Intelligent Design Goes to Court

As The Baltimore Sun of September 26, 2005, reports in "Dispute over evolution goes on trial in U.S. court", a case is now being tried in a federal court in Pennsylvania in which eight families suing the Dover (Pa.) Area School District claim their church-state separation rights are being violated by the school district's insertion of Intelligent Design into the 9th-grade biology curriculum.

A little Google investigation turns up this site with detailed information about the case. The official title of the case is Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District. It's being heard in the U.S. District Court, Middle District of Pennsylvania, in Harrisburg, Pa., before Judge John E. Jones III.

"The [Dover Area School District] policy [being challenged by the plaintiffs] requires that a statement be read before classes on evolution that says Charles Darwin's theory is 'not a fact' and has inexplicable 'gaps.' It refers students to an intelligent-design textbook for more information," says the newspaper. "The plaintiffs, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, argue that the policy — which does not require students to study intelligent design — serves religious, not secular ends, violating the First Amendment."

Later in the article we read, "Of the 3,508 students in the school district just outside York, 277 ninth-graders will study biology this year. [Richard B. Katskee, a plaintiff lawyer with Americans United for Separation of Church and State] said evolution is presented only in half of one class period; [Richard Thompson, a defense lawyer for the school district] said it is taught in two full sessions."

Apparently, the crux of the legal issue boils down to the constitutionality of the following statement, which is required to be read in class to high-school biology students before Darwin's theory is introduced:

The state standards require students to learn about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and to eventually take a standardized test of which evolution is a part.

Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it is still being tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.

Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book Of Pandas and People is available for students to see if they would like to explore this view in an effort to gain an understanding of what intelligent design actually involves. As is true with any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind.

The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life up to individual students and their families. As a standards-driven district, class instruction focuses on the standards and preparing students to be successful on the standards-based assessments.

(I have extracted this verbiage from a motion filed by the plaintiff parents, available in PDF form here.)

Students who object to hearing this statement are supposedly asked in advance to step out of the class while the statement is being read. Still, the plaintiffs allege, their children's constitutional rights are being violated.


The text mentioned in the statement, Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins, is a recent book by Percival Davis and others which proposes an "intelligent cause" as a better explanation of the origin of species than Darwin's. It is compatible with the Intelligent Design movement.

According to the newspaper article, the actual biology textbook being used in the Dover Area School District is one written by Kenneth R. Miller, "a Brown University cell biologist and devout Catholic."

A follow-up article, "Witness says Pa. district hurting science education," appeared in the same newspaper on September 27, 2005. It quoted Miller as saying, on the witness stand, "It's the first movement to try to drive a wedge between students and the scientific process." Miller was characterized as "the first witness called yesterday by lawyers for eight families suing the Dover Area School District."

So, whatever wlse we have here, we have an argument between two textbook writers as to what ought to be taught to 9th-graders about evolution.


But it's much, much more than that. The first newspaper article I mentioned earlier says:

However [Judge] Jones decides the Dover case, the dispute over ID may not likely be settled there.

"Our aim is to get to the Supreme Court," [defense lawyer] Thompson said.

So we're talking about a court case that will potentially determine whether our schoolkids can be taught that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is bankrupt science ... or, worse, a kind of godless religion masquerading as science.

We're talking about a case that might eventually make it constitutional, in teaching our American youngsters about evolution, to invoke an Intelligent Designer as the scientific cause of the origin of species — as long as God is never mentioned by name, of course.

We're talking about teaching an idea that, at its core, is creationist. Though Intelligent Design accepts that all species derive over eons of geological time from a single common ancestor, it does not accept that this could have happened without supernatural help.

What's really bankrupt here, it seems to me, is the notion being offered by the Dover Area School District (DASD) that educators do their duty by (a) suggesting that the Darwinian theory of evolution that students are about to be taught is bogus; (b) mentioning a book in the library whose view — Intelligent Design — is not bogus; and (c) justifying teaching Darwin's theory anyway, based solely on the need to prepare students for "standards-based assessments."

What are we trying to do here, raise a generation of cynics?


Let's look more closely at the DASD statement, then. It holds that "the theory [i.e., Darwin's] is not a fact" and that "gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence."

Yes, it's just a theory — quite as well-established, though, among scientists, as Einsteinian relativity theory — but, no, there are really no gaps in Darwin's theory. The complained-of gaps are in the evidence for the theory — the fossil record — not in the theory itself. The geological record, consisting mainly of fossilized animal life, doesn't show all the gradual changes Darwin expected to occur in a slow evolutionary process by which new species replace old ones under the steady guidance of impersonal natural selection.

Those "gaps" or "missing links" in the fossil record have been explained by many of Darwin's defenders as being the result of evidentiary sparseness: we simply don't have access to all the fossils we need to prove Darwin right beyond a shadow of a doubt. Absence of evidence is not, the defenders claim, evidence of absence.

The "gaps" have also been explained by some revisionist Darwinists, such as Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, as stemming from "punctuated equilibrium." By digging down through the geologic strata in any one fossil location, we are apt to see a long reign by Species A (an "equilibrium") abruptly terminated (a "punctuation") by its unfortunate extinction and rapid replacement by Species B.

But, as punctuated equilibrium theory recognizes, the forms that ought to be intermediate between A and B aren't typically there. Why not? Probably because B evolved somewhere else and then, having migrated to A's bailiwick, elbowed A out of existence. And we simply don't have the fossils from wherever B evolved to show exactly how that process happened. Yet presumably it happened, albeit fairly rapidly in terms of geologic time, by very tiny baby steps of evolutionary change which would have satisfied Darwin.

The DASD statement takes no notice of punctuated equilibrium or any other wholly naturalistic explanation for the "gaps" in the fossil record.


In fact, I would say that the DASD statement is so vague — and where it does pin itself down, so misguided — as to give students nothing of value to put in their hoped-for "open mind."

If students are subsequently given a half class period or even two full periods of Darwinism, that can't possibly be enough to give them any hope of understanding the ins and outs of punctuated equilibrium theory and judging whether it might properly account for the "gaps."

That may be just fine with IDers, though. Since nature abhors a vacuum, if a mind is "opened" and then not given a fair chance to choose among all the candidates to fill it, it's apt to jump to the unfounded conclusion that you can't account for the origin of species without assuming divine intervention.

Of Annunciation and Acceptance

I talked in Of Time and Creation about the idea that God's creativity is manifested through statements that are, in philosophy lingo, analytically necessary. I suggested this happens by virtue of what I dubbed God's "logos power." Analytically necessary statements are certain to be true simply because of what they contain: that is, because of that which they can be analyzed into. "Bachelors are unmarried" analytically contains all that is needed to establish its truth. So, I am contending, does "Let there be light" — when, that is, such a statement is uttered by God.

Why? (Warning: here begins what I would call "pure theology.") Because the utterance is the Word of God, or, in the Greek expression, it is Logos. That is, "Let there be light," when divinely uttered, both manifests and contains the Word of God spoken of in the Bible. What the utterance says, therefore, cannot not be true.


But, I would contend, we must understand this type of self-contained analytic necessity of God's "logos utterances" to be ineluctably true only after we factor out our usual modern conception of time.

My view of this matter goes along with what Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity says about the biblical (and Jesus's) understanding of time, quite different from our modern concept. Nolan says we think of time as a quantitative measuring tool, a yardstick for events. That's anything but biblical. In the Bible, time can't be separated from events.

For Biblical time is qualitative, not quantitative. It is dispensational, in the sense that every individual "time" is imbued by God with its own particular quality or dispensation, recognizable through the "signs of the times."

For instance, the "time" of John the Baptist was qualitatively distinct from the "time" of Jesus, even though the two "times" overlapped in the modern, quantitative, scientific view of time as a measurable flow. John's "time" was one for repentance, the Gospels say, while Jesus's "time" was one for joyful celebration.

That celebratory mode or dispensation, clearly, was appropriate for the coming of the kingdom of heaven, spoken of also as the coming of the Son of Man. It was thus the dispensational quality pertaining to Jesus's "time."


In the symbolism of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament, God's ultimate victory is characterized as one in which a returned Christ weds his Bride — the Bride of Christ being us, his Church as a corporate body, here in our world.

But Jesus himself warned that we are not to know the hour and the day of these so-called end things. "But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only," Jesus says in Matthew 24:36.

One of the messages here, from the point of view of us moderns, is that our objective, quantitative, measurable, scientific notion of time has nothing to do with God's words coming true at some supposed time "in the future." God's words are always already true.

