At this time of year, many Christians around the world are beginning or have begun their preparations for celebrating the coming of Jesus of Nazareth in a stable somewhere in Bethlehem sometime at the turn of the eras. Variously called the Little Lent, the Nativity Lent, or Advent, it nurtures the expectation that the world will be turned upside down somehow. That what was accidental will be revealed as essential, and the apparently essential as accidental. Today's author, Mikael Stenmark, asks us to do something quite similar as regards how we view purpose and creation in an evolutionary context.

Stenmark observes that "Christians who take evolutionary theory seriously (...) [have] to accept that God did not have the human species in mind when God created the world and that therefore our existence is without purpose in the sense that it is not part of anyone's plan.(...) [C]onsider the following analogy. Jacob is my firstborn child. However, my wife and I did not plan to have Jacob, our plan was simply to have a child. But as things turned out Jacob happens to be born.[15] Jacob's existence would then be due to chance because when we decided to have a child he was not part of our plan. I suggest that Christians and other religious believers can understand their relationship to God in a similar way, and just as my wife and I love our son, God could love people in the way Christians believe that God loves them, even though the human species was not intended to exist. (Here is in fact an opportunity to get away from the strong form of anthropocentrism that, I think, has been too closely associated with traditional Christianity.)"

Furthermore, he adds that what "Christians (and of course Jews and Muslims as well) seem to be committed to is rather the belief that central to God's purpose is, as Keith Ward puts it, the 'generation of communities of free, self-aware, self-directing sentient beings'.[16] On such an account the purpose of genes is to build bodies, the purpose of bodies is to build brains, and the purpose of brains is to generate consciousness and even self-consciousness, and with it there appears for the first time in natural history, reflective and critical thinking, experiences of meaning, love and forgiveness and a capacity to choose between good and evil. This development is something that was part of God's plan with creation, although no part of that plan was the specific development of human beings."

So, what does it mean or import to be human? Is it our biological bodies? Our thinking consciousnesses? Or is it something else, something that we, perchance, create? And is that something accidental or essential? In other words, what's it all about, Alfie? Or, perhaps, the point is that we do not actually perceive the real points? Thus, could it be the case that evolutionary biology as understood by Mikael Stenmark is actually pointing to something akin to a precept attributed to the abovementioned Nazarene: namely that the first shall be last and the last shall be first? Read on to explore the issue further.

Mikael Stenmark is associate professor in philosophy of religion at the Department of Theology, Uppsala University, Sweden. He is the author of "Rationality in Science, Religion and Everyday Life" (Notre Dame, Ind: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), for which he was awarded The John Templeton Foundation Prize for Outstanding Books in Theology and the Natural Sciences in 1996. His new book "Scientism: Science, Ethics and Religion" has just been released (Hardcover, 256pp. ISBN: 0754604454 Aldershort: Ashgate, November 2001), and a short review of the book was sent out today (2001.11.30) on Metanexus: News.

--Stacey E. Ake

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Subject: Evolutionary Biology, Religion, and the Meaning of Life. From: Mikael Stenmark E-mail: Mikael.Stenmark@teol.uu.se

Introduction

A number of biologists maintain that recent developments in evolutionary biology have profound implications for religion, morality and our self-understanding in general. Richard D. Alexander, for instance, maintains that these recent developments have such an impact that 'we will have to start all over again to describe and understand ourselves, in terms alien to our intuitions.'[1] These developments are going to change every concept of relevance for our self-view, concepts such as rationality, consciousness, guilt, meaning, unselfishness and egoism. In this paper I focus on one of these issues, namely, the impact of evolutionary biology on a religious understanding of the meaning of life. If we take the recent developments in evolutionary biology seriously how is it likely to affect our religious beliefs about the meaning of life?

The challenge posed by science is that evolutionary theory seems to undermine the religious belief that there is a purpose or meaning to the existence of the universe and to human life in particular, and that therefore people should reject such a belief or perhaps even abandon their religion as a whole.

