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Genes and God: Explaining Mind, Ethics, and ReligionDr. John F. Haught Among all the many facets of the
science–religion conversation I doubt that any have
drawn more attention than those having to do with the
implications of evolution for theology. Prominent
biologists and Darwinian philosophers have recently
begun to draw upon gene-centered accounts of evolution
in order to convince people that
It has become a great temptation
for scientists, philosophers, and an increasing number
of scholars in the humanities to look to Down House for
the ultimate explanation of living phenomena, including
our own intellectual, ethical, and religious
characteristics. The “modern synthesis” of However, whenever evolutionary biology is conflated with materialist metaphysics and then elevated to the status of a worldview it is no longer science but belief. I call this belief system evolutionary naturalism, and I argue here that whenever its defenders claim that this amalgam of science and materialism can provide the ultimate explanation of the organic features, habits, and instincts of everything living including human beings, it becomes self-subversive. It logically negates any claims it makes to being intellectually coherent. Evolutionary naturalism is the belief that Darwinian science provides the ultimate explanation of all characteristics of all living beings, not only scientifically but also metaphysically speaking. I am assuming here the fundamental correctness of new-Darwinian science. But evolutionary naturalism, which nowadays has become a hybrid of genes-eye biology and materialist metaphysics, shows itself to be internally self-contradictory especially when it professes to give an ultimate explanation of mind. I find it remarkable that few if any of its advocates seem to have noticed this underlying incoherence. I shall concentrate here, therefore, on what strikes me as an internal self-contradiction at the very heart of evolutionary naturalism’s attempts to provide an ultimate metaphysical explanation of human cognition, and by implication morality and religion as well, in purely Darwinian terms.
How Much Can Biology Explain?
[ii] Charles Darwin’s famous advocate, Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895) coined the expression “scientific naturalism” to emphasize the fact that science must proceed without ever invoking supernatural explanations.[iii] These days, however, the same expression is usually taken to mean that nature is all there is and that science alone can make sense of it. Scientific naturalism, as I use the term here, is the belief that “this world,” the realm of beings in principle available to scientific understanding, is literally all there is. Scientific naturalism holds that outside of nature, which includes humans and their cultural creations, there is nothing. Nature, therefore, is self-originating. There is no God, no “soul,” no cosmic purpose, and hence no reasonable prospect of conscious human survival beyond death. Evolutionary naturalism, which is my topic here, is a subspecies of scientific naturalism. It claims that the emergence of life and mind in evolution was the product of blind deterministic natural “laws” (especially natural selection) combined with a great many accidents and an enormous amount of time. All the various features of living beings, including human thought, morality, and religious aspiration, can be explained ultimately in evolutionary, specifically Darwinian, terms. Richard Dawkins and the recently deceased paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, though fierce rivals, both exemplify what I mean by evolutionary naturalism.[iv] Dawkins argues that genetic accidents and natural selection, in the context of an unfathomable depth of time, can account adequately for all the various kinds of life, as well as the behavioral tendencies of all organisms, including those of human persons. Not only our mental powers, but also our ethical and religious instincts have an ultimately evolutionary explanation. Invoking the idea of God, therefore, to account for such phenomena, no matter how impressive they may seem to be, is unnecessary. A simpler explanation exists: the Darwinian recipe. Accidents plus natural selection plus lots of time—this mix is enough to account for living design, organic variety, instincts, and other propensities of life all by itself. Dawkins’s evolutionary naturalism is captured nicely in the words of a materialist neurosurgeon Perowne in Ian McEwan’s recent novel Saturday. Referring to evolution, he asks: What better creation myth? An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex living beauty out of inert matter, driven on by the blind furies of random mutation, natural selection and environmental change, with the tragedy of forms continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them morality, love, art, cities—and the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true.[v] Prior to Darwin, Dawkins allows, it
may have been forgivable to invoke religious creation
myths and theologies to account for such outcomes as
life, adaptive complexity, mind, ethical aspiration, and
religious longing. But after Dawkins insists that one cannot be a serious evolutionist without also being a materialist (and of course that means an atheist), and he has much company today. His Darwinian antagonist, Stephen Jay Gould, tries to soften the evolutionary blow, but philosophically he sympathizes with Dawkins’s materialism: The stumbling block to the
acceptance of I believe that a majority of
evolutionists today agree with Dawkins and Gould. They
generally assume that a materialist, or physicalist,
reading of evolution is enough to make all evolutionary
outcomes fully intelligible, and that therefore
Understandably, then, this
explicitly materialist philosophical spin on biological
information leads many in our religious communities to
be even more wary of ID proponents, for example, insist that purely material forces cannot conceivably account for the intricate engineering in cells and organisms. They insist that it is essential for biologists themselves, and not just theologians, to invoke non-natural causes to account for the staggering complexity of living organisms and sub-cellular mechanisms. Science itself, ID defenders propose, needs to redefine itself in order to include non-natural explanations since secular science is woefully inadequate.[xii] It is clear to me that the notion of “intelligent design” is essentially theological, and that it deserves the criticism of good scientists. But if it is inappropriate to fuse science with theology, it is no less questionable to alloy Darwinian ideas with atheistic materialism.