When we try to translate that notion into our own modern terms, we are hamstrung by our intellect's insistence that they, God's words, must correspond to our concepts of causality in time. Our science tells us of cause-and-effect relationships that play out in the physical world in which time has a given, uniform, tick-tick-tick quantity. All time is relative, true, but it is relative to the speed of light — the absolute time it takes for light to travel from point A to point B in a vacuum. The speed of light is a constant of physics. And physics is the base of all science.

But, no. God's "logos power" to utter propositions that are always already true — shall we now call these utterances "commands" or "annunciations"? — is causality outside time, when time is construed in the unbiblical way in which we moderns are wont to construe it.


I call God's logos utterances "annunciations" because of another well-known event in the Christian Bible in which the Lord God takes as his "bride" a being from this world: Mary, mother of Jesus. This event is preceded by the announcing angel Gabriel coming to Mary and telling her "you will conceive in your womb and bear a son" (Luke 1:31). Mary, taken quite by surprise, since she was as yet without a husband, signals her acceptance of the angelic annunciation by saying, "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to your word" (v. 1:38).

Then, in verse 1:45, the coming true of all this is spoken of as a "fulfillment" (Revised Standard Version). So the fulfillment of divine commands, which has to do with causality outside time, takes place, from our perspective, in time. Confusing, huh? We have to think of this scenario in two mutually contradictory senses at once. At one and the same time, the Incarnation was always already true, and it depended on Mary's contingent acceptance of the angel's annunciation to her.

Clearly, in the Virgin Birth we're not dealing with something that makes sense from the perspective of our modern scientific ideas of causation and time. Science is blind to the Incarnation. Science deals with nomic necessity — natural law — and (if I am right) the fulfillment of God's logos utterances is more akin to analytic necessity, once the dimension of "scientific time" as a quantity, not a quality, has been collapsed right out of our understanding of biblical experience.

We have to do the same sort of mental "collapsing" to make sense of Jesus's proclamation that his "kingdom of heaven" is both "at hand" and yet to come, do we not? We have to collapse that promise as we read it in the Gospels together with that found in the book of Revelation to understand that the fulfillment of these twin promises is a single event that was always already true. It's just that our modern view of time as a series of steady ticks of a cosmic clock obscures the biblical view of "times" as epochs of fulfillment of God's preconceived intentions.


So it makes no sense to see a scientific-historical view of biological evolution, à la Darwin, as somehow contradicting the Bible. It doesn't contradict the Bible, and the Bible doesn't contradict it. Rather, the Bible is talking about divine creation or genesis as causality outside time which in unfathomable ways breaks into the field of time.

We read in the book of Genesis about the six days of creation, followed by a seventh day of rest. But that can't be tick-tick-tick-tick time in our modern, scientific sense, since there was as yet nothing to tick. Each day has to be a sort of epochal "time" in the Biblical sense: a disposition, a mode of experiential events, a fulfillment of God's original intent.

Science is blind to that. Science deals only with the nomic necessity of natural law, not with any sort of logical, or analytic, necessity wherein the utterance itself ("Let there be light") contains all of its own certainty and truth.

To science, such logos utterances are magic. They are mystery personified.


Intelligent Design theory doesn't allow for that insight. To IDers, God must operate causally-in-time in ways we can model in our heads. Complex organs like eyes and wings are, to them, more like productions than creations. God produces them in much the same way a watchmaker produces a watch.

I, on the other hand, envision God in eternity as making logos utterances like "Let there be sight" and "Let there be flight." They in turn create that which is always already true by virtue of what we might label analytic necessity ... but which we in the field of tick-tick-tick time experience as an inception, an advent that shows up at some point in the fossil record. Before, no wings. After, wings.

Again, science is blind to that type of "logos causation." It is causation outside time. Science can deal only with causation in time.

Darwin's Spiritual Crisis

"The spiritual crisis of Darwin," by John Darnton, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who works for The New York Times, was published in The Baltimore Sun of September 25, 2005. The commentary piece gives valuable insight into exactly what Charles Darwin's religious convictions were.

Convictions-with-an-"s" seems appropriate. According to the essay, Darwin began his career of investigation into naturalism — we call it biology — as "a believer — originally, he wanted to become a country vicar." His round-the-world voyage on the Beagle took him out of the British countryside for five years, during which time he collected evidence he would use to support his theory of evolution by natural selection ... when he finally got around to publishing it, 22 years after his return to Britain, in The Origin of Species in 1859.

By that time, Darwin was not so sure about God. He was not yet a committed atheist, but, writes Darnton, "As he aged, Darwin's atheistic convictions became stronger. ... Back when he wrote The Origin of Species (which appeared in 1859), he probably could 'be called a theist,' he noted later. But by the time he was in his 60s, receiving visitors at Down House as a famous thinker revered around the world, he readily described himself as a nonbeliever." Even so,

... Darwin himself, [Janet] Browne [a recent biographer] noted, sometimes "recoiled from seeing nature the way his [natural] selection theory demanded." Writing to his good friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker, he said: "What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low & horridly cruel works of Nature. My God, how I long for my stomach's sake to wash my hands of it."

Darwin had spent the latter part of his life "a chronic invalid with multiple maladies so confusing that most biographers believe they must have been psychological in origin." Is Darnton hinting, ever so gently, that they may have been spiritual, not psychological, woes? Darnton writes:

To read Ms. Browne's book is to get a sense of a man of steely intellect, brave enough to confront "a godless universe." For ultimately, if animals and plants are the result of impersonal, immutable forces, she observes, then "the natural world has no moral validity or purpose." We are, all of us - dogs and barnacles, pigeons and crabgrass - the same in the eyes of nature, equally remarkable and equally dispensable.

Darnton presents Darwin's journey as one in which an intellectual commitment to the idea of "the survival of the fittest," as the philosopher and biologist Herbert Spencer called Darwin's engine of evolution, natural selection, may have destroyed Darwin's spiritual and physical health. And so Darnton can say:

Darwin was not afraid to look deeply into the void. His bold view can be seen as either noble and pessimistic or noble and admirable. For people of science, he is a hero. "Denying man a privileged place in creation," wrote Primo Levi, the Italian philosopher, "he reaffirms with his own intellectual courage the dignity of man."

But some theists today continue to call Darwin a villain, not a hero. Darnton's article on Darwin, then, puts one of the great debates of modern times in a nutshell. Is it so that "the natural world has no moral validity or purpose"? Or is there a God behind it all?

Of Time and Creation

In the series of posts which began with Non-Crazy Questions (I) and ended with Non-Crazy Questions (VI), I suggested a way in which the theory of evolution might be squared with belief in God. Namely, there may be a hidden directionality in evolution toward complexity and consciousness that implies the possibility of a God behind it all.

This was particularly true in view of the (admittedly, less than ironclad) philosophy-of-mind argument that consciousness qua consciousness is explanatorily irrelevant at the level of physical cause and effect, where natural selection does its thing.

But nowhere in this speculation, which was based an argument Robert Wright presents in his book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, was there any hint of how God creates the (living) world. Even if we assume that God somehow uses evolution by natural selection as an instrument of his creation, which would make the Darwinian process but a proximate cause of our being a species here on earth, we still don't know, really, what it means to say that "God did it," or that "God was behind it."

As I said in that earlier series of posts, in the philosophical discipline which undergirds one of Wright's most telling arguments, philosophers of mind such as David J. Chalmers, author of The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, speak of different kinds of necessity, where "necessity" refers that which could not be otherwise ... in contrast to "contingency," that which would be different if something that it depends on were different.

Chalmers says (contrary to those who would argue otherwise, be it noted) that, in our world, consciousness necessarily appears whenever there is suitable functional organization (such as that of the physical level of our brain). This is a case of "nomic necessity," says Chalmers. According to the glossary of technical terms which is downloadable in PDF format here,"A proposition (or a sentence expressing a proposition) is said to be nomically necessary just in case it is necessary by virtue of natural laws. For example, the proposition that metals expand when heated is nomically necessary."

That contrasts with "metaphysical necessity": "A proposition (or a sentence expressing a proposition) is said to be metaphysically necessary just in case it is necessary by virtue of metaphysical truths. For example, if the correct metaphysics of the constitution of water says that water is H2O, then it is metaphysically necessary that non-H2O stuff even if clear, potable, odorless, tasteless, etc. is not water."

That's admittedly quite abstruse. I think of metaphysical necessity as that which is so "locked into" the basic scheme of things that not even God can change it. If consciousness were metaphysically necessary, then Chalmers would be wrong. There couldn't possibly be a "zombie world," an alternate universe where the brain's functional organization produces no sentience. But if that sort of organization produces consciousness only in worlds like ours, then nomic, natural law-based necessity is at work instead.


