st the odds, because so many contingencies had to happen before any one of us could come into being. Most of what occurred in natural and human history could have turned out differently than it did.
But does that lead to the conclusion that we can explain the world and the creatures living in it by mere contingency? That is the question, and the only question, that I am raising here. I am not denying the evolution of species or contending for a literal interpretation of the creation narrative in the Book of Genesis. Nor am I even arguing here that evolution requires an intelligent and purposeful Creator. Those are valid and interesting issues, but they are not the issue I am addressing here. If there has been an evolution of all life forms from an original one, whatever the correct explanation of that process may be, I am asking only whether chance variation and natural selection can be an adequate explanation of that whole process. That living creatures can and do adapt themselves to changes in their environment is clear enough, but not that the entire living world can be explained in this way.
If it cannot, I do not mean to offer an alternative explanation, nor do I see why I must do so. The Darwinist theory of evolution either explains it satisfactorily or it does not. If it does not, then some other explanation is needed, and other persons more competent than I may (or may not) provide it. I want only to raise a question that is not biblical or theological or scientific, but metaphysical: Does Darwinism violate the principle that effects cannot exceed their causes or, conversely, that causes must be adequate to the effects they produce?
At least part of the stubborn insistence that Darwinism must be the correct explanation of evolution is, I suspect, that it is the only one that materialists will accept. There have been materialist philosophies ever since the rise of philosophy in ancient Greece. But they have gained in force since the rise of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries. A couple of passages from David Lindley's book The End of Physics, will help to illustrate what I mean: [Sir Isaac] Newton mathematicized physics to turn the "tendencies" and "potentials" of Aristotelian thought into what we now recognize as true science, based on quantitative and precise relations between masses, forces, and motions. Numbers were needed to measure these quantities, so physical laws had to take the form of relationships between numbers -- mathematical laws, in other words ... . There is a temptingly simple explanation for the fact that science is mathematical in nature: it is because we give the name of science to those areas of intellectual inquiry that yield to mathematical analysis. Art appreciation, for example, requires a genuine effort of intellect, but we do not suppose that the degree to which a painting touches our emotions can be organized into a set of measurements ... . Science, on the other hand, deals with precisely those subjects amenable to quantitative analysis, and that is why mathematics is the appropriate language for them. The puzzle becomes a tautology: mathematics is the language of science because we reserve the name "science" for anything that mathematics can handle. If it's not mathematical to some degree at least, it isn't really science. Fair enough, if that is what you mean by science. It follows, of course, that science cannot deal with all subjects open to intellectual inquiry and cannot explain everything, but has a limited scope, and not necessarily the highest one. But the triumphs of mathematical science in the past four centuries have been so stunning that multitudes uncritically assume that if science cannot verify it, it isn't real. Or at least it isn't knowable, and belongs in the realm of poetry or myth.
This assumption turns not only religion but any philosophy that goes beyond the material into mythmaking and superstition. It also lends the enormous prestige of science to materialism, where matter is the real, and the real is matter. It thus enables materialists to dismiss 