Mao. Still others because no matter how many times they explained that the theory of evolution does not depend on an explanation of the origin of life, people still demanded they come up with one. And then there are the overt statements that people who accept evolutionary theory don't belong on Free Republic.
It's not exactly a conducive environment for scientific discussion.
Yes, I remember some of those who left saying that, over and over again. Maybe this is the real source of the disagreement between the so-called "Crevos" and the "orthodox" Darwinists.
For my part, any theory of evolution that cannot explain the origin of life (not to mention mind, consciousness) cannot explain what happens once it has "emerged," from presumably lifeless matter. Darwin never heard of DNA; but more recent scientists have. And they realize that DNA is information-intensive. So where does matter get its information from, so that it knows how to "evolve" DNA?
To put it crudely, how does "dumb matter" become "smart matter," such to give rise to the emergence in time of increasingly complex biological organisms? "Random mutation plus natural selection plus sufficient time" hardly seems to cut it. In any case, it is a supposition that cannot be demonstrated by scientific means. It is a groundless assertion which also happens to be anhistorical: The fossil record we have — the history — does not support the assertion. Which is what worried Darwin himself.
As a result, Darwin's theory has "evolved" into Neo-Darwinism, whose practitioners seem grudgingly aware that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to explain the quandary of life and mind on the basis of "matter in its motions" according to natural law. (Where did the natural law come from?)
Actually, the fly in the ointment is a physical cosmology premised in monist materialism. This is the worldview of the regnant scientific method.
Trying to shed some light on these issues, let me point out the argument of Thomas Nagel, University Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Law at New York University, in his recent book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinisan Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly Wrong:
[The] failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind ... is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology.As the book jacket points out, "Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief [Nagel is a self-professed atheist] or on a belief in any definite alternative.... [H]e does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic."
Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such.... In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement.
In sum,
The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life [e.g., the "natural process" of Abiogenesis, a/k/a biopoiesis], leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world. There must be a very different way in which things as they are make sense, and that includes the physical world, since the problem cannot be quarantined in the mind.In dialoguing with Darwinists, these were the issues that I always tried to raise, not whether my correspondent was an atheist or a Marxist or a Maoist, or fit to be a member of FR.
As an atheist, Nagel is seeking purely naturalistic answers to such questions. One proposal he offers is to say that matter itself "reduces" to an entity that bears within itself the "seeds" of a later emergence of life and mind, as teased out over the time of the world under the influence of natural law. (I'm putting this crudely to make the point clear.) This view comes pretty close to a philosophical theory called panpsychism. But then, he grudgingly admits that "proving the theory" would be just as difficult (if not impossible) as proving the theory of reductionist materialism as THE explanation of the natural world and of the living organisms bearing consciousness that constitute it.
Nagel's final paragraph makes me feel very sad for him:
It is perfectly possible that the truth is beyond our reach, in virtue of our intrinsic cognitive limitations, and not merely beyond our grasp in humanity's present stage of intellectual development. [I have often wondered about this myself.] But I believe we cannot know this, and that it makes sense to go on seeking a systematic understanding of how we and other living things fit into the world. In this process, the ability to generate and reject false hypotheses plays an essential role. I have argued patiently against the prevailing form of naturalism, a reductive materialism that purports to capture life and mind through its Neo-Darwinian extension. But ... I find this view antecedently unbelievable — a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense. The empirical evidence can be interpreted to accommodate different comprehensive theories, but in this case the cost in conceptual and probabilistic contortions is prohibitive. I would be willing to bet that the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two — though of course it may be replaced by a new consensus that is just as invalid. The human will to believe is inexhaustible. [itals added.]In conclusion, it seems to me Nagel is an honest man — or at least as honest as a man who rejects God out-of-hand can be.
Just some thoughts, FWTW.
Thanks for writing, Ha Ha Thats Very Logical! (Haven't seen you in a while....)
The abiogenesis does not imply the Standard model, evolution does not imply abiogenesis, and neither does the chain of implication go in the opposite direction. None of these things argue against intelligent design, under certain definitions, but all of them argue against Young Earth Creationism, a "theory" which is actually sillier than the idea that the Earth is flat.