Selections: History's Black Box

Because Darwinism posits only random evolution, there is a frequent confusion of necessity and design, in the triad, chance, necessity, and design. In the words of S. Kauffman in his At Home in the Universe

The existence of spontaneous order is a stunning challenge to our settled ideas in biology since Darwin. Most biologists have believed for over a century that selection is the sole source of order in biology, that selection is the tinkerer that crafts the forms. But if the forms selection chooses among were generated by laws of complexity, then selection has always had a handmaiden. It is not, after all, the sole source of order, and organisms are not just tinkered-together contraptions, but expressions of deeper laws. If all this is true, what a revision of the Darwinian worldview will lie before us! Not we the accidental, but we the expected![i]

This passage in remarkable both for its attempted extension of evolutionary mechanism, and the appearance of ‘design’ language or metaphor in the description of that projected new theory. It is here that we see that ‘necessity’ and ‘design’ are really a play on the cousin antinomy of freedom and necessity, and will echo the ambiguity of our treatment of ‘evolving freedom’, with a Kantian twist.

We see these issues resurfacing most recently in the more sophisticated versions of the design argument seen in such works as Darwin’s Black Box, by T. Behe, or No Free Lunch, by W. Dembski. Behe’s thesis considers the developmental aspect of evolutionary genetics. While this is a serious challenge to theories of natural selection, the lurking ‘argument by design’ tends to erode the soundness of this basic objection.[ii]

Looking at the complexity discovered now in genetic systems, we realize we are in terra incognita, and well out of the realm of natural selection. That sense of design that we see in a computer program is clearly evident in these structures, yet here we can easily fall into the trap of inferring divinity where no such thing can be inferred, save that our methods are primitive, and only as good as our technology, which loiters in the Newtonian kingdom, now moving in the realm of information.

We are confronted with this ‘design sense’ and a clear sense of ‘design’ in history that moves against the argument by design, perhaps a clear case of our N-design vs G-design. One resolution is to see that a basic question we will encounter, e.g., ‘what caused the Axial Age?’ is by definition causal, if only because our sense of a priori enquiry forces this question. But is there really a causal explanation? This causal thinking is the way we perceive and ask questions, and is really a ‘principle of sufficient reason’ at work. The latter may or may not be causal in the sense of physics, which formally excludes the idea of freedom, not necessarily the same as free will, and therefore calls for an extension of itself to account for the phenomena of nature. The answer to the question may involve a reconstruction of our reductionist principles. We must produce a causal answer, and yet the true answer in nature may not be causal. If we ask, what causes freedom? this confusion is compounded. Let us note again that ‘design’ resembles the issue of ‘will’, hence of freedom. Thus the dualism of necessity and design is a disguised version of a basic antinomy, freedom and necessity that we will address as we go along and which lingers under a Sword of Damocles, the ‘noumenal’ addressed by Kant.

Old Testament and design arguments The centerpiece of the design argument is the assumed prior evidence of ‘design in history’ shown in the Old Testament. In the light of Biblical Criticism and the greater awareness of history given by archaeology we can only conclude that the design argument, in our sense of ‘G-design’, fails, and its context in the Axial Age drives us to a new understanding.

We can only proceed beyond speculation toward the empirical. Therefore, we can ask ourselves, does history shows evidence of ‘design’? In fact it does, but any account of an actual designer requires explaining how such a strange and bungled history as that of monotheism could have been the object of willful manipulation. We would call it ‘N-design’. But, at this point, an atheist probably has a better chance at grasping the Old Testament riddle, if he could ever free himself from the hypnosis of scientism. The problem is that it too often looks mechanical in spite of itself, with an element of necessity, or self-organization. Even as we see design in history, we cannot distinguish that from directional necessity, and we certainly cannot conclude that ‘divinity however defined’ is acting through history. The remarkable fact is that the core period of the Old Testament is a remarkable instance of the eonic effect! So the ‘design’ argument can work both ways!

[i] Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 9.

[ii] William Dembski, No Free Lunch (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), Robert Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: Free Press, 1996).