Is Evolutionary Naturalism Reasonable? The main point I want to make here, however, is that evolutionary naturalism is logically self-contradictory. I am an enthusiastic proponent of evolutionary biology, but evolutionary naturalism is something else entirely. It defies the most basic standards of human rationality. My claim, in the most general terms, is this: Whenever evolutionary naturalists profess that Darwinian science provides an ultimate explanation of the human mind they logically sabotage the truth-status of such a claim. According to most Darwinians, after all, the process that produced living design is even more witless than the most unresponsive of its outcomes. Evolution, they insist, bears not a trace of intentionality, even though it has lately produced intention-driven human subjects. As philosopher Owen Flanagan puts it, intelligence is not necessary to produce intelligence. “Evolution demonstrates how intelligence arose from totally insensate origins.”[xiii] Countless similar claims are made today by scholars who embrace sociobiology or its offshoot known as evolutionary psychology.[xiv] In order to display the incoherence of an exclusively evolutionist account of intelligence, let me assume, for the sake of discussion, that you the reader are an evolutionary naturalist, and allow me to speak directly to you. I shall invite you to decide for yourself whether your (hypothetical) evolutionary naturalism is compatible with the instinctive trust you need to place in your cognitional activity in order to make the simplest of truth-claims. I shall commence this experiment by asking you to become explicitly aware of the trust you are placing in your mind is doing at this very moment. After all, you cannot help trusting your mind, even when you are in doubt. Apart from having made a tacit act of faith in your own critical intelligence you would not have bothered to follow me up to this point. You would not have asked what I am talking about, or whether I may be writing nonsense. Your whole cognitional performance leans on a deeply personal confidence in your own intelligence and critical capacities. Unless you had already placed some degree of trust in your cognitional ability you would hardly have bothered to raise questions about what I am writing here. I suppose that evolutionary naturalists, after attending to what I’m saying in this essay, might attempt to refute the claims I am making. But any such refutation could occur only if my critics trusted their own minds’ as they reach for deeper understanding and truth. However, the important question is: how do you justify this trust? Assuming that you too espouse evolutionary naturalism, can your worldview provide sufficient warrants for the cognitional confidence that underlies your own judgment about whether I am right or wrong? If you accept the belief system known as evolutionary naturalism, have you ever asked whether it coheres logically with what is needed for you to be an intelligent and critical knower? Let me put my question another way: Is the essentially mindless, impersonal and purposeless universe entailed by evolutionary naturalism resourceful enough to explain and ground the trust you have placed in your own critical intelligence? I shall try to convince you that it is not, and that intellectual honesty compels you to conclude that your evolutionary naturalism is an unreasonable creed. Your formal understanding of the world—your worldview, if you will—must not be such as to subvert the confidence that underlies the thought processes that give rise to all views of reality. Shouldn’t your evolutionary naturalism lead you to distrust your mental activity? Charles Darwin, somewhat ironically, seemed to think so: With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?[xv] To claim, along with evolutionary naturalists, that natural selection is the ultimate explanation of your mind’s insatiable longing for truth or of its spontaneous trust in its capacity to find truth, is self-contradictory. As regards the mind’s attraction to truth, the philosopher Richard Rorty, no friend of theology, has wisely remarked: “The idea that one species of organism is, unlike all the others, oriented not just toward its own increased prosperity [that is, toward “fitness”] but toward Truth, is as un-Darwinian as the idea that every human being has a built-in moral compass—a conscience that swings free of both social history and individual luck.”[xvi] Neither Rorty nor Darwin, however, seems to have grasped the gravity of their suspicions. Both the scientist and the philosopher claim to be lovers of truth, and clearly they spontaneously trust their minds as they make the claims I have just quoted. Moreover, they would both agree that their minds did not float in from some supernatural realm but are fully embedded in the evolutionary process from which they have blossomed. However, if that is so, then any natural world that could give birth to their prized critical intelligence must be considerably richer and more interesting, at least in its deepest dimensions, than is the picture of an essentially mindless universe presupposed by evolutionary materialism.[xvii] Again, can a purely Darwinian account ground the critical intelligence and cognitional trust needed to understand and know the universe? More strongly stated, doesn’t a serious acceptance of evolutionary naturalism logically sabotage the trust that underlies the evolutionary naturalist’s attempts to understand and know the world?
