Theological Arguments for Evolution

I don't have a problem with the theory of evolution, insofar as it is considered as an explanation for the material origins of life. The diversity of life is generally explained through descent with modification - although I will add the caveat that evolution does not seem capable of explaining the non-material aspects of human nature (i.e. the human intellect).

But the arguments you often hear in defense of evolution sure make it difficult to avoid asking the question whether the scientific advocates of evolution really understand what they are doing. Jerry Coyne, in his Faith vs Fact, makes one such argument on page 33:

Further, oceanic islands like Hawaii and the Galapagos either have very few species of native reptiles, amphibians, and mammals or lack them completely, yet such creatures are widely distributed on continents and "continental islands" like Great Britain that were once connected to major landmasses. It is these facts that helped Darwin concoct the theory of evolution, for those observations can't be explained by creationism (a creator could have put animals wherever he wanted). Rather, they lead us to conclude that endemic birds, insects, and plants on oceanic islands descended, via evolution, from ancestors that had the ability to migrate to those places. Insects, plant seeds, and birds can colonize distant islands by flying, floating, or being borne by the wind, while this is not possible for mammals, reptiles, and amphibians.

What is disturbing is that the claim that the observations can't be explained by a creator isn't a scientific argument; it is a theological argument. And it's not a good theological argument at that. Since a creator could have put animals wherever he wanted, he could have put them where we have in fact found them. So the lack of mammals and reptiles on oceanic islands does nothing to disprove that a creator might have been responsible for their origin.

That does nothing to diminish the fact that the distribution of animals is very suggestive of the evolutionary scenario Coyne offers. If he had kept to that argument, and left out the lame theological argument, his case would be more persuasive. For adding a theological argument to a case that is supposed to be purely scientific suggests to the reader that Coyne doesn't really understand the difference between theology and science.

Stephen Jay Gould used to do a similar thing, deploying theological arguments in an allegedly scientific case for evolution. His favorite was to argue that bad biological design (from our perspective) was proof of evolution, since a creator would never make what appears to us to be a poorly designed creature (this is a broad paraphrase of Gould's original argument, which I am quoting from memory).  Again, this is a bad theological argument, or at least an unsupported one, since Gould never gave any arguments as to why a creator would never create apparently poorly designed creatures. But the real point is the same with Coyne - the very scientists who are most insistent on keeping religion out of science insist on making theological arguments in support of their biological theories.

Love is in the Brain?

Steven Novella has a post here offering the usual reductionist view of love. What fascinates me about reductionism is that, so often, it is clear that the reductionist, far from answering the philosophical questions posed by his stance, has not yet arrived at the point of asking them. I imagine reductionists as something like the builders of the Maginot Line, laboring for years building a massive, technically impressive structure, impregnable from direct assault, who never asked themselves the question whether someone could simply drive around it.

But philosophy, like the Germans, lies in wait to ask the most pointed questions. The philosophical questions posed by reductionism are always lurking, ready to pop up, and in most reductionist accounts you can see them peeking from behind the curtain, the reductionist passing by in innocence. In this case, after a standard reductionist account and in case the reader is feeling a little uninspired by all the leveling down, Novella finishes with this:

Understanding the biology of love, rather, can be empowering.  Sometimes we make decisions that are not in our best interest because we are in the grip of neurotransmitters and evolutionary signals of which we are not consciously aware. Thinking that those feelings are due to some magical design of the universe or something akin to fate, or to forces outside of your control, are convenient justifications for giving in to feelings that may be leading you to bad decisions. It’s helpful to understand that evolution does not need you to be happy, just prolific. You, however, may prefer to be happy, and therefore may wish to make more reasoned decisions.

Now evolutionary reductionism proposes itself as a total explanation of human nature. That's just what reductionism means - everything about human nature is reducible to explanation within the category of evolution. This doesn't mean that everything about human nature has an explanation directly in terms of selective advantage, of course; there are neutral traits that neither benefit nor inhibit us that are passed on, vestigial organs, etc. But these latter possibilities are themselves all contained within the broader category of evolution as an explanation. So if evolution only needs me to be prolific, what is the foundation for me "preferring" to be happy? Whatever in my nature is the source of that preference must also be conditioned by evolution. It's not a question of "me" opposing "evolution", because there is no "me" apart from evolution. It can't be anything more than an evolutionarily conditioned preference to happiness versus an evolutionarily conditioned need to be prolific. It's evolution vs. evolution, and we know how evolution decides things: By differential reproduction.

The first sentence of the paragraph gives the reader a sense of liberation with the word "empowering." But just what is someone empowered to do with an understanding of the biology of love, or any other knowledge for that matter? The most educated biologist is no more capable of escaping evolutionary conditioning than was the most primitive caveman or the meanest dog. He's no more capable of overcoming the nature evolution gave him after he learned anything than he was before. Evolution - under the reductionist view, mind you - simply doesn't grant any platform from which a liberation might be launched. The sense of "empowerment" you are feeling is just another expression of your evolutionary nature, an expression no more nor less evolutionary than the reproductive urges over which you allegedly triumph. Neither one nor the other can claim to be either more or less evolutionary than the other; if our nature is not 100% evolutionary, if there is some aspect of it that is not subject to evolutionary conditioning; well, then reductionism is in ruins.

One of the philosophical questions posed by reductionism is: If everything is reduced to some one thing, how may any distinctions be made at all? If our nature is entirely reduced to "evolution", then "evolution" is useless in distinguishing one aspect of it from another. There is no distinguishing 5 and 3.14159 insofar as they are both "mathematical"; both are as much mathematical as the other. And if we are at all in the "grip" of neurotransmitters and evolutionary signals, the grip has a hold on the entirety of our being, not merely the occasionally inconvenient romantic desire. Blog posting about the grip is just as much in the grip as the lust the blog post is about.


The only way to distinguish things in a thoroughly reductionist account is to do it... magically. There is nothing "magical" about a design in a universe for a philosophy that has room for a Creator. But there surely is something magical about "empowering" yourself, and breaking the "grip of neurotransmitters, in a philosophy that reduces everything to neurotransmitters and the power of evolution.

David Brooks on the Moral Sense

David Brooks of the New York Times has a piece here on the origin of what he calls the "moral sense." The article starts this way:

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Most people think it is a gift from God, who revealed His laws and elevates us with His love. A smaller number think that we figure the rules out for ourselves, using our capacity to reason and choosing a philosophical system to live by.

Moral naturalists, on the other hand, believe that we have moral sentiments that have emerged from a long history of relationships. To learn about morality, you don’t rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live.

Brooks goes on to describe the naturalist case for the evolutionary development of the "moral sense." Right off the bat, however, Brooks has posed what I can only call a false alternative, a phrase I now have a visceral reaction against since Barack Obama so often abuses it. ("There are those who pose the false alternative between spending trillions of dollars you don't have and fiscal sanity...") Anyway, God gives us the "rules" in a number of ways. One way is through direct revelation, another way is through the natural law:

When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them... Rom 2:14:15.

There is no conflict between the natural law known by reason and the divine law known through revelation; both have their source in God. This would even include Brooks's evolution-based morality since God, if He is, would not have His Purposes stymied by evolution. Evolution would then be just another way God could reveal His Will to us. In other words, God created the kind of world in which we live, knowing that we would evolve the right sort of moral rules.

But we've got to dismiss the evolutionary basis for morality, not because it is exclusive of a Divinely Revealed morality, but simply because it is incapable of serving as a basis for morality in any case. Moral rules concern the relationship between the possible and the actual; they criticize what we are doing in terms of what we should be doing but are not. But if your moral rules are entirely based on "observing people as they live", then your rules will necessarily be nothing more an affirmation of already-existing arrangements. And no one needs rules to tell them to keep on doing what they are already doing anyway.

Brooks quotes a professor who compares the moral sense to our sense of taste:

By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argues that this moral sense is like our sense of taste. We have natural receptors that help us pick up sweetness and saltiness. In the same way, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty. Just as a few universal tastes can grow into many different cuisines, a few moral senses can grow into many different moral cultures.

