Jacques Monod's 1970 book, “Chance and Necessity”

Darwinism vs. theory of evolution

Many think that Darwinism is the same as the theory of evolution. But some people argue against this widespread belief that the two are identical, including Prof. Michael Behe of Lehigh University who wrote “Darwin’s Black Box” and “The Edge of Evolution.”

According to Prof. Behe, Darwinism has the three major tenets of random mutation, natural selection, and common descent. And he takes issue with the first because it hardly leads to the superior traits that are necessary for evolution.

In his words, no matter how long evolution proceeds, the possibility that random mutation will result in major evolutionary breakthroughs is practically nil. He also claims that Darwinism has to better explain in evolutionary developmental biology how “irreducibly complex” human organs come into existence.

His arguments involve the religious origin debate. He insinuates that an invisible hand, or God, has to be behind evolution, which he says cannot be the result of pure chance.

In comparison, Nobel Prize-winning French biochemist Jacques Monod claims that life is only the result of natural processes by “pure chance” in his 1970 book, “Chance and Necessity.”

“When one thinks about the tremendous journey of evolution over the past three thousand million years or so, the prodigious wealth of structures it has engendered, and the extraordinarily effective teleonomic performances of living beings, from bacteria to man, one may well wonder whether all this might not be the product of a vast lottery, in which natural selection has blindly picked the rare winners from among numbers drawn at utter random,” he says.

Is miracle explained?

And he complains that people do not accept the easy truth, which is backed by scientific evidence.

“Although a detailed review of the accumulated modern evidence assures us that this conception alone is compatible with the facts, it affords no synthetic, intuitive, and immediate understanding of evolution as a whole,” he notes.

“The miracle is ‘explained’; it does not strike us as any less miraculous. As Francois Mauriac wrote, ‘What this professor says is far more incredible than what we poor Christians believe.’”

Controversies continue whether or not “the miracle is explained” and they are not likely to stop any time soon.
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