“…Is not this the carpenter’s son?”
some further remarks on Darwinism and “evolution’s mistress”
A wag met Nasrudin. In his pocket he had an egg. “Tell
me, Mulla; are you any good at guessing games?”
“Not bad,” said Nasrudin.
“Very well, then: tell me what I have in my pocket.”
“Give me a clue, then.”
“It is shaped like an egg, it is yellow and white inside,
and it looks like an egg.”
“It must be some sort of cake,” said Nasrudin.
Last weekend, Subboor Ahmad kindly invited me on his channel to talk over Darwinian evolutionary theory.
The relative merits of the theory can be debated1 but even supposing it were shown to be a good theory, as far as it goes, it would still be in error. Of course, a heretical statement like this immediately disqualifies me from any academic debate on the matter, but consensus has never been a reliable metric for anything other than popularity, and if the qualifications for voicing one’s view on the theory include having pledged allegiance to it, then the debate has already left the path of science.
If a delivery man came to the door with a bill for 4,000 boxes of corn on the cob that I never ordered, I would regard it at most with bemused interest if he showed me the receipts so I could ensure the sums were correct. And if he then proceeded to produce proof of transportation and shipping calendars and documentation, and further, records of crop yields in Iowa, and so on, it wouldn’t change anything essential about the situation because, obviously, I didn’t place the order to begin with so the entire scenario hinges on a hypothetical. Similarly, the Darwinian theory purports to explain speciation in an imaginary mindless, non-teleological world. But what world is this? The theory is, as the saying goes, not even wrong. The so-called “blind watchmaker”2 responsible for performing the function of natural selection that ostensibly gave rise to the innumerable diversities of life is nothing that we encounter in real life except as an abstraction from that mode of thinking. Instead, the scientific world is a ghost of scientific methodology. In other words, “nature,” and, by extension, the physical universe, as conceived in the contemporary scientific paradigm, doesn’t really exist.
To explain, I would like to contrast the modern view of Nature with the traditional one. Cosmologies other than our own did not conceive of Creation as a stochastic accident. Instead, the Earth was generally conceived as the body of a deity, or as the careful handiwork of God.3 Materialist scientists resuscitated the eccentric notion of blind, material “atoms in a void” from Democritus and his followers and proceeded to exalt it as the standard paradigm of Nature. The researchers in question, being materialists, look at Nature only materially and hence, matter is all they see. As Blake says, “by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see Nature at all.”4 Henri Bortoft elaborates on this point:
In fact, “nature” was replaced by “matter” long ago. Although scientists often refer to “nature,” this only hides the fact that nature has been reduced to matter by modern science, so that we now think they are the same thing. But whereas there can be an atomic theory of matter, there cannot be an atomic theory of nature. This is born out by the fact that, according to modern science, most of what we attribute to nature, color for instance, is really not in nature but in human beings. It is reclassified as only a subjective experience. When that which seems to belong to nature is relocated in human beings, what is left is matter and not nature at all. There is little wonder that the development of modern science has led to the crisis of nature!5
Scientists take as their “inertial, existential frame” non-living, non-teleological matter and try to explain the existence of the diametric opposite of these qualities embodied in all life and most especially in ourselves. But this existential frame can only ever be a postulate and never a fact or an observation because it would be impossible, by definition, to encounter such a fact or make such an observation. Other times and other cultures have approached the problem by reasoning analogically from what we experience immediately to what we do not. Ours, however, has insisted on beginning from what a few have only conjectured and demanding that everything we can experience must somehow, Procrustes-like, fit itself into this frame.
To illustrate the departure of our modern ideas from traditional ones, consider the etymology of the very word φύσις, from which “physics” is derived: it is a verbal noun based on a Greek verb which means roughly “to grow,” “to swell,” “to emerge,” “to be born,” “to appear.” Phyo (φύω) is also cognate with the English verb “to be.” In fact, physis is related to genesis both semantically and syntactically, since both are process-nouns crystallized from verb stems. This is to say that they indicate conceptual reifications of ongoing events. Thus, physis originally meant something like “becoming,” or “be-ing” as a present participle. In other words, being is something that every being is doing. This meaning retained some of its vigour in its Latin translation as natura, which also relates to being born. Indeed “nature” is a cognate with “natal” and “nativity.”6
As indicated, Early Modern thinkers invented the concept of “nature,” in its current sense. Before the Scientific Revolution, there was no equivalent word for what we mean by either “physics” or “nature” today because there was no equivalent concept. The closest equivalent for Ancient and Medieval thinkers was physis (φύσις) or natura on the one hand, and ousia (οὐσία) or esse on the other, in Greek and Latin counterparts, respectively. The former means “being” with the connotation of “becoming,” “generating,” and “existing,” and the latter in the sense of “essence,” and neither to their modern English cognates. Indeed, for pre-Modern peoples the concept of Nature integrally compassed both of the meanings that have been sundered in our current usage. Nearly all ancient and traditional cosmologies conceived of the Earth as the Mother Goddess. Hesiod, for instance, writes in the Theogony circa 750 BC:
And Earth (Γαῖα “Gaia”) first bore starry Heaven (Οὐρανός “Uranus”), equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods. And she brought forth long hills, graceful haunts of the goddess Nymphs who dwell amongst the glens of the hills.7
The Scientific Revolution and thence the birth of Modern Science was inaugurated when the likes of Bacon and Galileo began to conceptualize Nature not as a goddess and also not as an organism, but as an artefact, whose form, motion, and creative principle were imposed, as laws, from an intelligence outside of it. In some ways, this was an inheritance from traditional Christianity, which depicted God in rough analogy with a craftsman—though an odd kind of craftsman who accomplishes his handiwork through his λόγος, his Word, and not with tools.8
But an analogy is not an identity and it is perhaps more illustrative to dwell on the disanalogy between God and a craftsman as we ordinarily imagine the denotation of this term. Creation through the Word is substantially different from creation with tools because in the first case, Creation is something like an instantiation, or even an incarnation, while in the latter case it is more like a product. God creates from wholes and not from parts, and he works from the inside as well as from without. In the first case, the creative principles, though transcendent to their objects, are also immanent in them, as formal causes, for instance.
