Denial and Reality
Faithful Syence #33
I have been speaking and writing about new biological research showing that agency, cognition and teleology (ACT) are properties of all living creatures—and that they are only found in life. This idea has met with some resistance among philosophical naturalists and materialists. For many of them, what we think of agency (or free will) is simply the result of automatic chemical or electrical processes within cells and between tissues.
This attitude is not new, of course. Sam Harris’ 2012 book Free Will and Daniel Dennett’s 1991 Consciousness Explained argued that these phenomena are illusory—they don’t really exist. It is not a coincidence that these two men were among the four original leaders of the New Atheist movement.
The New Atheists were quick to deny a number of other phenomena such as design in biology, morality, teleology, and anything else that could not be thoroughly explained by application of the known laws and principles of physical science. All the wonders of biological reality were considered to have arisen from the processes of neo-Darwinian evolution by natural selection. While this explanation certainly works for the majority of biological characteristics in the majority of organisms, it turns out not to be universally true for all of them.
The problem is magnified for the case of human beings, whose reality includes such things as a knowledge of good and evil, various spiritual and transcendent behaviors and thought processes, and the entire realm of consciousness and creativity, including music, art, technology, science, and wonder.
Evolutionary psychology has been used to answer some of these questions sometimes successfully, but often in ways that are embarrassingly deficient in logic and rationality. For other questions, the answer given is denial, as in the case of Harris and Dennett. The unstated rationale for this denial of reality is that if we can’t explain a phenomenon using established science, then it doesn’t exist. Since evil has no natural explanation (other than being a behavior related to natural selection), then there is no such thing, other than in the minds of humans. Since design implies a Designer, and code implies a Coder, we must call such phenomena “apparent design,” or “code-like.”
I believe the collapse of New Atheism might be at least partially due to the enormous conflict between reason and the denialist philosophies of this form of atheism.
I have also often stressed the fact that the pioneers of the new biological science that includes all the features of ACT are generally not religious. They do not attempt to explain the mystery of the reality that (for example) bacteria act purposefully thanks to their cognitive awareness of their environments by reference to a divine creator.
But I, as a Christian, feel no such hesitation. I believe the reality of the phenomena the atheists deny or downplay is in fact evidence for God. For agnostics or reasonable atheists, they at least point to something beyond the known territories of physics and chemistry.
God created our world to include natural laws, which can be expressed mathematically and are discoverable by us humans (which would arguably be unlikely in a meaningless universe). Assuming that is true, then I see no reason why there would not be such laws governing biology. Perhaps some such, as-yet unknown, natural but God-given principles will explain why Bach and the Beatles could do what they did, not to mention Newton, Einstein, Maxwell, and McClintock.
What we must not do is deny the reality of those things about life we do not understand simply because their existence so clearly contradicts our dogmatic certainty. Such dogma includes the absence of any form of divinity, and the exclusive use of gene-centric, natural selection-based evolutionary explanations for everything in biology. That is neither good science nor good philosophy, nor even just plain good.
I seem to recall some wag suggested that Dennett's book, "Consciousness Explained" should really have been entitled, "Consciousness Explained Away." I find it remarkable how philosophical presuppositions can hamper the understanding and interpretation of evidence. Recalling the expression "thinking outside the box", materialists live in a sub-universe that doesn't even use the whole box. Your post shows how some scientists are starting to break down old mental blocks that restricted understanding. Very informative and enjoyable reading.
Simon Conway Morris I believe showed evience that biological evolution converges on common solutions, like the insect eye and our camera eyes;