The Need for Another Worldview Only a view of reality that can ground the confidence needed to energize your desire to understand and know the truth can itself be accepted honestly. To pass the test of reasonableness your belief system or worldview must be congruent with your actual cognitional requirements. If a specific set of beliefs logically undermines your trust in your own critical intelligence, then it is out of joint with that same critical intelligence.[xviii] My claim, quite bluntly put, is that evolutionary naturalism is logically subversive of your critical intelligence. Embracing it as your foundational worldview is to be unfaithful to your own cognitional life. It is a violation of your mind’s natural inclination to look for deeper understanding and truth. What you take to be the ultimate explanation of your critical intelligence must not function in such a way as to contravene the restless longing for truth that expresses itself here and now, for example, in the questions you are probably raising about this essay. I want to emphasize that nothing I have written here is intended to negate evolutionary and other scientific accounts of mind. I fully accept evolutionary science. In terms of natural history alone it is clear that your critical intelligence emerged by natural selection from a universe that was formerly lifeless and mindless. But in order to account for the trust that you now place in your critical intelligence it is not enough to recite the story of its lifeless and mindless causal past. If the ultimate cause of your mental abilities were ultimately utter mindlessness, you would still need to look for good reasons to trust your mind here and now, as both Darwin and Rorty seem to agree. Fully justifying the obvious acts of faith that you place in your critical intelligence requires that you situate your cognitional life, and along with it the whole universe, in a more spacious environment than the one laid out by evolutionary naturalism. I believe it will be essential to call upon theology to accomplish this expansion.
Evolution and Theology Can Easily Co-exist Evolutionary naturalists, of course, by definition will not consent to such a proposal. They will not give up their belief that the fundamental causes of intelligence are themselves completely unintelligent. This means, however, that they are compelled to explain their capacity for critical intelligence ultimately and solely in terms of processes and events that lack both intelligence and subjectivity. However, can a series of blind and unintelligent causes, no matter how temporally prolonged and gradual in cumulative effect, ever provide a sufficient reason for putting the kind of confidence in their own intellectual functioning as evolutionary naturalists such as Dawkins, Dennett, and Flanagan in fact do when they fall back on such an account. They tell us a story about how unconscious physical stuff and mindless evolutionary algorithms working during almost endless time finally produced their own critical intelligence. It’s a good and interesting story, one that most educated people can accept. But where in that story itself do they find a basis for trusting their own cognitional life in the exceptionally confident way they do? Calling mind a fluke of nature, as some evolutionary naturalists do, will hardly suffice to support such swagger either. As long as they ground their own critical intelligence ultimately either in blind natural selection or in a series of accidents, or both, what reason do evolutionary naturalists provide as to why they should ever trust their minds or why we should pay any attention to them? In a fundamentally unconscious universe, or in the cultures that evolve from it what basis is there for their inordinately high degree of cognitional confidence? I have yet to find a satisfying answer, at least from evolutionary naturalists. Instead I find in their works an implicit appeal to what seems like magic. The evolutionary naturalist’s account of mind is one in which the lustrous gold of critical intelligence is said to “emerge” gradually from the dross of pure mindlessness. Calling upon the idea of deep time to “explain” this emergence hardly dispels the aura of miracle that a consistent naturalism is supposed to disavow. Once again, in saying this I am not denying the power and importance of evolutionary explanations, only the coherence of evolutionary naturalism. In no way do I seek to discredit the scientific research that is always looking for the details of the story that led historically to critical intelligence. But telling this story does not by itself provide a justification of the cognitional self-confidence required by human thought processes. My proposal then is that, given the evolutionary character of your mind’s emergence, your longing for truth and your cognitional trust can be explained and justified