An Enlightenment tradition that paralleled deism was the growing sentiment against supernatural miracles. In the early eighteenth century the debate raged in England and, once again, theological concerns were at the center of the move toward naturalism. Thomas Wollaston and Peter Annet, for instance, put forth a series of arguments against miracles and their tracts numbered in the tens of thousands. Wollaston ridiculed the idea of Jesus casting devils out of a madman and into a herd of pigs: "I could even now laugh at the thoughts of the Hoggs running and tumbling down-hill as if the Devil drove them."
As with the deists, Wollaston and Annet found divine intervention, this time in the form of miracles, to be theologically awkward. God has infinite knowledge, including foreknowledge, and power and wisdom. Hence God must be capable of so arranging and designing the natural order from eternity so as to accomplish his aims without violating the natural order.
Furthermore, as Annet argued, God's immutability mandates naturalism. God was the cause, and the laws of nature were the effect. A change in the effect—the natural order—means a change in the cause. But God does not change. And if such a change were required it would reveal a blundering creator, or worse:
If God ever determined for moral ends and reasons to interpose, if needful, by a different method, than that of his standard laws; it must be either because he could not foresee the consequences, which is like blundering in the dark; or he foresaw it would be needful; and then it would be like a blunder in the design and contrivance; or he foreknew and determined his own works should not answer His own ends, without His mending work, which is worst of all.
David Hume later refined and expanded these arguments, and by the time Darwin boarded the HMS Beagle miracles were increasingly viewed as passe. Henry Peter Brougham (1778-1868), the Lord Chancellor of England and advocate of natural theology, argued that miracles proved nothing but the exercise of miraculous power and they left the Creator's trustworthiness in question.
With that as background, it is hardly surprising that Darwin's theory of evolution was warmly received by cultural elites and many religious leaders. They may not have understood all of the underlying biology, but they understood the underlying metaphysics.
And it is hardly surprising that this opposition to miracles remains today as a core fundamental of evolution. This was made clear, yet again, this week by evolutionists Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers. Dawkins revealed this underlying metaphysic in an interview, as Myers recounts:
RD: Okay, do you believe Jesus turned water into wine?
HH: Yes.
RD: You seriously do?
HH: Yes.
RD: You actually think that Jesus got water, and made all those molecules turn into wine?
HH: Yes.
RD: My God. (spoken with astonishment)
HH: Yes. My God, actually, not yours. But let me…
RD: I've realized the kind of person I'm dealing with now.
Myers mercilously berates the interviewer for such irrationalism. This isn't about science--it never was.
