Plato Redivivus
OLD HABITS DIE HARD. The same can be said of old philosophies. We have traced what many (I suspect most Darwinians) would regard as the triumph of the Kantian perspective. Muted perhaps, but triumphant nevertheless. An undeserved victory in the eyes and hearts of vigorous opponents. From the time of the Scientific Revolution to the present, we find vocal representatives of what I am characterizing as the Platonic (external) approach or tradition and of the Aristotelian (internal) approach or tradition. Let us take them in turn.
Creator God
Before the Origin, there were those like Whewell and Adam Sedgwick, professor of geology at Cambridge, who simply put down the origins of new species to divine intervention.1 The fossil record shows that there has been a turnover of forms, and extinction is almost certainly due to natural causes. But when it comes to new forms, God intervenes miraculously. After the Origin, there were those who felt the same way. Louis Agassiz, Swiss-born ichthyologist and professor at Harvard, could never accept evolution, even though his students (including his son) stepped over the line pretty sharpishly.2 The preferred option though, for those who were Christians believing in a Creator God, was some form of guided evolution. God puts direction into new variations and hence natural selection has at most a kind of garbage disposal function—it gets rid of the bad forms but does little or nothing to create new, good forms. This was the stance of the evangelical Presbyterian Asa Gray.
But there is room only for the general declaration that we cannot think the Cosmos a series which began with chaos and ends with mind, or of which mind is a result: that, if, by the successive origination of species and organs through natural agencies, the author means a series of events which succeed each other irrespective of a continued directing intelligence—events which mind does not order and shape to destined ends—then he has not established that doctrine, nor advanced toward its establishment, but has accumulated improbabilities beyond all belief.3
Darwin would have nothing of this. Picking up on a metaphor used by Gray about water being channeled down certain streams, he wrote, “If we assume that each particular variation was from the beginning of all time preordained, the plasticity of organisation, which leads to many injurious deviations of structure, as well as that redundant power of reproduction which inevitably leads to a struggle for existence, and, as a consequence, to the natural selection or survival of the fittest, must appear to us superfluous laws of nature.” Darwin spotted what was going on: “On the other hand, an omnipotent and omniscient Creator ordains everything and foresees everything.”4 Basically, although they went on arguing, this was it. Gray suggested that if you are building a house, you have to have the stones precut to order. Darwin countered that if you had enough, as drystone wall builders show us, you can do a very good job on what nature hands you. And so on and so forth.
As noted, another who sought divine direction in evolution was Wallace, although he appealed not to the God of the Christians but to some kind of World Spirit—“a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction, and for a special purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and vegetable forms.” Continuing: “We must therefore admit the possibility that, if we are not the highest intelligences in the universe, some higher intelligence may have directed the process by which the human race was developed, by means of more subtle agencies than we are acquainted with.”5 Darwin, as we know, was not convinced, although he did agree that Wallace had made some good points, showing, for instance, how unlikely it is that human hairlessness and human intelligence came unaided through natural selection. This was the reason for pumping up sexual selection. Neither man budged from then on.
Being (what I am calling) a Platonist about these sorts of things did not mean one had to be a biblical literalist—six days of creation, six thousand years, worldwide flood, and that sort of thing. As it happens, given the science of his day, Augustine thought these reasonable beliefs—“we compute from the sacred writings that six thousand years have not yet passed since the creation of man”6—but he always insisted that advances in empirical understanding might mean modification of literal readings of scripture. As he pointed out, the ancient Jews could not be expected to understand the theories and experience of sophisticated Roman citizens. This was always the traditional Christian perspective. Wallace was an oddity, but no one could doubt the intensity or authenticity of Gray’s Christian commitment. However, as is well known, not all of his fellow countrymen felt this way, and before and after the Civil War in the South, in particular, a form of evangelical Protestant literalism took root and throve. Not the least of the attractions of such a stance was that it was taken (with reason) to offer a biblical justification of slavery. After the war, the story of the Israelites in captivity was much appreciated. God heaps burdens most on those whom he loves most.7
