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Reconciling Science and Religion by Britton Johnston

April 6, 2011

William Blake, The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve

 

Another reading selection from the article titled “How Girard’s Mimetic Theory Can Help Us Understand the Relationship Between Science and Religion” by Britton Johnston, a Presbyterian minister who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The complete article is at Metanexus: The Online Forum on Religion and Science.

It might be helpful here to give an example or two of how mimetic theory can reconcile the claims of science and religion. Let’s explore the issue of creation, and the question of the existence of spiritual beings.

The question of Creation is fundamentally a question of the distinction between culture and cosmos. Archaic cultures, being unable to distinguish the two, use material realities to express cultural ones. The creation story in the first chapter of Genesis, is not a text about physics or biology, but about cultural origins — one that stands in contrast to pagan creation myths.

For example, in the ancient Babylonian creation myth known as the Enuma Elish, the warrior God Marduk forms the world from the dead body of his mother Tiamat after he has slain her. He hews her body into two pieces, and with the upper half of her body he forms the heavens, and with the lower half he forms the earth. For the ancient Babylonians, this is the story of the foundation of the world.

From the point of view of Girard’s mimetic theory, this myth is a disguised account of an actual murder (or, more precisely, of a series of ritual murders). The murder would have taken place as Babylonian culture was forming for the first time. There was a mimetic crisis, which was resolved only when one or more people were killed by the mob, bringing order out of the social madness.

This originary murder rescued these Proto Babylonians from a state of acute mass psychosis. As they emerged from the psychosis, it appeared to them as though the cosmos itself had been re-created. They described the event as best they could, given that they were emerging from a condition of total delusion; so what amounted in actuality to a lynching, came to be described as a divine event, a divine drama playing itself out in the heavens. Historically, there were probably more than one of these collective murders. This lynching was reproduced in sacrificial rituals. These ritual sacrifices came to be understood as re-enactments of the original divine event, enriching and refining the narrative into a creation myth.

All creation myths seem on the surface to be about the creation of the material world; but they are really about the origin of human culture. It would be natural to ask at this point, why cultures don’t just describe their origin literally and factually? Why don’t the Babylonians simply say, “we were in a crisis and we saved ourselves by lynching a member of our community.” Why the elaborate narrative? Why the obfuscation?

There are two reasons for this: first of all, as I indicated above, these events are generated on the boundary between psychotic delusion and sane reality; therefore, myths have a dreamlike, semi-delusional quality. Secondly, the culture has a stake in disguising the original murder. Every culture knows that murder must not be spoken of approvingly, because murder invites revenge and revenge escalates, plunging the whole society into bloody madness. Therefore the society must pretend that it is innocent of murder. Yet still the original murder must be remembered, because it brought the benefits of social order. Myths have this dreamlike quality because they are the result of a double-bind: they must simultaneously recall and hide the crime they trace.

The creation story in the first chapter of Genesis is not a literal description of the origin of species or of the origin of the planets; rather, this is a story which uses the concept of species and the image of the planets as symbols to describe something which was much more pressing to the ancient Israelites than the matter of scientific explanations. This is a story of the origins of human culture and consciousness. In this way it is not unlike the creation myth of the Babylonians. Yet it also differs sharply from the Babylonian story (and virtually every other creation story from ancient culture): it contains no sign of a murder!

In fact, scholarship has revealed that the first chapter of Genesis was composed while the people of Judea were in exile in Babylon. The first chapter of Genesis was the Jews’ response to what their captors insisted was the origin of the world. In their refusal to go along with the idea of a founding murder, the Jews became the first culture in the history of the world to claim that violence is not essential to the cosmic order.

There is no murder in the first chapter of Genesis. There is only a powerful God working hard to establish a place for everything and to put everything in its place. The language of creation in the first chapter of Genesis is the language of establishing boundaries. There’s a boundary between the light and the dark. There is a boundary between the dry land and the sea, there is a boundary between the different kinds of plants and animals. The story has the quality of the storekeeper taking care of his inventory, or of a housekeeper picking up clutter. Instead of a warrior God carrying out the sacred execution, the Jews revealed to history a worker God who establishes order not by killing somebody, but by cleaning house.

The principle of creation in the beginning of the Bible is the principle of difference. In the first chapter of Genesis, we do not have a description of a creatio ex nihilo, but an account of the imposition of difference on the primordial waters of chaos. The day is separated from the night; boundaries are set between the sea and dry land; the plants and animals are separated out, “each according to its kind.” The original creation was the ordering of chaos through the establishment of differences.

Why is this important? According to Girard’s mimetic theory, the primordial waters are an archetypical image representing the pre-cultural mimetic sacrificial crisis. The (pre)human community is in a state of crisis brought about by the imitation of everyone by everyone. This has produced a confusing maelstrom of desire, rivalry, hostility and violence within which life is impossible. Like a swimmer tossed in the chaos of a riptide, everyone finds it impossible to distinguish up from down, left from right, light from dark.

According to Girard, the first strategy to resolve this crisis is human sacrifice. But in the Hebrew scriptures, humanity begins to move away from human sacrifice. In order to defer the sacrificial crisis, the Hebrew strategy is to put in place a strong system of sacred difference.

Difference defers or delays the sacrifice by blocking the development of mimetic rivalry. It works because when boundaries are drawn between people, they tend to imitate each other less strongly. We are most strongly mimetic toward those whom we perceive to be like us. If we see the other as different, we are less likely to want what they want, return their insults, and so forth. Thus we are less likely to come into mimetic rivalry with people who are different (violence against those who are of a different ethnicity or who are differently abled is not technically mimetic rivalry; it is a kind of scapegoating that discharges mimetic rivalry and unifies the community).

Consider an ice cube tray, the kind that has the removable dividers. If you fill it with water without the dividers and try to carry it across the kitchen, chances are that the water will spill. But if you insert the dividers into the water before carrying it, you find it is much easier to carry it without spilling. Differences in culture are analogous to this. They prevent the free flow of mimetic rivalry from building up to a chaotic loss of control.

The first chapter of Genesis is a projection onto nature of precisely this concern for difference. As a subtle anti-Babylonian polemic, Genesis 1 substitutes a structure of differences for the violent structures built on human sacrifice. This is an enormous advance in human consciousness. The fact that it retains the archaic confusion between culture and cosmos should not be grounds to dismiss it. After all, we owe our very awareness of that difference to documents such as this.

Science still has some things to learn from Genesis 1. The theory of natural selection itself depends on the notion of the selfish competition for survival as essentially a “creative principle of the cosmos.” Numerous critics have pointed out that this idea is far too much like the Malthusianism and “social Darwinism” (which is misnamed – Darwin borrowed it from Malthus and Spencer and applied it to biology) to be entirely independent of cultural bias. Even in our scientific endeavors, we may be too susceptible to the tendency to project our culture onto nature. Perhaps science should stay a little closer to the insights of the Bible after all.

A Theory of Spirits
Mimetic theory opens up a new category for describing reality that hasn’t been available until now: “mimetic forces.” Such forces are recognized by every culture, but they are not described, merely named – spirits, angels, ghosts, demons, etc. These are forces with real power but that are unseen and hard to measure. Mimetic theory gives us the means to actually describe them.

A “mimetic force” exists in the relationships between people. A simple desire is a mimetic force. According to Girard, if one person makes an acquisitive gesture toward an object, another person nearby will tend to focus on the same object, with an impulse to make a similar acquisitive gesture. The original gesture, by stimulating a mimetic response in the neighbor, could be said to be a kind of “force.” The force draws people under its influence. They in turn add their own energy to the mimetic force, causing it to strengthen. One person wants the object, generating a weak mimetic force in the next person, who likewise comes to desire the object; now the mimetic force is twice as strong, so that a third person will desire the object even more readily than the first two people. The force propagates through the population, gaining power to affect individuals as each additional individual is affected.

If the desire so propagated is a desire for the well-being of others, it could be called an “angel”; on the other hand, if the mimetic force is a spirit of resentment, it will be called a “demon” – that is, after its violent denoument is done.

The definition of demons, spirits and angels as mimetic forces accounts for all the characteristics attributed to them. They are invisible, more “felt” than seen. They are personal, yet not contained within a body; they affect people to the point of taking over the human will; and they can be invoked or exorcised by ritual and prayer.

Such mimetic forces doubtless play a huge role in illness and disease. They can affect the functioning of the body and mind in profound ways. The “science” of managing such forces exists almost exclusively within religious traditions. It could be an extremely important advance in medical technology if we were to begin to explore the means by which such forces can be managed. If scientists are to learn how to do this, however, they will have to become students of religion.

Mimetic theory, if it is correct, offers a fresh and clear path for us to understand how science and religion are radically interdependent. I hope that those who read this article will be motivated to explore this new and potentially fruitful avenue of inquiry into the relationship between the two.

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Reading Selections From Girard’s Mimetic Theory And The Relationship Between Science And Religion by Britton W. Johnston

April 1, 2011

René Girard

This is from an article titled “How Girard’s Mimetic Theory Can Help Us Understand the Relationship Between Science and Religion” by Britton Johnston, a Presbyterian minister who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Rev. Johnson earned his Masters of Divinity at the McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, class of 1990 and organized the annual meeting of the Girardian Colloquium on Violence and Religion in June, 2004. The complete article is at Metanexus: The Online Forum on Religion and Science. I add this to my little collection of Girardian articles and summaries.

Culture And Truth
The question of the relationship between science and religion, like many other leading concerns of theologians today, has to do with the relationship between culture and truth. It therefore seems appropriate to approach these theological issues anthropologically. Unfortunately, the field of Anthropology tends to be dominated by a “politically correct” suspicion of religion in general, and of theology in particular.

Fortunately, there is a new anthropological theory emerging. This new theory is congenial to theology, promising to give us powerful new concepts and tools to finally resolve these vexing theological questions. This theory is the “mimetic theory” of René Girard. It has been around for about 30 years, though it has made little progress among theologians and anthropologists until recently. What I would like to do with this essay is to introduce the basics of Girard’s theory, and to suggest how this theory might supply us with a fruitful new approach for reconciling science and religion.

Who Is René Girard
René Girard is what you might call a “literary” anthropologist — this despite the fact that his formal education was in neither literature nor anthropology. His Ph.D. is in history. His doctoral dissertation was on the subject of Franco-American relations after World War II. Although his “outsider” status might lead us to question the validity of his theories, in fact a lack of official credentials is common among those who bring revolutionary new ideas to a field of study.

Girard was born in France in 1923. He came to the United States in 1947, working on his doctoral dissertation at Indiana University. They put him to work teaching French literature, something for which he had little training beyond the fact that he was a Frenchman. In fact, he was often just barely ahead of his students, reading some of the novels for the first time, two chapters ahead of the class assignments. In the process of teaching literature, he began to notice certain patterns in the great novels, in their treatment of human desire

Deceit, Desire, and the Novel
His first book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, was published in French (with the title Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque) in 1961, after he had become a professor at Johns Hopkins University. In that book he argues that great literature reflects awareness that human beings get their desires from one another. We are “mimetic” creatures, meaning that we internalize one another through imitation. A crucial aspect of the mimetic process is that it is the means by which we acquire our desires. Human desire therefore is not innate; rather, we “borrow” our desires from those we imitate. This brings us into conflict with those others. The person who is our model also becomes for us the greatest obstacle to getting what we want. Great literature, Girard argued, depicts its protagonists’ entanglement in these mimetic webs of desire and rivalry — but often with liberation at the moment of the hero’s death or expulsion.

Patterns Of Expulsion
Girard continued to examine the theme of expulsion, in ancient literature and primal myths. He found that every ancient myth contained traces of a pattern of expulsion. Every ancient myth, that is, except for the Bible. In 1972, he published La Violence et le Sacré, in which he argued that all religious myths are disguised accounts of actual historical events, specifically expulsions, the sacrifice of scapegoats.Even the Bible follows this same pattern, but with one important difference: the Bible is the first narrative to present the expulsion from the point of view of the scapegoat.

Girard went on to develop his mimetic theory in subsequent books, such as Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (English edition, 1987), The Scapegoat (1986), To Double Business Bound (1978), and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (English edition 2001). In these books and others, Girard and his followers have demonstrated that his theory has amazing power to clarify issues in anthropology, theology, biblical interpretation, psychology, political science, economics, linguistics, and on and on. It is truly a “grand theory,” simple yet powerful. Such theories are not in fashion in these postmodern and multicultural times; they are in fact regarded with suspicion. So far, there have been no grand theories that have worked. So far.

A Sketch Of Mimetic Theory
The preeminent characteristic of human beings is that we imitate each other (thus the term “Mimetic Theory”). This mimesis is not mere mimicry, but an instinctive and preconscious impulse. Even our desires–especially our desires–come from the imitation of others. Because we want the same things that others want, we come into conflict over who will possess the desired object. This rivalry is in turn imitated so that it escalates into violence. The rivalry does not remain limited to the first individuals involved, but others imitate it until it spreads to the entire community, generating a mimetic crisis. Violence threatens to destroy everyone involved, unless a solution is found.

The solution that our species stumbled upon was the mechanism of sacrifice. One individual is singled out by the community as the scapegoat whose death absorbs the violence in the community, delivering the community from this threat. The community mistakenly believes that the scapegoat was at once the cause as well as the all-powerful cure for the chaos of the mimetic crisis. The pagan concept of the gods emerges from this misrecognition. The deliverance brought about by sacrificial violence is the basis for the primitive sacred. It is also the basis of archaic religion and the foundation of human culture.

