34. Evaluating Evolution (2)

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No single schematic or system can adequately depict the scale of complexity and intricacy in the connections between the mutually implicit facts and values that are intertwined throughout our universe. The direction and degree of causality in all this are uncertain. To take but one example, the common secular assumption that the struggle for survival explains religion could be reversed. Riffing on the modern atheist notion that religion is a virus that replicates itself in human cultures, we could consider religions (along with pseudo-scientific theories like evolutionary ethics) as complex life forms that keep the human race alive for their own purposes. In other words, religion explains human survival. (And when religion wanes, as in modern secular culture, we experience low birth rates, social malaise, and a greater incidence of suicide.)

The Qur’anic view is not far from this counter-intuitive perspective. Humanity is indeed GOD’s chosen medium for propagating His values through the universe.

We could develop an alternate narrative that describes human evolution as a fragile, intermittent, and potentially upward growth in awareness of what higher purposes our lives actually serve – values far greater than mere survival. Religion is the unfolding of this meta-history within not only history as a whole but even our spiritual history as individuals. Our personal stories mean much more, and go on for far longer, than merely surviving until we can reproduce – after which, from an evolutionary standpoint, there is nothing left for us to do but die.

That brings us to another point about the secular narrative of evolution that its proponents rarely address. The theory itself is maladaptive for the beings it addresses. Where would we be now if our distant ancestors threw away their supposedly misconceived morals and faith in a Higher Power and fervently believed, instead, in a life with no purpose, no meaning, and no ethics other than some abstract imperative to perpetuate their genes? What will happen to the human race if we all adopt this stunted version of reality as the basis of future generations’ bedtime stories and social engineering?

When talking about ethics, the materialist theorists of today are constantly directing out attention downwards, to chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants, dogs, ants, bees, and amoebae as the sources of our morality. In their exhaustive surveys of moral life, the lower they can go the better. If the intention is to show how ultimately uplifting the imperatives of ethical life can be (as even amoebae have a sense of what is good or bad for them) I see no problem. But if the aim is not to lift our gaze but to debase it, to show how degraded our motives really are, then they are working at cross-purposes to what morality actually means – the search for higher ends.

Values always imply the ultimate, not the minimum. They become values by their direction, not their natal or prenatal records. Reducing them to genetic mechanisms is a category error of the worst sort, like explaining a palace by counting the bricks and stones and planks that were used to build it while failing to mention for what purpose and what kinds of people palaces are erected.

When we consider our best acts to be nothing but ploys for reproductive success, either at the individual or group level, they are not ‘best’ in any meaningful way. Sophisticated, yes, but they are no longer ‘moral’. The concept of final causes, or doing things for higher ends, is alien to physicalist science, and hence excluded from evolutionist accounts of human morality. The life has been sucked out of them, since the narrative underlying them is reducible to lifeless matter.

To coin a term, until I can find a better one, I would call this approach de-signification. Rather than enhancing meaning, it de-means by subtracting life-enhancing values until it arrives at some lowest possible denominator – survival, random mutation, subatomic particles, or whatever. We try to breathe some greater narrative into them with our convoluted ‘just so’ stories of primordial soup and chemical reactions, but the odds of their finally generating human morality are about the same as watching for a fire to come from two sticks lying side by side instead of rubbing them together (i.e. by purposeful involvement). Neither the soup nor the sticks feel the need for meaning, so why do we?

The principle here is that Truth implies prior or concomitant Consciousness and Intention. Unconscious, unwilling entities are incapable of replacing GOD as a guide to ‘the’ truth, or any truth.

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