Religious Right Part III: Creationism and Intelligent Design

So I lied, or mispoke. I said the next installment would be on abortion, but I decided to do creationsism, evolution, and intelligent design first.

Again, always keeping in the mindset of the evangelicals as holding wisdom of the underside. In this case the elements of truth lost in a materialist metaphysics of evolution.

When Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species he postulated that the primary mechanism whereby evolution proceeded was natural selection-survial of the fittest. Around the same time Gregor Mendel, Austrian monk, was separately discovering the basic laws of inheritance, cross-breeding his pea plants in the solace of the cloistered walls. It was not until the 1950s and the discovery of DNA that Mendelian genetics was fused with Darwinian views on natural selection giving birth to the so-called Neo-Darwinian Synthesis. Evolution was now defined in the mainstream scientific community as proceeding by random mutation worked on by natural selection over long periods of time. This is the standard scientific definition still in use by most.

There are however problems right off the bat with this definition. First--spotted courtesy of Huston Smith, the great historian of World Religions--how does a scientist know that mutations are random or meaningless? All science deals with are physical observations. There is nothing in the fossilized record that shows that the change over time that is physical evolution is meangingless or random. There is no physical evidence either to prove that those changes are "meaningful" nor "non-random" either. The evidence on this point is totally mute.

Second point--this was the main thesis of the late great Stephen Jay Gould. If one assumes the standard Neo-Darwinian syntheis there is simply not enough time for mutations to work themselves out "randomly" to bring about the world we live--with its amazing diversity, complexity, and speciation. Natural selection working on random genetic mutation can not scientifically account for the totality of the fossilized record. Gould noted that the fossilized record showed periods of relative stability puncuated by disequlibirium, periods that saw massive new speciation. [Note: To Wilberites, punctuated equlibrium is simply transcend and include/transformation and tranlsation. The equilibria=translation, the punctuated=transformation.]

Third, the Neo-Darwinian synthesis has often been framed in exclusively individualist terms. The hero of this school is Richard Dawkins and his notion of the selfish gene. The selfish gene hypothesis amplifies random mutation worked on by natural selection. While not untrue, Dawkins has clearly overstated his case (as with the Neo-Darwinian position itself--not untrue just aboslutized and massively overstated). Dawkins' major rebuttal from the scientific point of view comes from Howard Bloom, the genius author of the Global Brain and Lucifer's Principle. Lucifer's Principle talks of an inherent death-wish (thanatos in Freudian terms) at the biological level, thereby repelling the notion that all acts are of the selfish erotic gene variety. Second, and more importantly Bloom notes that evolution is influenced heavily by collective, "global", machinations. The selfish gene notion does not cover inter-species symbiotic relationships nor intra-species collectivity: e.g. cellular systems, ant & bee colonies, primate tribes, etc. For other biological scientists who show the inadequacy of the Neo-Darwinian selfish-gene school see: Manfred Eigen and Stuart Kauffman.

Fourth and most devasting, the Neo-Darwinian synthesis falls into the general modernist metaphysics of materalism. Just as the Biblical fundamentalism has no Biblical quotation that states the Bible should be read literally, no physical-material piece of evidence in the universe categorically shows that only physical-material things are real. Materalism exists only in the "mind" (not the brain) of scientists and philosophers. It is not only bad science, its really bad philosophy and faith. Recall Plato's great insight--everyone believes in something. Materalism is as unquestioned a belief structure as any fundamentalist religious doctrine. Question its underpinnings and watch a scientist react as emotionally and viscerally as any evangelical Christian when you tell them that someone can be saved without believing in Jesus as the Christ. Materalist metaphysics can not explain the reality of complexification in the fossilized record. How is is that a human being has a reptilian brain stem, a paleo-mamamalian brain stem, and a neocortex? This unknown quantity that would show up after periods of "punctuation" are known as emergent qualities. Emergent qualities are something more than simply the sum of their parts. Something new, creative, and novel emerges from within. And there is no way random mutation and natural selection covers this fact. Simply put. There is not enough time, the paradigm of mutation/selection is not wide enough to encompass a mjaority of physical-chemical-biological data.

So here is the rub of course. The Neo-Darwinian Synthesis which all told accounts for only a small percentage of physical evolution is described as the whole shebang in classrooms. The materialist metaphysical belief system (and that is what it is) is never addressed, nor the fact that there are better frames to explain the fossilized record--punctuated equilibrium, complexity, Prigigone's dissipative structures and nonequilibrated thermodynamics, and on and on.

All of that is out there and we teach our children some stupid story about random mutation, blah blah blah long time, takes long long very long time, then changes happen. Wow. I'm excited already.

So know wonder the evangelicals (and others) bark at this. Of course they have chucked the babino with the babino's aqua. Creationism and intelligent design are even worse. There awful science, and horrible theology.