Human culture extends the power of sacrifice by creating myths and idols, which remind the people of the sacred event of the sacrifice, damping down the fires of the mimetic crisis. The function of a myth is to preserve and obscure the historical event of the sacrifice. By preserving the experience of the sacrifice, a myth reduces the need for frequent repetitions of it. But it is also important that myths obscure the murderous reality of the sacrifice, because to speak openly of murder is to risk triggering a new mimetic crisis.

Human culture inhibits the development of the mimetic crisis by also putting in place taboos, laws, and other forms of sacred differentiation so that the effects of mimesis are reduced, thus slowing the development of mimetic crises.

The biblical revelation (in both the Old and the New Testaments) breaks the power of this sacred violence by revealing it for what it is, the collective murder of an innocent victim. The voices of the prophets, and especially the revelation of Christ on the cross, demythologize human culture by forcing us to acknowledge our sacred sin. Because the sacred depends upon denial, the biblical revelation renders sacred murder unworkable. The Bible brings the workings of the sacred to an end. This is why Jesus is described in the Gospel of John as “the lamb of God who takes away the sin [singular] of the world.” (John 1:29)

The loss of the sacrificial mechanism would result in our self-destruction, if some alternate form of functioning were not provided. Fortunately, the Gospel also gives us new means to avoid mimetic rivalry, supplanting the old taboo systems, by calling us to imitate Christ. When we imitate Christ (“Set your minds on things that are above” Col 3:2), we are possessed by a desire for the well-being of our neighbors, in place of the old desire to have what the neighbor wants. This process of acquiring new desires transforms humanity and leads to a new and better non-sacrificial culture.

The Difficulty of the Sacred
One of the things that are hard to get used to with this theory is the idea that the “sacred” is a bad thing. It’s not as bad as the mimetic crisis, but it is nevertheless fundamentally bloody and violent. Violence seems to inhere in the sacred object like an electrical charge. Whoever draws too near runs the risk of inciting the crowd to attack.

Girard argues that without religion human beings could not exist. The greatest threat to our existence has never been starvation or predation, but our own violence. The origin and purpose of religion is to save us from this threat.

A Clear And Simple Scientific Hypothesis For The Origin Of Culture And Religion
The advantage of Girard’s theory is that it gives us a clear and simple scientific hypothesis for the origin of culture and religion. With this as an analytical tool, we can unpack theological problems in fresh ways, when they have to do with culture and violence. Most of the really difficult theological problems can now be taken apart in a few quick steps, like an encoded message that becomes easily readable once the key for the code is discovered.

Science and Religion
According to René Girard, the sacred is inseparable from the practice of sacrifice. In fact, the word “sacrifice” literally means to “make sacred.” This is “sacrifice” in the ancient sense, meaning taking someone (a person or an animal) and ritually killing them. The sacred comes into being with the spilling of reconciling blood.

For example, belief in witches is typical of the workings of the sacred in society. In virtually every primitive culture in the world, there is a belief in witches. Whenever things seem to be going wrong, when resentments build between people, and sickness seems to be everywhere, the primitive culture will posit that a witch is at work causing problems. The community sets to work identifying the witch. When they identify someone (usually whoever has the fewest friends in the community) in such a way that everyone believes the accusation, they put the witch to death. Upon the killing of the witch, the buildup of hostility in the community is discharged, and things seem to return to normal. It seems obvious that therefore the witch indeed was the cause of the problem. This in turn reinforces the belief in witches. This scenario could never function without a fundamental misrecognition of the situation. The “plague” that the witch supposedly caused was really a mimetic crisis. The witch was only a scapegoat, blamed and punished to help the community regain its harmony.

This cycle of crisis, execution, and renewal tends to reinforce the superstitious belief in witches, because experience seems to show that it works. People feel “deep down” that it is obviously true; that the world is filled with magical powers and that witches are a grave danger to society.

Jesus as Witch
The biblical narrative deconstructs these superstitions by presenting the familiar story of the witch from the point of view of the “witch.” Jesus occupies the same cultural location as the witch; but the narrative reveals that it is the crowd that is guilty, rather than the innocent – (and forgiving!) victim. As a result of this revelation, humanity begins (dimly at first) to realize that the founding “Truth” of culture is in fact a lie.

The historical and cultural project known as modernity, building on the influence of the gospel, is designed to demolish superstitious worldviews. Modernity begins with the assumption that what is purely cultural or purely a matter of what people feel “deep down” is not sufficiently trustworthy. Modernity applies principles of truth that it considers beyond culture, i.e., what one can observe in nature or what is consistent with the principles of logical reasoning.

Modern science is the result of the discovery that there is a difference between “culture” and “cosmos.” All archaic or “primal” cultures assume that the natural world is an extension or expression of their culture. They make no distinction between “culture” and “nature.” Animistic religions believe that every rock, tree and stream has its own “spirit” with its own will and power, and that this spirit must be treated with respect, even awe. The belief in spirits comes from cultural and religious experiences. These concepts are projected onto the natural world, so that the primal culture considers them intrinsic to nature. This is a confusion between culture and nature.

The reason that primal cultures have this confusion relates to what might be termed the “mythological imperative”: the sacrifice of the victim must be remembered (for its reconciling benefits), but it must also be forgotten (so that speaking directly of collective murder doesn’t generate violence). The description of the victim’s death is forgotten, but the spiritual power of the sacrifice is remembered, because the victim is said still to be present in the rocks, trees, or streams.

Or the stars. Many cultures, especially agrarian ones, put a lot of effort into the contemplation of the stars. This is useful because observation of the movements of celestial bodies is the best means of timing the changing of the seasons. The timing of the seasons is important especially in agricultural societies as the means of assuring a good harvest; an early thaw is less likely to tempt you to plant too early, if you know how to watch for the spring equinox.

It seemed as though the stars controlled the seasons. Did they control other things as well? The product of the sacrificial altar came to be projected onto the stars. The planets and constellations were said to contain the spirits of sacred beings — gods, monsters, and the hero-priests who killed them. These figures in the sky came to be seen as guiding life in society. The culture was written in the sky by people who believed that somehow the sky was writing itself into their culture. Thus did astrology — that entertaining but pathetic superstition — come into being. This confusion of culture with cosmos is common to all archaic cultures (and to a large extent it is found in Western modernity, even Western science, as well).

The biblical revelation is the force in human history that has made humanity aware that there is a difference between cosmos and culture. It has brought about this change by revealing that the sacrificial victim is not the cause of the society’s problems. Jesus, the crucified victim of the crowd, is revealed to be innocent. It is the crowd that is guilty. As the sacrificial myth is thereby demolished, the other myths and superstitions of the culture begin to follow one by one. We realize that we can’t trust ourselves to be right about what causes the rain to fall or how the stars influence our lives. So we begin to explore ways to know things apart from the influence of culture. Science, the effort to insulate our inquiry from cultural influence, is born. The rest of modernity emerges at the same time. Modernity challenges and tests our cultural assumptions about our world. Culture is regarded with a considerable amount of suspicion. Culture and cosmos begin to separate in our thinking. As René Girard has said, “We didn’t stop burning witches because we invented science; we invented science because we stopped burning witches.”

Biblical Revelation as the Source of Science
The apparent conflict between science and faith is the result of our discovery that culture and nature are not necessarily the same. Such an endeavor as modern science would be unthinkable without the insight that our culture may be a source of falsehood. This is precisely the insight that the biblical revelation brought into the world. Without the Bible, Western science would never have been possible.

Although science is the product of biblical faith, science in turn contributes to biblical faith, by accelerating the process of demythologization. Science acts as a powerful solvent to wash away the sacred superstitions that still cling to biblical religion. Science has put an end to our belief in the power of witches’ magic, for example. This is a good thing, because it removes one of the falsehoods that distract us from the message of mercy in the Bible.

Science has confirmed the biblical insight that illness is not necessarily a punishment from God, but a condition that has nothing to do with our moral standing. By helping to lift the moral stigma of disease, science has helped us to be more faithful to the revelation of Christ who calls us to be merciful toward those who are sick.

The scientific worldview made possible the “historical-critical” reading of the Bible, which in turn has liberated our reading of scripture from all sorts of violent superstition.

But science must be careful not to be arrogant in this. The insight that culture can be wrong is a tremendous advance. It has led us to find ways to explore the truth in things that are not influenced by cultural biases and superstitions. We know that an experiment well-constructed can lead us to solid insight. But we must be careful not to conclude therefore that religion is never to be trusted. The rituals, moral standards and narratives of religion contain real wisdom that has controlled human violence for millennia.

God As A Mimetic Force
Scientists should not assume that because the term “god” cannot be separated from its cultural fabric, then the notion of a god is purely false. Mimetic theory suggests that indeed gods are very real, along with demons, spirits, and souls. But mimetic theory would describe them as mimetic forces, rather than metaphysical or supernatural beings. Science should be working on ways to describe gods scientifically, rather than dismissing the notion of a god as superstitious.

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Michael Behe and Stephen Barr Debate

November 19, 2010
 
 
 

Steven Barr (on the left) and Michael Behe

 

 In the video/audio at the following links, you can watch Catholic scientists Michael Behe and Stephen Barr debate whether Intelligent Design should be taught in science classes. Barr is a physicist, and you will recognize his writings in First Things and such books as Modern Physics and Ancient Faith. Behe is a biochemist and a leading voice in ID, writing such books as Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution.

 Audio/Video links here:  http://www.isi.org/lectures/lectures.aspx?SBy=lecture&SFor=18fdfd28-e682-421f-9acf-2940402af8e3

 The video is 72 minutes but captivating.

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The Sacred and the Human by Roger Scruton

September 30, 2010

Religion is not primarily about God, but about the sacred, and that the experience of the sacred can be suppressed, ignored and even desecrated but never destroyed.

This essay first appeared in Prospect Magazine, August 2007 and has some of the thoughts included in Professor Scruton’s 2010 Gifford Lectures. An overview of the role of religion and a meditation on Girardian theory, the essay gives us much to reflect on, particularly for those who might wish to dismiss Religion as if it were some disproven theory.

A System Of Unfounded Beliefs?
It is understandable that decent, skeptical people, observing the widespread revival in our time of superstitious cults, the emerging conflict between secular freedoms and religious edicts, and the murderous insanity of radical Islam, should be receptive to the anti-religious polemics of Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens. The ‘sleep of reason’ has brought forth monsters, just as Goya foretold in his wonderful engraving. How are we to rectify this, except through a wake-up call to reason, of the kind that the evangelical atheists are now shouting from their pulpits?

Goya's The Sleep of Reason

Nor is it surprising that decent, skeptical people should regard last-ditch attempts to retain the belief in God’s temporal concern for us (such as the theory of ‘intelligent design’), as testifying merely to the miraculous ability to believe in the miraculous. Either we leave the field to science, or we take refuge in the inexplicable – which is no refuge from science. For the skeptical observer of the human scene, there is nothing that religion can add to scientific explanation other than the invocation of a transcendental causa sui which, by its very nature, eludes human comprehension.

Somewhat more surprising is the extent to which religion is caricatured by its current opponents, who seem to see in it nothing more than a system of unfounded beliefs about the cosmos – beliefs which, to the extent that they conflict with the scientific worldview, are heading straight for refutation. Thus Christopher Hitchens, in his relentlessly one-sided diatribe, writes as follows:

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made of atoms – had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). (God Is Not Great, p. 64)

Now Hitchens is an intelligent and widely read man, who recognizes that the arguments that are most useful to him were already well-known two hundred years ago. His book takes us through territory already charted by Hume, Voltaire, Diderot and Kant, and nobody who is familiar with the Enlightenment can really believe that anything has been added to its stance against religion by our contemporary imitators, whatever new examples they can add to the list of religiously-motivated crimes.

The Origin of Religion
However, the thinkers of the Enlightenment, having argued the claims of faith to be without rational foundation, did not then dismiss religion, as one might dismiss a refuted theory. Many of them went on to draw the conclusion that religion must therefore have some other origin than the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and some other psychic function than providing a world-view that consoles those who subscribe to it. The ease with which the common doctrines of religion could be refuted alerted thinkers like Jacobi, Schiller and Schelling to the thought that religion is not, in its essence, a matter of doctrine, but of something else. And they set out to discover what that something else might be.

Thus was born the anthropology of religion. For thinkers in the immediate aftermath of the Enlightenment it was not faith but faiths, in the plural, that composed the primary subject-matter of theology. Hence the appearance of books with titles like Origine de tous les cultes; ou, Religion universelle (C.F. Dupuis, 1795), and hence the busy decipherment of oriental religions by the Bengal Asiatic Society, whose proceedings began to appear in Calcutta in 1788. For post-Enlightenment thinkers the monotheistic belief-systems were not related to the ancient myths and rituals as science to superstition, or logic to magic. They were crystallizations of the emotional need which found equal expression in the myths and rituals of antiquity and in the Vedas and Upanishads of the Hindus.

Myth And The Human Psyche
This thought led Georg Creuzer, whose Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker appeared between 1810 and 1812, to represent myth as a distinctive operation of the human psyche. A myth does not describe what happened in some obscure period before human reckoning, but what happens always and repeatedly. It does not explain the causal origins of our world but rehearses its permanent spiritual significance. Myth is a way of understanding deep processes of the human psyche, which cannot be easily described except through imaginative stories.

If you look at ancient religion in that way then inevitably your vision of the Judaeo-Christian canon will change. The Genesis story of the creation is easily refuted as an account of historical events: how can there be days without a sun, man without a woman, life without death? Read it as a myth, however, which recounts the concealed and repeatable meaning of events that we live through every day, and this naïve-seeming text reveals itself as a profound study of the human condition.