adequately if you also understand your critical intelligence and the universe out of which it has emerged to be everlastingly enfolded by the Infinite Being, Meaning, Truth and Goodness that theistic faiths call God. I have developed this point at much greater length in my book Is Nature Enough: Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science, so I provide only a brief summary here. In doing so I am using a few ideas of the philosopher Bernard Lonergan. (1) Ultimately the mind’s inclination to be open or attentive to the world is awakened by the infinite horizon of Being-Itself in which all particular beings participate. (2) Ultimately the mind’s instinctual need to seek understanding of that to which it has attended, is aroused by the limitless Meaning (Logos) that gives intelligibility to the world and thus makes human inquiry possible in the first place. (3) Ultimately the mind’s imperative to be critical is stirred to life by the Infinite Truth that makes minds ever restless for deeper communion with what is. And (4) ultimately the imperative to be responsible is lured into the state of moral aspiration by the Infinite Goodness in which all finite beings participate. Only the existence of such an open and infinite transcendental environment can explain ultimately why we are critically intelligent beings and why we are fully justified in trusting our minds. Of course, one can always deny verbally that there is anything “more” involved in critical intelligence than its material constituents. The evolutionary naturalist will insist that minds, like everything else in life, are really just simplicity masquerading in the guise of complexity, as scientist Peter Atkins claims.[xix] However, any such declaration is self-contradictory and self-subverting since it implies logically that the complex mind that makes such a claim is itself really nothing more than the mindless stuff from which it arose. And if the ultimate roots of Atkins’s own mind are nothing more than mindless states of physical stuff, one can only ask exactly how he came to possess, and how he can now justify, the unquestioned trust he has in his own cognitive powers. Given his supremely self-confident explanation of all evolutionary outcomes as “simplicity masquerading as complexity,” why should we pay any attention to any product of his mind? No doubt, it is useful to expose scientifically the long trail of physical and biological events that led up to the existence of Atkins’s mind. But simply tracing them all the way back into the dumb silence of the early universe, or following them all the way down to the elemental levels of material reality out of which his mind emerged, will—at least by itself—lead only further and further into the domain of disjointed material units, another word for which is incoherence (which Atkins calls “simplicity”). The mind’s quest for intelligibility cannot be satisfied by looking into the physical past alone, or by uncovering the diffused elementality out of which living complexity and minds are said to have “emerged.” The universe becomes intelligible to us only as we look from the multiple units (atoms, molecules, cells, and genes) of the cosmic past toward the anticipated horizon of Being, Intelligibility, Truth and Goodness that has already grasped hold of our minds (and hearts). The world reveals its intelligibility only as the mind attends from the elemental and simple toward the complex and coherent.[xx] In other words it is only by looking from the past toward the future that the world begins to make good sense.[xxi] A sufficient ground for trusting your mind’s imperatives, therefore, cannot be found exclusively by scientifically exposing its material make-up or its evolutionary past. Although natural processes have been essential to the emergence of mind, they cannot alone account for the mind’s critical power or its spontaneous trust in this power. The evolutionary story of how the mind came into the history of nature may be interesting and informative. But such an account cannot alone explain how critical intelligence came to be interested in truth (even when it is often non-adaptive to follow this interest) or why it has a spontaneous trust in its own capacity to discover and affirm what is true. However, if your critical intelligence—and along with it the whole universe—is somehow already in the grasp of Infinite Being, Meaning, Truth and Goodness, then the reality of such an Ultimate Habitat can easily explain why you are being invited, and not forced, to follow the imperatives to be attentive, intelligent, critical, and responsible. And if you are already in the grasp of this divine milieu you have every reason to trust your mind—even as it uncovers more and more chapters of the evolutionary epic that has led up to it. REFERENCES AND END NOTES
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