Peter Pillai and Charles Darwin

“In short, what made Peter Pillai a critic of evolution is that he was able to distinguish between materialistic philosophy and empirical science and opposed the former because it came cloaked in the authority of the latter. "What Darwin designed in The Origin of the Species was a fragile edifice, where fact and fiction intermingled in an inextricable confusion concluded the philosopher mathematician.”
____________________________________

by Ephrem Fernando

(March 17, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Peter Alcantara Pillai, a creature of logic and order, was a pioneer who blazed paths where highways never ran. Completely un-self-seeking, he was impervious to greed, discouragement and unresponsiveness. He sacrificed, both himself and his personal interests, in promulgating the truth.


When Mr. Valiant-for-Truth passed over the river, Bunyan said "all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side". I often wonder how loudly the trumpets sounded when the oblate went on to the other side. Peter Pillai believed false prophets bamboozle even the converted with doubtful arguments trotted out as certitudes. He called them incubi and succubi, most eager to inflict harm, utterly alien from righteousness, subtle in deceit and so cunning that the Egyptian, mathematian and geographer Claudies Ptolemy’s view that the Sun revolves around the Earth is presented so cunningly that many find themselves re-examining their commitment to the astronomer Copernicus. The argument that there will always be temptation to undermine the truth goes back to Thucydides and Aristotle and the antidote against error Pillai said, is widespread education with state bursaries’ in well equipped schools, not shoddy free-education to all and sundry in dilapidated schools; support for the expression of opposing views, debate, rational thinking and skepticism.

He often came to St. Lukes, a university Hall of residence, to talk and sup with the undergraduates, which sadly has now been bulldozed with chapel and tennis courts. That night he came as usual and after dinner began by disclosing that the seventeenth century German astronomer Johannes Kepler, without whom Newtonian physics might not have come to be was his hero, because Kepler described his pursuit of science as a wish to know the mind of God. He thereafter began to layout his terrestial beliefs. I believe in Newton’s laws, he intoned and on he went invoking the illustrious names of Bernoulli, Fourier, Ampere, Boltzmann, Faraday, Maxwell and paused and launched a blistering attack on Charles Darwin.

I consider Darwinism hogwash, because Darwin was not a true scientist but one who looked for reasons for what he already believed, - that is the pre-eminence of the privileged social class from which he came-by perpetuating the myth of survival of the fittest. If you put Darwin’s social snobbery aside, you will find Peter Pillai and Charles Darwin dedicated men of the cloth. Pillai was a priest of the Church of Rome and Darwin, a minister of the Church of England when the opportunity to sail to the Galapagos island on the HMS Beagle presented itself. Although Pillai was steadfast in his faith to the very end, Darwin rapidly ceased to believe in the Christian doctrine.

Peter Alcantara Pillai a man of remarkable intelligence, was born in 1904 in Wennappuwa, a then god forsaken outpost on the west coast of the island. His father was a lowly paid teacher who could hardly support the family of five boys including Peter, the youngest. His paternal grandfather was a sharecropper. Peter financed his education with scholarships obtaining MA, MSc, PhD, specialising in Physics and Maths, from the University of London and a Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Rome. He was literate in physics and maths and knew in depth the true elegance of both subjects, so much so, that a stellar mathematician from the University of Madras, (from where Microsoft chairman Bill Gates gets his mathematicians) whom I believe was Subramaniam Chandrasekhar, called him a real genius.

By contrast, Charles Robert Darwin was born in 1809 in Shropshire, England, the fifth child of a wealthy and sophisticated English family. His paternal grandfather was the well known 18th century physician and savant Erasmus Darwin. His maternal grandfather was the successful china and pottery entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood. The family spent their leisure hunting foxes, a sport Oscar Wilde described as the "unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable". Charles went to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine but dropped out and entered the University of Cambridge, to prepare himself to become a clergyman of the Church of England. It is said that if destiny had changed roles, Peter would have sailed to the Galapagos and returned with a different story.

Pillai began the demolition by laying out Darwin’s Theory of Evolution which postulates that life arose from non-living matter, entirely by some unknown mechanistic natural process, on a pre- biotic earth and then proceeded to evolve into more complex life forms almost exclusively by way of a random mutation and natural selection process, all occurring without the involvement of a Creator. What Darwin did, charged Pillai, was to trot out a doubtful theory as a certitude by emasculating The Second Law of Thermodynamics, which relates to a process fundamental to the physical universe called Entropy, which is the process in which all matter in the physical universe eventually breaks down into its constituent parts, with the passage of time.

