He even found a seat in the overcrowded flight lounge.
In “Confessions of an Atheist Darwin-Doubter”( Evolution News & Views, May 21, 2012), James Barham explains why a reasonable atheist can easily doubt Darwin:
By the 1980s, I had become conversant with the standard critiques of neo-Darwinism, such as Karl Popper’s. Also, from my classical studies, I was familiar with Aristotle. So, I knew there were problems with Darwinism as a metaphysical system, and that alternatives existed. Gradually, too, I became conscious of a growing cognitive dissonance between my Darwin-inspired philosophical materialism and reductionism, and my first-person experience of the fundamental importance of purpose, value, and meaning for human existence. I was familiar with various schemes that had been proposed for explaining away the latter, such as Daniel Dennett’s “intentional stance,” but I could see they were just evading the issue. So, I was left with a contradiction between two aspects of my mental life that I had no idea how to resolve.
Then, one day while browsing in the stacks — this was around 1988 — I stumbled across an essay collection entitled Self-Organizing Systems: The Emergence of Order (ed. F. Eugene Yates; Plenum Press, 1987). This volume was devoted to efforts that were then underway to use dynamical systems theory as a means of modeling the operation of various physiological systems. I immediately had the experience of the scales falling from my eyes. I saw in a flash that the concept of a nonlinear oscillator — and its associated “basin of attraction” — might be a way to model the end-directed, or teleological, feature of biological functions. (A basin of attraction — or “attractor,” for short — is a mathematical representation of dynamical behavior as a “trajectory” through an abstract multidimensional space.) And upon this foundation, I could already vaguely see that an emergentist metaphysics might be erected which might provide a robustly realist, yet rigorously scientific, account of the phenomena of purpose, value, and meaning.
I was aware of well-known criticisms of both of the then-current reductionist accounts of function: the “causal-role” theory and the Darwin-inspired “selected-effects” theory. In a nutshell, the problem is that neither theory can explain the normative character of biological processes in a coherent manner. (Biological processes are “normative” in the sense that they may either succeed or fail in fulfilling their functions.) With respect to the “causal-role” theory, there is no way to distinguish between functional and non-functional parts of a biological system without presupposing the normative character of the overall system as a whole — which begs the question at issue. … More.
Actually, it seems to be a trend. One thing the New Atheists have done, for which the public is surely in their debt, is to render atheism and Darwinism so odious that people who would not have questioned the Darwinists’ circled wagons and circular reasoning before now find that they must.
See also: There are now hopeful signs of a backlash against the brain