Determinism and Contingency in the Designs of Nature

Yes, we generally accept that the biodiversity is a product of evolution. But this statement leaves open a big question: is there a purpose in the design of nature? Why over 40 thousand different species of butterflies, and why so many kinds of roses? To which purpose? And lizards, for example, or spiders: why are they there, what for?

One traditional answer, at least in our western culture, has been: God. God, in his imprescriptible mind, has made all with an intelligent design that we humans cannot understand. In the medieval time, and for centuries afterwards, people were satisfied with this answer.

The problem came with a man by name Charles Darwin, in the middle of the nineteen century, who introduced the notion of evolution, saying that the living species were not immutable and made once and for all by God, but had been evolving and changing from a common ancestor.

All under the driving forces of natural processes and natural parameters. Even the origin of life, he mentioned, could be due to physico-chemical natural forces.

Actually, the controversy between the God design, and the natural laws, was present much before Darwin. In 1802, William Paley, an Anglican priest, had written a famous book, “The Watchmaker”, where he was arguing that the things of life were too complex to be made spontaneously by natural processes, and that therefore only God could be responsible for the designs of life.

And today, more than two centuries after that book, the same arguments are presented by the creationists, who with the notion of intelligent design also fight against the concepts of evolution.

Scientist nowadays, with very few exceptions, do not hold to creationism and to the notion of intelligent design. Even scientist who are convinced believers, like the late Christian de Duve, accept the idea of an evolution without predetermined goals. No purpose in nature. But how it is then for life itself? Actually, considering the origin of life on Earth, we may go deeper in this argument.

Scientists in the field would agree that the pathway that goes from inanimate to animate matter must follow the natural laws- the laws of physics and chemistry. From this common denominator depart however two quite different points of view, both in the framework of science- forgetting the divine intervention.

The one, which we will call deterministic-better would be to say “absolute determinism”, states that the origin of life on Earth was an inescapable outcome of the original initial conditions on Earth.

In general, determinism means that we are dealing with a sequence of events, each one determined causally by the preceding one, and causing by necessity the next one. According to this view, then, the laws of nature are channelled into a narrow road that has to conduct to a well-defined goal: life itself.