Chance, Necessity and Purpose

Abstract

Charles Darwin, with characteristic honesty, rejected the notion that the world and all that is in it was the product of a predetermined plan or design. This was an inevitable and logical conclusion from his understanding of evolution as the product of natural selection of chance variations of living organisms. In rejecting a preordained creation, Darwin ran counter to the deism of the naturalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such as John Ray who believed that the order of nature implied deterministic design with an external designer and nothing left to chance.

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