The view of an inherence of the creative powers in Creation, again, gives rise to the picture of Nature as physis, “growing.”
Artefacts, mechanisms, and technology don’t grow, but are rather wrought, fashioned. It has to be fashioned because Nature alone is, as Steven Weinberg so memorably phrased it in 1993, “a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents.” He elaborates:
It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning.... It is very hard to realise that this is all just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realise that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.9
Darwin’s evolutionary theory was embraced because it promised to explain the infinite excellences of Nature in a manner congenial to the basic materialist cosmology. Philosopher Thomas Nagel eloquently explains this appeal:
Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of the nonteleological laws of physics on the material of which we and our environments are all composed.10
Modern evolutionary theory is part and parcel of the entire materialistic paradigm of Nature and existence. The theory is endemic to a particular intellectual climate and would soon wither up and die in another one.
Following an interview like the above and an article like “evolution’s mistress,” people of course wonder, incredulously, whether I even believe in evolution or whether I even believe in science. The second question strikes me as something like asking whether I believe in hammers and the fist, like whether I believe in the existence of a papermill on the dark side of the Moon in Neverland. The second question is premised on a category mistake and the first, on fairy-tale whose object is make-believe, just like our modern view of lifeless, material Nature. “Nature” is a euphemism for “Divine Creation,” and it’s impossible to explain the advent of Divine Creation through stochastic processes and natural selection because even if he were rolling dice, they would be dice that he first intentionally created
.
Though one would hardly know this from within the precincts of modern academic culture
cf. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (1986)
Psalm 19:1-2:
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
William Blake, letter to John Trusler, August 23, 1799:
And I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision. I see every thing I paint in this world, but everybody does not see alike. To the eyes of a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the Sun, and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees.
Bortoft, The Wholeness of Nature (1996)
If one consider this connection, together with that which holds between materia and mater, whose English cognates are “matter,” and “mother,” respectively, we can reach an intimation of the shining morning world that faced the pre-Modern minds, and from which autumnal world of res extensa that confronts us today gradually precipitated, like dry leaves out of living sap, or salt-crystals from a solution. Indeed the etymologies still retain vestiges of the past, which can be deciphered in a manner akin to the archaeologist interpreting a fossil record.
Lines 105–30, translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White.
Jesus, indeed, was called “the carpenter’s son,” which, though nominally a reference to his father, Joseph, is also a reference to God in his aspect as Creator. Cf. Matthew 13:55
…Is not this the carpenter’s son? is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas?
Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (1993), Epilogue, p. 154
Nagel, The Last Word, New York: Oxford University Press (1997), p. 130-1. Nagel, though it perhaps crosses the line into armchair psychology, elaborates in the full quote on some of the psychological underpinnings to the modern scientific paradigm:
I am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well‐informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of the nonteleological laws of physics on the material of which we and our environments are all composed. There might still be thought to be a religious threat in the existence of the laws of physics themselves, and indeed the existence of anything at all— but it seems to be less alarming to most atheists.
It's interesting, as you point out, that Darwinism was embraced after first embracing the materialistic view of nature. It fits with Thomas Kuhn's observations about the structure of scientific revolution following shifts in philosophy, not the other way around.
One of the riddles in the Gospels, and maybe the greatest of all, is the treatment of Jesus in his home town. Jesus had spoken many times in the synagogue of Nazareth, and what Matthew 13, and Luke 4, chronicle is this unusual attitude and treatment, and especially Luke. Jesus asks the attendant to hand him the Book of Isaiah, and he opens it to chapter 61, and reads. His reading from this chapter is designed to inform his fellow parishioners that Christ is now amongst them. Then, after reading, he returns the book, and everyone is looking favorably upon him. They acknowledge, "isn't this Joseph's son"? And his stepmother, Mary, and stepbrothers and sisters". Then, a Voice speaks out of Jesus with a slightly different inflection and tone. It says:
"No doubt you will quote this proverb to Me, ‘Physician, heal yourself! Whatever we heard was done at Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.’” 24 And He said, “Truly I say to you, no prophet is welcome in his hometown. 25 But I say to you in truth, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was shut up for three years and six months, when a great famine came over all the land; 26 and yet Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. 27 And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” 28 And all the people in the synagogue were filled with rage as they heard these things; 29 and they got up and drove Him out of the city, and led Him to the brow of the hill on which their city had been built, in order to throw Him down the cliff. 30 But passing through their midst, He went His way. Luke 4
So, this is one of those incommensurables that we simply do not know until we go further in the investigative process. Why can't a prophet be duly recognized in his own home town? The people knew Jesus, and were even pleased to hear his words. What caused them within seconds to haul him out of the synagogue and want to throw him off the cliff?
Was it the One who spoke out of the mouth of Jesus who inflamed the people? And why? Jesus never went back to his hometown of Nazareth. He transferred to Capernaum, where He received a better reception.