There is, however, no gainsaying taste. Some people like sweet foods, others like salty foods. Some people act fairly and others with cruelty. We haven't gotten to morality yet until we can say that it is better to act fairly than with cruelty, and that can only happen when we acknowledge that the possible (how people should act) has authority over the actual (how people in fact do act). I believe it was Kierkegaard who wrote that the poet is higher than the historian, because the poet criticizes the actual in terms of the possible. The evolutionist is an historian.

There was a time when slavery was a universally accepted human institution. At such a time, basing morality simply on how people live, we would have to conclude that slavery is a morally acceptable institution. There was a phrase popular back in the sixties that went if it feels good, do it. The evolutionary morality version of this is, if you are already doing it, keep on doing it. But who needs to be told that? No more than than they need to be told to keep on doing what feels good.

Now the supporter of evolutionary morality might object this way: Our studies show that evolution has endowed children with an inborn sense of justice:

This illustrates, Bloom says, that people have a rudimentary sense of justice from a very early age. This doesn’t make people naturally good. If you give a 3-year-old two pieces of candy and ask him if he wants to share one of them, he will almost certainly say no. It’s not until age 7 or 8 that even half the children are willing to share. But it does mean that social norms fall upon prepared ground. We come equipped to learn fairness and other virtues.

Slavery, the supporter of evolutionary morality will say, clearly conflicts with this inborn sense of justice. Therefore slavery is wrong. It just took people a while to figure it out, but when they did, it was because they realized slavery conflicted with their evolutionary developed sense of justice.


This doesn't work because if, for centuries, people had no problem approving of slavery despite the rudimentary sense of justice they were born with, then clearly slavery did not conflict with this sense of justice. The evolutionist is just reading back into his rudimentary sense of justice his preferred moral results. In other words, he's slipping the possible in by the back door. If our principle is to "observe people how they live", and if they live in happy accord with a slave-based society, then we have no possible basis on which to condemn that society. And historically, that is not how slavery ended. The slave trade ended in the 19th century because the British Navy decided that a world without slavery was preferable to a world with slavery (the actual one), and further decided to bring this preferable world about at the end of a cannon.


The only way to get to morality is through the notion of a final cause for man; in other words, to acknowledge that man has a rationally appreciable point to his existence that he is free to bring about (or not bring about) through his actions. The final cause serves for him as an ideal, as the possible which he has not yet brought into existence, but should. But the primary reason Darwin offered his theory of evolution was to banish final causes from the world; in doing so he banished any rational basis for ethics as well. This isn't to stay that people can't still behave morally in the era of Darwin; it only means that any attempt to make sense of their behavior in Darwinian terms must fail.

Exceptionalism and Darwinian thinking

John Derbyshire has an article over at NRO on human exceptionalism.

It includes the usual Darwinian thinking to which I am instinctively repelled:

My meaning there was only to point up the hostility of religious creationists to ordinary biology and the lessons it teaches us — mainly, the lesson that Homo sap. is just one more branch on the tree of life, not gifted with any supernatural attributes.

My problem with Darwinism is that it puts the theory before the data. The question should be: What attributes does human being have, and are evolutionary explanations capable of accounting for them? The way it does work is: Whatever human attributes cannot fit into an evolutionary explanation, are therefore dismissed as unreal. So of course evolution can account for human nature; for whatever evolution cannot account for is excluded from human nature.

I am not talking about human attributes we know about only through divine revelation. I am talking about human attributes directly deducible from common sense and common experience. There is a man over there and a man over here; and I, a man, know them all and myself as such. We therefore share something in common, the form of "man", which allows us all to be known as "men." This form must itself be immaterial and the faculty that knows it - the intellect - must be immaterial. Therefore man has an immaterial component to his nature. It is this intellectual faculty that separates us from other animals - we are the "rational animal" - and is the basis of human exceptionalism. A rational animal is not just another animal.

This is a simplified presentation of the Aristotelian argument for the immaterial intellect, which St. Thomas later extended to prove the immortality of the soul. There is nothing here that depends on supernatural revelation, and the conclusion is "supernatural" only if we make an a priori restriction on nature to include only the material. Or if we make an a priori restriction that human nature can only include those attributes accountable by evolution.

If we don't prejudice our thought in these ways, then it is clear that human beings are exceptional insofar as we possess an immaterial intellect. The true question to then be asked is: Can evolution account for the immaterial human intellect? Evolution may be able to account for other aspects of human nature, but it is this aspect, the intellect, that is crucial. This is what Pope John Paul II was getting at when he said that evolution, while it is more than just an hypothesis, is incompatible with the truth about man if it is used to deny his spirit.

Complexity as Inevitable

I would love to leave the Intelligent Design/Evolution controversy alone and read John Derbyshire in peace... why must I be ambushed by comments such as these from his Straggler column?

There are great cosmic principles at work here. Simplicity yields to complexity. From ammonites and trilobites come seven hundred species of dinosaur; from the spare pronouncements of the Master come annotations, exegesis, and commentary upon commentary; from the convenience of a phone call we advance to email inbox folders, texting, MySpace, Facebook, and twittering. There were originally three federal crimes: there are now, according to one scholar's tally, at least 4,452. (Did you know that as of 2002 it has been a federal crime to move birds across state lines to engage in fights?)

Derbyshire is a highly intelligent man, certainly smarter than I am. Yet this quote is open to a Sesame Street-level analysis that seems beyond the reach of committed Darwinists like him: Which one of these things is not like the others? His examples of exegesis and commentary, email and twittering, and the increase in federal law are all examples of the effects of intelligent agency. The complexity in these cases doesn't just "happen" as though complexity is waiting in the wings for simplicity to "yield" to it. It only happens because intelligent men apply their minds to the world and add complexity to it. The one case where this is alleged not to have happened is in the simplicity of ammonites "yielding" to the complexity of dinosaurs. Can't you just hear those complex dinosaurs banging at the door to be let in?

It may very well be that dinosaurs developed from ammonites through the unintelligent, mechanical process that Darwinists suppose. I don't know. I do know that email and federal law certainly didn't. What is perplexing about Darwinism, and makes me wary of it, is the manner in which its allegedly hard-headed and skeptical advocates fail to see the obvious. If they can't see intelligent agency in email and federal law, why should I put any stock in their assurances that there is no intelligent agency in the development of life?

Darwinian Logic and the Mind

The post Darwinists Check Their Logic at the Door over at Uncommon Descent brings up one of my favorite topics, the relationship of evolution to the mind. I think all three of the participants in the main post miss the logic of the situation.

The problem with Delurker's response in the first exchange ("To the extent that nature is comprehensible, modern evolutionary theory predicts that alignment with reality will be selected for.") is not that it is circular. Barry A. confuses an epistemological question with an empirical one in making that argument. No, the problem with Delurker's response is that it is a philosophical response rather than the empirically contingent one he seems to think it is.


There is nothing wrong with philosophical responses, of course, unless they are mistaken for something else. This is what happens here. "Alignment with reality will be selected for" cannot be a contingent conclusion from evolutionary science, but is a precondition for the possibility of evolutionary science itself. Is evolutionary science about the true world or merely about our impression of the world, an impression that may or may not have anything to do with true reality? (I.e. do we have a science of the noumenal or the phenomenal?) Evolutionary scientists to a man take it for granted that their science is about the world as it really is, which means that they already assume that their minds are "aligned with reality." Evolutionary science must predict that alignment with reality will be selected for, because only a mind aligned with reality can truly investigate how it is that the mind is aligned with reality. I happen to agree that our minds are aligned with reality, but not because I think it is a possible empirical conclusion, but rather because Aristotle settled the issue thousands of years ago in his Metaphysics Book IV.


The logic of Exchange #3 is similar. How did the mind and world become coordinated? The answer is that "organisms who don't deal with reality die (eventually)." This again cannot be a contingent conclusion from evolutionary science, but is a precondition for the possibility of evolutionary science itself. If it were a contingent conclusion, then we would have to seriously consider the possibility that "organisms who don't deal with reality fare quite well." But if this latter possibility were true, then since human beings have fared quite well, we may very well be the type of creature that fares well without dealing with reality. Our evolutionary science, in that case, might have nothing to do with the way things really are. The assertion "organisms who don't deal with reality die" is an assertion about reality only if it is spoken by a creature already confident of his connection with reality; if its negation is taken seriously as an empirical possibility then the mind has put itself out of its own misery.


