Sharon M. Kaye

Was there no evolutionary thought in the middle ages? The case of William of Ockham

One of the most popular arguments for the existence of God is the argument of design. According to this, the only way to explain the design we observe in nature is to posit a designer: namely, God. How could something so complex have come about by chance? With the publication of The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin demolished this argument. The design we see in nature can be explained fully in virtue of the blind process of evolution by natural selection. Granted, it would be absurd to suppose the complexity of the natural world was the result of a single coincidence, but it is not absurd at all to suppose that it is the result of self-replication and random mutation over millions of years. In fact, what we observe in nature is exactly what we would expect to result from those conditions. There is therefore no need to assume the existence of God. In The Blind Watchmaker, a popular yet penetrating exposé of evolutionary biology, Richard Dawkins avers that he cannot imagine being an atheist at any time before 1859, when Darwin’s The Origin of Species was published. Human beings want to know why. We look around the world, we notice the complexity, we want an explanation. Dawkins contends that prior to 1859, the only viable explanation was God. If one rejected the God hypothesis before The Origin of the Species, one was resigning oneself to inexplicability, a deeply unsatisfying state for an intellectual. Dawkins writes that ‘although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist’. Dawkins acknowledges that philosophers such as David Hume criticized the teleological argument for the existence of God before the advent of Darwin. However, tearing down a house is not the same as building a new one. It is one thing to assert that the existence of God cannot be proven; it is

Ockham's Razor

Ockhams razor is one of the best-known and most useful tools in the philosophers toolkit. Here Sharon Kaye explains how the razor works, and also how it may have come by its name.