That the living world might, in some deep mysterious way, be expressive of a transcendent dimension is largely rejected by contemporary secular thinkers. Most will argue that modern science has demonstrated, at least in principle, that life in all its evolving complexity and sophistication is the inevitable product of entirely natural, unplanned processes. Biological materialism, or naturalism, is an all-embracing material explanation of how molecules evolved into complex living organisms including us humans. In this view all of life is accounted for in terms of the outworking of scientifically describable chemical and physical processes guided entirely by rules and constraints resident within a wholly material universe. And so it asks - Why insist on a role for a Creator when science has shown there is nothing left for a Creator to do?

The God vs no-God polarization is one of the big tensions troubling contemporary Western culture. The intensity of the debate is fuelled in part by the recent widespread publicity given to religious fundamentalism and its frequent, and I believe, misplaced insistence that all scientific truth must be made subservient to a particular literal reading of the early chapters of Genesis. There is an added tension for many Christians genuinely engaged in science within the context of our secular scientific culture: there can be the threat of banishment to an academic gulag if one dares to express religious and specifically theistic sympathies or raise doubts about the explanatory power of a wholly material science.

In this paper I do not wish to explore the fundamental God versus no-God issue—that I shall leave to the theologians and philosophers. Rather, I want to linger briefly within the scientific ‘camp’ and ask whether the particulars that science reveals, and science has done this task with remarkable thoroughness, do in fact point to a purposeful, transcendent dimension.

The priority of natural selection

To begin our exploration it is important to note that naturalism’s recipe for the unfolding of life is intimately bound up with the concept of Darwinian natural selection (NS). Although Darwin proposed his theory before the gene had been discovered, and we must not forget Alfred Russel Wallace’s co-proposing of the same theory, our modern understanding of this concept is based on Darwin’s unique insights into the interplay between biological variability, fitness with the local environment and reproductive success.

Natural selection, now deeply informed by modern molecular biology, is really a description of biological transformation arising from the differential and adaptive survival of genes. Largely random alterations in an organism’s genetic make-up result in variations in its phenotype. If these genetically sourced variations enable the organism to adapt more successfully to its environment it will reproduce faster, resulting in a lineage that is better able to survive than those variants less favourably endowed. This, in brief, is naturalism’s primary explanation for life’s evolutionary unfolding.

Again, we need to remind ourselves that naturalism is about a natural as opposed to a transcendent cause. It is committed to placing natural selection entirely within the material basket. For the materialist the responsibility to deliver the richness of biological innovation rests squarely on the shoulders of natural selection. And it must bear this burden alone. There is no supporting cast. Single-handed, natural selection is charged with the monumental task of conquering the ‘Everest’ of biological innovation. So, in Richard Dawkins words¹:-

Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparent purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker. (p. 5)

Only natural selection comes close to omnipotence, but even here no intelligence, foresight, ultimate purpose or morality is involved. Natural selection is merely an amoral force, as inevitable and uncaring as gravity.

A particularly eloquent piece of prose in the same materialist vein comes from the distinguished French biologist Jacques Monod³:

Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a source of noise, natural selection could quite unaided have drawn all the music of the biosphere. Indeed natural selection operates upon the products of chance and knows no other nourishment.

How natural is natural selection?

But we need to ask - can natural selection be so easily dismissed as a wholly material, unconscious, purposeless process? I think it is fair to say that at one popular level the expression natural selection serves as a kind of mantra, an almost magical utterance that quickly allays any doubts a skeptic might entertain. It is uttered with power and authority when any kind of biological achievement required to be explained, and in the currency of a wholly material world. My argument is that the claim that natural selection explains the extraordinary (read life processes) while drawing only on the ordinary (read material processes), is not only bad science, it is also contradicted by the very narrative the materialist seems compelled to employ to present his or her story of life.

So let me first give you several recent examples from the popular science literature to illustrate just how reliant on the use of this mantra biological materialism has become.
London University geneticist Steve Jones⁴ in his book Almost like a Whale has a chapter on natural selection and explains its working in the following way. He describes his experience of working as a fitter’s mate in a Liverpool soap powder factory. A soapy liquid is blown out through a nozzle and the pressure drop creates a cloud of soap particles. But the process originally utilised a simple nozzle that narrowed at one end. This design led to several quality control issues. Jones describes the problem of finding an improved nozzle design as simply too difficult for scientists to solve so the company resorted to evolution - "design without a designer". Here are Jones’ words:

