GOD by language-users over non-language-users It seems almost as absurd as the idea that banks may have evolved because those born with an innate cheque-writing ability were better off than those born without it Language cannot be the result of trial and error learning because such learning presupposes stable goals that successive attempts realize or fail to realize (as a rat may find or fail to find a food pellet in maze) But there is no goal to which language is a means: one cannot have the goal of acquiring a language, because one needs a language to have that wish in If it is difficult to see how language could originate by natural selection, it is equally difficult to see how life could originate that way However successful natural selection may be in explaining the origin of particular species of life, it clearly cannot explain how there came to be such things as species at all Darwin never claimed that it did; he did not offer an explanation of the origin of life Neo-Darwinians, by contrast, often attempt to tell us how life began, speculating, say, about electrical changes in some primeval organic soup These explanations are of a radically different kind from those that Darwin put forward to account for evolution Neo-Darwinians try to explain life as produced by the chance interaction of non-living materials and forces subject to purely physical laws These accounts, whatever their merits, are not explanations by natural selection Natural selection and intelligent design are not incompatible with each other, in the way that natural selection is incompatible with the Genesis story But though ‘intelligent design’ may be used in political circles as a euphemism for biblical fundamentalism, in the sheer idea of an extracosmic intelligence there is nothing that commits one to a belief in the Judaeo-Christian, or any other, religious revelation To be sure, discussion of the possibility of such an intelligence does not belong in the science classroom; if it did, the intelligence would not be an extra-cosmic one, but a part of nature But that is no reason why philosophers should not give it serious consideration The most fundamental reason in favour of postulating an extra-cosmic agency of any kind is surely the need to explain the origin of the universe itself It is wrong to say that God provides the answer to the question, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ The question itself is ill-conceived: the proposition ‘There is nothing’ cannot be given a coherent sense, and therefore there is no need to ask why it is false It is not the existence 304