Let me give some examples of biologists or scientists holding this view. Stephen Jay Gould tells us that 'Darwin argues that evolution has no purpose. Individuals struggle to increase the representation of their genes in future generations, and that is all'.[2] William Provine asserts, 'Modern science directly implies that there ... is no ultimate meaning for humans'.[3] Richard Dawkins maintains, 'The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. ... DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music'.[4] Edward O. Wilson writes, 'no species, ours included, possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by its genetic history'.[5] Lastly, George Gaylord Simpson claims, 'Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned'.[6]

But many Christians, Jews, and Muslims, for instance, believe that the universe is created by God and that God intended to bring into being creatures made in God's image, and that therefore the universe and also human life have a purpose. So there seems to be a serious clash between science and religion on this point. The theologian John F. Haught thinks that if these evolutionary biologists are right then the conflict is so serious that 'although theology can accommodate many different scientific ideas, it cannot get along with the notion of an inherently purposeless cosmos' because such an idea is so central to a theological and religious concern.[7] He does not think this is true about merely the major theistic religions but of most religions of the world. Haught writes,

"Since for many scientists today evolution clearly implies a meaningless universe, all religions must be concerned about it. Evolutionists raise questions not only about the Christian God but also about notions of ultimate reality or cosmic meaning as these are understood by many of the world's other religious traditions. ... Almost all religions, and not just Christianity, have envisaged the cosmos as the expression of a transcending 'order,' 'wisdom,' or 'rightness,' rather than as an irreversibly evolving process. Most religions have held that there is some unfathomable 'point' to the universe, and that the cosmos is enshrouded by a meaning over which we can have no intellectual control, and to which we must in the end surrender humbly."[8]

So there are good reasons why many religious believers ought to take seriously these claims made by scientists and in particular by evolutionary biologists. The key claim seems to be that evolutionary theory implies that there is no purpose or meaning to be found behind the emergence of human beings in natural history. In other words, we are not here for a reason and, in particular, we are not planned by God or anything like God to be here. (I think there are more claims involved but I will not consider them in this context.)

1. The Scientific and the Scientistic No-Purpose Argument

Even if the key claim is not difficult to identify it is not so easy to determine what exactly the argument is that these biologists appeal to, to justify it. The conclusion is more often stated than the premises that warrant such conclusion. But it seems to have something to do with the fact that evolutionary biologists have discovered that central to the development of life is chance or randomness. Dawkins writes that 'natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind'.[9] But, of course, Christians, Jews, and Muslims (in short, theists) are not committed to believe that natural selection had any purpose in mind simply because natural selection is not an agent and as far as we know only agents can have purposes in mind. What they seem to be committed to believe is rather that God had a purpose in mind in using natural selection as a means to create human beings and that we, therefore, exist for a reason. The question is then whether science undermines such a religious belief. To be able to argue that that is the case, it seems as if one must show that natural selection (or any other relevant biological process) and the belief 'God bringing us intentionally into existence' are or probably are incompatible, i.e., they cannot both be true at the same time.

What Gould writes may prove to be a good starting-point for such a 'no-purpose argument' because he maintains that evolutionary biology has shown that 'we are the accidental result of an unplanned process ... the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not the predictable product of any definite process'.[10] In other words, evolutionary biologists cannot find any propensities in the organic material they investigate, which make the development of human beings likely. Therefore, human life lacks a meaning in the sense that we were planned by God or anything like God to appear in natural history. Gould writes, 'Homo sapiens ... ranks as a "thing so small" in a vast universe, a wildly improbable evolutionary event, and [therefore] not the nub of universal purpose'.[11] The argument then seems to be that all biological events taking place in evolutionary history, including the emergence of our species, are random with respect to what evolutionary theory can predict or retrospectively explain. Therefore, there is no ultimate meaning to human life. Humans are not planned by God or anything like God to be here.

Before assessing this argument let me try to clarify in what sense we are talking about purpose or meaning in this particular context. First, we need to distinguish between the meaning or purpose of (a) the universe, of (b) human life in general and of (c) a particular individual's life. Such a distinction is of importance because it seems possible that an individual life, for instance, can have meaning even if the universe as a whole were to lack meaning. What we primarily focus on is the second issue, the one about the meaning or purpose of the existence of the human species. Second, we also need to distinguish between whether something (e) exists for a reason, (f) serves some particular end or (g) chooses to achieve some particular end. For instance, there is a purpose to my children's lives in the sense that they exist for a reason because my wife and I intended that they should come into existence (sense e). But we did not intend that they should serve some particular end, at least not in the way that our new car is intended to make it easier for us to travel between different places (sense f). However, we hope that they in their lives would strive toward some particular end or to realize some particular values (sense g), so that their lives will have a positive meaning. So it is possible that we can exist for a reason without ourselves serving a particular purpose, and other combinations of these different senses might as well be possible.

The question 'What is the meaning or purpose of life?' is, in other words, ambiguous in a twofold way. In asking it we can either mean 'Why does the universe exist?' or 'Why do humans, that is our species, exist?' or 'Why do I exist?' Moreover, in asking 'What is the meaning or purpose of life?' we can also mean 'Do humans in general or I in particular exist for some purpose?' or 'What values or interests should we (or I) structure our lives (or my life) around to give them (or it) meaning?' Our focus, however, is merely on the question whether the human species exists for some purpose, that is (b) and (e) combined (not denying of course that the answer we give on this issue may have implications for the others).