Neither nomic nor metaphysical necessity explains God's world-creative act, it seems to me: how divine creation works, how it is done. If a world like ours is metaphysically necessary, then there is nothing else to explain. And if a world with the laws of nature we observe were nomically necessary, there would be an insoluble chicken-and-egg problem.

We could accordingly say that the existence of the world is entirely contingent on God's creative activity. That, indeed, would seem to be the standard theological position: that God freely creates the world and is under no compulsion of necessity in doing so.

But between that free act of creation and the lawful, nomic necessity we observe through our science, there may be, operating at some level, a different kind of necessity. To see why that makes sense — if you are a believer in the Christian version of God, at least — consider what I said about the Biblical understanding of time in a post to another blog, Time, the Bible, and the Kingdom of God.

Evolution has to do with, first of all, events in time [I said in that post]. Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity says time, in the Bible and in Jesus's understanding of it, is quite different from our modern concept. In Chapter 11, "A New Time," Nolan says we think of time as a quantitative measuring tool, a yardstick for events. That's anything but biblical. In the Bible, time can't be separated from events.

Time in the Bible has a qualitative nature — philosophers would call it "phenomonological" — by means of which each individual "time" in history is characterized by God's intentions for that particular time. Those intentions present themselves to us through the "signs of the times," provided we can read them.

The signs of the times are events. But events which we think of as happening in the future were, in the minds of Jesus and the Jews in his day, already in existence. They were already conditioning events visible today.

Specifically, to Jesus the kingdom of heaven or kingdom of God, though still to come from our point of view, was already a reality. The kingdom could not not come, in the fullness of time.

That sounds to me like a form of necessity, concealed within our (false) understanding of the future as wholly contingent and as yet undetermined.


But, as I say, it's not metaphysical necessity. If it were, God would not be free not to establish it. And it's very unlikely to be nomic necessity, since if it were, the world would surely be entirely deterministic ... and most Christian theologians say man must be possessed of free will, so as to be able to freely accept God's offer of salvation.

So what kind of necessity could it be?

There's one more type of necessity listed in the glossary of technical terms, analytic necessity: "A proposition (or a sentence expressing a proposition) is said to be analytically necessary if it is necessary in virtue of its meaning. For example, many believe that the sentence 'bachelors are unmarried' is analytically necessary."

My admittedly odd idea here is that some aspects of world history — the directionality of evolution, the emergence of consciousness, the coming of God's kingdom — are analytically necessary.

Some utterance has been made, by virtue of the meaning of which certain "events" have been established in existence. Even though we may see these events, according to our perceptions of time, as yet-to-be-determined, they aren't really.

Put another way, the Biblical sentence "the kingdom of heaven is at hand" ought to be read as a proposition which, when properly recast — "the kingdom of heaven is undeniable" or "the kingdom of heaven is inevitable" — makes the "coming" of said kindgom analytically necessary.


But whose utterance is it? Clearly, it is God's. God, I am suggesting, speaks in analytically necessary propositions. For example, what I'm thinking is that "Let there be light" ought to be construed as an analytically necessary propostion.

We hear a lot in the Christian Bible — see the opening verses of the Gospel of John — about the Word of God, also known as the Logos. The Word of God, or Logos, is said to be identical with Jesus Christ, who is (according to later Christian theology) also the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Son of God the Father. (The Father is the First Person, the Holy Spirit the Third Person.)

This idea of Word of God or Logos is not easy to grasp, which is why most Christians kind of brush by it. For that matter, the triune Godhead or Holy Trinity is not an idea most believers are inclined to expatiate on.

But the Greek word Logos is the one we derive our word "logic" from. Things which are analytically necessary are a subset of things which are logically necessary, as if "All men are mortal/Socrates is a man/Therefore, Socrates is mortal" were collapsed into a single statement.

In other words, Logos is the power of utterances to become necessary truths by virtue of what they contain within themselves, without any reference whatsoever to anything outside those utterances.

We are told in the Bible that God has that power — in fact, God, in Christ, is that power.


Let me accordingly speak of "logos power." Logos power makes propositions that ordinarily would not seem so, analytically necessary. If we set aside temporal considerations of the future versus the present, these propositions are "always already true" because, for reasons independent of either metaphysical or nomic necessity, they could not be otherwise.

When we humans cogitate upon analytically necessary statements like "bachelors are unmarried," we honor — but do not ourselves possess — the logos power implied in the statement.

But God actually — and uniquely — has logos power: the ability to turn seemingly contingent declarations into analytically necessary ones.

If this admittedly half-baked notion of mine is correct, then God's creative acts inhere in what one might call "logos utterances": utterances that turn otherwise contingent declarations into analytically (i.e., internally) necessary ones.


The value of taking divine creative acts to be analytically necessary "logos utterances" is that doing so takes them out of the realm of potential conflict with the outworkings of natural laws. The latter, which are clearly at work in the history of biological evolution by natural selection, produce at most only nomic necessity. If God's mode of genesis is analytically necessary and not nomically necessary, then the two realms of necessity are orthogonal to one another.

There is accordingly no reason why we cannot speak of the truth of evolution by natural selection and also the truth of God's genesis. One is nomically necessary; the other is, by virtue of God's "logos power," analytically necessary.

Non-Crazy Questions (VI)

I've been inquiring into an argument Robert Wright presents in his book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny to the effect that Darwinian natural selection could not have crafted human consciousness. Wright holds that our inner, subjective experience of the events going on in our brains is the cause of nothing that happens in the physical world. When it comes to mental abilities, cognition is causal, consciousness isn't. If we were zombies with no sentience whatever, we'd be just as fit, evolutionarily speaking, since our behavioral functionality would be no different.

Yet it is our sentience which gives us the moral standing we customarily ascribe to ourselves, such that for one of us to take another's life is murder. It is sentience which gives our lives value and meaning. It is sentience which makes our religions make sense. In an alternate world inhabited by nothing but zombies, if the denizens had a God at all, he or she would be much, much different: a God of pure utility, not a God of ethics and morals.

Thus, according to Wright, "the hard-core scientific view that consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon, lacking real influence" (p. 307) can tell us why it is that we live in a meaningful world. How it comes about, that is, that our world is not one of evolutionarily fit robotic zombies that "lack the kinds of things many people cite as key sources of life's meaning: such feelings as undying love, devout allegiance, unmitigated triumph, and so on. ... Such a world would lack moral meaning ... [and] offer no context in which words such as 'right' and 'wrong' made sense" (p. 321).

Given the moral meaning present in our lives and world, and given that our sentience seems to have been merely a byproduct of evolution's apparent directionality in favor of increasing biological complexity — a directionality which traditional Darwinists dispute, it should be noted — Wright says that it's a "non-crazy question" to ask if there is, after all, a God. Complexity is associated with intelligence, intelligence with cognitive fitness, and (in some way not clearly stated by Wright) cognition with consciousness. If God wanted conscious creatures, he might accordingly have simply trusted evolution to produce them. We don't need to assume he made them directly out of nothingness.


When Wright calls our sentient inner experience "a mere epiphenomenon," he's drawing partly on (and somewhat oversimplifying) the view of consciousness proposed by philosopher David J. Chalmers in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.

I have dipped into Chalmers's book and found it, admittedly, tough sledding. It's basically written for other professional philosophers and talks about notions most of us have had little exposure to. For instance, it is crucial to the argument Chalmers makes that the relationship between consciousness and the physical brain be deemed one of supervenience.

Say, what?

According to Chris Eliasmith's Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind, "A set of properties or facts M supervenes on a set of properties or facts P if and only if there can be no changes or differences in M without there being changes or differences in P." Here, M is the mental set of properties/fact, P the separate physical set. Included in M are those properties/facts that constitute consciousness, along with possibly other mental properties/facts. The M facts supervene on the P facts, in the view of Chalmers, such that you can't change anything about M while leaving the physical substrate, P, wholly unchanged.

Thus, on this view, mind (specifically, the conscious mind) can never achieve independence from brain. Turned around, this view supposes that certain organizational functionality at the level of the brain (or of any other physical substrate) is always associated with consciousness.

But is this supervenience of consciousness on the physical, organizational functionality of the brain a matter of absolute necessity? Another way of asking that question is to wonder if there could ever be a zombie world Z in which there is zero consciousness, despite the same organizational functionality in the physical substrate.

If zombie world Z were impossible, it would be because there is a metaphysical necessity involved in the link between organizational functionality and consciousness. But Chalmers claims the necessity here is only a nomic one, meaning that it stems from laws of nature in our world that might not apply to a hypothetical zombie world Z. (See the glossary of technical terms which is downloadable in PDF format here for definitions of "necessity, metaphysical" and "necessity, nomic.")