The story of the fall is, Hegel wrote, ‘not just a contingent history but the eternal and necessary history of humanity’. (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1827.) It conveys truths about freedom, about guilt, about man, woman and their relationship; about our relation to nature and mortality. A skeptical and scientific mind, such as that of Leon Kass in his The Beginning of Wisdom: The Story of Genesis, can use this text to explore moral and psychological truths that are nowhere else so vividly or succinctly evoked.

Hermeneutics
Not surprisingly, therefore, among the first effects of the Enlightenment were new ways of reading scripture, and new attempts to square the scriptures with the demands of the rational intellect. Thus was born the science, or at any rate the art, of hermeneutics, whose first conscious proponent, Friedrich Schleiermacher, saw religion as a distinctive activity of the rational soul, rooted in feeling rather than intellect.

For Schleiermacher’s contemporary Hegel, the Biblical stories had to be cleared of their merely imagistic nature, and construed as ventures of the spirit, on the path to self-knowledge. Religion, as he put it, is spirit that realizes itself in consciousness – it is the spirit coming to know itself, through the successive forms of human worship. The religions of mankind (which Hegel, spurred on by Creuzer, avidly collected and brilliantly analyzed) represent ‘determinations’ of the abstract idea of divinity. But we approach this idea through the path of alienation, and among religious concepts we should include not only those of God, creation, and design, but also those of guilt, unhappiness, atonement and reconciliation – features of the human condition which lead us to see the world from a position outside it, and to search it for the places and times in which freedom can enter the otherwise incomprehensible flow of events.

For Hegel, myths and rituals are forms of self-discovery, through which we understand the place of the subject in a world of objects, and the inner freedom which conditions all that we do. The emergence of monotheism from the polytheistic religions of antiquity is not so much an observation of the world as a form of self-knowledge, through which the spirit learns to recognize itself in the whole of things, and to overcome its finitude.

That idealist approach inspired Feuerbach to give a materialist rejoinder. Gods, angels, devils and the rest are, he argued, human creations, projections of the moral life, whose doings in the stratosphere reflect the moral tensions which animate the world below. The only reality here is the ‘species being’ of humanity, which creates these figments out of the raw material of human need. And the downside of religion is that it encourages our complacency, enabling us to place our virtues at an impassable distance from ourselves, by projecting them into that higher, and illusory, realm from which they can never thereafter be recuperated.

Nietzsche and Wagner
Between those early ventures into the anthropology of religion and the studies of Sir James Frazer, Emile Durkheim and the Freudians, two thinkers stand out as setting the agenda for a new intellectual enterprise – an enterprise which seems not to have been noticed by Hitchens, Dawkins or Dennett, but which is nevertheless of some importance to us today. The thinkers to whom I refer are Nietzsche and Wagner, and the intellectual enterprise is that of showing the place of the sacred in human life, and the kind of knowledge and understanding that comes to us, through the encounter with sacred things.

Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, and Wagner in Tristan, The Ring and Parsifal as well as in his writings on tragedy and religion, painted a picture that, while rooted in the post-Enlightenment tradition and owing much to Feuerbach, placed the concept of the sacred at the centre of the anthropology of religion. The lesson that both thinkers took from the Greeks was that you could subtract the gods and their stories from Greek religion, and still the most important thing would remain. This thing had its primary reality not in myths but in rituals, in moments that stand outside time, in which the deep loneliness and anxiety of the human individual is confronted and overcome.

By calling these moments ‘sacred’ we recognize both their complex social meaning and also the respite that they offer from alienation. Forget theology, forget doctrine and belief, forget all the ideas about an after-life – for none of these have the importance in Homer or in tragedy that attaches to the moment of ritual sacrifice, when the human world is suddenly irradiated from a point beyond it.

Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy was dismissed as an unscholarly fantasy, and cost him his career as a philologist. Wagner’s artistic proof of his own insights remained accessible only to those with ears. While most anthropologists recognized that religion belongs to another category of thought than science, and that it should not be dismissed (as Hitchens dismisses it) merely as a residue of animal fears and childish yearnings, the attempt to understand the concept of the sacred remained where Nietzsche and Wagner had left it.

Girardian Theory
It was not anthropologists but theologians and critics who took the matter forward – Rudolf Otto in Das Heilige, 1917, Georges Bataille in L’Érotisme, 1952, Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane, 1957, and, most explicitly and also shockingly, René Girard in La violence et le sacré, 1972. It is Girard’s theory, it seems to me, that most urgently needs to be debated, now that atheist triumphalism is sweeping all nuances away.

Girard begins from an observation that no impartial reader of the Hebrew Bible or the Koran can fail to make, which is that religion may promise peace, but is also deeply implicated in violence. The God presented in those writings is frequently angry, given to insane fits of destruction and seldom deserving of the epithets bestowed upon him in the Koran – al-raHmân al-raHîm, ‘the compassionate, the merciful’. He makes outrageous and bloodthirsty demands – such as the demand that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac. He is obsessed with the genitals and adamant that they should be mutilated in his honor – a theme that has been interestingly explored by Jack Miles in his riveting book God: A Biography.

Thinkers like Dawkins and Hitchens leap at once to the conclusion that religion is the cause of this violence and sexual obsession, and that all the crimes committed in the name of religion can be seen as the definitive disproof of it. Not so, argues Girard. Religion is not the cause of violence but the solution to it. The violence itself comes from another source, and there is no society without it since it is engendered by the very attempt of human beings to live together. The same can be said, too, of the obsession with sexuality: religion is not the cause of this, but an attempt to resolve it.

Girard’s theory is best understood as a kind of inversion of an idea of Nietzsche’s. In his later writings, Nietzsche expounded a kind of creation myth, by way of accounting for the structure of modern society. On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) envisages a primeval human society, reduced to near universal slavery by the ‘beasts of prey’ – namely the strong, self-affirming, healthy egoists who impose their desires on others by the force of their nature. The master race maintains its position by punishing all deviation on the part of the slaves – just as we punish a disobedient horse.

The slave, too timid and demoralized to rebel, receives this punishment as a retribution. Because he cannot exact revenge the slave expends his resentment on himself, coming to think of his condition as in some way deserved, a just recompense for his inner transgressions. Thus is born the sense of guilt and the idea of sin. The ressentiment of the slave explains, for Nietzsche, the entire theological and moral vision of Christianity. Christianity owes its power to the resentment upon which it feeds: resentment which, because it cannot express itself in violence, remains turned against itself. Thus arises the ethic of compassion, the mortification of the flesh, and the life-denying routines of the ‘slave morality’. Christianity is a form of self-directed violence, which conceals a deep resentment against every form of human mastery.

That ‘genealogy’ of Christian morals was effectively exploded by Max Scheler, in his book Ressentiment: as Scheler argues, the Christian ethic of agape and forgiveness is not an expression of resentment but rather the only known way of overcoming it. Nevertheless there is surely an important truth concealed within Nietzsche’s wild generalizations. Resentment is a fundamental component in our social emotions; it is widely prevalent in modern societies; and there is surely no way in which we might explain either the durability of egalitarian politics or such local phenomena as Islamist violence, if we do not see resentment as a major part of the cause.

We may suppose religion to make an input into social violence. But it is surely evident to any observer of the 20th century that you can take away religion, and the violence will usually remain. And the 20th century is the century of resentment. How else do you explain the mass murders of the communists and the Nazis, the seething animosities of Lenin and Hitler, the genocides of Mao and Pol Pot? The ideas and emotions behind the totalitarian movements of the 20th century are targeted: they identify a class of enemy, whose privileges and property have been unjustly acquired and at the expense of their victims. And this class must be destroyed. Religion plays no real part in the ensuing destruction, and indeed is usually included among the targets.

Girard’s theory, like Nietzsche’s, is expressed as a genealogy, or rather a ‘creation myth’: a fanciful description of the origins of human society, from which to derive an account of its present structure. (It is significant that Girard came to the anthropology of religion from his work as a literary critic, a student of Shakespeare, Cervantes and Stendhal.) And like Nietzsche Girard sees the primeval condition of society as one of conflict. It is in the effort to resolve this conflict that the experience of the sacred is born. This experience comes to us in many forms – in religious ritual, in prayer, in tragedy – but its true origin is in an act of communal violence.

Primitive societies are invaded by ‘mimetic desire’, as rivals struggle to match each other’s social and material acquisitions, so heightening antagonism and precipitating the cycle of revenge. The solution is to identify a victim, one marked by fate as ‘outside’ the community and therefore not entitled to vengeance against it, who can be the target of the accumulated blood-lust, and who can bring the chain of retribution to an end. Scapegoating is society’s way of recreating ‘difference’ and so restoring itself. By uniting against the scapegoat people are released from their rivalries and reconciled. Through his death the scapegoat purges society of its accumulated violence. His resulting sanctity is the long-term echo of the awe, relief and visceral re-attachment to the community that was experienced at his death.

According to Girard, therefore, the need for sacrificial scapegoating is deeply implanted in the human psyche, arising from the very attempt to form a durable community in which the moral life can be successfully pursued. One purpose of the theatre is to provide fictional substitutes for the original crime, and so to obtain the benefit of moral renewal without the horrific cost. In Girard’s view, we should see a tragedy like Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus as a re-telling of what was originally a ritual sacrifice, in which the victim is chosen so as to focus and confine the need for violence. Through incest, kingship, or worldly hubris the victim marks himself out as the outsider, the one who is not with us, and whom we can therefore sacrifice without renewing the cycle of revenge. The victim is thus both sacrificed and sacred, the source of the city’s plagues and their cure.

In many of the Old Testament stories we see the ancient Israelites wrestling with this sacrificial urge. The stories of Cain and Abel, of Abraham and Isaac, of Sodom and Gomorrah, are residues of extended conflicts, by which ritual was diverted from the human victim, and attached first to animal sacrifices, and finally to sacred words. By this process a viable morality emerged from competition and conflict, and from the visceral rivalries of sexual predation. Religion is not the source of violence but the solution to it – the overcoming of mimetic desire and the transcending of the resentments and jealousies into which human communities are tempted by their competitive dynamic.

And it is in just this way, Girard argues, that we should see the achievement of the Christian religion. In his study of the scapegoat (Le Bouc émissaire, 1982) Girard identifies Christ as a new kind of victim – one who offers himself for sacrifice, and who, in doing so, shows that he understands what is going on. The words ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’ are pivotal for Girard. They involve both a recognition of the necessity for sacrifice, if the guilt and resentment of community is to be appeased and transcended, and the added recognition that this function must be concealed. Only those who are ignorant of the source of their hatred can be healed by its expression, for only they can proceed with a clear conscience towards the tragic climax.

The climax, however, is not the death of the scapegoat, but the experience of sacred awe, as the victim, at the moment of death, forgives his tormentors. This is the moment of transcendence, in which even the most cruel of persecutors can learn both to humble himself and to renounce his vengeful passion. Through his willing acceptance of his sacrificial role Christ made the ‘love of neighbor’ – which had featured from the oldest books of the Hebrew bible as the standard to which humanity should aspire – into a reality in the hearts of those who rehearse or meditate upon his gesture. Christ’s submission purified religion of the need for sacrificial murder: his conscious self-sacrifice is therefore, Girard suggests, rightly thought of as a redemption, and we should not be surprised if, when we turn away from our Christian legacy as the Nazis and the Communists did, the hecatombs of victims reappear.

Girard’s account of the Passion is amplified by many learned asides, by a vigorous and ongoing engagement with Freud and Lévi-Strauss, and by a conviction that religion and tragedy are (as Nietzsche argued) adjacent in the human psyche, comparable receptacles for the experience of sacred awe. The experience of the sacred is not an irrational residue of primitive fears, nor is it a form of superstition that will one day be chased away by science. According to Girard, it is a solution to the accumulated aggression which lies in the heart of human communities. That is how he explains the peace and celebration that attends the ritual of communion – the sense of renewal which must always itself be renewed.

Girard’s Vision Of The Eucharist
Girard’s vision of the Eucharist is anticipated in Parsifal, and in particular in the sublimely tranquil Good Friday music of Act III. It is anticipated too by Hegel, who writes that ‘in the sacraments reconciliation is brought into feeling, into the here and now of present and sensible consciousness; and all the manifold actions are embraced under the aspect of sacrifice.’ (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.) Girard, like Hegel, takes himself to be describing deep features of the human condition, which can be observed as well in the mystery cults of antiquity and the local shrines of Hinduism as in the everyday ‘miracle’ of the Eucharist.

Girard Theory Criticisms
There are many criticisms that might be leveled against Girard’s theory – not least, against the idea that human institutions can be explained through genealogies and creation myths. The alleged ‘mimetic’ nature of human competition is underdescribed and underjustified; there are other and more plausible explanations of the ancient ritual of animal sacrifice than that offered by Girard; and the success of the Christian ethic has many other causes besides the mystical reversal that allegedly occurred on the Cross. But those criticisms do not, it seems to me, account for the comparative neglect of Girard’s ideas. Girard’s thesis has been received with the same dismissive indifference as Nietzsche’s in The Birth of Tragedy, and though he has been honored with a siège at the Académie Française, the honor has come only now, as Girard approaches his ninetieth year.

I suspect that, like Nietzsche, Girard has reminded us of truths that we would rather forget – in particular, the truth, which is anathema to the evangelical atheists, that religion is not primarily about God, but about the sacred, and that the experience of the sacred can be suppressed, ignored and even desecrated (which is the routine tribute paid to it in modern societies) but never destroyed. Always the need for it will arise, for it is in the nature of rational beings like us to live at the edge of things, experiencing our alienation and longing for the sudden reversal that will once again join us to the centre. For Girard that sudden reversal is a kind of self-forgiveness, as the concealed aggressions of our social life are abruptly transcended – washed in the blood of the lamb.