No one was a total literalist. The whore of Babylon was rarely taken to be a historical figure and generally interpreted as the pope or the Catholic religion or some such thing. Also, biblical claims about a thousand years being but a day in the eye of the Lord were generally taken as reason to suppose an old earth. This changed after the Second World War, thanks on the one hand to the influence of Seventh-day Adventist theology—it always took the days as literal days and the earth’s time span as 6,000 years—and on the other hand to the receptive nature of evangelical culture.8 This was the time of the Cold War with fears of nuclear conflagration. Armageddon started to loom large in many minds, and this was reason for a “dispensationalist” theology—periods of time brought to violent ends, the first being the expulsion from Eden and the last and future being the End of Times. The Noachian Deluge taken literally was a key piece of evidence, and thanks to the enterprising authors of The Genesis Flood (1961)—John Whitcomb, a biblical scholar, and Henry Morris, a hydraulic engineer—a “Young Earth” literalism was promoted with much success.9 Creation science, so-called because the insistence was that it was scientific and hence could circumvent the First Amendment–based prohibition on teaching Genesis in state-supported biology classes, owed little historically to Plato—who I am sure would be absolutely horrified that I am including it in a tradition started by him—but it made direct design, purpose, absolutely central. Design in the world of organisms, and then in the scriptures, put all in context and pointed the way forward for the believer. “We must go to the Scriptures for salvation. The scientific evidence for design and creation and the Creator are vital to present to those who do not know or believe the Bible (note Acts 14:15–17 and 17:22–29), but then they must go to the Scriptures if they would learn about the true God and His work of creation and redemption.”10
Creation science met its own Armageddon in the state of Arkansas in 1981, when—thanks to the testimony of a cohort of experts, including Francisco Ayala and Stephen Jay Gould—a federal judge ruled that it is religion, not science, and hence could not be taught in state-funded schools.11 But like a phoenix from the ashes, Creationism Lite arose, happily named “intelligent design theory” (IDT), the brainchild of Harvard-educated, Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson.12 For some of its enthusiasts, IDT is a smoother version of Young Earth creationism. For others, it is the foundation of a form of “guided evolution” that Gray would have understood and appreciated—an evolution where God steps in continuously and keeps things on track. No matter, the point is that at its heart is purpose, and this is something imposed from without. Central to IDT is the claim that the organic world is so “irreducibly complex” that blind law could not in principle explain it. We must invoke a designer of some sort. Usually IDT supporters rush to say that they do not imply that the designer must be a Designer—a god or God, specifically the Christian God. In fact, they are being a bit disingenuous here, for by and large they do mean the Christian God. Of one thing you can be certain, they don’t think the Designer is a grad student on Andromeda, fooling around with the life-forms, using Planet Earth for its dissertation.
Michael Behe, the best-known scientific supporter of IDT, makes much of bacteria, specifically, those that use a flagellum (a kind of whiplike strand) powered by a sort of rotary motor, to propel themselves along. Everything is highly complex and nothing will function until and unless every part is absolutely in its place. For example, the “flagellin,” the external filament of the flagellum, is a single protein. It makes a kind of paddle surface that contacts the liquid during swimming. Near the surface of the cell, one finds a thickening—just as needed—so that the filament can be connected to the rotor drive. In turn, we need a connector, something known as a “hook protein.” The filament has no motor. It has to be somewhere else. “Experiments have demonstrated that it is located at the base of the flagellum, where electron microscopy shows several ring structures occur.”13 From all of this, Behe concludes that the whole system is far too complex to have come into being in a gradual fashion. It had to be formed in one step, and such a process must involve some sort of designing cause. A similar argument is used of other phenomena, for instance, the blood-clotting cascade, a rather complicated sequential chemical process that takes place when you cut yourself and the gushing blood shortly starts to coagulate and stops pouring out. In both cases Behe claims there is no way that blind law could have created them. He argues this way primarily on the grounds that if all parts are not in place all at once, things do not work. He also, by illustration, uses the analogy of a five-part mousetrap, arguing that it too would not work unless all five parts are in place. It too is irreducibly complex.
Behe writes in a tremendously plausible sort of way, deftly using turns of phrase and attractive examples to bolster his case. I say, in admiration and without irony or sarcasm, that he must be a wonderful classroom teacher. Yet those with knowledge of the pertinent science have been all over the IDT claims, showing that far from inexplicable by selection, biologists now have some pretty good ideas about how these sorts of things occur.14 A couple of things to keep in mind are that rarely if ever is a complex part started from scratch. As often as not, something being used for an entirely different process is co-opted and then put to use. As one example, take the Krebs cycle, a highly complex process with many steps, used by the cell to provide energy. It did not just spring into being. It was a “bricolage,” built bit by bit from other pieces. The Krebs cycle was built through the process that Jacob called “evolution by molecular tinkering,” stating that evolution does not produce novelties from scratch: it works on what already exists.15 In any case, it is simply not true that the sorts of examples that Behe provides have no antecedents or clues as to how they might have come into being gradually. The blood-clotting cascade has over thirty moves, but many are more or less repetitions and could simply have come through duplication.16 There are examples of functioning cascades with far fewer steps. And the mousetrap has given rise to many happy hours of tinkering. You can, it appears, make a functioning trap with only four parts, with only three parts, with only two parts, and even with only one part. Admittedly, it is not a great trap, but remember that natural selection does not demand excellence. Just doing better than competitors. Until someone can show how you can make a trap with no parts at all, a one-part trap looks like a pretty good option.