In exchange #4, the point is made that "the nature of reality is not addressed by modern evolutionary theory. The fitness of organisms to that reality is." If the nature of reality is not addressed by modern evolutionary theory, but the fitness of organisms is, then the fitness of organisms must have nothing to do with the nature of reality. We are back to the point that the possibility of evolutionary science requires that the human mind be "fitted" to reality; if this fitness is not itself part of reality but only our imaginations, then evolutionary science as a science of the way things truly are is not possible.

Steven Pinker, Evolution and the Mind

In this post and this post I've discussed the theory of the mind as a model-maker, and how evolutionary theory is commonly used to bridge the models from the mind into reality. Here is Steven Pinker's version of this move from The Blank Slate:

"Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was rejected long ago; that the sense organs present the brain with a tableau of raw colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual experience is a learned social construction. As we saw in preceding chapters, the visual system of the brain comprises some fifty regions that take raw pixels and effortlessly organize them into surfaces, colors, motions, and three-dimensional objects. We can no more turn the system off and get immediate access to pure sensory experience than we can override our stomachs and tell them when to release their digestive enzymes. The visual system, moreover, does not drug us into a hallucinatory fantasy disconnected from the real world. It evolved to feed us information about the consequential things out there, like rocks, cliffs, animals, and other people and their intentions." (p. 412)

This example has it all. It's got the half-baked Kantianism masquerading as modern scientific insight; the confident assertion of evolutionary theory as the true savior from Descartes' Evil Demon (the hallucinatory fantasy by its original name); and the overall confident tone that modern scientists have those pesky old philosophical problems well in hand.

Pinker gives us the impression that the theory that the senses give us a tableau of raw colors and sounds was disproved by science - that's what the talk about fifty brain regions and pixels is about. Actually, this theory was blown away back in the 18th century by Kant, and Kant didn't need any neuroscience to do it. He also went a lot deeper than Pinker has gone. It's not just that our perceptual experience comes already organized into surfaces, colors and three-dimensional objects. Our entire mental life comes already organized into the basic categories of cognition; the here, there, before, after, unity, multiplicity, more, less, etc. The scientist may be able to "get behind" the perceptual experience of his lab subject, but he will never get behind the cognitive categories of his own thought. Those categories either map directly onto reality or they don't; if they don't, then science - including evolutionary science - isn't possible, at least if we want a science of the noumenal and not merely the phenomenal. If they do map onto reality, then evolution isn't needed to bootstrap the mind. Either way, the appeal to evolution is at best a distraction from the true issue.

The more I read about evolution, the more awe-inspiring it becomes. Alone among scientific theories, it seems, it is not only proven by science, but itself proves the science that already proved it. 

The Modeling Mind, Science and Post-Modernism

In this post I discussed the theory of the mind that holds that the mind is thoroughly a model-maker.

The holders of this theory generally believe that they do so in deference to science, or as a way to defend the intellectual primacy of science. In science, this view goes, we build models of the world and test them against each other. So if the mind is primarily scientific, it must primarily be a model-maker.

Unfortunately, the theory of the thoroughly model-making mind is ultimately destructive of science, at least if we want science to be about the real world, which seems to be what everyone wants. The only way to know if a model accurately reflects the real world is to compare it to the real world, so you must have some contact with the world that transcends the model if you are to have any hope of knowing if the model is true. If your verification of the model is itself an exercise in model-building (as must be the case for a thoroughly model-making mind), then there is no way to escape the world of models into reality. I know my model of an F-18 jet is accurate because I can compare it to a real F-18. If the only way I can find out if the F-18 is accurate is to build other models, then I can never find out if the F-18 is accurate. Whatever models I build to verify it will themselves need verification in terms of yet further model-building, ad infinitum. At some point there must be an end to model-building and a simple, direct appreciation of reality.

The truth of this can be found by analyzing the thought of any of these model-building-mind philosophers. At some point in their presentation, they will slip in some proposition as an absolute anchor point in reality, a point that is not itself a model of reality but is reality itself. It will not be called out as such, and is generally taken for granted in a way that makes it easy to overlook. But such an anchor point will always be there. One of the favorites is "organisms with more accurate models of reality survive better than organisms with less accurate models of reality" (which I'll call M1), which does the job philosophers want of bootstrapping the model-making mind only if M1 itself is a direct statement about reality and not a model. But then it contradicts the thesis of the thoroughly model-making mind.

The danger to science is that, in a philosophy that needs yet denies the mind any direct anchor in reality, the necessary anchor point can only be selected in an arbitrary manner. What is so special about M1? The model-making-mind philosophy cannot have an answer, since it is only hiding the fact that, according to its own principles, M1 is but another exercise in model-making. When this is realized, the theorist is free to keep the model-making mind philosophy, but select (arbitrarily) a different anchor point in reality. How about this one: "So that it may exploit the world in good conscience, Western thought hides from itself the violent and imperialistic principles that are its core", which I will call M2. In the view of M2, M1 is really just an expression of Western prejudices rather than a true reflection of reality; a convenient one at that since it maps the violent tendencies of Western man onto the core of reality. Here we have the genesis of post-modernism. And the post-modernist is right. M1 is a prejudice, for it is the prior principle that is itself not judged but in terms of which all other principles are judged.

The real answer to the foundation of science and its defense is in a philosophy that does not demand that the mind be nothing but a model-maker, and does not slip in foundational principles that are themselves not open to judgment. More on this later.

The Mind as a Model-Maker

I just finished reading The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger, which is subtitled The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. The book joins a steady stream of books from neuroscientists and philosophers (e.g. Descartes' Error and A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness ) all of which tell more or less the same story: The mind is nothing but the brain; the brain understands the world through model-making; the conscious self is but a part of that model and is therefore an illusion or a "myth." V.S. Ramachandran says it straightforwardly in A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness:

"Our brains are essentially model-making machines. We need to construct useful, virtual-reality simulations of the world that we can act on." [p. 105]

Thomas Metzinger's version is this:

"From a philosopher's point of view, there is a lot of nonsense in this popular notion. We don't create an individual world but only a world-model. Moreover, the whole idea of potentially being directly in touch with reality is a sort of romantic folklore; we know the world only by using representations, because (correctly) representing something is what knowing is." [p. 9]

What is so fascinating about these assertions is that the authors sincerely believe they are breakthroughs based on recent advances in neuroscience, but if they are, then the only thing to which neuroscience has broken through is a poorly understood version of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The Metzinger quote seems almost a direct lift from Kant; surely he is familiar with Kant, because he is a philosopher (and a German one at that). In fact, Kant is mentioned on page 26, but more on that passage later.

What makes a great philosopher great is his ability to plumb the full implications and meaning of a particular line of thinking, even if that line of thinking is ultimately mistaken in its foundation. Kant was a great philosopher, and if you want to understand the true meaning of the recent deluge of books on the philosophy of mind and neuroscience, read the Critique of Pure Reason and then the neuroscience books. Kant thought through this whole "mind is a model-maker" principle to its furthest implications, implications the more contemporary philosophers and scientists are still struggling to reach.

The key insight from Kant is this: If the mind is nothing more than a model-maker, if it doesn't have some direct contact with reality in its foundation, if all it knows is its representations of things, then whatever science or philosophy we construct will be a science or philosophy of those representations, not of the reality behind the representations. This is the basis of Kant's distinction between the phenomenal (things as they appear to us) and the noumenal (things as they are in themselves.) The recent philosophers/scientists of the mind, however, don't want a science merely of phenomena; they want a science of the things themselves. But they can't tell us how such a science is possible, so they just quickly brush the problem off and hope we don't notice. In the Metzinger quote above, he notes that knowledge is not merely representing something, but correctly representing it; there is a whole world of philosophy in that "correctly." How is that we can come to know that some representations are correct and others are not? The best answer Metzinger gives is this:

"Nor is it true that we can never get out of the tunnel or know anything about the outside world: Knowledge is possible, for instance, through the cooperation and communication of large groups of people - scientific communities that design and test theories, constantly criticize one another, and exchange empirical data and new hypotheses." [p. 9]

So knowledge is possible because we talk to each other and do science. This is straight question-begging, because science itself can get started only if we already are in possession of certain elements of knowledge (e.g. that mathematical knowledge reflects reality itself and not just our perception of reality. Kant held the latter position, which is why he insisted on the phenomenal/noumenal distinction.)