Girard’s genealogy casts an anthropological light on the Christian ethic and on the meaning of the Eucharist; but it is not just an anthropological theory. Girard himself treats it as a piece of theology. For him the theory is a kind of proof of the Christian religion and of the divinity of Jesus. And in a striking article in the Stanford Italian Review (1986) he suggests that the path that has led him from the inner meaning of the Eucharist to the truth of Christianity was one followed by Wagner in Parsifal, and one along which even Nietzsche reluctantly strayed, under the influence of Wagner’s masterpiece.

Of course, you don’t have to follow Girard into those obscure and controversial regions in order to endorse his view of the sacred as a human universal. Nor do you have to accept the cosmology of monotheism in order to understand why it is that this experience should attach itself to the three great transitions – the three rites of passage – which mark the cyclical continuity of human societies. Birth, copulation and death are the moments when time stands still, when we look on the world from a point at its edge, when we experience our dependence and contingency, and when we are apt to be filled with an entirely reasonable awe. It is from such moments, replete with emotional knowledge, that religion begins, and the rational person is not the one who scoffs at all religions, but the one who tries to discover which of them, if any, can make sense of those things, and, while doing so, draw the poison of resentment.

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Selections From Dismissing God by Donald D. Hoffman

September 29, 2010

Donald D. Hoffman is a Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science, University of California Irvine, California. If you are like me, you may be a little tired of the Steven Pinker neuroscientists and their broad claims at having discovered the Soul or God in the human brain. Dr. Hoffman makes a clear case here as to what neuroscience knows and doesn’t know.

DEBATES BETWEEN THEISTS AND ATHEISTS often hinge, naturally enough, on advances in cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Here I contend that such advances, though relevant to the debate, cannot license deductively valid arguments for or against theism. I contend further that the central role of probability in evolutionary theory grants no inductive strength to arguments for or against theism. The Kolmogorov axioms of probability and the mathematical definition of a stochastic process suitably model mutation and selection; using this fact to conclude for or against theism requires, in either case, a leap of faith.

Neuroscience and God
In 1961 the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, while making history as the first person to orbit the earth, also became the first person to discuss theology from space with the famous comment, “I don’t see any god up here.” Nothing was settled, of course, by this observation, and substantive debate between science and religion continues to this day. But Gagarin’s comment raises a wider question. As science advances it probes, with an increasingly powerful array of tools, all aspects of nature from the submicroscopic to the cosmological. As new vistas of nature open to the advances of science, it appears each time that the scientists exploring the new vistas can say, with Gagarin, “I don’t see any god up here.” The unexplored gaps in nature where God might be hiding are rapidly vanishing. Will God suffer the same extinction as species whose habitat vanishes?  

Or has neuroscience already dealt the extinction blow? Normal activity of the human cerebral cortex can be altered by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a magnetic field that can be applied directly and noninvasively outside of the human skull. Michael Persinger of Laurentian University in Canada has found that appropriate application of TMS to the temporal lobes of the brain will cause many people to experience the presence of God. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, using single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) to image the brain activity of nuns and monks who meditate to experience oneness with God, found that when the meditation reached its goal, certain regions in the parietal lobe decreased their activity. Is the experience of God simply an artifact of brain activity?  

And didn’t evolutionary theory deal the extinction blow long ago? God is no longer needed to explain the origin of species. Chance operating with natural selection seems to do just fine. I will not try here to argue for or against the existence of God. I will simply observe that the three dismissals of God just scouted, despite their psychological appeal, do not survive a sober understanding of the scope and limits of science, the nature of human perception, and the modern theory of chance.

The Nature Of Human Perception
I begin with the nature of human perception, and in particular human visual perception, which will illuminate the scope and limits of science. Most of us think pretheoretically that human vision operates much like a camera. There is an objective physical world out there that exists independently of whether we perceive it or not, and our eyes, like a camera, faithfully record this world. In part this is true. Our eyes do focus an image, as does a camera, and the retinas of our eyes record this image, as does the film or CCD (charge-coupled device) chip of a camera.

But our eyes are just the first stage of visual processing. Behind the eyes the optic nerves transport filtered versions of the retinal images to the brain’s cortex. And here there is a big surprise: Roughly half of the brain’s cortex is engaged in vision. About 50 billion neurons, and tens of trillions of synapses, are engaged each time you simply open your eyes and look around. This is far more computational power than is necessary to simply record an image. What is going on?

Research in the cognitive and neural sciences has made clear that our visual systems are not simply passive recorders of objective reality, but instead are active constructors of the visual realities we perceive. Each of us has within us a reality engine, which takes the images at the eyes and constructs three-dimensional worlds of objects, colors, textures, motions, and depth. What we see with each glance is not the world as it is objectively and as it would be even if there were no observers. Instead what we see is entirely our own construction. Our process of construction proceeds so rapidly and confidently that we are misled by our own prowess into thinking that we are not constructing at all, but simply reporting what is there independent of us. In short, our belief that we see the world as it objectively is, unadorned, is an illusion made possible by the very brilliance and efficiency of our reality creating process.

Reality As We Construct It According To Our Rules
What we see at any moment is the best theory our visual system can come up with to explain the images at the eyes. The visual system is much like a scientist, in creating theoretical explanations for the evidence at hand. The big difference is that the theory building process of the scientist is usually conscious, while the theory-building process of our visual systems is for the most part conducted without our conscious awareness. The visual system does not just create its theories at random, but instead is guided by many rules of visual construction, rules that are the subject of much current investigation by vision researchers. Rules have been uncovered for our constructions of color, depth, motion, objects, shapes, and edges. A visual example of our constructive processes at work is the “subjective Necker cube” first devised in 1977 by psychologists Bradley and Petry:

 

Perhaps you see a cube floating in front of black disks when you view this figure. If you look for a while you might notice that the cube flips, and that a corner of the cube that was in front suddenly is behind, and vice versa. So you actually construct two different cubes floating in front of the black disks. You might feel that you see the edges of the cubes quite clearly, even where they pass between the black disks. But if you cover up the black disks with your hands, you’ll see that there is no edge between the disks. You construct the edge you see, just like you construct the two cubes.

But you can do even more. Imagine that the black disks are holes in a sheet of paper, and that you are looking through the holes, and behind the paper you see a cube. Notice that now you see the cube not floating in front of the black disks, but sitting behind them. And the edges of the cube, that look ghostly when the cube floats in front, now look solid when the cube is behind. If you keep looking at the cube behind the holes, you’ll again see that it can flip, so that you can actually see two different cubes behind. In total, then, you construct four different three-dimensional cubes from this flat drawing, and you construct illusory edges which you make to be either ghostly or solid. That is a lot of construction, and just a hint of what your visual system is doing all the time. Space here does not permit going into more examples, but I have placed some interactive visual demonstrations online, where you can explore for yourself how you create color, motion, and objects.

The demonstrations are at this URL:  http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/Applets/index.html 

What is true for vision is true for all of our senses, including touch, smell, taste, and hearing. In each of these senses, what we perceive is not reality unadorned, but reality as we construct it according to our own internal set of rules. We are adept creators of all the sensory realities we experience. 

Insight Into The Nature Of Objective Reality
Philosophers studying perception distinguish two senses of perceiving: the phenomenal and relational. The phenomenal sense of perceiving refers to our visual experience, the way that things seem to us. If I am dreaming about an elephant, the elephant I am experiencing in the dream is being perceived in the phenomenal sense. The relational sense of perceiving refers to the objective reality that we interact with in an act of perception. For me to perceive something in the relational sense, that thing must exist independent of whether I perceive it or not.

Now clearly none of my sensory experiences exist independent of whether I perceive them or not. Therefore objects in the relational sense are not in my sensory experience, but must be inferred from my sensory experience. The situation, then, is that the world we experience as our perceptual reality is in fact an elaborate construction on our part. It is something we perceive in the phenomenal sense, not the relational sense. And what we construct is critically dependent on the rules we employ in the reality creation process. Realities that are not licensed by our rules are realities that we are not equipped to experience. What can we say then about an objective reality that does not depend on our sensory experiences for its existence? Do our sensory experiences give us secure grounds to make inferences about this reality, about the objects we might be perceiving in the relational sense?

One might be tempted to say this is so based on an evolutionary argument: Creatures whose perceptions in the phenomenal sense were too divergent from reality in the relational sense were at a competitive disadvantage, and natural selection has made sure that those of us who have survived have a good match between our phenomenal perceptions and the relational reality.

But this is not a valid argument within the structure of evolutionary theory. What natural selection secures, according to this theory, is survival to reproduction, not perceptual truth. Roaches, like humans, are the result of natural selection. But we have little confidence that roaches have deep insights into objective reality. They don’t need such insights in order to survive just fine. The same may be true of us. We have cognitive and perceptual apparatuses that allow us to survive long enough to reproduce, but we have no guarantees on evolutionary grounds that these apparatuses give us deep insight into the nature of objective reality.

Phenomenal Worlds And The Relational Realm
Indeed it is highly unlikely that objective reality resembles in any way the worlds of our phenomenal construction. It would be luck beyond belief to find that the human species, of the millions of species on earth, happens to be the one whose phenomenal worlds resemble the relational realm. It is a certain anthropocentrism that would lead us to assert otherwise, the same anthropocentrism that led us to assert that the earth is the center of the universe, about which all else revolves. What may be unique to humans as a species is a perceptual and cognitive apparatus which, for the first time in evolutionary history, can rise above the assumption, whether tacit or explicit, that our perceptions in some way resemble objective reality.

What view does this give of the scientific enterprise? Science walks on two legs: observation and logic. The success of science has been its care in arranging detailed observations, and its care in the logical interpretation of the results of these observations. But what the study of perception has uncovered is that, no matter how careful our observations are, we will always be limited to observing only what our internal rules of construction allow us to perceive. Even if we extend our senses with telescopes, microscopes, and various high-tech devices, we can never step outside our senses and see reality unadorned. We cannot get perceptual data that is independent of our own rules of perceptual construction.

The very rules that enable us to see also blind us to the infinity of other possibilities that do not conform to our rules. Evolution is not done yet. There is no reason to believe that we have arrived at the set of rules of construction that give deep insight into the nature of objective reality. There is every reason to believe that we are simply another species, like spiders and termites, that has developed an idiosyncratic perceptual system to fit the idiosyncrasies of the niches we happen to inhabit. This is, of course, no denigration of science. Science may be the best our species can do given the limits of its perceptual and cognitive endowments.

What this does make clear is that the ability of science to understand objective reality is limited by the perceptual and cognitive endowments of our species. Those endowments have not evolved, according to neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, to give us truth, just to give to us, as also to the roach, survival to reproduction. We can point to the many successes of science to suggest that our species might be special, that our perceptual apparatus might just give us true insights into the nature of reality independent of our perceptions. But we can also point to these same successes to tell the opposite story.

The Matter And Energy We Can Perceive Is A Mere 4% Of The Total
One stunning success of science is the discovery of dark energy and dark matter, which together constitute something like 96% of the energy and matter in the universe. The matter and energy we can perceive is a mere 4% of the total, the light frosting on the cake. We have no current way to discover any properties of this dark matter and energy. We can only postulate its existence because without it the behavior of the 4% we can see and measure would not make sense. So our best science tells us that there are serious limits to how deeply our perceptual and cognitive endowments allow us to penetrate the nature of objective reality. The same message appears repeated many times elsewhere in science, for instance in the uncertainty principle and the measurement problem of quantum theory.So the story outlined above, in which science is systematically uncovering all the secrets of nature, and leaving less and less room for God to hide, is not only immodest, but a complete misunderstanding of the scientific enterprise.

Unprovable Truths
Science is a species specific enterprise, which proceeds under the restrictions of the cognitive and perceptual endowments of one species among millions on earth. The most striking results of this enterprise appear to inform that species of some of its own limitations. These results crop up not only in science but also in mathematics, where we have discovered hard limits to our methods of proof: there are unprovable truths.

If science isn’t eliminating places where God might hide, hasn’t it at least made God unnecessary, replacing the creative role once assigned to God with the creative power of chance? This is a common assumption, but one that fails to understand the modern theory of chance. This theory is modeled by a series of axioms, among them the Kolmogorov axioms of probability theory, and various axioms for stochastic systems. In the case of probability theory, for instance, these axioms define the properties of a probability measure: It must be an additive function on events whose maximum sum is 1, and so on. Any process in nature that can be modeled by these axioms is taken to be a  probabilistic process, a work of chance. But this leaves completely open the interpretation of these axioms. Subjectivists claim that the indeterminacies modeled in probability theory simply reflect our own epistemological limitations; objectivists claim that the indeterminacies are not merely in our heads, but in the objective world itself. Neither interpretation precludes a God orchestrating the probabilistic process. All the mathematics can do is describe the essential properties of such a process, regardless of its origin, and without constraining the nature of its origin.

Indifferent Neural Facts
If modern theories of chance do not preclude the possible agency of God behind random processes, surely at least the recent brain imaging and TMS studies show that God is simply a figment of our brains, not to be taken seriously. But this conclusion is by no means dictated by the neural facts. Every one of our perceptions, not just our perceptions of God, can be correlated with neural activity. Surely it is a mistake to take none of our perceptions seriously. To do so would lead to quick and certain death. We must be careful, then, in sorting through which perceptions to take seriously and which not. And the neural facts don’t a priori tell us which way to treat God. If there were no God, and God was simply a figment of our imagination, then we might expect to find the neural correlates of God perception that we do. On the other hand, if there were a God, and God wanted us to perceive God, then one might equally expect to find the neural correlates of God perception that we do. The neural facts are indifferent to the conclusion we should draw here.