Guided Evolution
What of the attempt to put God directly into the historical process, seeing his hand as guiding the course of evolution, from the primitive up to the human? This was the claim of Gray and Wallace, and of the post-Origin Tennyson. In the “Higher Pantheism,” a poem read in 1869 at the first meeting of the Metaphysical Society (a group of believers and skeptics who met to discuss issues of mutual interest), God is behind all of the actions of unbroken law.
God is law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us rejoice,
For if His thunder by law the thunder is yet His voice.
Law is God, say some: no God at all, says the fool;
For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool;
And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot
see;
But if we could see and hear, this Vision—were it not He?
And, to the end of his life, Tennyson saw God as working his purpose out.
Where is one that, born of woman, altogether can escape
From the lower world within him, moods of tiger, or of ape?
Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning Age of ages
Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape?
All about him shadow still, but, while the races flower and
fade,
Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on the shade,
Till the peoples all are one, and all their voices blend in
choric
Hallelujah to the Maker “It is finish’d. Man is made.”
The story continues down to the present. John Paul II, conservative about doctrine and morality, was ever sympathetic to science—a reflection perhaps of the fact that he was the most famous professor from Cracow University in Poland since Nicolaus Copernicus. He embraced evolution, even Darwinism. But blind law could not do it all. In his encyclical Humani Generis, Pope Paul VI asserted: “The spiritual soul is created by God.” His successor reaffirmed this point: “As a result, the theories of evolution which, because of the philosophies which inspire them, regard the spirit either as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a simple epiphenomenon of that matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. They are therefore unable to serve as the basis for the dignity of the human person”; adding, “with man, we find ourselves facing a different ontological order—an ontological leap, we could say.”17
Protestants feel much this way too. The physicist-theologian Robert J. Russell calls his position NIODA, “Non-Interventionist Objective Divine Action.”18 Russell invokes quantum theory, suggesting that perhaps God flies below the radar, as it were. Think about mutations. In the Darwinian picture they occur, often on a regular basis, but have no direction. There are various reasons why they occur. Miscopying is a popular cause. We can even tell such things as why miscopying is more common in some cases than in others. At least one known cause of mutations occurs right down at the quantum level. Something happens and there is a knock-on effect and a new variation. But the thing about quantum events is that, although we may be able to quantify them over groups, we can never pin down any particular event. This is the crux. In time t, x% of genes A will mutate into genes B. Now it might be that ten seconds into t, a change would make no big difference, but that ten thousand seconds into t, a change might make all of the difference, because just such a mutation would then be needed and used. Russell suggests that this is where God makes his moves. From the viewpoint of modern science, he doesn’t interfere—you still get the same x% in time t—but when the actual mutation occurs is crucial, and God is in charge here. So God could and does guide evolution to the production of human beings.
The philosopher Elliott Sober thinks along somewhat similar lines.19 He is a nonbeliever so stresses that he does not think that God does intervene. Just that there is nothing in evolutionary theory that says he cannot intervene. In respects, it seems as if Sober’s position is even stronger than Russell’s because he does not need quantum mechanics to do the trick. No theory logically precludes some other (as yet unknown) natural cause influencing mutation rates—heat might be ignored but could be a factor—so God could step in and alter things, thus countering the unknown factor(s), and so we remain in ignorance. Or perhaps we note the changes but still have no right to insist on God. There could be something else, natural, in play. Staying with Russell, who believes that God does intervene, he thinks that his position (NIODA) is far superior to IDT. Perhaps so. It seems to me that will still have horrendous theological difficulties. If God was prepared to mutate the sperm of some poor little monkey so it could end up as our great grandfather, why does he not mutate the sperm of some chap who is about to parent a child with grave genetic issues? Once God starts to get involved in the processes, it never ends. But whether or not you agree that you should keep him out from the start, the fact is that John Paul II and Robert J. Russell are part of a tradition that thinks history shows purpose, the evolution up to humankind, and that the only way in which this could have occurred is by the direct designing intervention of the Almighty.