Metzinger discusses Plato's Cave on p. 22, but without understanding its full implications. The prisoners in Plato's Cave must be released from their chains in order to know the sunlit reality outside the cave. As long as they are chained in the cave and only watching shadows, it doesn't matter how clever their science is, how deep their philosophers think, or how much they talk to each other. Their science will necessarily be a science of the shadows, not a science of the sunlit reality outside the cave. Kant showed the limits of how far the philosophical prisoner could go: He could, through the a priori use of reason, come to know that his thought and his science was a science of shadows (the phenomenal) and not a science of real things themselves (the noumenal.) But he can't go beyond that; he can't know anything about the noumenal itself, only that it is something beyond his ability to comprehend through his science.

There is another implication of Plato's Cave that is sometimes overlooked. Even after the prisoners are released from the Cave and experience the sunlit reality outside the Cave, that experience will mean nothing to them unless their nature already has the capacity to benefit from that experience; they must be able to perceive and comprehend sunlit reality for it to mean anything to them. If their eyes are such that they can only perceive shadows (i.e. two-dimensional images of only two contrasting colors, in black and white without any gray), or their minds are such that they can only process the images of shadows, then the experience outside the cave will be worse than useless. It will be completely unintelligible and probably fatal. Plato, another great philosopher who understood the deep implications of his own thought, recognized this and so, in his story, the prisoners are initially baffled when released from the Cave. They initially refuse to believe that the world outside the Cave is the real world. It takes time for them to grow accustomed to the sunlit world, but that accommodation is only possible because the prisoner's nature already has the potential to understand it. Even while in the Cave, the prisoners have the faculties to perceive and comprehend three-dimensional, sunlit reality should they be exposed to it; those faculties are merely dormant in the Cave and need "waking up" outside the Cave. This is why Plato supposed that man was more a soul than a body, because the most significant aspect of his nature was that which enabled him to comprehend true reality when he encountered it. The soul is the part of man that is "woken up" in philosophy and begins to perceive reality as it is.

Now we may disagree with Plato's notion of human nature, but he at least understood the question and his answer is an attempt to address it. Kant disagreed with Plato about the connection of human nature with basic reality, and so concluded that man can never know more than the shadows (although he can come to know this fact itself, which was Kant's particular contribution.) The contemporary philosophers never reach the debate between Plato and Kant. They bake the Kantian cake by insisting that the mind of man is a model-maker through and through, but avoid eating the cake by insisting that their science of the mind is truly about the mind ("the brain") and not just the phenomena as they appear to scientists.

The real myth here is not the self, but the myth that a model-making mind can transcend its own models through science. Back to Metzinger's mention of Kant on p. 26 of his book:

"Philosophers like Immanuel Kant or Franz Brentano have theorized about this 'unity of consciousness': What exactly is it that, at every single point in time, blends all the different parts of your conscious experience into one single reality? Today it is interesting to note that the first essential insight - knowing that you know something - is mainly discussed in the philosophy of mind, whereas the neuroscience of consciousness focuses on the problem of integration: how the features of objects are bound together. The latter phenomenon - the One-World Problem of dynamic, global integration - is what we must examine if we want to understand the unity of consciousness."

Metzinger has gotten half of Kant but missed the other half. The blending of conscious experience into one single reality includes the empirical unity of consciousness, or the One-World Problem. But there is a deeper unity implicit, the transcendental unity of apperception, that is the unity of the thought of the scientist analyzing the empirical unity of consciousness. We might call this the One-Science Problem. Here is a concrete case: The neuroscientist examines the subjective experience of time of subjects in the lab. He notes how long they think different things have taken in different contexts, how long they think dreams are compared to how long they really are, that sort of thing. He stimulates various parts of the subject's brain and induces different time disorientations; the subject suddenly thinks it is tomorrow, or yesterday, or that lifting his hand took an hour instead of a second. The details don't matter. The point is that there is a distinction between the time experienced by the subject, and the time the scientist measures in his lab through his instruments; but both depend on structures of the human mind for their meaning. The time measured by the scientist in the laboratory, against which he judges the subjective time of his subject, has meaning only in terms of the concepts of before, now, after and duration that are basic cognitive elements of the human mind; science does not discover these cognitive elements but is constructed in their terms. What is the unity that brings these cognitive elements together into one science? It's not the empirical unity of consciousness, because the scientist is taking apart the empirical unity of consciousness in terms of his science. It is a unity that is not apparent in empirical experience, but is implied in our conduct of a science that permits us to decompose the empirical unity of consciousness. Kant called this deeper unity transcendental because it transcends empirics altogether; we know about it not through scientific analysis of empirical data but through pure reason, or thinking about what must be necessary for science to happen at all.

Either these basic cognitive elements of the mind are reflective of reality or they are not. If they are not (i.e. if our minds are model-makers through and through) then our science can't be a science of reality as such. Our construction of scientific theories to make sense of our experience may be models, but their basic cognitive elements (before, now, after, here, there, unity, multiplicity) had better not be, or we've got to eat the Kantian cake, frosting and all. If we don't want to end up with Kant, the only way is to accept that the human mind in its basic cognitive elements directly reflects reality. When we are confused about reality, it is not because our basic contact with reality is confused, or is merely a model of reality, but because we have constructed a false perception or understanding of reality through the elements of reality itself.

When reading a philosopher who starts with the principle that the mind is thoroughly a model-maker, but also wants to have a science that reflects reality itself, it is always possible to find a place where he surreptitiously slips out of Plato's Cave to find an anchor in reality, then slips back in the Cave and claims he never left. One of the favorite ways of doing this is by invoking evolutionary theory. We evolved as model-makers, you see, and we can have confidence that our models accurately reflect reality because organisms with poor models simply won't survive as well as organisms with better models. Over the millions of years of human evolution, this resulted in the very accurate models we human beings now possess.

That's a fine story, but it all hinges on this proposition: "Organisms with more accurate models of the world will survive better than organisms with less accurate models." Is this proposition a model of the world, or does it directly reflect reality? If it's merely a model of the world, then we can't use it to bootstrap all our other models, can we? It might be that, in true reality, it doesn't matter what sort of models organisms have, or they might not have models at all, or even that our model of the world as having "organisms" is itself mistaken. This tactic works only if it is granted that the evolutionary principle is an absolute anchor in the real world, not merely yet another model constructed by the model-making mind; which is what it must be if the mind is purely a model-maker. Typically, this assumption is never made explicit but is hidden in a bold assertion of evolutionary principle.

Because the brain evolved to...

If you read Darwinists tackling some social or moral issue, eventually you will find them invoking the phrase in the title of this post, as though it adds some insight to the issue at hand. It doesn't.

Darwinism proposes a comprehensive explanation of human nature. There is no aspect of human nature, not the smallest part, that is not the product of evolution. There is nothing that human beings do, or can possibly do, that doesn't have its origin in evolution. Darwinism insists that no aspect of nature transcends its own mechanisms.

So the facts, whatever they are, can always be accounted for by saying "because X evolved that way." Here is John Derbyshire explaining attitudes about abortion:

The problem is, of course, that a fetus is a rather particular kind of person: one sharing the body resources of another human being. It is manifestly not the case that we all agree the killing of this particular kind of person should not be permitted. Stamping your foot and yelling “But it’s a person! It’s a person!” doesn’t advance the argument.

Supernaturalists can of course point to divine ordinances, scripture, the Tao, and so on. That’s great, except that we are not all supernaturalists, so these appeals fall on a lot of stony ground. Since a great majority of people claim to be supernaturalists, these appeals might none the less form the basis for a consensus; but there is no sign that that is happening. The supernaturalist case seems to be unconvincing even to a lot of supernaturalists.

I’d guess that all the noise and confusion has origins within the scope of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. Our brains evolved to cope with commonplace features of the world: physical features (water flows downhill) and social features (every human group has gradations of status). Fetuses — and embryos much less — just were not a feature of everyday experience until recently. The brain has no developed categories for coping with them, either as physical or social objects.