This indifference of facts holds more generally. There is no evidence from the sciences or elsewhere that logically compels belief or disbelief in God. It is elementary in the philosophy of science that no matter how much data one collects, there will always be infinitely many theories compatible with that data, and that make contradictory predictions about the outcomes of new experiments. It is because the theories of science are not logically dictated (although surely influenced) by the facts that scientific theory building is such an interesting and nontrivial enterprise. The atheist, then, can marshal an array of evidence that there is no God, and the theist that there is. In neither case can the evidence logically prove the claim. Both choices are, equally, a step of faith.

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Memo to Hawking: There’s Still Room for God By Roger Scruton

September 28, 2010

Roger Scruton

Mr. Scruton, a philosopher, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, is a writer, philosopher and public commentator. He has specialized in aesthetics with particular attention to music and architecture. He engages in contemporary political and cultural debates from the standpoint of a conservative thinker and is well known as a powerful polemicist.  He has written widely in the press on political and cultural issues. This is a short article that was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal.

Neither Kant nor Einstein thought physics explained everything. I have another scientist who will weigh in on that thought for tomorrow’s post. In the meantime, Roger Scruton’s wonderful reply to Stephen Hawking…

How did the universe begin? Some think the question has no answer — that it lies beyond the limits of human reason. Others think the question has an answer, but that the answer depends not on reason but on faith.

What almost no one believes is that there is a single, rational scientific theory that tells us how the universe emerged from the primeval nothingness. How could there be such a thing?

When Isaac Newton proposed his laws of gravity, he did so in a spirit of awe and reverence before the simplicity and beauty of the physical world. He did not doubt that so perfect a design implied a yet more perfect designer.

Immanuel Kant, who believed that Newton’s laws of gravity are not merely true but necessarily true, argued that we humans lack the ability to comprehend the universe as a whole, and thus that we can never construct a valid argument for a designer. Our thinking can take us from one point to another along the chain of events. But it cannot take us to a point outside the chain, from which we can pose the question of an original cause.

Indeed the question of how the universe began does not make sense. The concept of cause applies to the objects of experience, linking past to future through universal laws. When we ask about the universe as a whole we are attempting to go beyond possible experience into a realm where the concept of cause has no purchase, and where the writ of reason does not run.

All physicists since Kant have been influenced by this argument. Some admit the point, like Albert Einstein, Others, like Stephen Hawking, express the point in a language of their own.

But Mr. Hawking now wishes to break with this consensus and to argue that science actually does have an answer to the question of origins. We can know how the universe was created, he suggests, since the laws of physics imply that there are limiting conditions, in which universes come into being by the operation of those very laws. There is no room for the creator, since there is no need for Him. The laws of physics do it all by themselves.

Mr. Hawking, of course, dazzles us with his scientific discoveries. Einstein broke with the common-sense view of the world when he decided to treat time as a fourth dimension, on a par with the three dimensions of space. Mr. Hawking gives us dimension upon dimension, assuming that because every continuum can be squeezed into the axioms of a geometry there is no limit to the number of dimensions in which we humans find ourselves suspended. Nor is there a limit to the number of universes, even though we happen to inhabit only one of them and the others may be forever inaccessible to us.

The laws of physics are fast ceasing to be laws of the universe and are becoming laws of a “multiverse” instead. By the time people absorb all of these shifts, they have little strength left to dissent from the view that “the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing” or to question Mr. Hawking’s conclusion that therefore there is no need for God.

But what exactly has changed? Have we really moved on from the position that Kant presented? Have we really lifted ourselves outside of everything and everywhere, and achieved the view from nowhere that tells us how things began?

If Mr. Hawking is right, the answer to the question “What created the universe?” is “The laws of physics.” But what created the laws of physics? How is it that these strange and powerful laws, and these laws alone, apply to the world?

There are those who will say that the question has no answer —that it lies at or beyond the limits of human thought. And there are those who will say that the question has an answer, but that it is answered not by reason but by faith.

I say that perhaps, in the end, they are the same position. That is what Kant believed. You find out the limits of scientific understanding, he said. And beyond those limits lies the realm of morality, commitment and trust.

Kant, who destroyed all the systems of metaphysics and dug a grave for theology, was also a believer, who, as he put it, “attacked the claims of reason in order to make room for those of faith.” It seems to me that he was right.

Posted in Science And Religion | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »

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Reading Selections from “Fearful Symmetries” by Stephen M. Barr

September 17, 2010

Dr. Steven M. Barr

Science seeks the elegant, elusive simplicity of the universe itself but suffers from the propensity of many of its adherents to flatten and trivialize the world by reductionism. In yesterday’s post C.S. Lewis wrote:

Christianity claims to give an account of facts — to tell you what the real universe is like. Its account of the universe may be true, or it may not, and once the question is really before you, then your natural inquisitiveness must make you want to know the answer. If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be: if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.

I wonder which facts would affect the atheist more. I think of the atheists who deny the historicity of the New Testament or retreat to the narrowness of the scientific method, for whom the inability to pull God from a test tube is prima facie evidence of his lack of existence. I think Steven Barr’s latest writings might come close.  Dr. Stephen M. Barr is professor of physics at the University of Delaware and author of Modern Physics and Ancient Faith and A Student’s Guide to Natural Science. Reading selections from Fearful Symmetries here:

Reductionism
Since the time of Newton, science has advanced by a strategy rightly called “reductionism.” This method, which explains things by analyzing them into smaller and simpler parts, has yielded a rich harvest of discoveries about the natural world. As a means of analysis, then, reductionism has certainly proven its value. But many wonder whether science is reductive in a more radical and disturbing way — by flattening, collapsing, and trivializing the world. For all its intellectual accomplishments, does science end up taking our sense of reality down several notches? One could well get that impression from perusing the writings of certain scientists. Francis Crick famously asserted that human life is “no more than the behavior of . . . nerve cells and their associated molecules.” Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, once described people as “machines made of meat.” Neuroscientist Giulio Giorelli announced that “we have a soul, but it is made up of many tiny robots.” And biologist Charles Zuker has concluded that “in essence, we are nothing but a big fly.”

A Metaphysical Tendency Accompanying Reductionism
This tendency to downgrade and diminish reflects a metaphysical prejudice that equates explanatory reduction with a grim slide down the ladder of being. Powerful explanatory schemes reveal things to be simpler than they appear. What simpler means in science is much discussed among philosophers—it is not at all a simple question. But to many materialists it seems to mean lower, cruder, and more trivial. By this way of thinking, the further we push toward a more basic understanding of things, the more we are im-mersed in meaningless, brutish bits of matter.

The philosopher Georges Rey has written, for example, that “any ultimate explanation of mental phenomena will have to be in non-mental [i.e., sub-mental or material] terms or else it won’t be an explanation of it.” Of course, the logic of this could be turned around. One could just as well say that any ultimate explanation of the material world must be in nonmaterial terms. But for materialists the lower explains the higher; and lower does not just mean more fundamental but instead suggests a diminished ontological status. The presumption is that explanations move from evolved complexity to primitive stuff.

At first glance, the history of the cosmos seems to bear this out. Early on, the universe was filled with nearly featureless gas and dust, which eventually condensed to form galaxies, stars, and planets. In stars and supernovas, the simplest elements, hydrogen and helium, fused to make heavier ones, gradually building up the whole periodic table. In some primordial soup, or slime, or ooze on the early earth, atoms agglomerated into larger and more intricate molecules until self-replicating ones appeared and life began. From one-celled organisms, ever more complicated living things evolved, until sensation and thought appeared. In cosmic evolution the arrow apparently moves from chaos to order, formlessness to form, triviality to complexity, and matter to mind.

Dennett Theory Of Religion
And that is why, according to philosopher Daniel Dennett, religion has it exactly upside down. Believers think that God reached down to bring order and create, whereas in reality the world was built — or rather built itself — from the ground up. In Dennett’s metaphor, the world was constructed not by “skyhooks” reaching down from the heavens but by “cranes” supported by, and reaching up from, the solid ground.

The history to which the atheist points — of matter self-organizing and physical structures growing in complexity — is correct as far as it goes, but it is only part of the story. The lessons the atheist draws are naive. Yes, the world we experience is the result of processes that move upward. But Dennett and others overlook the hidden forces and principles that govern those processes. In short, they are not true reductionists because they don’t go all the way down to the most basic explanations of reality.

As we turn to the fundamental principles of physics, we discover that order does not really emerge from chaos, as we might naively assume; it always emerges from greater and more impressive order already present at a deeper level. It turns out that things are not more coarse or crude or unformed as one goes down into the foundations of the physical world but more subtle, sophisticated, and intricate the deeper one goes.

An Example
Let’s start with a simple but instructive example of how order can appear to emerge spontaneously from mere chaos through the operation of natural forces. Imagine a large number of identical marbles rolling around randomly in a shoe box. If the box is tilted, all the marbles will roll down into a corner and arrange themselves into what is called the “hexagonal closest packing” pattern. (This is the same pattern one sees in oranges stacked on a fruit stand or in cells in a beehive.) This orderly structure emerges as the result of blind physical forces and mathematical laws. There is no hand arranging it. Physics requires the marbles to lower their gravitational potential energy as much as possible by squeezing down into the corner, which leads to the geometry of hexagonal packing.

At this point it seems as though order has indeed sprung from mere chaos. To see why this is wrong, however, consider a genuinely chaotic situation: a typical teenager’s bedroom. Imagine a huge jack tilting the bedroom so that everything in it slides into a corner. The result would not be an orderly pattern but instead a jumbled heap of lamps, furniture, books, clothing, and what have you.

Why the difference? Part of the answer is that, unlike the objects in the bedroom, the marbles in the box all have the same size and shape. But there’s more to it. Put a number of spoons of the same size and shape into a box and tilt it, and the result will be a jumbled heap. Marbles differ from spoons because their shape is spherical. When spoons tumble into a corner, they end up pointing every which way, but marbles don’t point every which way, because no matter which way a sphere is turned it looks exactly the same.

These two crucial features of the marbles—having the same shape and having a spherical shape—should be understood as principles of order that are already present in the supposedly chaotic situation before the box was tilted. In fact, the more we reduce to deeper explanations, the higher we go. This is because, in a sense that can be made mathematically precise, the preexisting order inherent in the marbles is greater than the order that emerges after the marbles arrange themselves. This requires some expla-nation.

Both the preexisting order and the order that emerges involve symmetry, a concept of central importance in modern physics, as we’ll see. Mathematicians and physicists have a peculiar way of thinking about symmetry: A symmetry is something that is done. For example, if one rotates a square by 90 degrees, it looks the same, so rotating by 90 degrees is said to be a symme-try of the square. So is rotating by 180 degrees, 270 degrees, or a full 360 degrees. A square thus has exactly four symmetries.

Not surprisingly, the hexagonal pattern the marbles form has six symmetries (rotating by any multiple of 60 degrees: 60, 120, 180, 240, 300, and 360 degrees). A sphere, on the other hand, has an infinite number of symmetries—doubly infinite, in fact, since rotating a sphere by any angle about any axis leaves it looking the same. And, what’s more, the symmetries of a sphere include all the symmetries of a hexagon.

If we think this way about symmetry, careful analysis shows that, when marbles arrange themselves into the hexagonal pattern, just six of the infinite number of symmetries in the shape of the marbles are ex-pressed or manifested in their final arrangement. The rest of the symmetries are said, in the jargon of physics, to be spontaneously broken. So, in the simple example of marbles in a tilted box, we can see that symmetry isn’t popping out of nowhere. It is being distilled out of a greater symmetry already present within the spherical shape of the marbles.

Spontaneous Symmetry
The idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking is important in fundamental physics. The equations of electromagnetism have a mathematical structure that is dictated by a set of so-called gauge symmetries, discovered by the mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl almost a century ago. For a long time it seemed that two other basic forces of nature, the weak force and the strong force, were not based on symmetries. But about forty years ago it was found that the weak force is actually based on an even larger set of gauge symmetries than those of electromagnetism.

Because the symmetries of the weak force are spontaneously broken, however, they do not manifest or express themselves in an obvious way, which is why it took so long to discover them. (The strong force is based on a yet larger set of gauge symmetries, but this fact was obscured by a quite different effect and also was not discovered for a long time.)

This history illustrates a general trend in modern physics: The more deeply it has probed the structure of matter, the greater the mathematical order it has found. The order we see in nature does not come from chaos; it is distilled out of a more fundamental order.

Symmetry is just one kind of order. In the case of the marbles in the box, other principles of order were also at work, such as the principle that caused the marbles to seek out the configuration of lowest energy. This is an aspect of a beautiful mathematical principle, called the principle of least action that underlies all of classical physics. When physicists investigated the subatomic realm, however, they discovered that the principle of least action is just a limiting case of the much more subtle and sophisticated path integral principle, which is the basis of quantum mechanics, as Richard Feynman showed in the 1940s. The lesson is the same: The deeper one looks, the more remarkable the mathematical structure one sees.

An Underlying Order
The mathematical order underlying physical phenomena is most easily observed in the motions of the heavenly bodies. Even primitive societies were aware of it, and it inspired not only feelings of religious awe (many expressions of which are found in the Bible itself) but also the earliest attempts at mathematical science. And when scientists began to study the solar system with more precision, they discovered unsuspected patterns even more beautiful than those known to the ancients.