A corollary of this Law he said is the observation that inanimate matter never spontaneously organises itself into more complex forms. For example, the Ford in which I came will eventually disintegrate into a pile of rust. It will never spontaneously build itself into a Cadillac. With that throw of the monkey wrench, he brought the wheels of Darwinism to a grinding halt. It was a thin scalpel job, so precise, so elegant. The coup de grace came when with unabashed sarcasm, he reminded his spellbound undergraduate audience, that Darwin was a drop out from medical school, who was mathematically illiterate.

Allan Turner in his book The Mythological Character of Evolution, argues that the scientific laboratory hardly helps the evolutionary cause and goes on to explain much more deeply The Second Law of Thermodynamics. All energy changes, some of the energy tends to be transformed into non-reversible heat energy. This is enunciated in the Law of Entropy, which states that in a closed system like the Earth, Entropy increases or the measure of availability of the energy of a system for the performance of work or maintenance of the life process decreases. This means, decreasing organisation, is characteristic of the universe. Now the idea of evolution is completely contrary to this law of science, as the theory involves a continual increase in order, organisation, size and complexity. Fred Hoyle the famed British astronomer, put it more bluntly. He declared that the " emergence of a living cell from an inanimate chemical soup", is about as likely as the assembly of a 747 by a whirlwind passing through a junkyard. Those who have mastered exponentials will understand, when mathematicians say that the odds against the probability of this happening are 10 to the power 160 to 1, an impossibility if the age of the earth is 4.6 billion years, which age has now been confirmed from the data received from the Hubble space telescope. Nobel laureate, Francis Crick who won the prize for his work on the DNA (deoxyribo nuclnucleic acid) lamented that the origin of life "seems a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to be satisfied to get it going".

Prof. W. R. Thompson FRS, when asked by the publishers of the new edition of Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, to write an introduction, replacing the one prepared by the Darwinian Sir Arthur Keith, felt extremely hesitant to accept the invitation because he was not satisfied that Darwin proved his point, or his influence in scientific and public thinking, has been beneficial. When he told the Editors that his introduction would not be a hymn to Darwin and Darwinism, they had not objected.

The introduction supplied by Prof Thompson was noteworthy for its erudition, its lucid exposition of a complex subject and not least, the way in which he subjected Darwin’s hypothesis to a withering, critical appraisal. Prof Thompson’s introduction concluded with these magical words "It may be said and the most orthodox theologians indeed hold, that God controls and guides even the events due to chance, but this proposition the Darwinians emphatically reject and it is clear that in the Origin, evolution is presented as an essentially unidirectional process. For the majority of its readers therefore the origin effectively dissipated the evidence of providential control. The failure of Darwin and his successors to attempt an equitable assessment of the religious issues at stake, indicates a regrettable obtuseness and lack of responsibility. Furthermore, on the purely philosophical plane, the Darwinian doctrine of evolution involves, some difficulties which Darwin and Huxley were unable to appreciate. Between the organism that simply lives the organism that lives and feels and the organism that lives, feels and reasons there are in the opinion of respectable philosophers, abrupt transitions, corresponding to an ascent in the scale of being and they hold that the agencies of the material world, cannot produce transitions of these kinds. That plants, animals and man can be distinguished because they are radically different is the common sense conviction".

So why is Darwin’s theory trenchantly defended by down to earth simpletons, unlearned and the learned. The reason, according to Peter Pillai, was that western society is rooted in philosophical materialism, which arose as a reaction to the stifling religious dogma of the 16th-18th century Europe.

Philosophical materialism postulates that the universe is essentially a three dimensional, materialistic phenomena and that life on earth somehow arose out of a freak event, eons ago, by way of some unknown, unconscious, mechanistic process. Philosophical materialism totally rejects as superstitious nonsense the concept of a Creator and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is in complete accordance with this philosophy and trenchantly defended, despite growing evidence of the manifest shortcomings of the theory. Darwinian theory is not empirical science but rather a deduction from naturalistic philosophy. In short, what made Peter Pillai a critic of evolution is that he was able to distinguish between materialistic philosophy and empirical science and opposed the former because it came cloaked in the authority of the latter. "What Darwin designed in The Origin of the Species was a fragile edifice, where fact and fiction intermingled in an inextricable confusion concluded the philosopher mathematician.

Peter Alcantara Pillai did not need Nietzche to point out that the longer you fight your enemy, the more you may come to resemble him. He was a man of peace and lived in peace. Now he rests in peace. The trumpets will sound because he did not show mighty indignation on irrelevant issues.By way of a shot across the bow, he warned not to sup with the Devil. But if you do, remember to use a long spoon. This advice is for the guidance of the wise and the obedience of fools.

- Sri Lanka Guardian