Creationism and ID are different, even though the media typically portrays them as the same. An IDer would not necessarily disagree with evolutionary science as such--only that they believe such a process could be guided by "intelligent design" and an intelligent designer. The most famous argument for Intelligent Design is based on the analogy of a clock (hence this Designer is referred to as The Watchmaker God). You stumble upon a clock sitting on a beach. It has gears, hands, numerals, battery and so on. You assume that someone built the watch, not that it randomly pieced itself together. Nature is like this clock with its intricate inner-harmony....and you get the point.

Even more so, all of the pieces had to be in place from the beginning for the clock to work. You can not first have the gears, then later somehow they glob onto a face, then a wristband, etc. Just so, there are certain complex systems in biology that must be pre-set for the entire structure to function. The example used by Michael Behe is a cell (see Behe: Darwin's Black Box). Behe's work is a souped-up version of the old design argument. Much more articulate and including much more up-to-date science, but still the same basic premise.

An IDer can easily believe in a universe that is 13.5 bilion years old, as well as the idea the creation story of Genesis is meant as a theological statement not a scientific one. IDers do not subscribe to a so-called young earth hypothesis--i.e. the earth is only 6,000 years old that.

That belief is the presevere of the creationists. Creationism is a strange mixture. Prior to the modern world, the question of "literalness" in regards to the Bible only came up so far as I know in Christian theology in relation to the question of the millenium. Was there to be a real, literal concrete 1,000 year reign of peace, prosperity on this literal concrete earth that would dissolve into the Final Tribulation-Battle of Armageddon, the total victory of the Returned Christ, and the End of the Universe and the Final Judgement of Souls? Now notice the key question here--was there really going to be a literal millenium on earth? The mainline theologians said no.

Those who said yes were known as chiliasts. Origen, the great Church Father derided them for their simplistic notions. The Chiliasts also believed that we would be resurrected with the bodies we know possess? To which Origen slyly remarked--what then about the bodies of the martyrs eaten by the lions? Will they resurrect in grotesque, managled form--missing limbs, half lion-half human?

[Sidenote: Mainstream Christianity does not hold to a literal 1,000 yr. millenium: this would include the official theology of the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and mainline Protestants (e.g. Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans). This view is held by many Baptist, evangelical, and fundamentalist Protestants in the United States. But again this is a minority view in Christianity, only seems majority in the United States, proof again of the total uniqueness and I would say weirdness of American Christianity].

So no literal thousand year reign. The millenium is a symbol of the life after death. The resurrected body is not the gross, concerte literal body. Nor is the Bible to be read solely as what is says concretely, literally. That was the Ancient view.

With the coming of modernism, the notion of truth was reduced to historicity and scientific observation. Was it true means "did it happen the way it says it did." This question struck at the Biblical story because it had never been questioned in quite that way. Fundamenatlist Christians made the categorical error of assuming the modernist view of truth. Truth is only what is observable and historically verifiable. And the Bible is true. So the Bible must be scientifically, observationally, historically accurate.

The problem then with this view is not that it is backward and old-timey, it is that is far too modern. It is the inverse of modernism. The premodern theologies never had this problem because they were never stupid enough to believe that what was true was only what was physical or historically reported. Only modernists both atheistic and fundamenatlist adhere to such nincompoopery.

The Creationists show their modernist strip by arguing that the book of Genesis reports the facts. Turns out interestingly enough the notion of the earth as only 6,000 years old comes from St. Augustine, fourth/fifth century Church Father. Augustine, by the standards of his day, undertook an ingeniuous paradigm; namely, he would add up the ages of the all those named in the Bible counting backwards until Adam (i.e. Noah was such an such an age when he begat his son Shem. Noah lived to be x number of years old).

Given the historical/intellectual context, it was in a way, as brilliant a paradigm as the scientific one is in our day. It just has been superseded--transcended and included. I mean Augustine was right in his math. He followed evidence, used sound (though misguided) logic, and even left his quest open to further exploration at a later time. Coincidentally, Augustine also theorized that perhaps God had implanted seeds in the universe at creation that would grow at a later point--not exactly evolution but interesting nonetheless. Augustine' s historical timeline is in his magisterial De Civitatis Dei (On the City of God).

Young earth creationists have bought into Augustine's paradigm wholesale--yet again showing that it is not a solely Biblical viewpoint. It actually is a product of a Catholic theologian in Late Antiquity. No one before Augustine read the Bible that way, so those after him are not beholden to.

Augustine was a forerunner of modern thought. He is the author of the first autobiography in Western history, discovered the unconscious 1500 years before Freud, and wrote about doubting until one can no longer doubt that one is doubting over a thousand years before Descartes. Not surprising therefore that his views would lend themselves to the faux modernist evangelical creationist camp.

So how to parse all these streams?

Well, what intelligent design and creationism both get right (along with plenty of other scientific systems that are not theologically-religiously connected, e.g. Howard Bloom) is that the Neo-Darwinian explanation of evolution is flawed.

Intelligent design further is right to point to intelligence and creativity as inherent to the evolutionary process.