Four hundred years ago, for example, Johannes Kepler discovered three marvelous geometrical laws that describe planetary motion. So impressed was he by the beauty of these laws that he wrote this prayer in his treatise Harmonices Mundi (The harmonies of the world): “I thank thee, Lord God our Creator, that thou hast allowed me to see the beauty in thy work of creation.” Decades later, Newton succeeded in explaining Kepler’s laws — but he did not explain them down, if by down we mean reducing what we observe and experience to something more trivial or brutish.

On the contrary, he explained them by deriving them from an underlying order that is more general and impressive, which we now call Newton’s laws of mechanics and gravity. Newton’s law of gravity was later explained, in turn, by Einstein, who showed that it followed from a more profound theory of gravity called general relativity. And it is now generally believed that Einstein’s theory is but the manifestation of a yet more fundamental theory, which many suspect to be superstring theory. Superstring theory has a mathematical structure so sophisticated that, after a quarter of a century of study by hundreds of the world’s most brilliant physicists and mathematicians, it is still not fully understood.

It is true that science seeks to simplify our picture of the world. An explanation should in some sense be simpler than the thing it explains. And, indeed, there is a sense in which Einstein’s theory of gravity is simpler than Newton’s, and Newton’s theory of planetary motion simpler than Kepler’s.

As physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek notes, however, Einstein’s theory is “not ‘simple’ in the usual sense of the word.” Whereas Kepler’s laws can be explained in a few minutes to a junior-high-school student, Newton’s laws cannot be fully explained without using calculus. And to explain Einstein’s theory requires four-dimensional, curved, non-Euclidean space-time and much else besides. And yet, once we know enough, Einstein’s theory does have a compelling simplicity greater than Newton’s theory. The simplicity to which scientific reductionism leads us, then, is of a very paradoxical kind. It is a simplicity that is by no means simpleminded. It is not at all jejune, but deeply interesting and intellectually rich.

Paradoxical Reductionism In Chess
The same paradox can be found in many fields. The chess world champion Capablanca was admired for the purity and simplicity of his style. But to understand his moves one must have an understanding of the game that can be acquired only by years of experience and study. A later world champion, Mikhail Botvinnik, wrote of him, “In this simplicity there was a unique beauty of genuine depth.” Another world champion, Emanuel Lasker, observed that “[in Capablanca’s games] there is nothing hidden, artificial, or labored. Although they are transparent, they are never banal and are often deep.” Wilczek had just the right term for this kind of simplicity, which is also found in the fundamental laws of physics: profound simplicity.

Profound Simplicity
Profound simplicity always impresses with its elegance, economy of means, harmony, and perfection. This perfection, as Wilczek notes, is such that one feels that the slightest alteration would be disastrous. He quotes Salieri’s envious description of Mozart’s music in the film Amadeus: “Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall.” Applying this to physics, Wilczek says, “A theory begins to be perfect if any change makes it worse. . . . A theory becomes perfectly perfect if it’s impossible to change it without ruining it entirely.”

Symmetry is one of the factors that contribute to profound simplicity, both in the laws of physics and in works of art. Paint over one petal of the rose window of a cathedral, remove one column from a colonnade, and the symmetry is destroyed. Each part is necessary for the completion of the pattern.

The symmetries that characterize the deepest laws of physics are mathematically richer and stranger than the ones we encounter in everyday life. The gauge symmetries of the strong and weak forces, for example, involve rotations in abstract mathematical spaces with complex dimensions. In other words, the coordinates in those pecu-liar spaces are not ordinary numbers, as they are for the space in which we live, but complex numbers, which are numbers that contain the square root of minus one. Grand unified theories—which combine the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces into a single mathe-matical structure—posit symmetries that involve rotations in abstract spaces of five or more complex dimensions.

Supersymmetries
Stranger and more profoundly simple are supersymmetries. There is much reason to think that supersymmetries are built into the laws of physics, and finding evidence of that is one of the main goals of the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, Switzerland, which has recently begun to take data. Supersymmetries involve so-called Grassmann numbers, which are utterly different from the ordinary numbers we use to count and measure things. Whereas ordinary numbers (and even complex numbers) have the common-sense property that a × b = b × a, Grassmann numbers have the bizarre property that a × b = -b × a. A simple enough formula, but hard indeed for the human mind to fathom.

Esoteric symmetries also lie at the heart of Einstein’s theory of relativity. These Lorentz symmetries involve rotations not just in three-dimensional space but in four-dimensional space-time. We can all visualize the symmetries of a sphere or a hexagonal pattern, but Lorentz symmetries, supersymmetries, and the gauge symmetries of the weak, strong, and grand unified forces lie far outside our experience and intuition. They can be grasped only with the tools of advanced mathematics.

Physicists have found beauty in the mathematical principles animating the physical world, from Kepler, who praised God for the elegant geometry of the planets’ orbits, to Hermann Weyl, for whom mathematical physics revealed a “flawless harmony that is in conformity with sublime Reason.”

Some might suspect that this beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or that scientists think their own theories beautiful simply out of vanity. But there is a remarkable fact that suggests otherwise. Again and again throughout history, what started as pure mathematics — ideas developed solely for the sake of their intrinsic interest and elegance — turned out later to be needed to express fundamental laws of physics.

Starting As Pure Mathematics Later Needed For  Fundamental Laws Of Physics
For example, complex numbers were invented and the theory of them deeply investigated by the early nine-teenth century, a mathematical development that seemed to have no relevance to physical reality. Only in the 1920s was it discovered that complex numbers were needed to write the equations of quantum mechanics. Or, in another instance, when the mathematician William Rowan Hamilton invented quaternions in the mid-nineteenth century, they were regarded as an ingenious but totally useless construct. Hamilton himself held this view.

When asked by an aristocratic lady whether quaternions were useful for anything, Hamilton joked, “Aye, madam, quaternions are very useful — for solving problems involving quaternions.” And yet, many decades later, quaternions were put to use to describe properties of subatomic particles such as the spin of electrons as well as the relation between neutrons and protons. Or again, Riemannian geometry was developed long before it was found to be needed for Einstein’s theory of gravity. And a branch of mathematics called the theory of Lie groups was developed before it was found to describe the gauge symmetries of the fundamental forces.

Indeed, mathematical beauty has become a guiding principle in the search for better theories in fundamental physics. Werner Heisenberg wrote, “In exact science, no less than in the arts, beauty is the most important source of illumina-tion and clarity.” Paul Dirac, one of the giants of twentieth-century physics, went so far as to say that it was more important to have “beauty in one’s equations” than to have them fit the experimental data.

At the roots of the physical world, therefore, one does not find mere inchoate slime or dust but instead a richness and perfection of form based on profound, subtle, and beautiful mathematical ideas. This is what the famous astrophysicist Sir James Jeans meant when he said many decades ago that “the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” Benedict XVI expressed the same basic insight when in his Regensburg lecture he referred to “the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality,…the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature.”

A Greater And More Impressive Order
Modern science does not directly imply or require any particular metaphysical theory of reality, but it does suggest to us that the picture presented by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins is false because the picture is only partial. In the terms of Dennett’s meta-phor of cranes constructing complexity, one sees what is built from the ground up; but delving beneath the surface, one finds an astonishing, hidden world — the underground mechanisms of the cranes, as it were.

It is true that the cosmos was at one point a swirling mass of gas and dust out of which has come the extraordinary complexity of life as we experience it. Yet, at every moment in this process of development, a greater and more impressive order operates within — an order that did not develop but was there from the beginning. In the upper world, mind, thought, and ideas make their appearance as fruit on the topmost branches of an evolutionary tree. Below the surface, we see the taproots of reality, the fundamental laws of physics that shimmer with ideas of profound simplicity.

To describe people as machines made of meat is as scientifically unsophisticated as to think of the sun as a heat-emitting machine made of swirl-ing gas. It ignores the reasons why the machines function as they do—reasons that the explanations of modern physics reduce to simplici-ties as elegant as they are elusive. Peering into the hidden depths, we see that matter itself is the expression of “a great thought,” of ideas that are, as Weyl said, “in conformity with sublime Reason.” And we begin to discover that matter, although mindless itself, is the product of a Mind of infinite profundity and infinite simplicity.

Posted in Aesthetics, Science And Religion | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments »

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More Evolution Topics by Dr. Francisco Ayala

April 28, 2010

Dr. Francisco Ayala

A continuation of a previous post.

Natural Selection as an Opportunistic Process
Natural selection has no foresight, nor does it operate according to some preconceived plan. Rather it is a purely natural process resulting from the interacting properties of physicochemical and biological entities. Natural selection is simply a consequence of the differential multiplication of living beings. It has some appearance of purposefulness because it is conditioned by the environment: which organisms reproduce more effectively depends on what variations they possess that are useful in the environment where the organisms live. In a sense, natural selection is an “opportunistic” process. The variables determining in what direction it will go are the environment, the preexisting constitution of the organisms, and the randomly arising mutations. But natural selection does not anticipate the environments of the future; drastic environmental changes may be insuperable to organisms that were previously thriving.

Examples of Adaptive Behaviors
Adaptation to a given environment may occur in a variety of different ways. An example may be taken from the adaptations of plant life to desert climate. The fundamental adaptation is to the condition of dryness, which involves the danger of desiccation. During a major part of the year, sometimes for several years in succession, there is no rain. Plants have accomplished the urgent necessity of saving water in different ways. Cacti have transformed their leaves into spines, having made their stems into barrels containing a reserve of water; photosynthesis is performed in the surface of the stem instead of in the leaves. Other plants have no leaves during the dry season, but after it rains they burst into leaves and flowers and produce seeds. Ephemeral plants germinate from seeds, grow, flower, and produce seeds — all within the space of the few weeks while rainwater is available; the rest of the year the seeds lie quiescent in the soil.

The opportunistic character of natural selection is also well-evidenced by the phenomenon of adaptive radiation. The evolution of Drosophila flies in Hawaii is a relatively recent adaptive radiation. There are about 1,500 Drosophila species in the world. Approximately 500 of them have evolved in the Hawaiian archipelago, although this has a small area, about one twenty-fifth the size of California. Moreover, the morphological, ecological, and behavioral diversity of Hawaiian Drosophila exceeds that of Drosophila in the rest of the world.

Why should have such “explosive” evolution have occurred in Hawaii? The overabundance of drosophila flies there contrasts with the absence of many other insects. The ancestors of Hawaiian drosophila reached the archipelago before other groups of insects did, and thus they found a multitude of unexploited opportunities for living. They responded by a rapid adaptive radiation; although they are all probably derived from a single colonizing species, they adapted to the diversity of opportunities available in diverse places or at different times by developing appropriate adaptations, which range broadly from one to another species.

Natural Selection Explains The Adaptive Organization Of Organisms
The process of natural selection can explain the adaptive organization of organisms; as well as their diversity and evolution as a consequence of their adaptation to the multifarious and ever changing conditions of life. The fossil record shows that life has evolved in a haphazard fashion. The radiations, expansions, relays of one form by another, occasional but irregular trends, and the ever present extinctions, are best explained by natural selection of organisms subject to the vagaries of genetic mutation and environmental challenge. The scientific account of these events does not necessitate recourse to a preordained plan, whether imprinted from without by an omniscient and all-powerful designer, or resulting from some immanent force driving the process towards definite outcomes. Biological evolution differs from a painting or an artifact in that it is not the outcome of a design preconceived by an artist or artisan.

Natural Selection Can “Create”
Natural selection accounts for the “design” of organisms, because adaptive variations tend to increase the probability of survival and reproduction of their carriers at the expense of maladaptive, or less adaptive, variations. The arguments of Aquinas or Paley against the incredible improbability of chance accounts of the origin of organisms are well taken as far as they go. But neither these scholars, nor any other authors before Darwin, were able to discern that there is a natural process (namely, natural selection) that is not random but rather is oriented and able to generate order or “create.” The traits that organisms acquire in their evolutionary histories are not fortuitous but determined by their functional utility to the organisms.

Chance
Chance is, nevertheless, an integral part of the evolutionary process. The mutations that yield the hereditary variations available to natural selection arise at random, independently of whether they are beneficial or harmful to their carriers. But this random process (as well as others that come to play in the great theatre of life) is counteracted by natural selection, which preserves what is useful and eliminates the harmful. Without mutation, evolution could not happen because there would be no variations that could be differentially conveyed from one to another generation. But without natural selection, the mutation process would yield disorganization and extinction because most mutations are disadvantageous. Mutation and selection have jointly driven the marvelous process that starting from microscopic organisms has spurted orchids, birds, and humans.

Randomness
The theory of evolution manifests chance and necessity jointly intricated in the stuff of life; randomness and determinism interlocked in a natural process that has spurted the most complex, diverse, and beautiful entities in the universe: the organisms that populate the earth, including humans who think and love, endowed with free will and creative powers, and able to analyze the process of evolution itself that brought them into existence. This is Darwin’s fundamental discovery, that there is a process that is creative though not conscious. And this is the conceptual revolution that Darwin completed: that everything in nature, including the origin of living organisms, can be accounted for as the result of natural processes governed by natural laws. This is nothing if not a fundamental vision that has forever changed how humanity perceives itself and its place in the universe.

Teleology and Teleological Explanations
Explanation by design, or teleology, is “the use of design, purpose, or utility as an explanation of any natural phenomenon” (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, 1966). An object or a behavior is said to be teleological when it gives evidence of design or appears to be directed toward certain ends. For example, the behavior of human beings is often teleological. A person who buys an airplane ticket, reads a book, or cultivates the earth is trying to achieve a certain end: getting to a given city, acquiring knowledge, or getting food. Objects and machines made by people also are usually teleological: a knife is made for cutting, a clock is made for telling time, a thermostat is made to regulate temperature. Similarly features of organisms are teleological as well: a bird’s wings are for flying, eyes are for seeing, kidneys are constituted for regulating the composition of the blood. The features of organisms that may be said to be teleological are those that can be identified as adaptations, whether they are structures like a wing or a hand, or organs like a kidney, or behaviors like the courtship displays of a peacock. Adaptations are features of organisms that have come about by natural selection because they serve certain functions and thus increase the reproductive success of their carriers.

