HOW THINGS BEGAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 548, 23 December 1949, Page 5

HOW THINGS BEGAN

Sir,-Whatever be the conventions in the matter, I think that in the ¢ircumstances it will be more satisfactory if I comment on Mr. Prior’s review of Evolution and Philosophy (Listener, December 9, 1949). The reviewer, quoting part of a sentence from the jacket, declares that "this work aims at revealing what modern science has to tell us about ‘how things began.’" Actually, it is quite clear from the context that this sentence refers to the second part of the book, and a glance at the table of contents reveals that the book has a much wider aime being a critical examination of various evolutionary theories, philosophical as well as scientific. Mr. Prior attributes to me the statement that philosophers who do not believe in God have either held that change does not occur or that change is the only reality, and he adds that "the cause of theism is ill-served by the making of such rash accusations against its opponents." If Mr. Prior had read more carefully, he might have spared us this rash accusation. I did not say that every atheist philosopher holds one or other of these views. What I ‘wrote was: "Every philosopher who attempts to construct a metaphysical system from which God is excluded'will, if he is completely logical, be led to one or other of these extremes." Mr. Prior has over-looked the qualifying clause which I have italicized. Besides, I made it clear that some of the atheist philosophers whose views I criticised, e.g:, Hegel and Haeckel, did not go to either of these extremes. Mr. Prior declares that "although the idea of an uncaused change is a bizarre one to most of us, it is an abuse of logical terminology to call it, as Father Duggan does, ‘self-contradictory.’" Mr. Prior may hold, with Hume, that a change which has no cause implies no contradiction, but I hold, with St. Thomas and common sense, that it does. That is why the idea strikes "us as bizarre. That a change must have some cause is a self-evident proposition (and one of the postulates which the scientist accepts without question), and so the concept of an uncaused change is literally self-contradictory.. To say, for example, that an unhewn block of marble became a statue of Apollo without the intervention of any cause is nonsense. Would Mr. Prior agree? Mr. Prior also speaks of my. "indis‘criminate" use of the term "self-contra-dictory." Will he please substantiate this charge by quoting specific cases where my use of the term cannot be justified? Finally, Mr. Prior asserts that biologists are sometimes undecided about which major group an organism belongs to, and implies that this fact invalidates my conclusions about the state of the fossil record. The indecision he refers to ‘is commonly due to the desire of some biologists to have the transitional forms so necessary for the. Darwinian theory of evolution from one stock; usually there is no real doubt about the place these organisms occupy in the system of nature. Furthermore, even such forms are too few for the requirements of the theory. If Mr. Prior will mention some specific instances we shall see. whether the principles of biological classification are not sufficiently cut-and-dried to dispose of the claim that these forms are

transitional,

G. H.

DUGGAN

S.

M.

(Greenmeadows).