So what about the 'scientific' no-purpose argument, is it a valid and sound argument? The argument appears to be:

(1) The human species came into existence through the process of evolution. (2) But all individual species that come into existence through the process of evolution are random (i.e., have a low probability) with respect to what evolutionary theory (or more broadly, the sciences) can predict or retrospectively explain. ---------------
Therefore, the existence of human beings is an accidental event, that is, their existence as a species is not a result of God's purposes, intentions or plans, given that such a being exist.

Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that it is true that the existence of human beings is a wildly improbable event given the information that is accessible to scientists through the use of biological methods, but how can we from this information alone conclude that we are not intended by God or something like God to be here? This does not seem possible and consequently there is a logical gap between the premises and the conclusion. The scientific no-purpose argument is an incomplete argument. We need an extra-premise to make the argument valid because it is quite possible that things could exist for a purpose, even if evolutionary biologists were unable to discover it.

Does perhaps the argument presuppose the all-sufficiency of biology or that the scientific account at least is exhaustive? What science cannot discover does not exist or at least we cannot know anything about it. If so we would, it seems, have the extra premise needed for the argument to be valid: If evolutionary theory implies that our existence is a widely improbable event and the only source of knowledge we have is science (or more specifically evolutionary biology in this case) then it follows that we ought to believe that our existence is the result of pure chance, that is, it is not a part of anyone's plan and it serves no one's end. (Thus a 'chance event' is in this context taken to be something that is not a part of anyone's plan and serves no one's end.)

Let us call this version of the argument the 'scientistic' no-purpose argument:

(1) The human species came into existence through the process of evolution. (2) But all individual species that come into existence through the process of evolution are random (that is, have a low probability) with respect to what evolutionary theory (or more broadly, the sciences) can predict or retrospectively explain. (3) The only things we can know anything about or rationally believe anything about are the ones science can discover.[12] ---------------
Therefore, the existence of human beings is an accidental event, that is, their existence as a species is not a result of God's purposes, intentions or plans, given that such a being exist.

But the problem with such an argument is that the extra premise appears to contain a non-scientific claim. For how can one set up a scientific experiment to demonstrate the truth of (3)? What methods in, for instance, biology or physics are suitable for such a task? Well, hardly those methods that make it possible for scientists to discover and explain electrons, protons, genes, survival mechanisms and natural selection. Furthermore it is not because the content of this belief is too small, too distant or too far in the past for science to determine its truth-value. Rather it is that beliefs of this sort are not subject to scientific inquiry. We cannot come to know (3) by appeal to science alone. Premise (3) is rather a view in the theory of knowledge and is, therefore, a piece of philosophy and not a piece of science. But if it is a piece of philosophy then we cannot know it to be true because we would then have non-scientific knowledge, which the premise denies the possibility of. Thus, the more profound problem with the premise is that it seems to undermine itself. If it is true, then it is false. So what we have here is a version of the no-purpose argument, which contains a controversial non-scientific premise (scientism) and moreover appears to be self-refuting.[13]

2. The 'Not Purely Scientific' No-Purpose Argument

Is there any other, more promising way in which the no-purpose argument could be developed so that those of us who take evolutionary theory seriously may after all have to reconsider at least some of our religious beliefs? I think so. These biologists could instead of maintaining (3), add a premise about the conditions that must be satisfied for something to exist for a reason or to be something which is intended or planned by someone. Thus they could claim that it is this premise together with premises (1) and (2) that entail the conclusion.

Remember that the religious belief under consideration is that we-as a species-are here in accordance with God's plan, that there is in this sense a meaning or purpose to our existence. We are not merely accidental because God intended to create us and did so, we have discovered, not by a direct act of creation but by the process of evolution. It seems, however, as if a requirement for a plan, purpose, foresight or intention to be involved in an object coming into being is that this object is not the result of mere chance, but has a certain likelihood of obtaining. That is to say, we cannot attribute purpose to a thing without implying that someone did something intentionally, that is had a purpose in mind in bringing about the thing. But that is not sufficient. I might have the intention to bring about a state of affair, say to plant some red roses in my garden, and I do this by taking away the grass and in its place put some topsoil from a bag that I have bought. Three weeks later, even though I have not planted some seeds in the flowerbed, red roses start to grow. Under these circumstances we would not say that there is a purpose why these red roses grow in my garden merely because I had such a general intention. The reason is that even though I had the intention to bring about this state of affair this is not in itself sufficient, because the likelihood that my action, given what I actually did, would have this outcome was too low.