The Essential Characteristics Of Teleological Phenomena
Inanimate objects and processes (other than those created by people) are not teleological in the sense just explained because we gain no additional scientific understanding by perceiving them as directed toward specific ends or for serving certain purposes. The configuration of a sodium chloride molecule (common salt) depends on the structure of sodium and chlorine, but it makes no sense to say that that structure is made up so as to serve a certain purpose, such as tasting salty. Similarly, the shape of a mountain is the result of certain geological processes, but it did not come about so as to serve a certain purpose, such as providing slopes suitable for skiing. The motion of the earth around the sun results from the laws of gravity, but it does not exist in order that the seasons may occur. We may use sodium chloride as food, a mountain for skiing, and take advantage of the seasons, but the use that we make of these objects or phenomena is not the reason why they came into existence or why they have certain configurations. On the other hand, a knife and a car exist and have particular configurations precisely in order to serve the purposes of cutting and transportation. Similarly, the wings of birds came about precisely because they permitted flying, which was reproductively advantageous. The mating display of peacocks came about because it increased the chances of mating and thus of leaving progeny.

The previous comments point out the essential characteristics of teleological phenomena, which may be encompassed in the following definition: “Teleological explanations account for the existence of a certain feature in a system by demonstrating the feature’s contribution to a specific property or state of the system.” Teleological explanations require that the feature or behavior contribute to the persistence of a certain state or property of the system: wings serve for flying; the sharpness of a knife serves for cutting. Moreover, and this is the essential component of the concept, this contribution must be the reason why the feature or behavior exists at all: the reason why wings came to be is because they serve for flying; the reason why a knife is sharp is that it is intended for cutting.

The configuration of a molecule of sodium chloride contributes to its property of tasting salty and therefore to its use as food, not vice versa; the potential use of sodium chloride for food is not the reason why it has a particular molecular configuration or tastes salty. The motion of the earth around the sun is the reason why seasons exist; the existence of the seasons is not the reason why the earth moves about the sun. On the other hand, the sharpness of a knife can be explained teleologically because the knife has been created precisely to serve the purpose of cutting. Motorcars and their particular configurations exist because they serve transportation, and thus can be explained teleologically. Many features and behaviors of organisms meet the requirements of teleological explanation. The hand of man, the wings of birds, the structure and behavior of kidneys, the mating displays of peacocks are examples already given.

Distinguishing Different Kinds Of Teleological Phenomena
It is useful to distinguish different kinds of design or teleological phenomena. Actions or objects are purposeful when the end-state or goal is consciously intended by an agent. Thus, a man mowing his lawn is acting teleologically in the purposeful sense; a lion hunting deer and a bird building a nest have at least the appearance of purposeful behavior. Objects resulting from purposeful behavior exhibit artificial (or external) teleology. A knife, a table, a car, and a thermostat are examples of systems exhibiting artificial teleology: their teleological features were consciously intended by some agent.

Systems with teleological features that are not due to the purposeful action of an agent but result from some natural process exhibit natural (or internal) teleology. The wings of birds have a natural teleology; they serve an end, flying, but their configuration is not due to the conscious design of any agent. We may distinguish two kinds of natural teleology: bounded, or determinate or necessary, and unbounded or indeterminate or contingent.

Bounded natural teleology exists when specific end-state is reached in spite of environmental fluctuations. The development of an egg into a chicken is an example of bounded natural teleological process. The regulation of body temperature in a mammal is another example. In general, the homeostatic processes of organisms are instances of bounded natural teleology.

Unbounded design or contingent teleology occurs when the end-state is not specifically predetermined, but rather is the result of selection of one from among several available alternatives. The adaptations of organisms are designed, or teleological, in this indeterminate sense. The wings of birds call for teleological explanation: the genetic constitutions responsible for their configuration came about because wings serve to fly and flying contributes to the reproductive success of birds. But there was nothing in the constitution of the remote ancestors of birds that would necessitate the appearance of wings in their descendants. Wings came about as the consequence of a long sequence of events, where at each stage the most advantageous alternative was selected among those that happened to be available; but what alternatives were available at any one time depended, at least in part, on chance events.

The Compatiblity of Teological and Causal Explanations
Teleological explanations are fully compatible with (efficient) causal explanations. It is possible, at least in principle, to give a causal account of the various physical and chemical processes in the development of an egg into a chicken, or of the physicochemical, neural, and muscular interactions involved in the functioning of the eye. (I use the “in principle” clause to imply that any component of the process can be elucidated as a causal process if it is investigated in sufficient detail and in depth; but not all steps in almost any developmental process have been so investigated, with the possible exception of the flatworm Caenorhabditis elegans. The development of Drosophila fruitflies has also become known in much detail, even if not yet completely.) It is also possible in principle to describe the causal processes by which one genetic variant becomes eventually established in a population by natural selection. But these causal explanations do not make it unnecessary to provide teleological explanations where appropriate. Both teleological and causal explanations are called for in such cases.

Paley’s claim that the design of living beings evinces the existence of a Designer was shown to be erroneous by Darwin’s discovery of the process of natural selection, just as the pre-Copernican explanation for the motions of celestial bodies (and the argument for the existence of God based on the unmoved mover) was shown to be erroneous by the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. There is no more reason to consider anti-Christian Darwin’s theory of evolution and explanation of design than to consider anti-Christian Newton’s laws of motion. Divine action in the Universe must be sought in ways other than those that postulate it as the means to account for gaps in the scientific account of the workings of the Universe.

Nothingness As A Subject For Scientific Investigation
The Copernican and Darwinian revolutions have jointly brought all natural objects and processes as subjects of scientific investigation. Is there any important missing link in the scientific account of natural phenomena? I believe there is, namely, the origin of the universe. The creation or origin of the universe involves a transition from nothing into being. But a transition can only be scientifically investigated if we have some knowledge about the states or entities on both sides of the boundary. Nothingness, however, is not a subject for scientific investigation or understanding. Therefore, as far as science is concerned, the origin of the universe will remain forever a mystery.

Science as a Way of Knowing?
Science is a wondrously successful way of knowing. Science seeks explanations of the natural world by formulating hypotheses that are subject to the possibility of empirical falsification or corroboration. A scientific hypothesis is tested by ascertaining whether or not predictions about the world of experience derived as logical consequences from the hypothesis agree with what is actually observed. Science as a mode of inquiry into the nature of the universe has been successful and of great consequence. Witness the proliferation of science academic departments in universities and other research institutions, the enormous budgets that the body politic and the private sector willingly commit to scientific research, and its economic impact. The Office of Management and the Budget (OMB) of the U.S. government has estimated that fifty percent of all economic growth in the United States since the Second World War can directly be attributed to scientific knowledge and technical advances. The technology derived from scientific knowledge pervades, indeed, our lives: the high-rise buildings of our cities, thruways and long span-bridges, rockets that bring men to the moon, telephones that provide instant communication across continents, computers that perform complex calculations in millionths of a second, vaccines and drugs that keep bacterial parasites at bay, gene therapies that replace DNA in defective cells. All these remarkable achievements bear witness to the validity of the scientific knowledge from which they originated.

Scientific knowledge is also remarkable in the way it emerges by way of consensus and agreement among scientists, and in the way new knowledge builds upon past accomplishment rather than starting anew with each generation or each new practitioner. Surely scientists disagree with each other on many matters; but these are issues not yet settled, and the points of disagreement generally do not bring into question previous knowledge. Modern scientists do not challenge that atoms exist, or that there is a universe with a myriad stars, or that heredity is encased in the DNA.

Science is a way of knowing, but it is not the only way. Knowledge also derives from other sources, such as common sense, artistic and religious experience, and philosophical reflection. In The Myth of Sisyphus, the great French writer Albert Camus asserted that we learn more about ourselves and the world from a relaxed evening’s perception of the starry heavens and the scents of grass than from science’s reductionistic ways. The validity of the knowledge acquired by non-scientific modes of inquiry can be simply established by pointing out that science dawned in the sixteenth century, but humanity had for centuries built cities and roads, brought forth political institutions and sophisticated codes of law, advanced profound philosophies and value systems, and created magnificent plastic art, as well as music and literature. We thus learn about ourselves and about the world in which we live and we also benefit from products of this non-scientific knowledge. The crops we harvest and the animals we husband emerged millennia before science’s dawn from practices set down by farmers in the Middle East, Andean sierras, and Mayan plateaus.

It is not my intention in this section to belabor the extraordinary fruits of nonscientific modes of inquiry. But I have set forth the view that nothing in the world of nature escapes the scientific mode of knowledge, and that we owe this universality to Darwin’s revolution. Here I wish simply to state something that is obvious, but becomes at times clouded by the hubris of some scientists. Successful as it is, and universally encompassing as its subject is, a scientific view of the world is hopelessly incomplete. There are matters of value and meaning that are outside science’s scope. Even when we have a satisfying scientific understanding of a natural object of process, we are still missing matters that may well be thought by many to be of equal or greater import. Scientific knowledge may enrich aesthetic and moral perceptions, and illuminate the significance of life and the world, but these are matters outside science’s realm.

On April 28, 1937, early in the Spanish Civil War, Nazi airplanes bombed the small Basque town of Guernica, the first time that a civilian population had been determinedly destroyed from the air. The Spanish painter Pablo Picasso had recently been commissioned by the Spanish Republican Government to paint a large composition for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World Exhibition of 1937. In a frenzy of manic energy, the enraged Picasso sketched in two days and fully outlined in ten more days his famous Guernica, an immense painting of 25 feet, 8 inches by 11 feet, 6 inches. Suppose that I now would describe the images represented in the painting, their size and position, as well as the pigments used and the quality of the canvas. This description would be of interest, but it would hardly be satisfying if I had completely omitted aesthetic analysis and considerations of meaning, the dramatic message of man’s inhumanity to man conveyed by the outstretched figure of the mother pulling her killed baby, bellowing faces, the wounded horse or the satanic image of the bull.

Let Guernica be a metaphor of the point I wish to make. Scientific knowledge, like the description of size, materials, and geometry of Guernica, is satisfying and useful. But once science has had its say, there remains much about reality that is of interest, questions of value and meaning that are forever beyond science’s scope.

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Evolution Topics by Dr. Francisco Ayala

April 27, 2010

2010 John Templeton Foundation Prize winner Dr. Francisco Ayala

These topics were written by Dr. Francisco Ayala, Professor of Biological Sciences and Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. He is a member of the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology, and has been President and Chairman of the Board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Dr. Ayala is a highly respected evolutionary biologist who has received the 2010 Templeton Prize, an award issued each year by the John Templeton Foundation to a person “who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.” He is perhaps best known scientifically for his research into the evolutionary history of the parasite scientists have associated with malaria, with an eye toward developing a cure for the disease. He also pioneered the use of an organism’s genetic material as molecular clocks that help track and time its origins.

But for the past 30 years, he has been at the forefront of battles to keep creationism and its more-sophisticated offshoot, intelligent design, out of public-school biology classes, noting that they actually represent religion masked as natural science. At the same time, he has vigorously argued that religion is a vital pillar in American life, thereby confusing those who confuse religion with being anti-science.

The US scientific enterprise is the envy of the world, he says, and the country is the most religious of any nation in the western world. “It is nothing short of tragic to see these two pillars of society are often seen as in contradiction with each other,” he said during the award’s presentation Thursday at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. “Properly understood, there can be no contradiction because they deal with different subjects,” he said.

Although he has been reluctant over the years to describe his own religious leanings, Mr. Ayala argues that religion and science are “different windows” for looking at the world. Only when each tries to make “assertions beyond their legitimate boundaries” do the two appear to clash.

“Science gives us an insight on reality which is very important; our technology is based on our science,” he says. “But at the end of the day, questions important to people, questions of meaning, purpose, moral values, and the like” are not answered through science.

Beyond championing the roles science and religion can play in their respective domains, he also has argued that “scientific knowledge, the theory of evolution in particular, is consistent with a religious belief in God, whereas the tenets of creationism and the so-called intelligent design are not.”

While intelligent-design advocates point to the complexity of many biological processes as too intricate to have emerged from a random evolutionary process, Ayala points to many of biology’s flawed designs as evidence of a lack of intelligence behind them. “Any engineer who would have designed the human jaw bone would be fired the next day,” he says. Instead, he terms biology’s flawed products as “a consequence of the clumsy ways of nature and the evolutionary process.”

Ayala, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, began his dual journeys into science and religion during his formative years in Spain, where he graduated from college with a bachelors degree in physics. After graduation, he studied theology there, and five years later became an ordained priest. But during his theological studies, two geneticists took him under their wing, and in 1961, Ayala moved to New York to take up graduate studies in evolutionary biology and genetics at Columbia University. And he left the priesthood. Over the course of his career, he has won awards for his scientific work and has served on several high-level science advisory panels in the US. In 2001, President George W. Bush awarded Ayala the National Medal of Science.

In a prepared statement, John Templeton Jr., the president and chairman of the John Templeton Foundation said, “Ayala’s clear voice in matters of science and faith echoes the Foundation’s belief that evolution of the mind and truly open-minded inquiry can lead to real spiritual progress in the world.” Ayala has donated the $1.42 million prize to charity.