Creationism, as a faux modernist position, makes the same mistake as mainstream science--it assumes the materialist Neo-Darwinian position is the only one. Creationists reject it; scientists accept it. Both are wrong. The Neo-Darwinian position is only a small percentage of the mechamism of evolution. Evolution itself is not the issue. The packaging of it in terms of Neo-Darwinian materialist dribbe is. That is when the Neo-Darwinian materialist metaphysics is absolutized as the only and/or most important mechanism for biological evolution, which again I can not stress enough is not sound philosophically nor more important evidentially. The evidence doesn't show that.

Where ID missteps is its de facto assumption of a theistic (or Deistic) theology. The Designer is a thinly veiled reference to the God of the Bible. And more so to the God of the Bible as has been interpreted and understood since the early modern period. That is God is considered to be purely separate from the world, a giant figure "out there" or "up there" somewhere. A God of the concrete imaginary premodern mythic worldview with a little rationality thrown in for good measure.

ID fails because it adds unnecessary steps and being(s). Theism, as understoood to mean a God somewhere out there is a very limited and immature form of theology. Traditional Christianity actually is best interpreted as pan-en-theistic ("everything in God" pan-en-theos). Everything is within God but God is greater than the world. God transcends-and-includes the created matrix in other words. Creation is like a baby in the womb of the Divine.

ID fails to understand the truth of eroticism from within the universe. It actually to my mind does not inspire faith. It reinforces Freud's criticism of mythic theism--namely that the God figure as either Father or Mother keeps us from having to assume adult responsibility. For our dear Father in Heaven will take care of us all. Our dear Designer has already arranged everything for us. How sweet of him.

In Christian circles the man who overcame these silly (non)debates between creationism, intelligent design, and materialist science was Fr. Teilhard de Chardin. A member of the Jesuit Order, a Catholic priest, and a geologist Teilhard spoke of a phenomenology of the universe.

His masterpiece (an absolute must read) is The Human Phenomenon (formerly translated as The Phenomenon of Man). Teilhard begins by stating that science, by its study of exteriors ("the without") only had two axises: large or small. In physics it is the argument between Einstenian general relativity and quantum theory. Large or small, heavy or light, vast or miniscule. But how then to fit time into that scheme--for even Einstein understood that time and space are warped together?

Teilhard stated that science had failed to find a trajectory, a guide in its findings because it had neglected the within. His phenomenology was nothing but the description of the inter-relationship between the development of materiality and interiority. He described this inter-relationship in his famous: Law of Complexity and Consciousness. In short, The Law states that the greater the degree of material complexity found in an organism, the greater the degree of consciousness and vice versa. The book simply follows the path of what he called the deployment of the biosphere (the sphere of life) until it reaches the human, then deployed into the noosphere (the sphere of thought).

The human organism has the most complex material make-up with its triune brain stem, and also possesses the first fully self-reflexive consciousness on the planet. Notice, Teilhard never said the materiality caused the consciousness nor the consciousness the materiality. He simply said they were correlated. When you find one, you always find the other. Nor did he then postulate an exterior-outside theistic God who "designed" this relationship? For if that is the case, why all the failed stops and starts in evolution? Why have 95+% of the species ever raised up to life were brought to extinction? Why all the waste in evolution?

So he trumped the materalists, the IDers, and the creationists. And you never hear his name in these debates? Why? Because both sides are wrong--the debate will not end as long as they are both lost in nonsense. Bush says that other theories of evolution should be discussed. He is right but for the wrong reasons. The Teilhardian view of the cosmos should be taught. It not only is more accurate to the data--of both interiors and exteriors--but there is something to be said for aesthetic beauty and giving a direction in life to human beings.

Teilhard famously said that we are the universe aware of itself thinking. Really ponder that for a moment. Let that sink in. All of us are the expression of Life itself in its most complex material form and greatest "centrated" consciousness (so far as we know). The Book of Genesis says that God put us here "to tend the garden." We are the garden manifest. That is how we are the gardeners. It is our job to realize ourselves as the process itself and help co-create. To bring harmony and mutually beneficial relationship to the physio and biosphere with the noosphere, and begin building the theosphere.

That is what children could be learning in schools. How would children be if that is what they were taught to think of themselves from early on--you are the universe aware of itself. You are responsible. You are the microcosm of the macrocosm. Better theology, better ethics, and better science.

Teilhard's cosmic vision leaves open the question of the nature of Eros in the Universe and how emergent properties emerge. It holds a healthy mystery, instead of explaining it away as "intelligent design". It leaves God to be God.

What Teilhard did not understand was nonduality. To find out the exact relationship between materiality and consciousness you must simply inquire into this moment--What is this? Who am I? They both arise as expressions of the same Ground. That Ground can be realized, but never described.

Ultimately the materialist Neo-Darwinians, IDers, and creationists continue their battles because the play on the plane of realtivity. They are playing the game of Atman. They attempt to destroy one of the poles of relativity and declare the Absolute. Neither realizing the Absolute nor the Relative Truth.