If the advocates of the no-purpose argument from evolutionary biology apply these observations about purposive actions of human agents to God, they would, it seems, have a complete argument, and one that would not presuppose the acceptance of scientism. The argument would then be:

(4) The human species came into existence through the process of evolution. (5) The existence of the human species is planned by God (or something like God) only if the species' existence is (a) intended by God and (b) it is probable that its emergence by means of evolution will take place for that reason. (6) But all individual species that come into existence through the process of evolution are random (that is, have a low probability) with respect to what evolutionary theory (or more broadly, the sciences) can predict or retrospectively explain. ---------------
Therefore, the existence of human beings is an accidental event, that is, their existence as a species is not a result of God's purposes, intentions or plans, given that such a being exist.

Is this a good argument? Perhaps, but notice that it is not a scientific argument because premise (5) contains an extra-scientific or philosophical claim. So this argument could not be used to support William Provine's claim that 'Modern science directly implies that there ... is no ultimate meaning for humans'.[14] Evolutionary biology alone cannot establish that the universe and humans are not here for a reason. What seems true is that scientific theories such as evolutionary theory can in conjunction with an extra-scientific or a philosophical claim like (5) undermine such a religious belief.

Let us assume that the argument in this version is valid and sound. What would then follow for, for instance, Christians who take evolutionary theory seriously? It would imply that they had to accept that God did not have the human species in mind when God created the world and that therefore our existence is without purpose in the sense that it is not part of anyone's plan. Our existence would then be due to chance because it was not a part of God's plan for the creation. Is this a modification that Christianity can undergo without losing its unique identity?

I think, perhaps surprisingly, that the answer is 'yes', and to see why consider the following analogy. Jacob is my firstborn child. However, my wife and I did not plan to have Jacob, our plan was simply to have a child. But as things turned out Jacob happens to be born.[15] Jacob's existence would then be due to chance because when we decided to have a child he was not part of our plan. I suggest that Christians and other religious believers can understand their relationship to God in a similar way, and just as my wife and I love our son, God could love people in the way Christians believe that God loves them, even though the human species was not intended to exist. (Here is in fact an opportunity to get away from the strong form of anthropocentrism that, I think, has been too closely associated with traditional Christianity.)

What Christians (and of course Jews and Muslims as well) seem to be committed to is rather the belief that central to God's purpose is, as Keith Ward puts it, the 'generation of communities of free, self-aware, self-directing sentient beings'.[16] On such an account the purpose of genes is to build bodies, the purpose of bodies is to build brains, and the purpose of brains is to generate consciousness and even self-consciousness, and with it there appears for the first time in natural history, reflective and critical thinking, experiences of meaning, love and forgiveness and a capacity to choose between good and evil. This development is something that was part of God's plan with creation, although no part of that plan was the specific development of human beings.

But does perhaps evolutionary biology also undermine this belief, the belief that God brought the universe into being in order to realize a set of values or worthwhile states, including, in particular, the emergence of a complex self-conscious life form, a life form that due to chance happens to become Homo sapiens? However, it is more difficult, I think, for evolutionary biologists to argue successfully for such a conclusion because in their profession they typically focus on the evolution of a particular lineage of animals-which they have shown could have developed in a number of quite different ways from the way it actually developed-and not on the types of life forms and functions served. Holmes Rolston has provided at least some reasons to doubt the credibility of such a version of the no-purpose argument. He writes,

"Assuming more or less the same Earth-bound environments, if evolutionary history were to occur all over again, things would be different. Still, there would likely again be organisms reproducing, genotypes and phenotypes, natural selection over variants, multicelluar organisms with specialized cells, membranes, organs; there would likely be plants and animals: photosynthesis or some similar means of solar energy capture in primary producers such as plants, and secondary consumers with sight, and other sentience such as smell and hearing; mobility with fins, limbs, and wings, such as in animals. There would be predators and prey, parasites and hosts, autotrophs and heterotrophs, ecosystemic communities; there would be convergence and parallelism. Coactions and cooperations would emerge. Life would probably evolve in the sea, spread to the land and the air. Play the tape of history again; the first time we replayed it the differences would strike us. Leigh Van Valen continues: 'Play the tape a few more times, though. We see similar melodic elements appearing in each, and the overall structure may be quite similar. . . . When we take a broader view, the role of contingency diminishes. Look at the tape as a whole. It resembles in some ways a symphony, although its orchestration is internal and caused largely by the interactions of many melodic strands.'"[17]

The biochemist, Christian de Duve, agrees with Rolston and Van Valen on this point. He writes: 'Life was bound to arise under the prevailing conditions, and it will arise similarly wherever and whenever the same conditions obtain. There is hardly any room for "lucky accidents" in the gradual, multistep process whereby life originated. ... I view this universe [as] ... made in such a way as to generate life and mind, bound to give birth to thinking beings'.[18] So perhaps it is true that the development of the human species is not likely given the scientific theories we have, but the development of some form of intelligent life might still be. If we play the tape again and again, it seems likely that something like us will reappear.