I advance three propositions. The first is that Darwin’s most significant intellectual contribution is that he brought the origin and diversity of organisms into the realm of science. The Copernican Revolution consisted in a commitment to the postulate that the universe is governed by natural laws that account for natural phenomena. Darwin completed the Copernican Revolution by extending that commitment to the living world.

The second proposition is that natural selection is a creative process that can account for the appearance of genuine novelty. How natural selection creates is shown with a simple example and clarified with two analogies, artistic creation and the “typing monkeys,” with which it shares important similarities and differences. The creative power of natural selection arises from a distinctive interaction between chance and necessity, or between random and deterministic processes.

The third proposition is that teleological explanations are necessary in order to give a full account of the attributes of living organisms, whereas they are neither necessary nor appropriate in the explanation of natural inanimate phenomena. I give a definition of teleology and clarify the matter by distinguishing between internal and external teleology, and between bounded and unbounded teleology. The human eye, so obviously constituted for seeing but resulting from a natural process, is an example of internal (or natural) teleology. A knife has external (or artificial) teleology, because it has been purposefully designed by an external agent. The development of an egg into a chicken is an example of bounded (or necessary) teleology, whereas the evolutionary origin of the mammals is a case of unbounded (or contingent) teleology, because there was nothing in the make up of the first living cells that necessitated the eventual appearance of mammals.

I conclude that Darwin’s theory of evolution and explanation of design does not include or exclude considerations of divine action in the world any more than astronomy, geology, physics, or chemistry do.

The Darwinian Revolution
The publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin ushered in a new era in the intellectual history of humanity. Darwin is deservedly given credit for the theory of biological evolution: he accumulated evidence demonstrating that organisms evolve and discovered the process, natural selection, by which they evolve. But the import of Darwin’s achievement is that it completed the Copernican revolution initiated three centuries earlier, and thereby radically changed our conception of the universe and the place of humanity in it.

The discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had gradually ushered in the notion that the workings of the universe could be explained by human reason. It was shown that the earth is not the center of the universe, but a small planet rotating around an average star; that the universe is immense in space and in time; and that the motions of the planets around the sun can be explained by the same simple laws that account for the motion of physical objects on our planet. These and other discoveries greatly expanded human knowledge, but the intellectual revolution these scientists brought about was more fundamental: a commitment to the postulate that the universe obeys immanent laws that account for natural phenomena. The workings of the universe were brought into the realm of science: explanation through natural laws. Physical phenomena could be accounted for whenever the causes were adequately known.

Darwin completed the Copernican revolution by drawing out for biology the notion of nature as a lawful system of matter in motion. The adaptations and diversity of organisms, the origin of novel and highly organized forms, even the origin of humanity itself could now be explained by an orderly process of change governed by natural laws.

The origin of organisms and their marvelous adaptations were, however, either left unexplained or attributed to the design of an omniscient Creator. God had created the birds and bees, the fish and corals, the trees in the forest, and best of all, man. God had given us eyes so that we might see, and He had provided fish with gills to breathe in water. Philosophers and theologians argued that the functional design of organisms manifests the existence of an all-wise Creator. Wherever there is design, there is a designer; the existence of a watch evinces the existence of a watchmaker.

The English theologian William Paley in his Natural Theology (1802) elaborated the argument-from-design as forceful demonstration of the existence of the Creator. The functional design of the human eye, argued Paley, provided conclusive evidence of an all-wise Creator. It would be absurd to suppose, he wrote, that the human eye by mere chance “should have consisted, first, of a series of transparent lenses … secondly of a black cloth or canvas spread out behind these lenses so as to receive the image formed by pencils of light transmitted through them, and placed at the precise geometrical distance at which, and at which alone, a distinct image could be formed … thirdly of a large nerve communicating between this membrane and the brain.” The Bridgewater Treatises, published between 1833 and 1840, were written by eminent scientists and philosophers to set forth “the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation.” The structure and mechanisms of man’s hand were, for example, cited as incontrovertible evidence that the hand had been designed by the same omniscient Power that had created the world.

The advances of physical science had thus driven humanity’s conception of the universe to a split-personality state of affairs, which persisted well into the mid-nineteenth century. Scientific explanations, derived from natural laws, dominated the world of nonliving matter, on the earth as well as in the heavens. Supernatural explanations, depending on the unfathomable deeds of the Creator, accounted for the origin and configuration of living creatures — the most diversified, complex, and interesting realities of the world. It was Darwin’s genius to resolve this conceptual schizophrenia.

Darwin‘s Discovery: Design without Designer
The strength of the argument-from-design to demonstrate the role of the Creator is easily set forth. Wherever there is function or design we look for its author. A knife is made for cutting and a clock is made to tell time; their functional designs have been contrived by a knifemaker and a watchmaker. The exquisite design of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa proclaims that it was created by a gifted artist following a preconceived purpose. Similarly, the structures, organs, and behaviors of living beings are directly organized to serve certain functions. The functional design of organisms and their features would therefore seem to argue for the existence of a designer. It was Darwin’s greatest accomplishment to show that the directive organization of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural selection, without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent. The origin and adaptation of organisms in their profusion and wondrous variations were thus brought into the realm of science.

Darwin accepted that organisms are “designed” for certain purposes, i.e., they are functionally organized. Organisms are adapted to certain ways of life and their parts are adapted to perform certain functions. Fish are adapted to live in water, kidneys are designed to regulate the composition of blood, the human hand is made for grasping. But Darwin went on to provide a natural explanation of the design. He thereby brought the seemingly purposeful aspects of living beings into the realm of science.

Darwin’s revolutionary achievement is that he extended the Copernican revolution to the world of living things. The origin and adaptive nature of organisms could now be explained, like the phenomena of the inanimate world, as the result of natural laws manifested in natural processes. Darwin’s theory encountered opposition in some religious circles, not so much because he proposed the evolutionary origin of living things (which had been proposed before, and accepted even by Christian theologians), but because the causal mechanism, natural selection, excluded God as the explanation for the obvious design of organisms.

The Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to Galileo in the seventeenth century had been similarly motivated not only by the apparent contradiction between the heliocentric theory and a literal interpretation of the Bible, but also by the unseemly attempt to comprehend the workings of the Universe, the “mind of God.” The configuration of the Universe was no longer perceived as the result of God’s Design, but simply the outcome of immanent, blind, processes. There were, however, many theologians, philosophers, and scientists who saw no contradiction then nor see it now between the evolution of species and Christian faith. Some see evolution as the “method of divine intelligence,” in the words of the nineteenth century theologian A.H. Strong. Others, like the American contemporary of Darwin, Henry Ward Beecher (1818-1887), made evolution the cornerstone of their theology. These two traditions have persisted to the present. Pope John Paul II has recently (October 1996) stated that “the theory of evolution is more than a hypothesis. It is … accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge.” The views of “process” theologians, who perceive evolutionary dynamics as a pervasive element of a Christian view of the world, are well represented in this volume.

Natural Selection as a Directive Process
The central argument of the theory of natural selection is summarized by Darwin in The Origin of Species as follows:

As more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life. … Can it, then, be thought improbable, seeing that variations useful to man have undoubtedly occurred, that other variations useful in some way to each being in the great and complex battle of life, should sometimes occur in the course of thousands of generations? If such do occur, can we doubt (remembering that more individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favorable variation and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.

Darwin’s argument addresses the problem of explaining the adaptive character of organisms. Darwin argues that adaptive variations (“variations useful in some way to each being”) occasionally appear, and that these are likely to increase the reproductive chances of their carriers. Over the generations favorable variations will be preserved, injurious ones will be eliminated. In one place, Darwin adds: “I can see no limit to this power [natural selection] in slowly and beautifully adapting each form to the most complex relations of life.” Natural selection was proposed by Darwin primarily to account for the adaptive organization, or “design,” of living beings; it is a process that promotes or maintains adaptation. Evolutionary change through time and evolutionary diversification (multiplication of species) are not directly promoted by natural selection (hence, the so-called “evolutionary stasis,” the numerous examples of organisms with morphology that has changed little, if at all, for millions of years, as pointed out by the proponents of the theory of punctuated equilibrium). But change and diversification often ensue as by-products of natural selection fostering adaptation.

Darwin formulated natural selection primarily as differential survival. The modern understanding of the principle of natural selection is formulated in genetic and statistical terms as differential reproduction. Natural selection implies that some genes and genetic combinations are transmitted to the following generations on the average more frequently than their alternates. Such genetic units will become more common in every subsequent generation and their alternates less common. Natural selection is a statistical bias in the relative rate of reproduction of alternative genetic units.

Natural selection has been compared to a sieve which retains the rarely arising useful genes and lets go the more frequently arising harmful mutants. Natural selection acts in that way, but it is much more than a purely negative process, for it is able to generate novelty by increasing the probability of otherwise extremely improbable genetic combinations. Natural selection is thus creative in a way. It does not “create” the entities upon which it operates, but it produces adaptive genetic combinations which would not have existed otherwise.

The creative role of natural selection must not be understood in the sense of the “absolute” creation that traditional Christian theology predicates of the Divine act by which the universe was brought into being ex nihilo. Natural selection may rather be compared to a painter which creates a picture by mixing and distributing pigments in various ways over the canvas. The canvas and the pigments are not created by the artist but the painting is. It is conceivable that a random combination of the pigments might result in the orderly whole which is the final work of art. But the probability of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa resulting from a random combination of pigments, or St. Peter’s Basilica resulting from a random association of marble, bricks and other materials, is infinitely small. In the same way, the combination of genetic units which carries the hereditary information responsible for the formation of the vertebrate eye could have never been produced by a random process like mutation. Not even if we allow for the three billion years plus during which life has existed on earth. The complicated anatomy of the eye like the exact functioning of the kidney are the result of a nonrandom process — natural selection.

Natural Selection as a Creative Process
Critics have sometimes alleged as evidence against Darwin’s theory of evolution examples showing that random processes cannot yield meaningful, organized outcomes. It is thus pointed out that a series of monkeys randomly striking letters on a typewriter would never write The Origin of Species, even if we allow for millions of years and many generations of monkeys pounding at typewriters.

This criticism would be valid if evolution would depend only on random processes. But natural selection is a nonrandom process that promotes adaptation by selecting combinations that “make sense,” i.e., that are useful to the organisms. The analogy of the monkeys would be more appropriate if a process existed by which, first, meaningful words would be chosen every time they appeared on the typewriter; and then we would also have typewriters with previously selected words rather than just letters in the keys, and again there would be a process to select meaningful sentences every time they appeared in this second typewriter. If every time words such as “the,” “origin,” “species,” and so on, appeared in the first kind of typewriter, they each became a key in the second kind of typewriter, meaningful sentences would occasionally be produced in this second typewriter. If such sentences became incorporated into keys of a third type of typewriter, in which meaningful paragraphs were selected whenever they appeared, it is clear that pages and even chapters “making sense” would eventually be produced.

We need not carry the analogy too far, since the analogy is not fully satisfactory, but the point is clear. Evolution is not the outcome of purely random processes, but rather there is a “selecting” process, which picks up adaptive combinations because these reproduce more effectively and thus become established in populations. These adaptive combinations constitute, in turn, new levels of organization upon which the mutation (random) plus selection (nonrandom or directional) process again operates.

The manner in which natural selection can generate novelty in the form of accumulated hereditary information may be illustrated by the following example. Some strains of the colon bacterium, Escherichia coli, in order to be able to reproduce in a culture medium, require that a certain substance, the amino acid histidine, be provided in the medium. When a few such bacteria are added to a cubic centimeter of liquid culture medium, they multiply rapidly and produce between two and three billion bacteria in a few hours. Spontaneous mutations to streptomycin resistance occur in normal (i.e., sensitive) bacteria at rates of the order of one in one hundred million (1 x 10-8) cells. In our bacterial culture we expect between twenty and thirty bacteria to be resistant to streptomycin due to spontaneous mutation. If a proper concentration of the antibiotic is added to the culture, only the resistant cells survive. The twenty or thirty surviving bacteria will start reproducing, however, and allowing a few hours for the necessary number of cell divisions, several billion bacteria are produced, all resistant to streptomycin. Among cells requiring histidine as a growth factor, spontaneous mutants able to reproduce in the absence of histidine arise at rates of about four in one hundred million (4 x 10-8) bacteria. The streptomycin resistant cells may now be transferred to a culture with streptomycin but with no histidine. Most of them will not be able to reproduce, but about a hundred will start reproducing until the available medium is saturated.

Natural selection has produced in two steps bacterial cells resistant to streptomycin and not requiring histidine for growth. The probability of the two mutational events happening in the same bacterium is of about four in ten million billion (1 x 10-8 x 4 x 10-8 = 4 x 10-16) cells. An event of such low probability is unlikely to occur even in a large laboratory culture of bacterial cells. With natural selection, cells having both properties are the common result.

As illustrated by the bacterial example, natural selection produces combinations of genes that would otherwise be highly improbable because natural selection proceeds stepwise. The vertebrate eye did not appear suddenly in all its present perfection. Its formation requires the appropriate integration of many genetic units, and thus the eye could not have resulted from random processes alone. The ancestors of today’s vertebrates had for more than half a billion years some kind of organs sensitive to light. Perception of light, and later vision, were important for these organisms’ survival and reproductive success. Accordingly, natural selection favored genes and gene combinations increasing the functional efficiency of the eye. Such genetic units gradually accumulated, eventually leading to the highly complex and efficient vertebrate eye. Natural selection can account for the rise and spread of genetic constitutions, and therefore of types of organisms, that would never have existed under the uncontrolled action of random mutation. In this sense, natural selection is a creative process, although it does not create the raw materials — the genes — upon which it acts.

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