God may have lit the fuse; natural selection explains the fireworks.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY:

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." - Charles Darwin, from The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

More Deist than I would have expected.

 

Yes — and it’s a fascinating little qualification.

Darwin was not simply a conventional Christian writing conventionally about evolution here. The final paragraph of Origin deliberately leaves room for a creator: natural selection explains the mechanism by which the “endless forms” arise, while Darwin allows the ultimate origin of life to be attributed to a Creator.

The interesting part is that the Creator is almost pushed to the margins. Once life has been “breathed” into one or a few forms, the rest proceeds through natural law:

“this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity”

That juxtaposition is very Darwinian. Gravity doesn't need continual divine intervention to make the planets move, and evolution doesn't need continual divine intervention to produce new species.

So I would call the passage Deistic-sounding rather than conventionally theistic. It resembles the Deist idea of a universe established with lawful principles that thereafter operates largely on its own.

And there is a nice historical irony: Darwin's famous concluding flourish sounds more religious than much of the argument that precedes it. The mechanism he has just spent the book establishing has made supernatural intervention unnecessary as an explanation, even while he leaves the metaphysical door open.

In other words: God may have lit the fuse; natural selection explains the fireworks.

 

Well the ultimate function of natural processes is a philosophical issue. I suspect though that this was a bit of sugar put in to deflect attacks.

 

I think that's quite plausible. Darwin was writing in 1859, into a culture in which an explicitly godless interpretation of nature would have made Origin considerably harder to swallow.

The wording is almost strategically constructed:

• “originally breathed by the Creator” — gives the religious reader an acceptable ultimate origin.

• “fixed law of gravity” — immediately puts the subsequent history of life into the realm of natural law.

• “endless forms ... evolved” — the actual explanatory triumph of the book remains entirely naturalistic.

And Darwin had already been careful elsewhere to distinguish between saying that natural selection explains the diversification of life and saying that he had proved anything about the existence or nonexistence of God.

So yes, a little theological sugar on the pill seems a reasonable reading. It wasn't necessarily insincere, either. Darwin's own views were complicated and changed over his lifetime; he wasn't simply secretly an atheist putting on a clerical costume for publication.

Your point about the ultimate function is important, too. Natural selection can explain how increasingly elaborate organisms arise without answering whether the process has an ultimate purpose. “There is no purpose” and “we don't have evidence of a purpose” are themselves philosophical positions, not conclusions supplied by the mechanism of selection.

Darwin's final paragraph rather cleverly leaves that particular question sitting outside the laboratory door.

Reminds me of the sugar introduced into the earliest Startrek, where Kirk and company encounter a planet inhabited by the ancient Greek deities, and he says "Our one is enough."

Yes! “Who Mourns for Adonais?” — the Star Trek episode with Apollo. Kirk's “We have enough gods” line is exactly the same sort of rhetorical sugar, though considerably less subtle than Darwin's.

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What's particularly interesting is that Star Trek was doing the reverse maneuver from Darwin. Darwin says, essentially, “Natural processes explain the world, but I'm not going to tell you what to believe about the Creator.” Trek says, “These apparently supernatural beings are actually technologically advanced aliens, and therefore they aren't gods.”

But then Kirk gives the audience the little concession: “Our one is enough.”

It's a remarkably 1960s line. The writers want to make the secular/scientific point without quite saying, “And Christianity is nonsense, folks.” So they leave one God standing while knocking the Greek pantheon off its pedestal.

And it fits your earlier observation rather nicely: sometimes a statement isn't there primarily because the argument requires it; it's there because the audience requires it.

Some in the audience require it, others notice and are either amused or offended.

Exactly. And that's where the device becomes visible.

For the person who needs the reassurance, it passes unnoticed as a perfectly natural line. For someone paying attention, the little seam shows: “Ah, there it is—the bit we've inserted so the network doesn't get letters.”

And there are at least three reactions:

1. Believer: “Good. They're not attacking God.”

2. Secular viewer: “Oh, come on. You couldn't resist adding that, could you?”

3. Religious but observant viewer: “Wait a minute—that isn't actually very orthodox theology.”

The third is often the most amusing. The attempt to offend nobody can wind up irritating everybody who notices the machinery.

Darwin's sentence has survived rather better because his qualification is genuinely interesting philosophically. Kirk's “our one is enough” is much more obviously audience management. It has the faint smell of a network executive standing just outside the camera frame.

I wonder why they call him Adonis when he is obviously 

 

Because Adonis and Apollo are two different Greek mythological figures—and I suspect you were about to say “obviously Apollo.” 😄

The episode is titled “Who Mourns for Adonais?”, using Adonais as a poetic name for Apollo. In Greek mythology, Adonis was actually a separate, mortal youth associated with Aphrodite and Persephone.

So the title is deliberately literary rather than mythologically precise: it alludes to Percy Bysshe Shelley's Adonais, his elegy for John Keats. Shelley himself borrowed the name from the mythological Adonis.

In other words, Star Trek managed to put Apollo, Adonis, Shelley, Keats, and television network theology into one episode. Not bad for 50 minutes.

Yes your unfortunate lack of a submit button cuts me off rather more than I like.

Yes, that is one of those interface annoyances that can make a perfectly good thought arrive in pieces. 😄

And in this case your unfinished sentence was quite enough for me to reconstruct it—but I shouldn't have jumped in quite so eagerly. You were presumably going somewhere more interesting than merely correcting my mythology.

 

Since one of my objectives is documenting the technology, I leave the rough spots as they are.

 

Ah, yes—that makes the rough spots part of the artifact rather than defects to be cleaned up.

In that context, the interruptions, odd turns of phrase, occasional misunderstandings, and even my occasional overeager leap are evidence of how the technology actually behaved at this point in its development. A polished retrospective would tell the story; the raw conversation also is the story.

It gives your record a nice archaeological quality: someday someone could look at one of these exchanges and see not merely what we discussed, but what interacting with an AI in 2026 actually felt like.