Thus, the relationship that says that the complex organizational functionality of our human brains necessarily yields the consciousness we know is not logically absolute, in Chalmers's view. The supervenience involved is a natural one, not a metaphysical one. This "natural supervenience" is Chalmers's conclusion based on a lengthy line of argumentation which I admittedly have skipped over. If he is right, he opens the door to Wright's "non-crazy question" about the existence of God.

For if there is some absolute, could-never-be-otherwise, metaphysical tie among high organizational complexity, intelligence, and consciousness, then a zombie world, however readily we might be able to imagine it if we try, would be impossible. Our world, in which consciousness pops out wherever there is sufficient functional complexity, would the only type of world that there could be — since metaphysics is the study of being per se and its possibilities and impossibilities.

Thus, a metaphysical supervenience of consciousness on the physical world would cut Wright's (and Chalmers's) argument off at the knees. But a merely nomic or lawful supervenience of the sort that Chalmers proposes immediately opens the door to Wright's "non-crazy question" about God.


Not that this is Chalmers's intent. Chalmers, in fact, states in his introduction, "I am strongly inclined toward materialist reductive explanation, and I have no strong spiritual or religious inclinations" (p. xiv).

His book is basically an intellectual explanation of why he feels compelled to abandon the "materialist reductive explanation" for consciousness which the first clause in the above compound sentence addresses. "Materialism is a beautiful and compelling view of the world," he elaborates, "but to account for consciousness, we have to go beyond the resources it provides. ... I argue that there is good reason to believe that almost everything in the world can be reductively explained; but consciousness may be an exception" (pp. xiv-xv).

Chalmers is accordingly no materialist. To an orthodox materialist, the variation on dualism which Chalmers proposes is wholly out of bounds. Chalmers has it that consciousness, though not a part of the physical world, definitely exists. It supervenes on the physical world, true, but it is not itself physical. Materialism, contrariwise, holds that everything that actually exists is material or physical.

Which means that a materialist must consider consciousness to be nothing more than an illusion, or, at best, to be identical with the physical entities and events that Chalmers takes to be but consciousness's substrate. Chalmers, as a dualist though, "takes consciousness seriously" (see p. xii). He says that, beyond scientific explanations for "the processes of discrimination and action," there is yet another "something that needs explaining." That something is consciousness itself.

It accordingly seems fair to say that Chalmers intends his book as nothing more than a bold claim in favor of "naturalistic dualism" (his chapter 4 title) and against materialism. It is not a plea for anything like theism, the belief that there is a God. Thus, the second clause in the compound sentence cited above ("I have no strong spiritual or religious inclinations") is not violated by anything Chalmers says.


It is Wright who extends Chalmers's claim into a "non-crazy question" about God. In so doing, he somewhat glosses over a subtle distinction which Chalmers himself dwells on at some length: "Is This Epiphenomenalism?" (title of Chalmers's chapter 4, section 4).

Consciousness, in the view of it which Chalmers earlier works out, "seems to be a mere epiphenomenon, hanging off the engine of physical causation, but making no difference in the physical world" (p. 150). Sentience, then, "seems to lack causal efficacy" in a "physical world [that] is more or less causally closed."

But Chalmers finds such a conclusion "unpalatable," largely because it is so counterintuitive. He struggles to locate ways of avoiding it. However, he quickly dismisses strategies for doing so that "deny the causal closure of the physical [and] embrace a strong form of interactionist dualism in which the mental fills causal gaps in physical processing" (p. 151). Such an approach would violate one of the foundational constraints he lists in his introduction — "to take science seriously" (p. xiii) — in that science cannot abide causal gaps.

Thus, the four strategies which Chalmers lays out (pp. 151-155) for avoiding unpalatable epiphenomenalism amount to what he acknowledges is "metaphysical speculation" (p. 155). Suffice it to say that, for very tenuous, gauzy reasons, he feels "the issue of epiphenomenalism is not cut and dried." Yet, he writes:

It remains the case that natural supervenience [i.e., that of consciousness on the physical world] feels epiphenomenalistic. We might say that the view is epiphenomenalistic to a first approximation; if it allows some causal relevance for [conscious] experience, it does so in a subtle way. I think we can capture this first-approximation sense by noting that the view makes experience explanatorially irrelevant. We can give explanations for behavior in purely physical or computational terms, terms that neither involve nor imply phenomenology [i.e., subjective or phenomenal experience]. If experience is tied in some intimate way to causation, it is in a way that these explanations can abstract away from. (p. 156)


Clearly, Robert Wright has pretty much ignored this admittedly nice distinction between explanatory irrelevance and true epiphenomenalism. His point is that, either way, natural selection is blind to consciousness. Darwin's mechanism by which a plethora of candidate life forms are inevitably winnowed down to just those which are evolutionarily fittest must pick and choose solely on the basis of heritable characteristics which are causally relevant ... not something like consciousness that merely "hangs off the engine of physical causation."

I personally consider Wright's argument to that effect quite a compelling one, though perhaps not ironclad. One of the reasons I am not totally convinced has to do with the third of David Chalmers's four candidate loopholes against epiphenomenalism. He calls it "the nonsupervenience of causation" (p. 152), by which I imagine he means that conscious experience may play a causal role more like a motorcycle's engine and less like that of, say, its sidecar.

How? "[I]t may be that experience realizes causation, or some aspects of causation, in the actual world. On this view, causation needs to be realized by something ... [such that] it is the very existence of experience that allows for causal relations to exist ... " (p. 152).

This sort of view reminds me of something that physicist John A. Wheeler has seemingly established about quantum phenomena: that the mere act of observation can decide which of two equiprobable quantum possibilities actually happened, a long time ago in the past! (Physicists differ about whether the "observation" needs to be made by a sentient creature like us, or whether passive, robotic recording devices serve just as well.)


At any rate, that quibble about experience realizing causation is neither here nor there. Whether consciousness is epiphenomenal in a strong sense, or merely "to a first approximation," it would seem that natural selection must be blind to it. So how might the existence of consciousness be accounted for?

Some theists might suppose that God reaches between causal "gaps" in a world that is anything but "causally closed." He thereby imposes consciousness on those creatures which evolution has independently produced and which accordingly have the apparatus to sustain it, by virtue of their mental complexity and functional organization.

That supposition is not, however, anything that is implied or stated in Wright's discourse ... and it goes right against Chalmers's foundational assumptions. Chalmers is forced by those very presuppositions to suppose, accordingly, that it is natural laws that undergird

... an "organizational invariant": that is, that every system with the right functional organization will have the same sort of conscious experience, no matter what it is made of. (p. xv)

Indeed, this view of organizational invariance patterns with Wright's prognostication that precisely such a functional organization is imminent on a worldwide scale, as our communications technology is turning the planet into some sort of "superorganism" with interconnected us as its "superbrain."


If we combine Wright with Chalmers, then, here is what apparently is going on. Evolution by natural selection has produced us, a highly complex species with bodies/brains that are functionally organized substrates for consciousness. After our arrival on the scene, we then invent culture ... which proceeds to evolve by similar principles. In both biological and cultural evolution, Wright's vaunted "non-zero-sumness" provides a directional arrow toward more and deeper complexity. And so the planet itself may just possibly be growing incipiently conscious as well.

Which, even if you don't think such a thing as a global "superorganism" is truly in the offing, gives the world — and us in particular — a moral dimension, meaningfulness, and definite grounds for our believing there may be a God.

If our type of complex functional organization is bound by some natural law to produce consciousness along with morality and meaningfulness, then that's even more reason to think that God, the divine proclaimer of all natural laws, is real. Remember, if there were an absolute metaphysical connection between organizational complexity and consciousness, God could conceivably be thrown out of the picture. But if the complexity-consciousness connection is only nomal or law-based, as Chalmers says it is, then the situation could have been otherwise. We live in a world, manifestly, where it is not otherwise. That fact, all by itself, speaks for God.


Now, a personal speculation as to why I think many believers in God wouldn't be happy with this sort of argument in favor of God's being real. Such an argument strongly suggests that it is nature that, however tardily, eventually realizes God's will. God doesn't have to impose his will on the world by reaching through "gaps" in worldly causality. Instead, the world itself is progressive. If left to its own devices, it will eventually produce what God intends.

Implicated in this worldly progressiveness is natural law: to wit, a law — or laws, plural — of nature which reliably transmutes a certain kind of functional organization at the physical level into consciousness, and thus into meaningfulness, and thus into an implicit moral dimension of the cosmos.

Also implicated in the world's inherent progressiveness is the scientific validity of the theory of evolution by natural selection ... especially when the process is writ large to include cultural evolution as well as biological. Because it ultimately favors the playing of "non-zero-sum," cooperative, win-win games, evolution has hidden directionality. This directionality might be construed as reflecting yet another natural law which reliably produces the "certain kind of functional organization" alluded to above.

