Lamarck and Darwin revisited

Autor: Ladislav Kováč
Rok vydání: 2019
Předmět:
Zdroj: EMBO reports. 20(4)
ISSN: 1469-3178
Popis: EMBO Reports (2019) e47922 “That little word ‘why’ has run through all universe from the first day of creation, and all nature cries every minute to its creator ‘why’. And for seven thousand years it has had no answer” exclaimed Captain Lebyadkin, one of the characters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel Demons . The protagonists of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century had an answer: the world was a machine, set in motion by a divine force and operating according to natural laws. Isaac Newton explained in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica : “Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being, necessarily existing”. For him and his followers, religious beliefs predicted a rational order beneath the apparent chaos in nature. Truth disclosed by science may have been identified with God's thoughts. Did these members of the intellectual elite not notice the misery of the common people who were struggling to survive and feed their children? The philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz proposed a principle of pre‐established harmony to account for this apparent dichotomy: good and evil are intertwined to make this the best of all possible worlds. Many scholars of the 18th century, the “Age of Enlightenment”, perceived the world in the same way: evil had no substantive nature. Just as darkness is the absence of light, evil means the absence of good. The enlighteners believed that once the light of knowledge penetrates the darkness of ignorance and superstition, mankind will see things as they are. Many of them may have been theists—or rather deists, who claimed that God exists as a …
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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