The Anthropic Principle
One thing that has rather dropped out of the conversation was something Plato thought an important part of the story, namely, purpose in the nonliving world. He (and Aristotle) thought we see design and purpose there, if not (at least for Aristotle) as strongly as in the living world. Although we shall see some post–Scientific Revolution support for final-cause thinking in the nonliving world, in optics particularly, generally such talk was absent and if promoted, strongly frowned upon. Remember the story of the chemist James Lovelock and the biologist Lynn Margulis—two very good scientists—who conceived the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that the earth is a living organism?20 They argued that this is shown by the fact that the earth’s temperature and atmosphere has remained far more stable—it is “homeostatic”—than one might have expected by chance, and that this demonstrates its organic nature. Things happen in or on the physical world to promote its well-being. Atmospheres and seas and the like function as they do in order to maintain stability. The outcry was deafening, with scientists scrambling to get in their criticisms. Typical was the reaction of the Canadian molecular biologist Ford Doolittle that although Jim Lovelock’s “engaging little book” gives one “a warm comforting feeling about Nature and man’s place in it,” it is based on a view of natural selection that “is unquestionably false.”21 Others were significantly less courteous.
It was biologists who reacted most strongly against Gaia, because it is they who have been fighting the purpose wars for so long, and who feel now—thanks to natural selection—they are finally winning the battle. Generally, physicists stayed out of the fight, which perhaps prepares us for the fact that today there are some physicists and fellow travelers—philosophers and theologians—who want to revive the argument from design, now basing their claims on the physical world rather than the organic world. Discussion centers on the “Anthropic Principle,” something said to come in a number of versions.22 Most obvious is the “Weak Anthropic Principle,” the WAP: “The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirements that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so.”23 This does not say a huge amount and is fairly uncontentious. If you have life like we have, then the conditions for it must have been such that life like we have appears and is sustainable.
More interesting is the “Strong Anthropic Principle,” SAP. The key idea here is that the universe had to be “fine-tuned” to get life going at all and sustain it. The various constants that govern the laws of nature could not be chosen at random but had to be very exact within incredibly narrow limits. “There exists one possible Universe ‘designed’ with the goal of generating and sustaining ‘observers.’”24 In other words, the lack of randomness implies a designer of some sort. What constants are we thinking of? Gravity for a beginning. It is 1,039 times weaker than electromagnetism. Which is just as well, for if gravity had only been 1,033 times weaker than electromagnetism, the suns of the universe would be a billion times less big and burn a million times faster. Analogously, the nuclear weak force is 1,028 times weaker than gravity. If it had been slightly weaker, the hydrogen of the universe would have been converted to helium, and that would have meant no water. Life as we know it would not be possible.
All of this points at least to an updated version of the Demiurge, even if (as is the case with design arguments) it cannot take us all the way to a Creator God. Plato was right after all! Or was he? Part of the trouble with these anthropic arguments is that we are working from a single example—our world—and it is so difficult to know if we are unique or what might have happened pretty much all of the time. Think of a number. Double it, and the answer you want is a half. Suppose there really are multiverses, alternative universes, as many physicists believe? Wouldn’t a universe like ours be bound to crop up if you tried enough times? Physics Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg writes:
In any such picture, in which the universe contains many parts with different values for what we call the constants of nature, there would be no difficulty in understanding why these constants take values favorable to intelligent life. There would be a vast number of big bangs in which the constants of nature take values unfavorable for life, and many fewer where life is possible. You don’t have to invoke a benevolent designer to explain why we are in one of the parts of the universe where life is possible: in all the other parts of the universe there is no one to raise the question.25
The fact that it is our universe or part of the universe in which there is life is no more improbable than that someone holds a winning lottery ticket. Given enough rolls of the dice or the drum, there was bound to be a winner eventually. The same with livable universes. Obviously, if we didn’t hold the winning ticket, we wouldn’t be around to tell everyone about it. That’s no miracle, any more than that the person who won the lottery is the person who quits work and goes to live in the South of France.