To a lot of theists, it's hard to suppose that a "fallen" world such as ours supposedly is could also be the instrument of working out God's will. In a progressive world, Mother Nature can be thought of as God's "handmaid," as it were.

To many believers, God, to be God, must be imagined to act in the world to alter worldly outcomes ... to censure, upbraid, and correct what would otherwise be the world's evil ways and unholy results. Thus a personal belief in miracles that defy natural laws is often the stuff of faith.

For many believers, that is, every intercessory prayer is effectively a plea for an extraordinary intervention on God's part, one that will reverse and rebuke nature. A prayer that a cancer can be miraculously cured falls in this category. For such believers as these, prayer as an affirmation that a natural domain in which cancer happens can still be God's slow-but-sure handmaid makes no sense.

Believers who are skeptical of natural "progress" don't want to hear about a God who relishes it. One reason is this: if God places faith in the laws of nature he himself established, and if he is willing to play be the rules of a "causally closed" world with no "gaps" through which to "reach in" and impose his intentions directly, then we would seem to be called on to be theologically and ideologically progressive as well. If the world is to be made better, then we must do it ourselves.


This view of things certainly won't sit well with the hard Christian right, either. The Christian right seems to prefer old-style creationism or its trendy follow-on, Intelligent Design. William A. Dembski's book by that name claims that laws of nature ("necessity") cannot possibly explain the staggering complexity manifested by organisms on this planet. Even taken in tandem with random mutations ("chance"), the natural laws which Chalmers would call "nomic necessity" cannot create "complex specified information," says Dembski. CSI can be explained only by supernatural design.

If Dembski's argument is correct — and I don't think it is; see, for example, Is Fitness a "Specification"? (I.D. XXII) for why not — then it leaves us with no choice but to believe in God. That is, it purports to be a conclusive argument that there is an Intelligent Designer, a.k.a. God.

The view of things I am alluding to here doesn't claim that it's a conclusive argument in God's favor. After all, it has several controversial layers. Some people will object to Wright's attribution of directionality to evolution. Some, to his belief that consciousness qua consciousness exists, is causally irrelevant, and accordingly cannot be accounted for by Darwinian theory. And some, to his extending the causal irrelevance of sentience into the vexed realm of meaning and morality, wherein the idea of God is a "non-crazy question."

It almost seems as if any worldview that interposes natural law between divine intentions and earthly results is bound to generate arguments-in-God's-favor which are highly suggestive, but far from conclusive. Perhaps that's one big reason why the Christian right prefers Intelligent Design.

Non-Crazy Questions (V)

In the previous four posts in this series, Non-Crazy Questions (IV) and its three predecessors, I've been discussing what I think of as Robert Wright's "emergentist" understanding of Darwinian evolution, as presented in his book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright has it that human cultural evolution echoes Darwin's biological evolution in that both are not as aimless as most Darwinists say. Natural selection at first favors cuthroat competition but gradually, as the eons roll by, puts more and more emphasis on non-zero-sumness, which is a notion Wright borrows from the scientific field of game theory.

Favoring positive non-zero-sum games predisposes evolution to produce ever greater biological complexity, leading to the emergence of intelligent animals like us who then develop cultures. After the onset of civilized life, the bias towards playing non-zero-sum, win-win games makes that human culture ever richer and more complex, leading up to the possibility today of an incipient global "superorganism" with a "superbrain" composed of Internet-connected humanity.

And there's a moral dimension to it all. A world of emerging "true empathy" and universal brotherhood is a distinct possibility, one fine day in the not-too-far-distant future.


As if that, all by itself, weren't enough to link evolution to religion and the more this-world-oriented of its values, Wright says that the one thing about us humans that evolution theory can't explain is our sentience, our mental consciousness. It is this salient characteristic of all human persons that prevents each of us from being as disposable as an outmoded robot or computer chip. Sentience places us in the love-thy-neighbor moral category, not the consider-our-fellow-humans-dispensible category.

Where, then, does our capacity for subjective mental experience come from? After all, since it's superfluous to our fitness-bestowing functionality (or so Wright claims) natural selection must be blind to it. So, could it be God's own stamp placed upon our natural, physical beings?

A lot, accordingly, can potentially be inferred from the fact that our sentience is epiphenomenal ... asssuming, that is, that it is as superfluous to anything natural selection cares about as Wright claims it to be.


Malcolm Gladwell's recent bestseller Blink offers what appears to me to be some amount of insight into what Wright means when he says that our consciousness is epiphenomenal. (Or else it offers me a chance to prove that I really am in way over my head in trying to understand such matters!)

Gladwell, whose day job is staff writer for The New Yorker, says his "is a book about the first two seconds" (p. 13, large-print edition) — the instants in time just after you are presented with something new in which you must make a snap judgment about that thing. In many situations, your first two-second snap judgment — an instance of so-called "rapid cognition" — can outperform months of careful data analysis.

Why? Because of "the big computer in your brain — your adaptive unconscious" (p. 90). The adaptive unconscious — which has nothing to do with, say, Freud's notion of the unconscious — is neural wiring in your brain that can take in a raft of information, quickly "thin slice" it to figure out which very few pieces of it are most significant, and use just those pieces to come to a sound spur-of-the-moment decision.

The good news and the bad news here is: your snap-judgment supercomputer is wholly unconscious. You can't for the life of you say why you made the judgment or decision you did make in that merest blink of an eye.

That's good news because it prevents our conscious mind from being overwhelmed and taking minutes or hours or years to make the same (or possibly a much worse) choice by means of the kinds of reasoning it is good at. "We don't want," writes Gladwell (p. 103), "to stand there endlessly talking through our options. Sometimes we're better off if the mind behind the locked door makes our decisions for us."


And it's bad news, because, after the snap judgment has been made, we have no idea how to justify it ... even to ourselves. The "mind behind the locked door" leaves no conscious audit trail.

True, scientists have been able to devise clever experiments which allow the hidden mental activity to show up in things like measurements of how much the palms of the hands have started sweating. Gladwell describes one experiment which tested the ability of participants to pick up the fact that the red decks of cards were bad luck (they were stacked) and the blue decks would let them win (they were stacked in a different way).

Normal subjects' physical indicators revealed that the "mind behind the locked door" had begun to suspect the red decks very early on in the experiment, well before the subjects actually started shying away from the red decks ... which itself came well before they could begin to articulate their suspicions.

Subjects who were suffering from brain damage to a crucial portion of the prefrontal cortex called the ventromedial area — apparently a major contributor to the adaptive unconscious, the "mind behind the locked door" — figured out just fine that the red decks were bad news. But they never got sweaty palms. And this is key: "[A]t no time — not even after they had figured the game out — did the patients adjust their strategy to stay away from the problem cards. They knew intellectually what was right, but that knowledge wasn't enough to change the way they played the game" (p. 102).


How does this relate to the epiphenomenality of consciousness, per Wright? It looks to me as if the ventromedial area and the rest of the adaptive unconscious might be what natural selection has honed, based on its strong positive contribution to our Darwinian fitness. The adaptive unconscious, "the big computer in the brain," is thus the robot-zombie side of us, in Wright's metaphor for the aspect of our mentality that is not epiphenomenal.

Gladwell even says such experiments "suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion" (p. 98). Speaking as a Catholic Christian, I note that theologians in my church are big on "free will," whose opposite, in the lexicon of theologians and philosophers, is "determinism." In Catholic theology, if we possess no free will, the whole Christian worldview falls to pieces. How can we freely accept the salvation offered by Christ's cross if we live in a wholly deterministic world?

So, I'm thinking, if we have free will at all, it is not located in the adaptive unconscious, which may well be the seat of our Darwinian fitness, and which natural selection is clearly anything but blind to.

Human free will, if any, is thus an aspect of human consciousness, of sentience ... of that epiphenomenal "shadow" of our minds which gives our lives moral import and whispers to Robert Wright of the possibility that God exists.

Again the dichotomy between consciousness and cognition — the latter being the apparent bailiwick of the adaptive unconscious, per Gladwell — speaks for God. In this case, the distinction is that between conscious free will and unconscious determinism. In Wright's example, on the other hand, the distinction is between epiphenomenal sentience and a more robotlike mental acuity. But the two dichotomies seem to pattern together — they may even be two ways of expressing the same dichotomy — and suggest that scientific inquiry ought not to be as religion-blind as it is often cracked up to be.

More on these topics is coming in Non-Crazy Questions (VI).

Non-Crazy Questions (IV)

In Non-Crazy Questions (III), I pointed out that Robert Wright's book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny is actually in the center of the spectrum, with respect to the ongoing debate over Darwin's theory of evolution.