Yes, all that noise and confusion has origins within the scope of cognitive science and evolution. That is because everything about human nature, and all its possible manifestations, has origins within the scope of cognitive science and evolution. Our brains evolved to cope with commonplace features of the world, yes. Yet we must also deal with uncommonplace features of the world - the occasional tsunami, for example. Do we deal with them through means that escape, or even possibly transcend, evolutionary mechanisms? Of course not; nothing is allowed to escape evolutionary mechanisms, so in whatever way we deal with uncommonplace features of the world, our brains evolved to do it that way.

Why do religious believers invoke sacred scripture, the Tao, etc. in condemnation of abortion? Because their brains evolved that way. Why are some people not supernaturalists? Because their brains evolved that way. Why do some people think that tracing moral and social issues to a remote evolutionary past adds anything to the discussion? Because their brains evolved that way. Why do I think that discussions about evolutionary history add nothing one way or the other to discussions of the morality of abortion? Because my brain evolved that way. Why does John Derbyshire conclude from the fact that evolution has not lead to a moral consensus on abortion, that no reasonable case can be made against abortion? Because his brain evolved that way.

The real trick in invoking Darwinism on moral issues is the sleight of hand that turns an apparently descriptive account of human nature into a prescriptive one. Anti-abortion advocates advance all sorts of rational arguments against abortion. The fact that these arguments are made, and found persuasive by many, is a natural fact as much as any other. The only way people could find these arguments persuasive is if their brains had evolved "the categories for coping with them." Yet Derbyshire tells us authoritatively that asserting that the unborn is a person doesn't advance the argument. Why not? Well, because we haven't evolved the "developed categories for coping with them." But the people who make the arguments clearly have developed the categories for coping with them, or they couldn't make the arguments. Everything is a result of evolution.

This is where the argument turns prescriptive. Some manifestations of human nature are more equal than others. The fact that many people find anti-abortion arguments reasonable and compelling is not a fact that must be accounted for by evolution; it is an inconvenient piece of data that must be undermined. Those anti-abortion folks aren't making real arguments, you see, because our brains have not evolved the categories for dealing with them. They are just fake arguments. In a few years, when enough people have fallen for this nonsense, nobody will make those arguments anymore - then our prescriptive argument will safely collapse into a descriptive one.

How do I know this will happen? Because my brain evolved to...

Man, Nature and Religion

Man is a question that nature poses but does not answer.

This is the origin of religion and mythology. Religion and mythology are universal across human culture because nature is universal, and so the question of man is universally put. The more naive secularists miss this point. They think that religion poses the question that it answers, so if you rid the world of religion, you rid the world of the question to which religion is an answer. But it is nature, not religion, that poses the question of man, and it is for this reason that religion is ineradicable.

Even the most primitive mythology is truer than the modern scientistic, materialist understanding of man. For mythology faces the truth that man is an anomaly, an "outlier", a being whose nature demands an account different in kind from everything else in the universe. Modern man prides himself on his universalism, but it was really ancient man who was universal, for he universally agreed on the nature of the question of himself. The ancient pagan could construct a pantheon with doors that were always open to new Gods, for he was certain of the question but not the finality of the answer.

Modern conflict has an inhuman aspect to it that pre-modern conflict lacked. Pre-modern man universally agreed on the "first nature" of man, that is, that the question of man has no immediate answer in nature.*  A bear or a bee can be understood directly as an immediate part of nature. The "first nature" of bears and bees is the nature of bears and bees complete. But the immediate nature of man is a question that points beyond nature; on this pre-modern man universally agreed. The "second nature" of man, the nature found in mythology and religion that answers the question of the first nature, was the pre-modern basis of disagreement. The Moslem and the Christian, battling for Jerusalem in the twelfth century, fought over whether the Koran or the New Testament was the true account of the second nature of man, but this conflict hid their more basic agreement on the first nature of man. In the first nature of man the Moslem and the Christian recognized each other's humanity. The proof of this is that the Moslem and the Christian could make his enemy his friend by the simple act of converting to his enemy's faith. 

The modern world may be defined as the attempt to "naturalize" man. Since history shows that man cannot agree on his second nature, perhaps there is no second nature, and man is really just a creature with a first nature like every other animal. Or so modern man has thought. The various modern ideologies are the variety of attempts to reveal the true first nature of man that is complete in itself, rather than a question that points to a second nature. But this means that ideological disagreements are no longer disagreements about the second nature of man grounded in a shared understanding of man's first nature, but disagreements about man's first nature itself. An ideological enemy is, then, in his very being, on the wrong side of human nature and history, and there is no way for him to get on the right side. A Jew could save himself from the Crusader by converting to Christianity, or from the Saracen by converting to Islam, but he could never save himself from the Nazi by converting to Nazism, for the Nazi views the Jew as an enemy in his first nature. He does not recognize humanity in the Jew the way Moslems and Christians recognized humanity in each other, despite the atrocities they committed against each other. Neither could the French nobleman save himself from the guillotine by converting to the Revolution, for he is by first nature an enemy of the Revolution, or the kulak save himself from the Red Army by converting to Leninism. This is why the modern attempt to rid the world of religion, the alleged source of conflict, has led to wars of a ferocity and inhumanity that was unimaginable to ancient man, for it turned conflicts over second nature into conflicts over first nature, or, in other words, it eliminated what had been the universally recognizable human.

Modern thought attempts to naturalize man through a theoretical reconstruction of him. Of course the project is absurd because what makes something "natural" is the fact that its nature is immediately available to the intellect, and therefore needs no theoretical reconstruction to be known. Bees and bears can be understood directly by observing bees and bears; no theoretical mediation is required. We don't need to hypothesize a grizzly bear "state of nature" that is somehow more fundamental to the bear than its manifest nature, or a class history of bees, to understand either. The bear we immediately see is in the state of nature (the circus and the zoo not withstanding) and the class distinction between queen and worker bees is a simple manifestation of the nature of bees. Dian Fossey could thoroughly understand gorillas by living among them as a gorilla because gorillas are directly knowable. But the evolutionist can only understand man by reconstructing his evolutionary past, and interpreting the present in light of that historical reconstruction. He cannot simply live as a man among men and understand him - or so the modern thinking goes. 

Marx reconstructed man in terms of his theoretical economic history. Nazism reconstructed man in terms of a theoretical racial history. The goal of both was to reveal the first nature of man in such a way that he is completely naturalized. This means that the first nature of man is simply knowable, and not a question that points to a second nature of man. Ideology does not answer the question of man but eliminates the question itself. The attempt cannot succeed, and the question of man persists, posing a scandal to ideology. Ideology cannot respond to the scandal by answering the question of man, for an answer concedes that the question is legitimate in the first place; the only alternative is to eliminate the question by destroying the questioner, and here we have the origin of the horrors of modern totalitarianism, horrors unknown to pre-modern man for the simple reason that he could not imagine them. John Paul II, incidentally, understood that merely posing the question of man constitutes a mortal threat to secular ideologies, and he used that weakness to bring down Communism in Eastern Europe.

Darwinian evolution, whatever its empirical merits, is an attempt to theoretically reconstruct man through the organic, and thereby naturalize him. The evolution of the lower creatures is really incidental to the point of evolutionary theory because every creature but man can be understood directly. Spiders are understood by studying spiders, not by puzzling out a theoretical organic history of pre-spiderian creatures culminating in the spider. Were man truly a natural creature like all other animals, no one would be interested in evolutionary history or see any point in thinking about it.

The evolutionary past is the medium in which present organisms are reconstructed in terms of present organisms. More to the point, the evolutionary past is the medium in which man is reconstructed in terms of present organisms. Since there is very little evidence beyond a few bone fragments concerning mans pre-human and quasi-human ancestors, and we certainly have no experience of such creatures, in whatever ways those creatures were unlike present organisms we can know absolutely nothing about them. In a similar way, the alien creatures in science fiction always bear some similarity to terrestrial creatures (e.g. the monster in Alien is a kind of giant bug), since we can't possibly imagine creatures utterly unlike any we have experienced. So our pre-human ancestors are imagined in terms of present creatures, as quasi-chimps or quasi-bears or a compromise between chimps and man. Man is then reconstructed in terms of these hypothetical ancestors, completing the return to his present nature, the ancestors serving merely as the medium of reconstruction. Again, the very attempt at the evolutionary reconstruction of man is proof that man is not natural like other creatures, since natural creatures stand in no need of reconstruction.

