34. Evaluating Evolution (1)

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We are told that natural selection – the process by which differences in organisms result in greater or lesser opportunities for survival and reproduction – is amoral. It has no aim or direction; rather it operates according to a model of population dynamics that takes only genetic and environmental variables into account regardless of what a particular organism is meant to do or what it intends to do. Purpose and intention are irrelevant. We need not consider agency or intelligence when we are talking about the complex interactions of lifeless genes, proteins, and mutations.

With this foundation, it has always been a challenge to account for the emergence of morality. How did the notions of good and evil and right and wrong, come into the picture?

The Wikipedia article on “Evolutionary Ethics”¹ provides a handy summary of three possible answers. We could summarize them thus:

• Evolution tells us what our ethics are (descriptive evolutionary ethics).
• Evolution tells us what our ethics should be (normative evolutionary ethics).
• Evolution tells us that our ethics are not real, but rather an illusion (evolutionary metaethics).

The narrative of descriptive evolutionary ethics portrays morality as arising from the competitive advantages that primitive human groups enjoyed by enforcing loyalty to the tribe and conformity to its norms, and by encouraging the growth of values that promoted fairness, mutual care, love within families, and general altruism. Normative evolutionary ethics goes one step further, prescribing what values we should maintain for the sake of an overarching communal, national, or pan-human super-standard, i.e., survival. And evolutionary metaethics accepts the argument that bundling all ethics into one value, namely survival, makes no sense, and so questions the objectivity or intelligibility of any morality whatsoever in light of the obvious truths of evolution.

Common to all three positions, however, is the belief that ethics is derivative. If the descriptive version is accepted, then evolution, in the form of group dynamics, produced ethics. This would be analogous to the manager of a milk processing plant taking credit for the fact that consumers drink milk. Having accepted the manager’s authority to make such a claim, we might agree that he could tell us what kinds of milk to drink, or how or when to drink it, if we are to succeed as milk-drinkers – a normative position. If, however, we decided to produce our own milk, he could then peremptorily assure us that we would be fooling ourselves, since milk is not a natural substance but merely a complex combination of lipids and proteins, and only processing plants know the formula.

What does it mean for us to turn to a fact-based narrative like evolution to account for our values? It can only mean this – that we no longer know how to value our values. If I tell you that I believe in honesty (a value), for example, because that is how I get ahead in the world (a fact), what does that say about my commitment to honesty (and all my other morals)? We could go even further, and say that if we believe that life arises from the unliving, what does that say about our lives?*

In a frame whose root principles are facts, where organisms are nothing more than machines that improbably won the evolutionary lottery of random mutation, values and life as we know it are, in fact, foreign elements, intruders. Ethics must be demoralized and esthetics anesthetized – rendered aimless and insensate – if they are to make sense in an ultimately unfeeling world. A strictly physical world has no space for metaphysics, and no time for timeless truths. A materialistic frame demands that no whole be greater than its parts, that everything be reducible to its constituent atoms, to dust. What we have, in short, is a universe conceived according to the dictates, not of Life, but Death.

‘Cheer up,’ says the materialist. ‘It may sound bad, but at least it’s true!’ And right there is the irony of it all. The materialist can cheerfully devalue the universe and empty it of all transcendent meaning for the sake of his last remaining value – truth. But if we are nothing but machines, ultimately soulless and lifeless, of what use is truth? For the sake of a single value, we deny all others, and then find our own selves so devalued that we mean nothing to the god for whom this cosmic waste was made. Nor, logically, should it mean anything to us.

But if values do not exist in and of themselves, independent of matter, then neither does truth, and the whole conceptual edifice of evolutionary ethics collapses in a normless, useless desert of its own making. I am reminded once again of Tarski’s undefinability theorem, that “Each language owes its ultimate validation to a higher metalanguage.” The overly ambitious narrative of evolutionary ethics fails because it has nothing to validate its own framework (a self-referencing privilege appropriate to no one but GOD) and claims to account for elements ostensibly within it, namely values, that paradoxically account for it. Evolutionary ethics is the branch that breaks and dies to spite the tree.

While the evolutionary narrative must reduce God, faith, religion, and all other human phenomena to the same low level as mere objects of belief, historical data, or sociological facts, the GOD of the Qur’an is, on the contrary, sufficiently Generous (Al-Karim) and Vast (Al-Wasi’) to comprehend evolutionary ethics with all its principles and methodologies intact as a viable theory with real explanatory power. It does no harm to the theory of evolution to point out that, by its very nature, it cannot explain the values that govern it and other theories, and indeed the entire normative realm (al-amr) that shares with facts (al-khalq) the constitution of the cosmos. Truly His are the creation (al-khalq) and command (al-amr). Blessed be AL-LAH, the Master of the worlds! (Q7:54)

The Qur’anic model is open to science and whatever else GOD makes, while scientistic systems (i.e. ones that claim science can explain everything, not scientific systems) are closed to whatever they portray as lacking evidence. The Qur’anic model includes both facts and values; scientism stops at what it believes are facts alone. The Qur’anic model motivates a broad swathe of humanity; scientism appeals, by the values it espouses (values that have no place in it, however), to a small, educated, and privileged minority. Yes, the Qur’anic model moralizes, as humans cannot help but do; scientism demoralizes, as it cannot help but do. The Qur’anic model establishes, stabilizes, and shapes societies; scientism attempts to explain them in the dim light of an abstract rationality. The Qur’anic model affirms life, celebrates beauty, promotes love, calms the heart, and activates the mind in ways that uplift and inspire; the aim of scientism is to reduce everything to ones and zeros.

¹ From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_ethics

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