I have suggested that Christians and other theists may as a response to what we have come to know through evolutionary biology about the development of life on earth, modify their religious faith in such a way that they admit that the existence of the human race was probably not planned by God. Instead of believing that God had a particular species in mind, they should (or at least could) believe that what God had in mind was the emergence of a generation of communities of free, self-aware, self-directing sentient beings. The benefit of thus revising our beliefs is that the likelihood that such a life form would appear in evolutionary history is much higher than that a particular instance of this type of life, Homo sapiens, would emerge.

But why think even that this development had to take place on Earth? Why believe that part of God's plan or intention was to create on a particular planet a complex self-conscious life form by means of evolution? I see no reason why Christians (or Jews and Muslims for that matter) should think that they are committed to believe that the creation of the Earth was essential for God's plans. However, if we accept this line of thought then surely the likelihood that free, self-aware and self-directing sentient beings would appear somewhere in the Universe is higher then the likelihood that this form of life would emerge on the planet that we call 'Earth'. So it seems to be compatible with theism not merely that we exist due to chance, but also that due to chance the evolution of a complex self-conscious life form did take place on this particular planet.

3. The Complete No-Purpose Argument

But suppose that evolutionary biologists like Dawkins, Gould and Wilson succeeded in developing an argument that could show that even the emergence of communities of free, self-aware, self-directing sentient beings in natural history is not probable on earth or anywhere else in the Universe, given what evolutionary theory (or more broadly, the sciences) can predict or retrospectively explain. Does it really follow then, as we have assumed so far, that the existence of a complex self-conscious life form (which has by chance been actualized in the form of the human species) is not, or is probably not, a result of God's purposes, intentions or plans? I do not think so for the following reason.

It seem to me that the relevant issue is not, strictly speaking, what is likely given the scientific information or theories we possess (premise 6), but what is probable given what we could assume that God's knowledge would be about the outcome of the evolutionary process that science investigates, if certain initial conditions are initiated at the beginning of the universe. Theists agree that such a being's cognitive capacity would far outrun our capacity. They disagree, however, whether God's knowledge includes merely what has occurred and is occurring, or if it also includes all that will occur. Some theists even think that God possesses 'middle knowledge.' In other words, God also knows what would in fact happen in every possible situation or possible world.[19]

Moreover, where theists stand on this issue depends at least partially on whether they think God is best understood as a temporal or as an atemporal being. Ernan McMullin, like St. Augustine and Thomas of Aquinas, believes that the most appropriate way to describe God's relationship to time is to say that God is an atemporal being or exist 'outside' of time. This means that God knows the world in the act of creating it, and thus knows the cosmic past, present, and future in a single unmediated grasp. But if this is so, McMullin points out, it does not seem as if it matters whether the emergence of the human species or any other complex self-conscious life form is an inevitable product of the evolutionary process or whether it is a widely improbable event given what evolutionary biologists can predict or retrospectively explain.[20] This is so because God would then not anticipate the future by extrapolating from knowledge of the present, as we do, but knows the outcome of evolution in the direct way that we know the present. For God to plan means on such an account that the outcome occurs; there is no gap between decision and completion.

But even if God is understood to be a temporal being and God's knowledge is limited to everything that is or has been and what follows deterministically from it, it seems as though God's ability to predict with great accuracy the outcome of future natural causes and events is enormous. We cannot, therefore, automatically assume that what is probable, given such divine knowledge, is the same as what is probable given the scientific knowledge that we happen to have.

Thus if God planned to create us or more specifically a complex self-conscious life form and if it is likely that we or such a life form actually come into existence, given what God can know about the future of the evolving natural processes, then one could reasonably claim that we are here for a reason, although the human species was perhaps not an explicit part of God's plans, purposes or intentions, just as I could maintain that my daughter Beatrice exists for a reason, although she was not an explicit part of our plan when my wife and I decided to have a second child.

To establish the opposite conclusion seems to require more than basing one's calculation of probable outcomes on current scientific theories. The argument would have to show that the evolution of human beings or any complex self-conscious life form is unlikely given (a) what we know through biology or any other science about evolution and (b) what we could assume about what God (if such a being exists) would know about the outcome of the process

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Published   2001.11.30