John Paul II, as he did with Communism, went right to the philosophical heart of evolution by granting Darwinism all the empirical laurels it wished - "The convergence in the results of these independent studies - which was neither planned nor sought - constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory" - but denied the only prize Darwinists have ever really wanted, which is the final elimination of the question of man: "Theories of evolution, which, because of the philosophies which inspire them, regard the spirit either as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a simple epiphenomenon of that matter, are incompatible with the truth about man."

* The terms "first nature" and "second nature" typically refer to, first, man's uneducated nature and, secondly, man's nature after it has been educated into virtue and/or remade through divine grace. I am using the same terms with a different meaning. Here, "first nature" means man's nature as immediately known, and "second nature" means the hidden nature of man as revealed by the answer to the question posed by man's first nature.

Darwin Day and Man as Special

It's Darwin Day, and this gives me a chance to sound-off about some of the silly reasoning associated with Darwinism. One common claim, repeated to the point that it is nearly a cliche, is that Darwin supposedly de-throned man, and showed that he is "not special."

Sorry, but the fact that man is special has nothing to do with religion, or even whether or not Darwinism is true. That man is special is an obvious fact of nature. Man is the only creature on Earth who can destroy any other creature if he so chooses, or even the Earth itself if he so chooses. He is the only creature who pursues knowledge for its own sake, love for its own sake, art for its own sake, and develops theories of origins like Darwinism over which he argues. Man is the only creature who self-consciously transcends his environment, not only physically in his trips to the Moon, but intellectually as well. Alone among creatures, he wonders about his place in nature. The argument between Darwinists and creationists is not how peculiar man is, but how this peculiar creature called man came about.

One of the reasons put forward for the fact that man is "not special" is that Darwin showed that species are not discrete, but blend into each other over time. I say: So what? The chain of being remains nonetheless. We may discover that the chain holding the bell in a tower is actually a rope, and so is continuous rather than discrete. But the rope still has a top and a bottom, a beginning and an end. We can still distinguish two feet from the top of the rope from two feet from the bottom of the rope, just as we could various places on the chain. Really, the difference between the Darwinists and the traditional view is that the Darwinists claim the chain has many more links, to the point that it becomes continuous (as in calculus), and that the higher links arose from the lower. All that is besides the point regarding the nature of the chain, or rope if you like, as we immediately encounter it. Saying that Darwinian gradualism proves that we cannot draw a metaphysical distinction between man and lower animals, is like saying that we can't draw a metaphysical distinction between noon and midnight because of analog clocks.

I will be scolded by the more metaphysically hardcore Darwinists for using terms like "higher" and "lower." Darwin, you see, showed that life is just a blind, materialist game of survival, and man is not "better" or "worse", "higher" or "lower", or "more important" than any other creature. But Darwinism does give a scale of values; its whole point is that life is a game of survival, as in "survival of the fittest." Games by their nature have winners and losers, unless they are held in post-modern elementary schools, and I am confident the Darwinists will approve of my saying that Darwinism is anything but post-modern. And there is no doubt that man has won this game, to the point every other creature only survives at his whim. The lack of a sense of irony in Darwinists is demonstrated by enviro-Darwinists, who say we shouldn't wipe out other species because Darwin showed we are just another animal, no better or worse than others. The very fact that we can decide whether or not to wipe out other species proves that we are not just another animal. It's the king who decides whether or not someone will be executed.

The more Darwinists insist that the distinction between men and animals is trivial, the more trivial they make Darwinism. The genius of Darwin was supposed to be that he explained how the glorious diversity of life on Earth, with its intricate designs, strange symbiotic relationships, and astounding range of beings, from the simple amoeba to the staggeringly complex and scientific man, the species that includes geniuses like Darwin himself, all resulted from the simple combination of chance and natural selection. My point here is not to argue with that conclusion; it is to point out that, the more we denigrate the powers of man compared to the lower organisms, the less impressive becomes Darwinism. If conducting science is but a trivial improvement on apes probing anthills with sticks, then the process that changed the ant-hunting ape into the Darwinist scientist is of trivial significance.

And the real target of the man-isn't-special Darwinists isn't the ancient conception of man, but the early modern conception of man, despite what Darwinists think. The ancient conception of organic life was based on the three-way division of the soul into vegetative, locomotive and intellectual aspects. All living things had a soul, plants relatively poverty-stricken with only a vegetative soul, animals a little richer with a locomotive as well as a vegetative soul, and man fully loaded with a vegetative, locomotive and intellectual soul. Our soul is the same soul as plants and animals but with an intellectual aspect as well. The difference, then, between Darwinists and Thomas Aquinas is that St. Thomas thinks the soul of man recapitulates the hierarchy of organic life in its being, whereas the Darwinist thinks the soul of man recapitulates the hierarchy of organic life in time (as the current temporal culmination of an historical process.) So both St. Thomas and Darwinists see a continuity between man and the rest of organic life, although they differ profoundly (of course) concerning the nature of that continuity.

The early moderns, mesmerized by the new advances in science (especially physics), leapt to the conclusion that animals are really organic machines, most famously stated in the philosophy of Descartes. But a machine doesn't know anything, a fact that the early moderns didn't forget even if many philosophers forget it today, so Descartes supposed a radical division in the nature of man between the material, mechanical body and an immaterial knowing substance - the soul. The Cartesian soul is essentially the ancient soul stripped of its vegetative and locomotive natures, a pure knowing substance absurdly attached to a body, marking a radical break in being between man and the rest of nature, and turning man into a monster wandering in an alien world of natural creatures. Of course man so conceived is "special" only in the unfortunate sense that Frankenstein's monster was special, and the Darwinists are to be applauded for finally chasing this conception of man into a windmill and burning him alive.

But the Thomistic soul did not perish in the windmill, because it was never a monster that drew the ire of a mob of pitchfork wielding villagers. Thomistic man is special for the same reason Darwinian man is - he is the culmination of nature.

Evolution and the Myth of the Machine

Jerry Coyne starts chapter one of Why Evolution is True this way:

If anything is true about nature, it is that plants and animals seem intricately and almost perfectly designed for living their lives. Squids and flatfish change color and pattern to blend in with their surroundings, becoming invisible to predator and prey. Bats have radar to home in on insects at night. Hummingbirds, which can hover in place and change position in an instant, are far more agile than any human helicopters, and have long tongues to sip nectar lying deep within flowers. And the flowers they visit also appear designed - to use hummingbirds as sex aids. For while the hummingbird is busy sipping nectar, the flower attaches pollen to its bill, enabling it to fertilize the next flower that the bird visits. Nature resembles a well-oiled machine, with every species an intricate cog or gear.

Coyne then expresses the obvious, but (for the Darwinist) mistaken conclusion that all this implies a designer:

What does all this imply? A master mechanic, of course. This conclusion was most famously expressed by the eighteenth-century English philosopher William Paley. If we came across a watch lying on the ground, he said, we would certainly recognize it as the work of a watchmaker. Likewise, the existence of well-adapted organisms and their intricate features surely implied a conscious, celestial designer - God.

I will mention in passing that Coyne, like all Darwinists, admits that there is a reasonable, even strong, prima facie case for intelligent design, a case that has nothing to do with authoritative religious texts. In fact, their case for the genius of Darwin was that he showed that the common-sense conclusion of intelligent design was empirically false. Why, then, do folks like Coyne strenuously insist that intelligent design is a "discredited, religiously based theory", one only a fool or fraud could put any credence in compared to evolution, "a theory so obviously true", as Coyne does in his introduction? He compares the introduction of creationism in the classroom with introducing shamanism in medical schools or astrology in psychology classes. But there is no common-sense case for shamanism or astrology like there is for intelligent design - a case Coyne himself presents in his book! The intelligent design movement is simply an extension of the common sense arguments Darwinists admit are true; the appearance of design is true "if anything about nature is true." Of course, the common sense case may be wrong, but Coyne doesn't even want it presented in the classroom, under the penalty of law.