Even in our universe, one gets the sense that often these anthropic arguments work from the alteration of just one parameter.26 Everything collapses, and the cry is that there must be more than chance. But what if you alter not just one constant but several in unison? It is less obvious now that life is impossible. Think of an analogy. You have a soccer team with a brilliant center forward. Your whole strategy is built on getting him and the ball up close to the opponents’ goal while avoiding the offside rule. Then he breaks a leg. Does this mean you will never win another game? No! However, you probably aren’t simply going to substitute for him, using someone else in the same role. You might, for instance, start to pay more attention to defense, hoping that the opposition will wear down and then collectively you can strike. As in physics. Pushing the analogy a bit, if your ultimate aim is to make a living entertaining spectators, you might use your team’s talents by switching from soccer to cricket or baseball, and providing thrills there instead. Are we convinced that only the kind of life-form we know—carbon-based and so forth—is the only viable life-form? What about the Horta in Star Trek? Unlike some people I know, I am not that keen on sex with someone made from silicone, but if they can write music like Bach, I’m game. To go to the concert, that is.
There are still the Humean philosophical arguments, holding as much here as with traditional design arguments. Do we have one designer or a squad of designers? Is there a trail of botched attempts and are we just one attempt on a course to a perfect universe? What about the problem of evil? Is this something that had to be? And so forth. And in any case, Weinberg suggests that often things are not as precise—nor need they be as precise—as people think. The formation of carbon is often cited as a case where super accuracy was needed. To make carbon from helium, you need a huge energy state above normal—in fact, about 7 million electron volts (MeV) above normal. However, it also turns out that if you go over 7.7 MeV, things won’t work properly. Miraculously, apparently, there is such a needed state for carbon, which comes in at 7.65 MeV. All of this surely cannot be chance. Carbon misses the cutoff by .05 MeV, or less than 1 percent. Over the cutoff and no life. Under the cutoff and abundant life. But, asks Weinberg, why the figure of 7.65? It turns out that this is a function of the carbon production—first you combine two helium nuclei to make beryllium, and then you bring in a third to make carbon. And here, apparently, there is more flexibility. The beryllium-helium join up occurs at 7.4 MeV. So you cannot go more than 0.3 MeV more before things come apart. But this means that although, in fact, the carbon state (at 7.65) misses the target by .05 MeV, remember: this is against a rise of .25 MeV (from 7.4 to 7.65). This means that the upper target of 7.7 is actually missed by 20 percent (.05/.25) rather than 1 percent. So, in other words, while it is true that the 7.7 figure is fixed as we know it, further down the road, things are nothing like as tight, and the coincidences seem less striking.
There are other cases where the “coincidences” involve orders of magnitude of wriggle room.27 No need to pursue things here, for in the end, the trouble with these sorts of arguments is that nobody is going to change anyone else’s mind. Biologists are so sick of design arguments that if the heavens opened and Almighty God yelled down that he exists, they would not take him seriously. Physicists are to the sciences what philosophers are to the humanities, convinced that they are the best and brightest, and no one has any authority to challenge them. Even if they are not themselves very keen on design arguments, they are not about to let biologists make the decisions. Let us simply conclude that one should beware of the gods bearing gifts. Anthropic arguments have a way to go before they will be at all convincing, and the science is developing so quickly that in the end there may indeed be nothing to grasp.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
One final word. God had a rough time in the nineteenth century. For all that, there were those who saw in the devastation ways of rebuilding in a more theologically satisfying manner. The arguments for the existence of God—particularly the argument from design—were taking a horrendous beating. Perhaps the right way forward was not to defend them—as in this chapter we have seen people doing and as, in the religious world, Thomists still do—but to argue that the demise of natural theology was a good thing. “Teleological observations on things often proceed from a well-meant wish to display the wisdom of God as it is especially revealed in nature … Whole books used to be written in this spirit. It is easy to see that they promoted the genuine interest neither of religion nor of science. External design stands immediately in front of the idea: but what thus stands on the threshold often for that reason is least adequate.”28 Reason undermines faith. True belief in God—faith-based belief in God—is meaningless, or at the least gelded, by an underpinning of argument. Wherein lies the virtue if all you are doing is that which can be demonstrated? In his analysis of the Abraham and Isaac story, the Danish philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard stresses how Abraham’s action of taking his son to the altar to be sacrificed is truly “absurd.”29 And yet it is the paradigmatic example of faith. In the twentieth century, this idea was picked up and strongly endorsed and defended by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth: “Every visible status, every temporal road, every pragmatic approach to faith, is, in the end, the negation of faith.”30
Whether or not one can or should thus eliminate natural theology, including design arguments, has been happy fodder for many a student in search of a topic for a doctoral dissertation. Remember: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork” (Ps. 19:1). The point is that in the eyes of many sophisticated Christians, wanting to make the second part of the Design argument, from design-like to real Design, is false theology. Battles over Intelligent Design Theory and the anthropic principle and the like have a very old-fashioned look about them. A bit like arguing about whether it is moral for women to use the pill.