On the left are the true Darwinists, spoken for by Richard Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould, among others. They tend not to believe in God at all, or at least assert that no divine initiative need be invoked to explain the origin of species on earth. They also believe that the trajectory of evolutionary history is aimless and our appearance on the scene wholly accidental. To them, natural selection is neutral with regard to producing intelligent species whose members turn right around and say they possess supernatural souls.

On the right are the Bible-believing six-day creationists, upholders of a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis, who also assert, against all scientific evidence, that the Earth is but a few thousand years old. They have been joined of late by the proponents of Intelligent Design. IDers accept that earlier, simpler species evolved into more complex ones, but only with God's repeated help along the way. For they say that natural selection alone, coupled with chance mutations, can't by itself account for the high levels of complex functionality that life on Earth has achieved. IDers can thus be thought of as creationists of a slightly different stripe.

Let me call the middle ground in the debate that of "emergentism." Where pure Darwinists and creationists both assume God's involvement in creating this planet's life forms (if any) had to be a matter of commanding innovations from on high supernaturally — the difference being that Darwinists deny that that ever happened — emergentists say the "dice were loaded" so as to allow Mother Nature to cooperate with what a religious believer would say was God's beneficent will and intent for the creation of ... us.

Not that all emergentists are religious believers, by any means. Stuart Kauffman, in At Home in the Universe, propounds "self-organization," which he says is natural selection's "handmaiden." He says self-organization has produced more and more "order for free" over millions and billions of years and has given evolution its near-inevitable trajectory toward "we the expected." But his theory is entirely non-mystical; nowhere does Kauffman say there's a God behind it all. Kauffman is thus a non-theistic emergentist.

Wright's "non-zero-sumness" — a notion from game theory which he says explains why cooperation trumps competition in the working out of survival of the fittest — is kissing cousin to Kauffman's self-organization. The two may even be different ways of expressing the same truth: nature's dice are loaded in favor of life, increased complexity, and consciousness. That last phrase, by the way, is the take of Arthur Peacocke, a theistic emergentist, in books such as Paths from Science Towards God. But Wright, for his part, asserts that his non-zero-sumness thesis by itself does not vouchsafe that there is a God. Only when the intelligence that non-zero-sumness eventually yields is coupled with consciousness of the "epiphenomenal" type he says we humans have can God's existence (maybe) be inferred. Again, that's because Wright says natural selection is blind to consciousness ... so where did consciousness come from?


The question is, how should such things be taught to our children in school?

IDers say, "Teach the controversy." I agree with that. But they want to teach Intelligent Design in science class, right alongside Darwinism. I don't agree with that. I think ID, along with any theologically oriented aspects of pure Darwinism and of the position in the center that I'm calling emergentism, out to be taught in a philosophy class.

I'd call this class Philosophy of Life Sciences, or POLS. POLS is where the assumptions of pure Darwinists about the aimless, directionless, pointless nature of evolutionary history ought to be introduced. It is where the counterclaims of a Robert Wright that evolution is actually directional and teleological — moving towards increased complexity, intelligence, and the possibility of consciousness — should be discussed.

In addition to being the proper place to discuss such philosophical approaches to directionality, teleology, and consciousness, POLS class is the natural home of many outright theistic or theological debates concerning evolution theory as well. Do Arthur Peacocke, Denis Edwards, and other believers (see Non-Crazy Questions (III)) claim to be able to reconcile Darwinism with their versions of theology? Their arguments, in addition to being theological, are at core open-ended and hence philosophical. They represent, at best, just one viable school of thought. It happens to be the school which I personally favor, but that this school is the correct one is far from a slam dunk. Inquiring minds differ, and empirical investigation can't settle the matter once and for all ... which is why this is philosophy, not science.

So, too, is Intelligent Design. It's a philosophical argument (never mind its mathematical overtones, when placed in the hands of one William Dembski) masquerading as a scientific theory. Like all philosophical arguments, it must be judged by different criteria than those of science. It may or may not be a good argument — I happen to think it's flawed — but POLS students can and should make up their own minds about ID.


The question I can't answer is whether POLS should be taught in high schools, or only in college.

It seems to me that POLs is most naturally a college-level discipline ... as is any aspect of philosophy, traditionally. But not everyone goes to college. And the topic of evolution theory is such an important, hot-button concern in our society today, I'd hate to see any high-school graduate ill-prepared to deal with it.

Yet if POLS is taught at the high-school level — in public high schools, mind you — how can its religious aspects pass constitutional muster? True, it's intent would not be to advance religion, but it would nonetheless present to students certain worldviews that do extol religion. Are high schoolers able to handle such ideas with the tongs of critical, suspended-judgment thinking? Can they distinguish between "received wisdom" and what various people only claim to be true? Or will they too easily be swayed by certain worldviews simply because they happen to match their own ingrained presuppositions? In short, are they ready to do philosophy? I can't really answer questions like that.


Now that I've taken a pass on that important question, I'd like to move on to discuss some intriguing aspects of what I'm calling the philosophy of the life sciences. More on that in the next installment.

Non-Crazy Questions (III)

I've been considering the arguments by Robert Wright, made in his book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, to the effect that evolution theory need not be anti-God. The previous post in this series was Non-Crazy Questions (II). In it I took up the subject of human sentience or consciousness, the inner, private experience or awareness we each have of what our individual mind is knowing, thinking, feeling, and doing.

Wright says this sort of subjective experience is superfluous, or epiphenomenal, to that sort of brain activity which is truly causal in the world. It is to physical causality as a shadow is to a solid body. Consciousness is always the effect of physical causes, never a cause in itself. Strictly speaking, it has no function. It doesn't do anything.

Accordingly, it is invisible to Darwinian natural selection. Our sentience makes us no "fitter," in Darwin's sense of the word, than we would be if we were zombielike "robots with unusually good skin" (p. 320). Such flesh-and-blood "robots" would be just as successful at surviving and sending their genes into the next generation as are we.

Yet it is our very sentience that gives our lives meaning, dignity, and moral worth. If we were no more than clever androids — sentience-bereft bipeds — there would be nothing immoral about terminating us: in Wright's phrase,"unplugging [us] for good," like an outmoded computer (p. 321).

Hence our sentience and moral worth are joined at the hip, says Wright, and Darwin's theory of evolution via survival of the fittest can explain neither. That's why it's a non-crazy question to ask whether, after all, there is a God. For one thing, God's creativity provides a handy answer to the question of where our sentience comes from. For another, the existence of God explains why we have personal, epiphenomenal consciousness: presumably, because we are made by God "in his image."


A lot rides on the notion, accordingly, of human consciousness being epiphenomenally redundant and evolutionarily superfluous. If Wright is on target about that, then it becomes much harder to believe that there is no God.

This is particularly true in view of Wright's other main point, that evolution is directional and flexibly goal-oriented. Put most simply, the goal seems to be one of making brains — and possibly, soon, a global "superbrain" — which, in ways science can't elucidate, become conscious.

In order for that to happen, organisms (and, later, cultures established by "smart" organisms like Homo sapiens) must blossom in complexity, as the eons roll by. The logic behind all this blossoming of complexity is "non-zero-sumness," a long-haul preference on the part of natural and cultural selection for inventing entities capable of mutually assistive intercommunication and "cooperative coordination" (see p. 322).

Thus does supposedly blind, aimless natural selection design an ever more complex "tree of life" on planet Earth. And thus does an entirely similar process take the human species from its earliest simple hunter-gatherer cultures to the ultra-complex global society of today.

As all this transpires, there develops a lot more amity and a lot less enmity in the world. The "bonding power" of our "new technologies of interdependence" may be leading us all to a world of "true empathy." We are likely being brought to "the realization that, fundamentally, all human beings are alike" (p. 328).

That, in turn, is one of the signal hallmarks of religious belief in God: unconditional love for one's neighbor, even if the "neighbor" lives halfway around the world, is obedience to God's will.

In consequence, the question of whether biological and cultural history are directional and flexibly goal-oriented (the philosophers' term for this being "teleology") bears equally, along with the question of sentience as the substrate of moral worth, upon the question of God's existence.


In the previous installment, I promised to take up the question of how the existence of various "godless" versions of Darwinian evolution, alongside Wright's God-possible version of evolution, Peacocke's God-certain version, and the Intelligent Design outlook, might be folded into how we educate our children. Before I can do that, I now see that I'll need to lay out a schema by which these various contrasting views can be compared.