But that is beside the point I really wish to address, which is the manner in which our thinking about nature - including both Darwinists and their modern opponents like Paley - has become dominated by what Lewis Mumford called the "myth of the machine." We see it in Coyne's expression that "nature resembles a well-oiled machine, with every species an intricate cog or gear." This gets it backwards. Machines resemble nature, nature doesn't resemble a machine. There is much more to nature than is captured in the metaphor of a machine, and the insidious result of taking the machine prior to nature is to eliminate from view all those aspects of nature that cannot be fit into the ideology of the machine.

Machines are artifacts made by man to serve his purposes. Therefore the primary quality of a machine is efficiency: How powerfully and cheaply does the machine achieve the end for which it was made? Reading the myth of the machine into nature means turning efficiency into a metaphysical fundamental. But nature is an end in itself; the nature of nature is to be, not to be-for-something-else like a machine. Organisms are about more than efficiency; they are about being what they are.

The classical Christian view of God is that God is an artist, not that God is a mechanic. An artist creates things that are ends-in-themselves and for which efficiency is at most a secondary concern. When God is seen as a mechanic, as implied in Paley's argument from mechanical design, then power and efficiency are seen as the fundamental forces in nature and therefore constitute the measure of nature. Something like Darwinism will ultimately follow as a philosophical consequence (although mistaken for an empirical one), since Darwinism is simply the observation that some organisms are more efficient than others, which is undoubtedly true, allied to the philosophical principle that efficiency is the metaphysical fundamental of nature. As Darwin puts in in the Origin of Species:

In looking at Nature, it is most necessary to keep the foregoing considerations always in mind  - never to forget that every single organic being may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers; that each lives by a struggle at some period in its life; that heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or the old, during each generation or at recurrent intervals. Lighten any check, mitigate the destruction ever so little, and the number of the species will almost simultaneously increase to any amount. (italics mine)

As the philosopher David Stove pointed out, the passage is manifestly false as a matter of empirics; the checks on the population of man, for example, have largely disappeared yet population growth is declining and, in some places like Europe and Russia, population is decreasing despite abundant food. So man is a counterexample to the assertion that every organism is striving to the utmost to increase in numbers. I would like to focus on Darwin's assertion that it is "most necessary" to keep the "struggle for existence" foremost in mind when thinking about nature. If reproductive efficiency were really the be-all and end-all of nature, then why is it necessary to keep reminding ourselves of the fact? The fact should become manifest as a matter of course. Of course, what Darwin is really insisting on is not to keep reminding ourselves of obvious empirical truths, but to read nature through the lens of the principle of efficiency in reproduction.

If we are not spellbound by the myth of the machine, then we may ask just what it means that, as Coyne says, "plants and animals seem intricately and almost perfectly designed for living their lives." In what way do plants and animals fail the test of perfection? A bear lives the life of a bear, and it seems to lead that life perfectly... bears do not sometimes fail to live like bears and instead live like birds. Now grizzly bears fish in streams, and no doubt they could do it more efficiently, and so we could say bears fail in that sense the test of perfection - if we take it for granted that the measure of a bear's life is efficiency. Does a bear become more "bearlike" the more efficiently it fishes? Maybe a perfect bear is a bear that fishes exactly as efficiently as actual bears do... the life of a bear is not about doing what it does with ever more power and violence, as though bears are waiting to discover dynamite so they can blow salmon out of streams. 

One of the standard Darwinist arguments against creation is that nature is "flawed" or contains examples of "bad design", and therefore no intelligent designer could be responsible for it. Although Darwinists typically deny any reality outside nature, the argument is in danger of presupposing it, for it supposes a standard beyond nature (a standard of "perfection") against which nature can be measured and found wanting. If we are not to repair to a standard outside nature, then the standard can only be that of efficiency, for efficiency only demands that nature do what it is already doing, only faster and with more power. Really it reads the ideology of the machine into nature, for machines can always be bigger, faster, and more efficient. Unlike a painting, an opera, a piece of furniture, or an organism, a machine always fails the standard of perfection of its own nature because it is always possible, in principle at least, for there to be a better machine that does what it does faster and more cheaply. There is no inherent limit to the speed of computers, some speed at which we say "the best computers run at one million millon gigahertz and no faster." But a symphony does not always become better by being played faster or more loudly, and why must a bear be viewed under the metaphor of a machine rather than a symphony? Why must the "increase in numbers" be taken as the first principle of nature?

The Story of Evolution

What fascinates me about evolution is not so much the science of it, but the philosophy. The science seems pretty straightforward and, well, boring. Organisms undergo random modifications, some of which are passed on with greater probability to descendants than others, and so become a more or less permanent part of the genetic heritage. These modifications accumulate to the point that, many generations on, the descendants bear only little resemblance to their ancestors.

So far, so boring. It sounds like geology. A river flowed over the same patch of ground for millions of years, gradually wearing down the rock underneath it, creating the Grand Canyon. Great.

It's when evolution turns from a dry account to a story that my interest perks up, as in a quote from Michael Shermer at the beginning of the Introduction to Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True:

Darwin matters because evolution matters. Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.

Now we are talking! I've always been a sucker for history, especially "epic sagas" with deep meaning - like the Civil War or the New Testament, for instance. But here is where the philosophy comes in. Freedom is essential to a story. A story is the account of the decisions of a free agent as he grapples with the demands of existence. A story must be told because there is no a priori way to predict the actions of a free agent with assurance; it is only in the act itself that the decision reveals itself. Will Rick assist Victor Laszlo in escaping from Casablanca, or turn him in to the Germans? Will MacBeth murder his way to the throne of Scotland? Will Gen. Richard Ewell hesitate at the end of the first day and cost the Confederates victory at the Battle of Gettysburg, and miss perhaps the best Confederate chance to win the war? If decisions follow of necessity from first principles, then there is no story, only logic and empirical necessity. When water flows over rock it wears it down; this is what happened over a long, long time and made the Grand Canyon. And if Rick must of necessity turn Laszlo into the Germans, there is no Casablanca.

Chance and contingency are no substitutes for freedom. If an earthquake occurs and diverts the Colorado River two miles west, this changes the location of the Grand Canyon but we still don't have a story, let alone an epic saga. Neither is Casablanca a story if the events are entirely driven by chance and contingency; say, if all that matters to Laszlo's safety is whether it happens to rain on the day he leaves.

Evolution, its proponents insist, is a scientific theory like any other, as for example geology and astronomy. There can't really be any epic sagas in evolution, then, anymore than there are in geology, because there is no more freedom in evolution than there is in geology. What is Shermer talking about, then, in the words I just quoted? There is a studied ambiguity in Shermer's words. He writes that Darwin and evolution matter because science matters, and science matters because it is the "preeminent story of our age." Now there is a story of science, insofar as there is a history of scientific endeavor. Galileo spying the moons of Jupiter or Darwin's journey on the Beagle or Freidrich Kekule discovering the structure of benzene in a dream; these are events full of freedom, drama and danger. And the history of science does have much to tell us about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. We are a creature who not only lives in an environment, but a creature who can investigate, understand, dominate and transcend his environment.

But I get the sense that this isn't really what Shermer is talking about. It's not the history of scientific endeavor, but the science itself, specifically the science of evolution, that tells us who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. Evolution, then, can't be just another science like geology. As the "preeminent story of our age", it must be the story of stories, or the science of sciences. Geology may reveal the nature and history of rocks, but evolution reveals the nature and history of man, the creator and conductor of the science of geology. Man is also the creator of evolutionary science, so evolution has the further peculiarity that it is a science of itself. Darwinists speak of the evolution of religious belief, but there must also be an evolution of evolutionary belief, as there is an evolution of everything else.

This raises several puzzling questions about evolution. Every story has a storyteller, and so must evolution, the preeminent story of our age. Just who is telling the story, and how is it he is able to tell it? The second question is: Who are the characters in the story, the ones whose freedom makes the story a story?

In his first chapter, Jerry Coyne summarizes evolution in the following sentence:

Life on earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species - perhaps a self-replicating molecule - that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection. (p. 3)

I will only note in passing that Coyne uses the word itself ("evolved") in its own definition. Coyne elaborates by saying that evolution consists of six components:

When you break that statement down, you find that it really consists of six components: evolution, gradualism, speciation, common ancestry, natural selection, and nonselective mechanisms of evolutionary change.

