Further Reflections on Atheism 215based, in various clays. Crystals of the clays could have replicated themselves
as crystals do when in a suitable solvent. Dawkins even fantasises a not
impossible scenario as to how there could be changes in and natural selection
of clays. Eventually by chance an evolved clay might serve as a template for
a replicating precursor of DNA and RNA.
At present we do not know how life began. Nevertheless there are various
plausible conjectures (admittedly incomplete) as to how it might have occurred.
This should allow us to think that no miracles were needed. Indeed, if the
origin of life was a lucky accident that could be expected to occur once in
millions of years, the short time span of a laboratory experiment might not
allow for the beginning of carbon-based life to be reproduced experimentally.
It may be worth making a comparison with the various differing but not
implausible and non-miraculous accounts of the historical Jesus furnished by
the higher criticism of the New Testament. We may not be able to decide
which of these is the most plausible, or even whether the truth about Jesus
is captured by any of them, but they may convince us as possible accounts and
that there is no need to believe the stories of miraculous or supernatural
events.
What are the alternatives to the scientific conjectures about the origin of
life? ‘Intelligent design’ by itself does not tell us much. With human design,
say, of a watch, there are stories of how the design is carried out. With God
it is as if there is word magic in saying ‘Let it be the case that p’ so that this
leads to it being the case that p. Hence I am not doing a service to the
theologian by making the story too simplistic. It is like saying that ‘Open
Sesame’ causes the robbers’ entrance to the cave to open. (It is obvious that
the author of the story did not imagine that the robbers had an electronic
voice recognising device triggering a relay that started the cave-opening
machinery.) I can concede that I am being too simplistic but so is the attribu-
tion of design without details of how the design in God’s mind is translated
into configuration of biological ‘hardware’. (Here hardware need not be hard.
It can be squashy.)
9 A Possible Olive Branch (or maybe Twig) to the Theist
The Bayesian formula accounts for the severity of tests. If an hypothesis
enables us to predict something we had thought highly unlikely this provides
a severe test, as compared with a hypothesis that predicts things that we know
already or which are not surprising. Hypotheses in physics get explained by
more inclusive and abstract theories. What happens if we get to an ultimate
‘theory of everything ’? Since the theory is ultimate it could not be derived
from some other theory. In choosing between theories when there is no