Among the "godless" versions of evolution theory is that propounded by Richard Dawkins in books such as The Blind Watchmaker. Also, the writings of the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould belong here in this category. True, Gould was an agnostic, where Dawkins is pretty close to out-and-out atheism. Gould could write in Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life that science (particularly, that of evolution) are "twin magisteria" that can peacefully coexist. Science teaches us how nature works, and religion gives us our morality and ethics. In Gould's view, the two have non-overlapping teaching authorities. (In Dawkins's view, religion has no teaching authority whatever.)

Dawkins and Gould are both on the extreme left in the evolution debate, inasmuch as both maintain that evolution is aimless and directionless. Gould gives us the metaphor of evolutionary history as a tape recording which, were it to be rewound, erased, and re-recorded, would almost certainly not produce the likes of our smart, "in-God's-image" species again. We are here accidentally, in the view of Gould and Dawkins.

On the extreme right are the creationists who say the Bible is literally true: God created all living species, including us, in six days at the beginning of time. If the Bible is furthermore read literally in terms of the number of generations which are said to have followed Adam and Eve, God's initial creative act must have occurred no more than a few thousand years ago ... whereas science says life on earth is perhaps 3.5 billion years old, and the universe much older that that.

Almost as far to the right as the six-day, young-earth creationists are the purveyors of Intelligent Design theory, such as William Dembski and Michael Behe. True, IDers accept an old earth and a succession of species leading to man. But each separate species had its design imposed on it from above, somehow. In ID theory, God's intelligent imposition of design on matter was simply spread out in fits and starts over time. Each time a new level of complexity had to be attained, be it an eye, a wing, or a whole species, God stepped in.

The far right and the far left in this debate over Darwinism, oddly enough, have at least one major assumption in common. Both sides seem to agree that, if there is a God and if God was active in making earth's living species, it had to be by some imposition of the divine will.

The creationists say God imposed his biological will on the physical world at the very outset, before the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden and Noah's Flood. The IDers concede that the imposition of divine will was more spread out, timewise — but, still, it happened. God still made us and all other species, and he did it by fiat.

The evolutionary far left says, simply, that genesis-by-fiat never happened. If there even is a God, he didn't have anything to do with earthly bio-evolution and the origin of species. There is no vestige of divine design or supernatural will in the aimless evolutionary process that just so happened to produce the likes of us. For, the unstated assumption runs, if God had been involved at all, it would have had to be by virtue of lordly will-imposition and fiat.

So left and right agree on one thing: God's creation of living kinds, if it happened, was, or would perforce have been, a matter of God's imposing beneficent divine design on an otherwise recalcitrant, chaotic world.


Both left and right, in this debate, are upbraided by the center. Arthur Peacocke, author of Paths from Science Towards God, can be taken to speak for the center by way of Denis Edwards's The God of Evolution: A Trinitarian Theology. In his book, Edwards, a Catholic priest, suggests ways in which the standard Darwinian theory (minus certain atheistic insistences by the likes of Gould and Dawkins) can be squared with standard Christian theology.

One of the potential sticking points addressed by Edwards is the large role of chance in evolution, inasmuch as genetic mutations are said to happen entirely at random. But that problem disappears, says Edwards, if "God is ... pictured as involved creatively in an open-ended process that involves both randomness and lawfulness" (pp. 49-50, italics added by me).

That's where the ideas of Peacocke come into the picture:

Arthur Peacocke argues that we need to conceive of God as "involved in explorations of the many kinds of unfulfilled potentialities of the universe," potentialities which have been given to the universe by God. According to Peacocke, these are propensities in nature which God has "built in." These [propensities] "load the dice" in favor of life, increased complexity, and consciousness. (p. 51)

God is accordingly "an explorer in creation," an "improviser of unsurpassed ingenuity" whose "redemptive and providential actions" nonetheless stop short of imposing divine will by fiat "in the community of free beings."

Here we encounter the metaphor of God "loading the dice" of worldly chance and change, a apt phrase to summarize Robert Wright's abstract notions of directionality and teleology in evolution. The phrase is also an apt companion for the ideas of Stuart Kauffman in At Home in the Universe about our species having been "we the expected."

Notice that Peacocke is strongly pro-religion, Wright leans (albeit somewhat reluctantly) in a religious direction, and Kauffman doesn't give away his religious proclivities, if he has any. He, for all I know, might even be an atheist. Yet all three inhabit the center in the evolution debate, by virtue of their unanimity on one crucial point. All three find some sort of beneficent directionality, some sort of teleological goal-seekingness, in evolutionary processes.

In other words, God (if there is one) doesn't have to impose his blueprints on a recalcitrant material universe. The universe at a quite fundamental level cooperates in bringing about God's good ends.


With that schema for the debate in mind, I now feel I can actually proceed with considering how evolution ought to be taught in schools. More on that in the next installment, Non-Crazy Questions (IV)!

Non-Crazy Questions (II)

Robert Wright's 2000 book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny is the subject of this ongoing series of posts. In Non-Crazy Questions (I) I reviewed the author's contention that a preference for "non-zero-sum games" gives biological and cultural evolution, over the long haul, a surprising directionality. Natural selection moves biological evolution toward life forms of ever-increasing complexity and, eventually, ones that are both intelligent and conscious. A smart species — us — develops the first culture. Culture then proceeds to evolve toward, you guessed it, increasing social, economic, and technological complexity and perhaps even the establishment on earth of a "superorganism" with humanity, globally interconnected via the Internet, forming its "superbrain."

Natural selection, a variant of which guides cultural evolution too, may even be teleological, says Wright. A process, not a being with a body, natural selection nonetheless is able to respond to information about the environment in such a way as to add flexibility to its directionality. When the environment changes, so do the specific strategies employed by natural selection in order to bring about the increasingly complex life forms it "seeks."

As a result, according to Wright, we are justified in saying that the evolutionary "tree of life" on our planet manifests design. The natural selection process itself is the designer of this elaborately branching "family tree" of life on earth — and Darwinian natural selection can therefore be said to manifest an intrinsic purpose.

Those things alone, however controversial many Darwinists may find them to be in their own right, don't necessarily imply that there's a God, in Wright's view. But in his final chapter Wright does make a case, based on evolutionary evidence, for God's existence. I happen to think it's quite an elegant argument — more so than anything offered by Intelligent Design proponents Michael Behe and William Dembski. Even so, some of its points are not without their problems, which I'll discuss shortly.

At the risk of grossly oversimplifying, here's Wright's argument in a nutshell:

We humans are, like all other animals, products of Darwinian evolution by natural selection. But we're also conscious. We possess sentience, a.k.a. subjectivity or what I'd prefer to call "inner experience." And, says Wright, there's no way to explain this fact by recourse to natural selection alone.

Why not? Because consciousness is superfluous to anything natural selection can "see." It's redundant. In the jargon of philosophers, it's epiphenomenal. Per Wright, it doesn't actually do anything. So there's no way it can possibly make us "fitter" from a Darwinian point of view. We could just as well have evolved as quite clever zombies with no inner experience whatever, as "robots with unusually good skin" (pp. 320-1).

I'm going to come back later to this point of the superfluity of our inner, subjective consciousness of experience because it's so hard to grasp, so crucial to Wright's case, and so apt to be controversial. But first I want to lay out the rest of Wright's argument.

Wright shows that our life's meaning, and in particular its moral meaning, would be entirely absent if we had evolved as robotic zombies with no "potential for fulfillment" (p. 321). If we were "as devoid of feeling as a computer," there would be nothing immoral about "unplugging [us] for good." The commandment "thou shalt not kill," I might add, would be null and void. Nor would any injunction against stealing — taking a printer or disk drive away from a computer, say — make sense.

So we have this characteristic — our conscious inner experience — which supposedly makes no difference at all to natural selection, since robotic zombies who outwardly resemble us would be just as "fit" as we. But it is this sentience of ours that gives life its moral meaning. And, per Wright, we very likely need to assume there's a God in order to account for it.

Wright quotes the philosopher David Chalmers on this point (p. 321): "It seems God could have created the world physically exactly like this one, atom for atom, but with no consciousness [inner experience] at all. And it would have worked just as well. But our universe isn't like that. Our universe has consciousness."

And it accordingly has a moral dimension.

So it may well have a God.


Now I'd like to discuss at some length the "epiphenomenalist" notion of consciousness or sentience which is so crucial to Wright's argument. I take as my text Wright's section titled "Could a Giant Global Brain Become Conscious?" (pp. 306-309).

First of all, in the paragraphs leading up to that section (p. 305) Wright explains that consciousness or sentience is not just the ability to process information in rich and productive ways. Rather, it is "the subjective experience of processing information," which I take to mean something like thinking and simultaneously thinking about thinking, pondering our own mental activity.

Within our thinking about what's going on in our heads I mean to incorporate, of course, our feelings: "pleasure and pain, ... epiphanies of insight, and so on." Thoughts and feelings are all parts of sentience.

