Evolution is not God, Eliezer Yudkowsky says, but it’s strangely close — almost an alien god:
Find a watch in a desert, said William Paley, and you can infer the watchmaker. There were once those who denied this, who thought that life “just happened” without need of an optimization process, mice being spontaneously generated from straw and dirty shirts.If we ask who was more correct — the theologians who argued for a Creator-God, or the intellectually unfulfilled atheists who argued that mice spontaneously generated — then the theologians must be declared the victors: evolution is not God, but it is closer to God than it is to pure random entropy. Mutation is random, but selection is non-random. This doesn’t mean an intelligent Fairy is reaching in and selecting. It means there’s a non-zero statistical correlation between the gene and how often the organism reproduces. Over a few million years, that non-zero statistical correlation adds up to something very powerful. It’s not a god, but it’s more closely akin to a god than it is to snow on a television screen.
In a lot of ways, evolution is like unto theology. “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 by human standards. It is 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 really genuinely different from us. Evolution is not a God, but if it were, 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.