I sing the goodness of the Lord
That filled the earth with food;
He formed the creatures with his word And then pronounced them good.
Isaac Watts, 1715
Is it the goodness of the Lord That fills the earth with food? Selection has the final word And what survives is good.
Kenneth E. Boulding, 1975 [Kenneth Boulding, "Toward an Evolutionary Theology," in The Spirit of the Earth: a Teilhard Centennial Celebration, edited by Jerome Perlinski (New York: The Seabury Press, 1981), pp. 112-13]
IN CONTEMPORARY CONVERSATIONS ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP OF RELIGION TO SCIENCE two questions stand out: is nature all there is? And does the universe have a purpose? The two issues are inseparable. For if nature is all there is, there could be no overall purpose to the universe. That is, there could be no goal beyond nature toward which the long cosmic journey would be winding its way. But if the logic here is correct, then the detection of an overarching purpose in nature would imply that nature is not all there is. In the broadest sense purpose means “directed toward a goal or telos.” The question before us, then, is whether the cosmos as a whole is teleological, that is, goal-directed. Is there perhaps a transcendent goodness luring it toward more intense modes of being and ultimately toward an unimaginable fulfillment? How can we find out?
If cosmic purpose were to manifest itself palpably anywhere in nature, would it not be in the life-world? Yet contemporary biology finds there only an apparent purpose. Scientists, for the most part, seem to agree that there is indeed a kind of purposiveness, or teleonomy, in living phenomena.[Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, translated by Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Vintage Books, 1972).] The heart has the purpose of pumping blood, eyes of seeing, brains of thinking, and so on. Purposiveness in this sense is an indisputable fact of nature. However, the orientation toward specific goals in the life of organisms is not enough to demonstrate that there is an across-the-board purpose to the universe itself. Darwin’s impersonal recipe for evolution now seems to be enough to account for what scientists used to think were signs in living organisms of a divine intelligence that orders all events toward a meaningful end. The adaptive complexity that gave earlier generations of biologists reason to believe in an intelligent deity now only seems to have been purposefully intended.[ Michael Ruse, Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 324-28.] Blind evolutionary mechanisms are the ultimate explanation of purposive design.
In a recent interview the famous evolutionist Richard Dawkins states: “I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe. So purpose, at least in the guise of design, has apparently been fully naturalized by evolutionary science. Natural phenomena that formerly seemed to bear the direct imprint of divine intelligence are now exposed as outcomes of a completely mindless process. The adaptive design of organisms gives only the illusion of being deliberately intended. Purpose, at least in any theologically significant sense of the term, simply does not exist.
Dawkins is willing to grant that we humans have “purpose on the brain, [Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. 96] and many other naturalists allow that we need a sense of purpose to live happy lives. But this does not mean that life at large or the universe as a whole is in fact purposeful. Viewed from the perspective of evolutionary biology, the old human habit of looking for meaning in nature may be adaptive, but it is illusory. Nature itself has no goals in mind, and the purposiveness of organisms is no signal of an eternal divine plan. It is natural — even for naturalists — to seek purpose, but whatever purpose people seem to find in nature as a whole is in fact a purely human construct, not a reflection of the world as it exists “out there.”
Biologically speaking, evolutionary naturalists emphasize, there is no significant difference between our own brains and those of our ancestors who sought purpose through religion. Our brains and nervous systems are built to look for meaning in things. But in an age of science the personal search for purpose can no longer presume the backing of the universe in the way that religions did in the past. After Darwin the ancient spiritual assumption that purpose is inherent in the natural world has been exposed as nothing more than an evolutionary adaptation.[ Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998), p. 262; Walter Burkert, Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 20.]
Maybe the illusion of purpose was invented by our genes as a way to get themselves passed on to subsequent generations. Or, if not directly rooted in our genes, the human passion for purpose is a freeloading complex, parasitic on brains fashioned by natural selection ages ago for more mundane tasks. [Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: the Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 78-79; Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: the Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 145.]
By either account, the penchant for purpose is ultimately explainable in a purely naturalistic way. All human yearning for lasting purpose, whether in the universe or in our personal lives, is groundless. At best, religious myths about purpose are noble lies, perhaps convincing enough to help humans adapt, but too imaginative to be taken seriously in an age of science. [Loyal Rue, By the Grace of Guile: the Role of Deception in Natural History and Human Affairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 261-306.]. There is not the slightest evidence that the whole scheme of things makes any sense ultimately.
Can Purpose Be Fully Naturalized?
However, it is necessary to make two points here. First, it is not evolutionary biology, but evolutionary naturalism that rules out purpose. Dawkins himself, as we have just seen, admits that he believes — but cannot scientifically demonstrate — that evolution undermines any theological sense of purpose. Science as such, even the naturalist must agree, has nothing to say one way or the other about any overarching purpose in nature. Science, strictly speaking, is not preoccupied with questions about values, meanings or goals. Teleology is not its concern.