The engineers used the idea that moulds life itself: descent with modification. Take a nozzle that works quite well and make copies, each changed at random. Test them for how well they make powder. Then, impose a struggle for existence by insisting that not all can survive. Many of the altered devices are no better (or worse) than the parental form. They are discarded, but the few able to do a superior job are allowed to reproduce and are copied - but again not perfectly. As generations pass there emerges, as if by magic, a new and efficient pipe of complex and unexpected shape. (p. 91)

Now Steve Jones should, of all people, know better than to use such a misleading illustration. The trial and error or hit and miss type of process which he claims is analogous to natural selection is actually loaded with intentionality, or to be exact, intelligent scrutiny. Firstly, a better nozzle is being sought. So, a nozzle, said to have been modified at random, is tried and found to do a better or worse job than another. And who decides whether it is an improvement or not? A rather discerning “nozzle operator,” one skilled in the art of recognising whether the change is for better or for worse, one who is able to detect subtle degrees of improvement or deterioration.

Even the expression “trial and error” presupposes an expectation against which an altered performance can be judged. “Hit and miss” is all about a target that is being aimed for. The men on the Liverpool soap factory shop floor knew precisely what end result they wanted (a better performing nozzle) and this surely robs Steve Jones of his convenient metaphor for natural selection. The words “design without a designer” are little more than misleading sloganeering and what he presents to his readers is more a piece of materialistic fiction. Natural selection, even if simplistically illustrated with the soap powder analogy, is a truly intentional process.

Interestingly, Darwin⁵ had, some 150 years earlier, resorted to the same language of intentionality in order to convey to his readers the discerning power of natural selection:

It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

Darwin's picture of natural selection “scrutinising”, “rejecting” the bad, “preserving” the good, carries the same idea of there being a profoundly important element of intentionality that operates in the living world - the very world he was attempting to explain in naturalistic terms.

But where does this quality of purpose or intention come from? Few would suggest that it could come from atoms or molecules themselves, unless of course we attribute to them qualities akin to mind or personality. Natural selection is certainly a biological reality but it is intimately linked with a dimension that would appear to be much more than material. Its persistence in the evolutionary literature as a wholly material process is, in my view, unfortunate. For while it serves rather well the particular ideological assertion that reality is ultimately unthinking matter, I do not think that it is consistent with the facts of science and especially biology.

The achievement of biological complexity

A fundamental issue for biology is how organs of great complexity might have evolved. The answer is generally framed in terms of gradualism and the creative power of cumulative small changes. Scientifically there seems nothing wrong with such an approach. Certainly, in modern animals there are enormous differences in the degrees of sophistication, for example, of the organs of sight (figure 1). The eye of the microscopic aquatic animal Euglena consists of a tiny light-sensitive spot. Further up the complexity ladder, the two eyes of the little Tubellarian flatworm Planaria are each formed from an arrangement of cup-shaped cells that are heavily pigmented. The interior of each cup is filled with special nerve cells which feed sensory signals back to the brain. Then there is the compound eye found in the vast family of arthropods with its built-in ability to adjust optically to varying levels of lighting, and especially ‘tuned’ for detecting rapid movements. Finally, the vertebrate eye provides us with a truly staggering leap in optical sophistication.

The eye is of course just one of many impressive examples of a single physiological function that is supported by an enormous range of complex biological technologies. And it is this that suggests to Dawkins a gradual upgrading or evolving of a primitive eye into a more sophisticated eye, and on this point he may well be correct.

Dawkins⁶ draws on a computer model devised by two Swedish biologists Dan Nilsson and Susanne Pelger⁷ and which ‘evolves’ a virtual eye object from a flat layer of virtual cells sandwiched between virtual pigmented and transparent layers (figure 2). The model works by producing at random small percentage changes in the degree of curvature of the sandwich, in the size of a light-restricting aperture, and in the local value of its refractive index (light-bending ability). The computer is programmed to perform a simple calculation of the focusing or resolving power of the sandwich each time a small random change (read virtual mutation) occurs in any of the three variables.

In a relatively small number of generations the computer model is shown to transform the flat sandwich layer through continuous minor improvements into a configuration representing a virtual, focused, lens-shaped object. Dawkins argues that this transformation is exactly analogous to climbing the mountain of biological complexity and in his own words:

Going upwards means mutating, one small step at a time, and only accepting mutations that improve optical performance. So, where do we get to? Pleasingly, through a smooth upward pathway, starting from no proper eye at all, we reach a familiar fish eye, complete with lens. (p. 151)

But one can immediately see that Dawkins' supposedly wholly material explanation is anything but material. He is required to impose a non-material constraint on the behaviour of the eye model - he inserts the crucial condition of “only accepting mutations that improve optical performance.” Or, in terms of his mountain-climbing analogy, one must aim for the summit. Thus again, in order for his model to transform into a symbolic eye object, he is required to impose a profoundly purposeful constraint on the model’s function.

