Absent those answers from him, let me first point out a few inaccuracies and mischaracterizations, which litter the brief post as they did the initial one. Perhaps, at some point, my co-blogger will realize that it's okay to say "I made a mistake" when it comes to such things.
He said: "It seems quite odd that Darwin would title his work On the Origin of Species, yet offer absolutely no 'theory' on the actual origins of life."
It's actually not odd at all. After all, Ilya's just wrong: the book was not called On the Origin of Species, but instead was called On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (see http://darwin-online.org.uk
Thus, while it's true that the origin of life from non-life is an important question, the fact that Darwin himself did not address it in his masterpiece has nothing - zero, zilch, nada - to do with the debate. Still, I will return to the topic of the origin of life shortly.
Ilya ends with: "[T]here is a great scientific work which attempts to reconcile the aforementioned dilemma with a degree of efficacy. Highly recommended reading for those unconvinced by the nihilistic Darwinian perspective." The work in question? At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, by Stuart Kaufman.
Now, I almost fell off my chair when I saw that link. If Ilya's citing of Einstein to support his position previously was a slight misfire, this citation is rather like turning a bazooka on himself. For one, while Einstein is agnostic, Kaufman is an avowed atheist! See, for just one example, this video, where Kaufman says: "The secular humanists, I among them, who don't believe in God..." (http://reinventingthesacred
Sadly, it gets much, much worse for Ilya's position. Kaufman himself has dedicated his life to scientific research into the origin of life, despite Ilya's claim that "Here [i.e. in wondering about the origin of life itself] all 'scientific' camps (including Darwinian and ID) are grasping at things far beyond their reach." But wait! Here's a quote from Kaufman himself from the VERY WORK THAT ILYA CITES (it's on page 47, for those interested): "I hope to persuade you that life is a natural property of complex systems, that when a number of different kinds of molecules in a chemical soup passes a certain threshold, a self-sustaining network of reactions...will appear."
So, what am I missing? Here Kaufman, a self-described atheist-scientist, tries to do precisely what Ilya admonishes scientists not to do - indeed, what he (unfairly) describes as a deficit in Darwin's theory - which is to describe the origin of life from nonlife in purely scientific/mathematical terms. If Ilya can't admit that page 47 of that book doesn't pose a direct, head-on conflict to the Jewish/Christian/Muslim theory that an omnipotent and benevolent Deity created life where none previously existed, I just don't know what does. I give up. Really. The two accounts - Genesis 1 and Kaufman 48 - are just exact opposites.
But then, as if Kaufman himself wanted to personally settle this very debate in my favor, he says (at 2:48 of the aforementioned video): "Is it more extraordinary to imagine that God created it all...or is it more awesome to say that everything around us from the solar system to the galaxies to life to the intricacies of the cell... - that all of this has come into existence without a Creator, but as the natural evolution of this universe? I think the latter is more astonishing, and I find myself wanting so say 'that's God enough for me.'" In other words, you know how Ilya was just mocking those who would say "All Hail Lord Darwin!?" Um, so, this is awkward, but: Kaufman himself just literally did that. Literally. Kaufman just claimed, on video, in explicit terms, that Darwin's theory underlies Kaufman's own form of "religion." That the remarkable fact of evolution IS his religion. All Hail Lord Darwin indeed - and this guy was supposed to support Ilya's position! Maybe if Elie Wiesel went ahead and cited to Joseph Goebbels for some sort of moral authority about tolerance would there have been a more inapt citation than Ilya's presenting Kaufman as someone who transcends the science vs. religion debate. Maybe. It'd be close, though.
In closing - because Kaufman went ahead and made all of my points for me, so I don't have much left - I do want to clarify why Ilya may have gone so horribly wrong; it's a confusion of what one might call the "necessary" claim with the "actuality" claim. The necessary claim is a weak one, and a rather uninteresting one in my view: namely, does modern science - and specifically the neo-Darwinian claim that evolution is essentially undirected - necessarily conflict with every single thing that anyone might give the name "religion"? That answer is an easy and emphatic no: the quasi-religious beliefs of Einstein, Kaufman, Daniel Dennett, and many others - where they essentially see a kind of spirituality or Kantian "sublime" beauty in the very fact that life and consciousness arose, undirected, from nothingness fit that bill. But we need to recognize this for what it is: it's not a melding of science with Christianity or Judaism in some new way; rather, it means abandoning belief in any semblance of a creator or personal God and letting science dictate one's deep understanding of the universe. And that's fine, if you're into that thing. But, as Ilya noted, about 99.99999% of religious people want to keep their Biblical/Koranic God and not start Hailing Lord Darwin with Mr. Kaufman.
But let's not confuse this weak claim (as Ilya so clearly has) with the "actuality" claim: namely, given the specific claims made by the major religious and the actual beliefs held by the vast, vast majority of religious believers, does Darwin's dangerous idea pose a direct conflict to the truth of these beliefs? The answer, as I've tried to show - and as Kaufman and Einstein recognize - is quite simply yes. They collide head-on. That's why from the very day of publication, religious leaders have been railing against evolution by natural selection, and coming up with stopgaps like creation science and ID theory to try and shore up their views. They knew the trains are running into a head-on collision. I know the deal. I'm not sure why Ilya doesn't.
N.B. In addition to Kaufman and Einstein, Ilya cites ones additional authority for his view that there really is no dilemma between religion and science, a "philosopher" (who, incidentally, "never formally entered into the field of academia," so his views were never required to be scrutinized or clarified) named Frithjof Schuon. I would respond to his use of him and his work, except that it's not clear what Mr. Schuon actually believed or what anything he said actually meant. His metaphysical beliefs are summarized as follows on Wikipedia; anyone who can unpack them is smarter than I am:
"Said differently, being the Absolute, Beyond-Being is also the Sovereign Good (Agathon), that by its nature desires to communicate itself through the projection of Maya. The whole manifestation from the first Being (Ishvara) to matter (Prakriti), the lower degree of reality, is indeed the projection of the Supreme Principle (Brahman). The personal God, considered as the creative cause of the world, is only relatively Absolute, a first determination of Beyond-Being, at the summit of Maya. The Supreme Principle is not only Beyond-Being. It is also the Supreme Self (Atman) and in its innermost essence, the Intellect (buddhi) that is the ray of Consciousness shining down, the axial refraction of Atma within Maya."
Let's agree to ignore old Frithjof, shall we? His beliefs sound more like those of Sarumon from "Lord of the Rings" than a philosopher's to me.
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