Abstract
Charles Darwin, with characteristic honesty, rejected the notion that the world and all that is in it was the product of a predetermined plan or design. This was an inevitable and logical conclusion from his understanding of evolution as the product of natural selection of chance variations of living organisms. In rejecting a preordained creation, Darwin ran counter to the deism of the naturalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such as John Ray who believed that the order of nature implied deterministic design with an external designer and nothing left to chance.
I cannot think that the world as we see it is the result of chance; and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of Design…. I am, and shall ever remain, in a hopeless muddle. (Charles Darwin in a letter to Asa Gray, 26 November 1860; see Darwin, F. (1888), 378.)
I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfied me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. (Charles Darwin in a letter to Asa Gray, 22 May 1860; see Darwin, F. (1888), 312.)
There must be something positive limiting chance, and something more than mere matter in matter, or Darwinism fails to explain life. (Hartshorne, 1962, 210.)
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© 1974 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Birch, C. (1974). Chance, Necessity and Purpose. In: Ayala, F.J., Dobzhansky, T. (eds) Studies in the Philosophy of Biology. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-01892-5_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-01892-5_14
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