Conspicuously absent from either the original statement or the elaboration is any notion of freedom. This is as it should be so far as science is concerned: The elements of a scientific theory are thoroughly determined by that theory, as mass, force and acceleration are determined in the science of mechanics. But a storyteller requires distance from a story in order to tell it, as the story of The Princess Bride is told by Peter Falk to a little boy in the film of that name, or Philip Marlowe tells the story of The Big Sleep in retrospect. We immediately see the humor when Woody Allen plays on this truth by having his character in Annie Hall "break the frame" and speak directly to the audience, exercising a freedom he cannot possibly have as a character in the story.

Well, we are all part of the story of evolution, are we not? If we are in the story, how can we tell the story? The very fact that we can tell the story seems to be proof that the theory of evolution cannot be the entire truth about the nature of man. There must be some further truth - a truth that permits man to know evolution for what it is (and to possibly inflate it with a grandiosity it can't possibly have.)

And who are the characters in the story? The airplane that carries Laszlo away from Casablanca, the gun with which Rick shoots Major Strasser, the knife MacBeth uses as an instrument of murder, are all props. Props are things with no freedom used in a story by things that have freedom; that is, people. But if people ultimately do not have freedom - and evolution, by its nature, has no place for freedom - then they must be props. For whom are they props? This leads to the search for the true characters of the story of evolution. Originally, the characters of evolutionary history were species, as in the "origin of species." Individual organisms - this amoeba, that squirrel, you, me - are props for the species of which we are representatives. The story of evolution is the story of species struggling to succeed in the survival of the fittest. This worked because the mechanism of mutation, until recently, was unknown and therefore mysterious. Freedom is the essential mystery and will find it's philosophical place in the locus of mystery, wherever that locus is according to a particular philosophy (and every philosophy will have it, explicitly or implicitly.) Since mutation was mysterious, freedom found its implicit home in it, and a mythology of the "survival of the fittest" with its "arms races" was born. 

With the advance of genetic science, the mystery of organismic change was dispelled and species lost their ability to serve as characters in the evolutionary story. Now it is genes, as in Richard Dawkins's "selfish genes", that are offered as the true characters of evolutionary history. People are merely carriers - props - of genes, and species are merely the outward manifestation - the costume - worn by genes. Instead of the mythology of the survival of the fittest between species, we get the mythology of clever, ruthless genes manipulating biological forms for their own ends. Some day, and perhaps this day has already come - I don't know - the details of genetic mutations will themselves become known and lose their mystery, and genes will be dethroned as the characters of evolutionary history. A new protagonist, the "ruthless cosmic ray", perhaps, will kick genes off the stage, the same way genes kicked species off the stage.

Of course cosmic rays, genes or species can't ultimately be any more free than people are, because there is no freedom in evolutionary theory. This is the philosophical dilemma of Darwinism. The ultimate dream of evolutionary theory is to explain man - "who we are, where we came from, and where we are going." Now man is manifestly a free being. The key to explaining him will not be like the key to explaining the solar system, which was Kepler's breakthrough that the planets travel in ellipses rather than circles. Such a "closed-form" answer works for planets because planets are not free. The key to the nature of a free being like man will be getting his story right, because we know free beings through stories. So Darwinists are forced to tell a story, but since their philosophy has no place for freedom, it also has no place for the free characters essential to a story, and so Darwinism becomes the never-ending hunt for the true protagonists of evolution.

Evolution and Theological Arguments

My interest in the theory of evolution started about 25 years ago when I read the article Evolution as Fact and Theory by Stephen Jay Gould. Prior to that reading I had no particular interest in evolution one way or the other. I learned it in high school biology, did well on the biology Regents, and that was that.

What caught my interest in Gould's article was the form of argument he used. In particular, the following paragraph fascinated me:

"Evolution lies exposed in the imperfections that record a history of descent. Why should a rat run, a bat fly, a porpoise swim, and I type this essay with structures built of the same bones unless we all inherited them from a common ancestor? An engineer, starting from scratch, could design better limbs in each case. Why should all the large native mammals of Australia be marsupials, unless they descended from a common ancestor isolated on this island continent? Marsupials are not 'better', or ideally suited for Australia; many have been wiped out by placental mammals imported by man from other continents. This principle of imperfection extends to all historical sciences. When we recognize the etymology of September, October, November and December (seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth), we know that the year once started in March, or that two additional months must have been added to an original calendar of ten months." [Italics in original]

Now this argument may be perfectly sound. But whether it is sound or not, it is not scientific in the ordinary sense of the word; it is theological. Its premise is that we know what God - if there is one - would do in creating life: He would create to a standard of perfection; at least He would do a better job than has apparently been done. Since the life we find does not measure up to the standard we suppose God must create to, God could not have done it. 

How is it that a scientific theory rests on a purely theological argument? I've been trying to find the answer to this question for these past decades to no avail. I'm not the only or the first one to make the point; the despised intelligent design advocates and creationists make it repeatedly but apparently to no effect. For example, last weekend's Boston Sunday Globe contains a review of Jerry Coyne's new book "Why Evolution is True", which the reviewer says "lays out an airtight case that Earth is unspeakably old and that new species evolve from previous ones." I don't doubt that the Earth is old, but what is so unspeakable about it? It's about 4.5 billion years old, right? What's so hard about saying that, especially when we have no problem speaking about 850 billion dollar stimulus packages?

Anyway, among the mountains of undeniable scientific evidence that proves that evolution is "far more than a scientific theory", "it is a scientific fact", which evidence is selected for presentation in the review? Why, our old friend the theological argument:

"Why, " he asks, in a typical example, "would a creator use exactly the same bones in flying and flightless wings, including the wings of swimming penguins?"

The answer is: I have no idea. Does Jerry Coyne? How does he have any idea - let alone a scientific idea - what a putative Creator might or might not do? What sort of scientific theory offers as evidence speculations about divine creative methods and purposes? I don't remember Newton relying on his knowledge of God's purposes to argue for his three laws of motion.

Why is it considered terribly vulgar and reactionary merely to ask this question?

More on nature/nurture

In this post I discussed John Derbyshire and the state of the nature/nurture debate.

There are two points about the nature/nurture debate that have always struck me. The first is the manner in which, and this is typical of modern philosophy, the most important points are simply assumed and all the energy is spent debating points of secondary significance. The "human sciences", for example, take it for granted that man can be explained entirely in terms of nature or nurture or some combination of the two, as though these two alternatives self-evidently exhaust the possibilities. Barack Obama, for example, is explained by John Derbyshire entirely in terms of nurture (his mind was "set that way" by cultural Marxism, says Derbyshire.) My point in the prior post was that Derbyshire's explanation of Obama contradicts his own thesis, which is that genetics explains at least half of personal differences.

But why must Obama's political views necessarily be a product of either his genes or his environment? Might not his political views be a product of rational thought, a process that transcends both genes and environment? What is self-evident, surely, is that man cannot be explained entirely in terms of nature and/or nurture. Why does Barack Obama believe in the Pythagorean Theorem? Not even John Derbyshire, I think, would say that it is due to his genes or his environment, as though Obama were raised in "cultural geometry" the way he was allegedly raised in "cultural Marxism." We recognize that geometry transcends culture, and genes, and that the rational process by which we understand geometry is not reducible to either genes or environment. Is it not at least possible that political thought can also transcend genes and environment?

This brings me to my second point, which is that if we accept that man is entirely a causal product of his genes and/or his environment, then the nature/nurture argument is pointless in any event. For then man is a slave one way or the other; a slave to his genes or a slave to his environment. And it's not only Barack Obama's political thought that is enslaved, but also John Derbyshire's thought about Barack Obama's thought, and my thought about both Obama and Derbyshire. There is no escape from this slavery, and in the end the identity of the master, whether it be nature or nurture or Descartes' Evil Demon or a space alien or something else, must be a matter of impenetrable mystery to us. For our thought about the identity of the master is itself enslaved to the master, and therefore subject to his (its?) manipulation. My genes may determine my thinking, but there is no a priori guarantee that my genes will let me in on the fact.