I’m not competent enough to dive into evolutionary biology and speak to it with any certainty. Nonetheless, as a metaphysician, I am very interested in the principles that set up the entire framework of existence and make reality possible in the first place. To that end, I believe David Berlinski, writer, philosopher, and mathematician has some interesting things to say about why traditional Darwinism can no longer account for the development of biological life on this planet.

Metaphysically, let us keep this in mind. The world is in fact made up of diverse things. Diverse things do not come together unless ordered. The world has an ordered unity and, therefore, there must be one Orderer of the world.

In Aristotelian and Thomist language, diversity is only an accident of unity. (Which is why earlier posts regarding the one and the many are important.) In this sense, an accident is that which exists not in itself but only in some substance as its property or attribute. In metaphysics, an accident is a feature or characteristic which does not belong necessarily to the nature of a thing. In the video, the puzzle that life moves significantly towards an end even in the face of the second law of thermodynamics (things move towards entropy) is brought up. I would offer that as diversity (the many) is an accident of the one (unity), entropy itself is an accident of the prior goodness and teleology of Being itself.

Interestingly enough, Berlinski, an agnostic, believes there are good reasons for Christian theism. Enjoy.