My second point is that evolutionary naturalists, along with some religious believers, tend to confuse purpose with “divine intelligent design.” And since Darwinism can explain local organic “design” naturalistically some claim there is no need any longer to look for purpose in the universe as a whole. To the pure Darwinian, organisms may seem to be designed, but divine intelligence is not the ultimate cause of their “apparently” purposive features. [Dawkins, River out of Eden; Ruse, Darwin and Design, pp. 268-70, 325] Design is the outcome of an evolutionary recipe consisting of three unintelligent ingredients: random genetic mutations along with other accidents in nature, aimless natural selection, and eons of cosmic duration. This simple formula has apparently banished purpose once and for all from the cosmos.
However, the idea of purpose is not reducible to intelligent design. Design is too frail a notion to convey all that religions and theologies mean when they speak of purpose in the universe. Purpose does not have to mean design in the adaptive Darwinian sense at all. Rather, purpose simply means the actualizing of value. What makes any series of events purposive is that it is aiming toward, or actually bringing about, something that is undeniably good. Is it possible that the actualizing of value is what is really going on in the universe? And is not critical intelligence, with its capacity to know truth, direct evidence of it?
There is a close connection between purpose and value. Naturalists would agree with this point, but they doubt that values really exist anywhere independently of our human valuations. Obviously, most of them would agree, we humans have a sense of values that gives purpose to our lives. For example, I take my writing this book to be purposive since its intended goal is that of achieving something I consider good or worthwhile. Likewise, scientific naturalists consider their own intellectual efforts to be purposeful. They tacitly surrender their minds and hearts to the value of truth-telling, a cause they expect to outlive them and give significance to their work even after they are gone.
If they did not consider truth-telling to be an enduring value worthy of the deepest reverence, they would scarcely care whether readers took them seriously, nor would they write books so earnestly instructing us that religions lead human minds away from the truth. Obviously evolutionary naturalists care about truth, and their lives are made meaningful only because truth functions for them as a value worth pursuing. So, in seeking what is unquestionably good, they too have “purpose on the brain.” Were they to deny it, they would eviscerate their own intellectual achievements.
Naturalists maintain that there is a fully natural explanation for everything. But what about the value of truth itself, the value that gives meaning to their own lives? Can that too be explained naturalistically — as a purely human invention? If we really believed that truth is merely a human construct, then the pursuit of truth could no longer function to give purpose or meaning to our lives. To experience meaning in life, after all, requires the humble submission of our minds and lives to a value that pulls us out of ourselves and gives us something noble to live for. [This is a point made emphatically by Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning (New York: Pocket Books, 1959)] It entails a commitment to something greater than ourselves. Having a sense of meaning is the consequence of being grasped by a value or values that we did not invent and that will outlive us. If we sincerely thought that we were the sole creators of truth then truth could no longer function to give purpose to our lives, nor would it allow our intelligence to function critically. If evolutionary naturalists consistently thought that truth — along with other values — were nothing more than the products of genes, minds or cultures, then such a fabrication could no longer function to give meaning to their own lives either.
For a value to be the source of meaning it has to function as more than an arbitrary human invention. If I thought of truth as the product of human creativity alone, then there would be nothing to prevent me from deciding that deception rather than truth-telling should guide my life and actions. The naturalist of course will instinctively reject such a proposal. But why? What is it in the naturalist worldview that makes truth-telling an unconditional value, the absolute good that everyone is obliged to revere? If all the ideals that give purpose to one’s life were seriously taken to be contingent concoctions of the human brain or cultural convention, it would seem inconsistent for naturalists to tell me in effect that I must treat the values of truth and truth-telling as though these were not also pure inventions.
In fact, however, naturalists are not consistent. Typically they deny in their philosophy of nature what they implicitly affirm in their actual ethical and intellectual performance. For example, evolutionary naturalists clearly treat truth as a value that judges their own work, and therefore as something they did not invent. Some of them even devote their whole lives to its pursuit. It is what gets them up every morning. In effect they are serving a cause that they tacitly know will outlast them. Their implicit sense of the lastingness of truth gives continuity to their efforts and satisfaction to their careers. Like the rest of us they are grasped by truth and have submitted their minds to it. At the same time, however, some of their own writings portray truth and other values as pure creations of human minds and, ultimately, of genes. They generally fail to see the logical contradiction between their almost religious obedience to truth-telling on the one hand and their evolutionary debunking of it on the other.
Since the universe itself is inherently valueless, their argument runs, people can all the more easily see that values and meanings must spring from their own creativity.’[E. D. Klemke, "Living without Appeal," in The Meaning of Life, edited by E. D. Klemke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 169-72; Stephen Jay Gould, Ever since Darwin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 12-13.] Owen Flanagan, for instance, says that “we have to find and make our meanings and not have them created and given to us by a supernatural being or force.” Then he adds, “It seems like good news that meaning and purpose are generated and enjoyed by me and the members of my species and tribe, rather than imposed by an inexplicable and indefinable alien being.[ Owen Flanagan, The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 12.]
