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“Gods are ontologically distinct from creatures,” said Damien Broderick, “or they’re not worth the paper they’re written on.” And indeed, the Shaper of Life is not itself a creature. Evolution is bodiless, like the Judeo-Christian deity. Omnipresent in Nature, immanent in the fall of every leaf. Vast as a planet’s surface. Billions of years old. Itself unmade, arising naturally from the structure of physics.
Doesn’t that all sound like something that might have been said about God?
And yet the Maker has no mind, as well as no body. In some ways, its handiwork is incredibly poor design. It’s internally divided.
Most of all, it isn’t nice.
In a way, Darwin discovered God - a God that failed to match the preconceptions of theology, and so passed unheralded. If Darwin had discovered that life was created by an intelligent agent - a bodiless mind that loves us, and will smite us with lightning if we dare say otherwise - people would have said “My gosh! That’s God!”
But instead Darwin discovered a strange alien God - not comfortably “ineffable”, but genuinely different from us. If Evolution were a god, it wouldn’t be Jehovah. It would be H. P. Lovecraft’s Azathoth, the blind idiot God burbling chaotically at the center of everything, surrounded by the thin monotonous piping of flutes.
Which you might have predicted, if you had really looked at Nature.
So much for the claim some theists make, that they believe in a vague deity. That they are waiting innocently curious for Science to discover God. Science has already discovered the godlike maker of humans - but it wasn’t what the theists wanted to hear. They were waiting for the discovery of their God, the highly specific God they want to be there. They shall wait forever, for the great discovery has already taken place, and the winner is Azathoth.
Well, more power to us humans. I like having a Creator I can outwit.
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