Just for the record, neither the originators of the computer program, Dan Nilsson and Suzanne Pelger nor Richard Dawkins, appear to have contributed much that is conceptually new in presenting their evolving eye model. Some 135 years earlier Charles Darwin⁸ proposed a near identical schema with his own ‘thought’ experiment. Here is what he wrote:

. . . we ought in imagination to take a thick layer of transparent tissue, with spaces filled with fluid, and with a nerve sensitive to light beneath, and then suppose every part of this layer to be continually changing slowly in density, so as to separate into layers of different densities and thicknesses, placed at different distances from each other, and with the surfaces of each layer slowly changing in form. Further we must suppose that there is a power, represented by natural selection or the survival of the fittest, always intently watching each slight alteration in the transparent layers; and carefully preserving each which, under varied circumstances, in any way or in any degree, tends to produce a distincter image. . . . variation will cause the slight alterations, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of Man?

Note too how Darwin constructs for his readers a scenario that aims for a “distincter image”, one that will “pick out with unerring skill each improvement”. It is this principle of aiming for enhanced function that is absolutely crucial to the materialist’s theory of life but one which defies any purely impersonal or material explanation.

Object versus system

There is another layer of misrepresentation made by the biological materialist that needs to be discussed. And it concerns the confusing of material objects, however ordered they might be, and living systems. Richard Dawkins⁹ uses the example of such objects in an attempt to show his readers that evolution proceeds by virtue of the power of cumulative selection acting on small random changes. He describes his invention of a computer program which begins to draw from a simple predetermined form and which ‘evolves’ an array of intriguing shapes he calls biomorphs (figure 3). These arise from small random changes occurring in the instructional ‘genes’ contained in his program. Dawkins describes his own utter surprise and delight when he first ran his computer program:

When I wrote the program, I never thought that it would evolve anything more than a variety of tree-like shapes. I had hoped for weeping willows, cedars of Lebanon, Lombardy poplars, seaweeds, perhaps deer antlers. Nothing in my biologist's intuition, nothing in my 20 years’ experience of programming computers, and nothing in my wildest dreams, prepared me for what actually emerged on the screen. I can’t remember exactly when in the sequence it first began to dawn on me that an evolved resemblance to something like an insect was possible. With a wild surmise, I began to breed, generation after generation, from whichever child looked most like an insect. My incredulity grew in parallel with the evolving resemblance . . . Admittedly they have eight legs like a spider, instead of six like an insect, but even so! I still cannot conceal from you my feeling of exultation as I first watched these exquisite creatures emerging before my eyes. (p. 59)

Dawkins' main point is that as the generations pass, the total amount of genetic difference between a particular ‘offspring’ and its original ‘ancestor’ can become extremely large. And while the offspring in any one generation are different from their parents in random directions, the choice of which progeny goes forward into the next generation is determined by a non-random selection process - the human eye.

He does admit that the model is deficient in that it uses an artificial method to do the selecting, and goes on to suggest that a really clever programmer might be able to devise a form of natural selection that in some way modeled a mechanism of survival or death based on his so-called ‘biomorphs’ interacting with a simulated hostile environment.
But there are glaring conceptual flaws in Dawkins’ whole analogy. Firstly, he has committed a fatal error by mixing his metaphors. In effect he confuses systems that achieve with objects that simply are. What he produces is a series of computer-generated objects, in essence, digital doodles that certainly go through an interesting sequence of transformations resulting from the accumulation of small random alterations in the values of his shape-determining instructional ‘genes’. But they are nothing more than objects and can never be used to explain, in even the simplest analogous sense, how any living system might have arisen.

Dawkins appears to be exploiting the fact that his computer model generates shapes that crudely resemble all manner of objects, both living and non-living, and he even calls them by a name designed, I suspect, to evoke in the reader’s mind a living connotation - biomorphs. An unsuspecting reader might then imagine a plausible connection between these computer-generated pictures and the real thing. But in reality Dawkins' program produces pictorial representations of anything and everything, living and non-living - a great variety of recognisable shapes or ‘digital doodles’, Lego-like biosymbolic fantasy objects, crude and simplistic symbols of reality, but little more.

His computer program is a fantasy-generating machine - of a digital kind! His biomorphs offer nothing in the way of explanation as to how any functioning system, living or non-living, might have come into existence. They