However, Flanagan clearly performs professionally as though the truth-telling to which he apparently bows in writing his books, including the excerpt I have just quoted, is not simply “generated” by his or his tribe’s inventive minds. If he seriously thought that he was the inventor of all the values he follows, among which truth-telling would have to take a prominent place, then it would seem unlikely that truth could function as a standard against which he could measure critically the content of his mind, or as something that could give his life significance.
Once again, then, naturalism proves to be too restrictive a worldview to contain the minds that thought it up. While Darwinian science can go a long way toward laying out the natural history that led up to the existence of our minds, it is too undersized to function as a worldview that accounts fully for why we are purpose-driven, meaning-seeking and truth-oriented beings. Darwinian explanations by themselves, after all, do not rule out the possibility that nature can create a kind of conscious organism that finds illusions more adaptive than truth. In fact, since truth can often be unsettling, and obedience to it demanding, the flight into fiction could conceivably be much more adaptive than facing up to facts. Some Darwinian naturalists understand religion in precisely this way. Religion is adaptive, they claim, because it allows people to avoid facing reality even while it is giving purpose to their lives.
Such a view, however, makes it all the more difficult to state in purely Darwinian terms how the naturalist’s own mind came to be guided by an exceptionally pure passion for truth. What special events occurred in nature’s normal course of making adaptive minds that allows one now to assume that the naturalistic belief system is not just one more way of adapting, no less illusory than all our other adaptive belief systems? As philosopher Richard Rorty admits, “the idea that one species of organism is, unlike all the others, oriented not just toward its own increased prosperity but toward Truth, is as un-Darwinian as the idea that every human being has a built-in moral compass — a conscience that swings free of both social history and individual luck. [Richard Rorty, "Untruth and Consequences," The New Republic, July 31, 1995, pp. 32-36. Cited by Alvin Plantinga: http://idwww.ucsb.edu/fscf/lihrary/plantinga/dennett. html]
But perhaps, the naturalist might suggest, the passion for truth does not need to be explained in evolutionary terms after all. Maybe the naturalist’s exceptional flair for truth-telling is the product not of natural, but of cultural evolution. Perhaps when humans came along in evolution they could learn to contradict what their genes dictate and thus elevate themselves to a new level of truthfulness and morality. Richard Dawkins insists that “we have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth. [Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2nd edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 200.]However, it is fundamental to the naturalist creed to insist that humans and their cultural creations are all ultimately part of nature. So it would be more consistent with evolutionary naturalism to insist that there has to be a purely natural explanation of everything, including the urge to create culture.
But let us suppose that the move by humans from nature into culture is so abrupt as to render evolutionary understanding irrelevant at a certain point. Perhaps, in other words, the naturalist’s special ability to value truth is a skill that has been inherited through cultural influence rather than natural selection, since in the human arena Darwinism no longer works to explain everything very well. If so, however, this shift of ground only moves my question sideways. Can cultural influences, which we know to be riddled with relativity and historical contingency, explain any more substantially why the naturalist should have developed an exceptional talent for truth-telling? Dawkins, for example, does not provide a non-Darwinian explanation of why truth-telling is morally superior to deception either.
I doubt that moving over to the historico-cultural setting will make it any easier for the naturalist to say why truth-telling is an unconditional good. In any case, if truth were consistently thought of exclusively as either an evolutionary or a cultural invention it could no longer function as a beacon that arouses the imperatives of the mind or gives purpose to lives. Thus we need to consider another possibility: truth, in order to function as a value that gives meaning, must have its foundation in a region of being that transcends both nature and culture. Truth is best thought of as neither a natural nor a cultural creation, but as the anticipated goal of the desire to know. This is how truth functions in fact for naturalists whenever truth-telling gives zest to their lives.
Truth is not something they possess, but something they anticipate. It is not something they concoct, but something that invites a surrender. What remains to be done, then, is for naturalists to bring their formal belief system into harmony with the way their minds actually work. What they tacitly affirm in every commitment of their minds to truth must no longer be denied when they articulate their worldview.
Truth, to reiterate my point, can function to give purpose to human lives only if it is encountered as a value distinct from or transcending our minds. Of course, human creativity enters into all our finite construal of truth, including this sentence. But even such constructs are responses to something like an invitation. We are addressed by truth even as we participate in its representation. There is no understanding of the world that is not in some measure a human construct, including those of both theology and naturalism. Every proposition can be subjected to layered explanation. At one level what I am saying now can be explained as a product of my own brain. At another level it can be explained as the result of my will to understand. But at still another it can be explained as my response to the attractive power of what is, that is, of being, reality, truth. By focusing only on the creative side of the mind’s meeting with truth, naturalistic explanations fail to articulate what it is about truth that compels, persuades, makes us alive with excitement and gives purpose to our lives. To explain ultimately why truth has the power to attract and give purpose to our lives will require moving beyond the naturalistic worldview.