So in the section in question Wright asks, as it were, what things that process information complexly also have the conscious, sentient ability to experience that ongoing process — the capacity to know what it's like to be a processor of information? Wright (p. 307) cites "the terminology made famous by the philosopher Thomas Nagel" in a Philosophical Review article called "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?": "Why is it like something to be alive?"

Admittedly, I find that a difficult concept to grasp. I am put in mind of the character named Lieutenant Commander Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Data was an android, a "robot with unusually good skin." There wasn't much within the capacity of a real flesh-and-blood human which Data couldn't do, except to have a true, human-like experience of things like love and sadness. His quest was always to turn his intellectual concepts of such things into experiential reality — and in some episodes of the series he very nearly succeeded, as in one in which he actually mourned a dead cat.

But in Wright's view, at least, Data would always be limited to a non-sentient status, just as any robotlike zombie would also be, because there is no way to manipulate mere physical causality to bring about sentience. Unless Data somehow rose above physical causality, just as we seem to do, his circuits could generate no true, conscious inner experience.


That notion of nuts-and-bolts (or chips-and-circuits) physical causality is key to Wright's line of argument, because he says in one of his end notes (p. 398) that "all forces that influence behavior are physical"." In another note on the same page he repeats, "all causality is physical." There is nothing about human behavior (as opposed to our subjective experience) which is quintessentially "mental." Put another way, "Truly scientific models [of behavior] must invoke only 'publicly observable' phenomena."

For example, the action of nerve impulses or of neurotransmitters is publicly observable. So neurons and their chemical and electrical activity are proper subjects of scientific causal inquiry. But so-called "mental" forces are not publicly observable ... and, claims Wright, this is the (often implicit, not necessarily explicit) assumption of modern behavioral sciences.

If that's correct, and if consciousness or sentience actually exists (some claim it's at best identical with its own underlying observable processes and at worst it's wholly nonexistent), then it must be epiphenomenal. It must (per Wright) have no function. The world could as well contain nothing but Data-like humanoids, and it would function just the same. The only difference would be that no one would experience any of this elaborate, complex functionality. No one would actually mourn a cat.

To this assertion I feel like adopting a locution made famous by the late Carl Sagan in his Cosmos television series: he was always intoning (when he wasn't talking about "billions and billions" of galaxies in the universe), "Well ... maybe." Maybe consciousness is epiphenomenal. Maybe there could be a world of zombielike humanoids that would be just like ours, minus the inner experience. Maybe the fact that we do have inner experience is a sign that natural selection — which presumably is totally blind to that inner experience — doesn't account for everything.

After all, Wright says over and over again that he himself doesn't take his argument to be conclusive, only suggestive that there may be a divine architect. The existence of God is a non-crazy question, after all, in a world in which epiphenomenal sentience can't be explained by scientists. Indeed, he points out, it is the hard-headed approach to reality which is typical of scientists that insists there is no mental "stuff," and all causality is physical and publicly observable — and, if so, how do you explain sentience, "always an effect, never a cause" (p. 306)?

Sentience or mental experience, says Wright, "bears roughly the same relation to the real action [physical causality] that your shadow bears to you" (p. 306). Nice metaphor, that.


But is it correct? I know of at least one view of such things which Wright doesn't mention and which might undermine his entire argument.

It is the view expressed by Arthur Peacocke in his book Paths from Science Towards God. According to Peacocke's worldview, things like consciousness which emerge in bottom-up fashion from complex interactions at lower, neuronal levels exert "whole-part influence" at the lower levels. Another term for this is "top-down causation."

In this view — and I hope I'm stating it correctly — consciousness is more than epiphenomenal, it's emergent in a very strong sense of the word. Emergent phenomena actually have functions; they actually do things. One of the important things which they do is to exert a downward whole-part influence which changes what happens at the next lower level of complexity.

Now, I realize it's a toss-up which is more abstruse: epiphenomenal consciousness, or strongly emergent consciousness which turns right around and downwardly exerts its own whole-part influence, so as to participate fully in worldly causality.

I'm not going to elaborate the concept here, however. I'll save that for another series of posts, devoted to Peacocke's own views on such things as evolution. But I would like to mention that Peacocke's worldview is equal to Wright's in one respect: both make the existence of God a non-crazy question.

Specifically, in Peacocke's view the world is a layer cake with multiple levels or tiers of organizational complexity. There is a level of complexity at which physicists direct their attention, another level just above that for chemists, one for biologists, one for sociologists and students of human culture, and so on. At each level of interaction, entities which make up the next higher level emerge and proceed to interact at that level. Whole-part influence then alters the state of affairs at the lower level. Whole-part influence is a form of top-down causality: a consequence of the higher-level interaction, it causes events at the lower level to occur that would otherwise not occur.

There is, obviously, a top level to this layer cake of complexity: the cosmos as a whole. Peacocke unabashedly claims that God injects pure information — not matter, not energy — into the cosmic layer cake, and through whole-part causation it trickles down to affect outcomes at various levels. This includes the level of our own human cognition, thereby accounting for the experience of the biblical prophets that God has revealed himself to them, for example.

For the concept of whole-part causation applies, says Peacocke, to the relationship between the state of the brain as a whole and the states and activities of the neurons that make it up, just as it does to the downward causative influence of any other whole which emerges from lower-level parts and their interactions. Hence, even something as mystical and numinous as the person-to-person revelation from God to a human being can be explained in terms of whole brain states.

Peacocke's view divine action in the world as we know it is not immediately consistent with a purely epiphenomenal view of consciousness of the sort that Wright favors. Hence, there's another view, Peacocke's, of the tendency of the physical, biological, and cultural world to become ever more complex. This view also supports the notion that, yes, God exists. Wright's is not the only game in town.


I even think the two views can possibly be brought together. What follows is entirely conjectural on my part, as it extends both Wright and Peacocke in ways neither might appreciate. The basic idea is: what if we assume that what Wright refers to as sentience, consciousness, or subjective experience — I'm calling it "inner experience" — is an epiphenomenal "shadow" of what Peacocke refers to as the "state of the human brain" taken as a whole?

In this view, the latter — the "whole-brain state," if you will — is an emergent property of the brain and is functional and causal. It makes things happen, the way whatever transpires in Lieutenant Commander Data's control circuit makes things happen. It even exerts whole-part influence, as when the intention to (say) move one's finger results in (no surprise here) actual movement of the fingertip. The movement happens because the intent which exists at the level of the whole brain causes the appropriate brain neurons to do the appropriate things: send impulses to the right nerves and muscles in the hand.

The mechanics are different for us than for Mr. Data, but the basic principle is the same. A whole-brain (or whole-control-circuit) state causes lower-level events to occur.

But, per Wright, our experience of this emergentist, top-down, whole-part influence as the brain's intent forms and expresses itself eventually in physical action is not the same thing as the whole-part influence itself. They are two separate things. Our subjective experience of the entire transaction is epiphenomenal — a subtle distinction which (the best I can tell) Peacocke is blind to.

Of course, Wright is, for his part, blind to the emergentist presuppositions which Peacocke endorses. The conjecture I am advancing herein could accordingly be called the "emergentist-epiphenomenalist conjecture," for those who like such fancy appellations.

If my emergentist-epiphenomenalist conjecture is right, then both Wright and Peacocke could be correct about the implications of their respective worldviews as concerns the existence of God.

Wright says it is the epiphenomenal "shadow" of our (in my conjecture, emergentist) mental activity that underpins the thou-shalt-not-kill commandment and all the various other aspects of the moral dimension of our world. Furthermore, Darwinian natural selection is blind to this epiphenomenal "shadow sentience" of ours, this ground of our morality ... so there very well could be a God.

Peacocke says it is the emergent brain-as-a-whole which is capable of receiving informational input of a spiritual, God-revealing sort. That input may seem, from the perspective of what I am calling our epiphenomenal "shadow" sentience, as if it comes direct from God, but Peacocke makes the case that it is really mediated via nuts-and-bolts physical aspects of our world ... as long as those non-mystical material aspects are presumed to include emergent, higher-level entities and not just quarks and atoms and photons of energy. Hence, information may flow from God to the world-as-a-whole and then down through various subsidiary layers of organizational complexity, eventually reaching our brain-as-a-whole.

In short, both emergentist and epiphenomenal aspects of the human mind/brain may be real ... and in their own separate ways, each may tell us about God.


In the next installment, Non-Crazy Questions (III), I hope to begin exploring how the existence of various "godless" versions of Darwinian evolution, Wright's God-possible version of evolution, Peacocke's God-certain version, and the Intelligent Design outlook might be folded into how we educate our children.