My Problem with Evolutionary Materialism

I have no argument with the facts of evolution, but with the meaning imputed to those facts.

The problem is not that I think evolution didn’t occur, or that life did not evolve pretty much as the scientific account says that it has. You can't argue with the fossil record.  So I have no sympathy whatever with religious fundamentalism. But I think that Darwinism has developed into a fundamentalist orthodoxy in its own right. The problem is evolutionary materialism, insofar as this purports to be an account of ‘who we are’ and then proceeds to explain this in terms of purely natural or material processes, knowable in principle by scientific means. I have debated this a number of times on the Forum, but many people just don't understand that life is something other than physics and chemistry.

Here is a question I would like to pose to those who propose abiogenesis, the idea that life spontaneously arises as the result of purely material causes. Generally if you ask a person who holds this view why such a thing occurred, the answer must surely be that it occurred 'for no reason'. If there is a 'why' then there is an implied telos, some purpose for which this occurred. Of course, the whole point of the purely physicalist account is to demonstrate that such things happen for no purpose. There is no purpose for anything to occur, other than direct material causation. So the implicit contradiction within any theory of abiogenesis is that it seems to be trying to answer the question as to 'why did life occur', while at the same time denying that there is really any reason for it!  Because to ask the 'why' of life is to leave science and to venture into philosophy and religion. This is why Dawkins, for example, must always denigrate any notion of 'purpose'. So the very attempt to 'explain' the origin of life in a scientific sense, simply is an exercise self-contradiction. It is the exact point where scientific research morphes into materialist ideology - where evolution becomes a secular religion.

Quite apart from the gross fallacies of creationism on the one side, and crude materialism on the other, there is another undercurrent in this whole debate. This can be understood in terms of historical positivism. This is the idea which began to emerge in the Enlightenment, that mankind was developing from 'primitive superstition' to 'science'. It was given voice by Auguste Comte, who indeed coined the very term 'positivism', which was said to denote the 'positive sciences', to distinguish them from 'the obscurities of metaphysics'. So in this sense, evolutionary thought was understood as 'progressive': not in the sense of unfolding consciousness, but in the sense of scientific progress, the movement from religion to science as the guiding light of mankind. But on a deeper level still, this entire vision was borne out of the Christian notion of the aeon, but here with 'enlightened reason' occupying the throne of Christ. This can be seen in the pronouncements of the scientific ideologues who enthusiastically proclaim that 'the Cosmos is all there is' - and Science the only road to understanding it. It is a quasi-religious instinct, but one whose roots are not recognized - and the basis of the 'religion of scientism'.

So, while it might be true that one ought not to teach creationism, one also ought not to teach materialism, which amounts to an anti-religious ideology in its own right. There is plenty about the theory of evolution that can be taught and that will require years of study to understand and master. And of course, the implications of evolutionary theory extend to the whole field of biology insofar as evolutionary science provides the over-arching narrative of the biological sciences. But the fact that there are questions it cannot ask, and can't hope to answer, does not mean that those questions do not exist, or that they don't have answers. And to say that they don't have answers, or that questions of this kind are meaningless, is to encroach into territory where the biological sciences have no authority whatever.

There is an article in New Scientist about whether evolution is progressive. To Bergson, Tielhard du Cardin, Aurobindo, and to many others, it seems obvious that evolution engenders progressively more elaborated and complex creatures over time. This is not allowed by current evolutionary theory, however. It is regarded as 'orthogenesis' or 'vitalism', which are both taboo in the scientific mainstream.  But, if you think about it, the fact that even such arguments as these are regarded as somehow 'theistic' shows the narrowness of the materialist view of the question. It must systematically exclude anything that cannot be conceived in terms other than proximate and material causes - and obviously, again, the idea of the progressive nature of evolution cannot be couched in those terms.

For the 'evolution debate' to progress, there needs to be acknowledgement on both sides. I don't believe anyone that argues about the fossil evidence or the age of the Earth has any credibility whatever. But those who argue that the material facts 'prove' one thing or another about questions that are deeply philosophical or spiritual are equally pernicious, or even more so, because one would think they were more intelligent. (They're supposed to be responsible adults!)  But, as noted below, many of them don't understand what it is that they don't understand, and it simply cannot be explained to them.