Wed 30 Jul, 2008
New Age “Evolution”
7:00 am Comments (6) Filed under: New Age, Origins and ScienceTags: Evolution, New Age
Here’s a good example of how not to marry science with a worldview: the so-called Evolutionary Manifesto. There are lessons here for Christians who want to understand origins both in relation to the teachings of science as well asto alternate religions.
This Evolutionary Manifesto is not the product of science, but of a New Age-oriented worldview; yet its author seems to accept evolutionary theory as fact. It’s a rather unique version of evolutionary theory, however:
At the heart of the evolutionary worldview is the fact that evolution has a trajectory—it heads in a particular direction.
No, that’s not at the heart of evolutionary theory, at least not as biology departments teach it. It’s the theory as it has been commonly misunderstood, though: a comic-book version of evolution.
I mean that quite literally. I can remember a couple of comic books I read as a kid (why this sticks in my memory I have no idea). In one of them, the bad guy had learned how to “speed up” evolution for himself, and he personally went through a progression: from shark to fish to some kind of mammal to ape to human – and then he went right on past human to the next step, which was stronger, smarter, better in all the ways humans would value. Sure, it’s a comic book, and it’s fair that it would call on us to suspend disbelief regarding one organism experiencing eons of evolutionary change. I don’t have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is what it did count on us believing: that evolution’s next step of progress would be something super-human like that.
In another comic there were aliens posing as humans on earth. They looked exactly like us except that “a quirk of evolution” (I remember the phrase exactly) had caused them to have two right hands (that is, their left-hand thumbs were on the wrong side of the hand). That’s how Superboy was able to identify them as impostors and save the human race. (Today they wouldn’t last two days passing themselves off as teenagers. I mean, just imagine how they would tie their hands in knots while texting!)
In both of these comic-book depictions, there is indeed a trajectory, a “particular direction” that evolution inevitably follows, unless some “quirk” sidetracks it. Real evolution, however, knows nothing of long-term progress or direction. Its only trajectory is toward whatever turns out to have been successful for reproduction. Now, did the verb tenses in that last sentence seem awkward? That was intentional, indeed necessary, to state the case accurately. Evolution’s “plan,” as it were, is to go wherever it happens to have gone. Its direction is toward wherever it happens to have ended up. It knows of progress in no other terms except reproductive fitness. And all of these terms—progress, direction, plan—are anthropomorphisms. If we see any of these sorts of things in evolution, it is because we have projected our own ways of thinking upon a process that has no analogue to it at all.
Note well that this is not an Intelligent Design distortion of evolution. This is what the theory actually means. So the above-mentioned “Evolutionary Manifesto” has almost nothing to do with real evolutionary theory. In fact, as it goes on it relies on an ironic, rather comical turn toward Intelligent Design:
In this new phase evolution will be driven intentionally, by humanity. The evolutionary worldview that emerges from an understanding of our role in the new phase has the potential to transform the nature of human existence.
Victor Reppert (at whose blog I found the link to this Manifesto) noted,
I smell the naturalistic fallacy (illicit shift from “is” to “ought”).
That’s for sure. For example:
“It relies solely on scientific knowledge and reason to identify our critical role in future evolution.”
All of the above quotes come from just the first five paragraphs. The sixth displays all of these errors in one compact location:
It is as if evolution is a developmental process. Just as a human embryo is organized to develop through a number of stages to produce an adult, evolution tends to produce a particular sequence of outcomes of increasing complexity. Initially, evolution moves in this direction of its own accord. However, at a particular point evolution will continue to advance only if certain conditions are met: organisms must emerge that awaken to the possibility that they are living in the midst of a developmental process; they must realize that the continued success of the process depends on them; and they must commit to actively moving the process forward.
Somehow this sells anyway. I wonder how many misunderstand the truth? How many think the science of evolution is about that comic-book version of progress? How many buy into New-Age optimistic corruptions of evolutionary theory? (I assure you this is not the only place I’ve seen it.) How many recognize, on the other hand, that evolutionary theory provides no basis whatever to regard humans as more advanced or progressed than any other organism?
Just thought I’d chime in and say I pretty much agree with you here, mostly because when I usually chime in it’s to tell you the opposite.
In some ways it’s kind of refreshing to see those who are espousing evolutionary theory, instead of opposing it, still getting it fundamentally wrong. Something about that theory, I guess, that just makes people want to take off and run with it. And run badly.
It’s nice to agree once in a while, isn’t it?
That opens up a question, though, Tony: given that you agree there’s no progress related to evolution, how do you feel about the question of progress here?
Well, Tom, I don’t know if I exactly agree with the statement “there’s no progress related to evolution,” for one. I think it would be correct to say that a salamander and human are both equally evolved, but you can also say that evolution has led to progressions — the largest animals, the most complex, etc. all exist today, and they did not exist in the not so distant (relative) past. The overall evolutionary trend has resulted in some animals that are larger, more complex, etc., and so I think in some instances you could make a case for biological progress. This is not the same thing as saying “more evolved,” however. That’s the point I thought you were making, and that’s what elicited my agreement.
I didn’t really understand the posting you linked to the first time — I try not to get involved in arguments that have philosophical underpinnings, and I thought that was where that discussion might logically go. If you really want me to bite I’d say that a) I have never heard of the progressive secularists, so I’m not so sure they’re that deserving of ridicule, and b) it was my understanding that progressivism is a kind of idealistic, pro government political philosophy that tried to manage the changes brought about by the industrial revolution. I wouldn’t think that they would require the modifier “secular” to distinguish themselves from other progressives, because I wasn’t aware they were known to have a religious bent.
So I thought the quote that started the post seemed to disparage a group whose name did not intend to have a philosophical meaning beyond “improvement over what is.” That is how I think of progressives, by the way; other centralizing, pro government philosophies all seem to have a utopian ideal which they spectacularly fail to reach. I think of progressives as “healers,” bent on “fixing” ailments (forbidding alcoholic consumption, streamlining processes, etc.) rather than striving for a positive ideal.
I was thinking of eugenics while reading the quotes in the post.
Isn’t this stating that it’s up to us to use our knowledge to continue the process of evolution in humans?
I can only imagine… a world where a microscopic cell built itself, all by its clever self, then figured out how to duplicate itself and, over eons of time, to grow its DNA information base exponentially, thereby becoming ever increasingly complex, creatures filling the earth?? So where does God come into this picture? That’s a rhetorical question by the way.
From the Manifesto we see where evolutionary theory takes one:
“At present humanity is lost. We don’t know what we are doing here. We are without a worldview that can point to our place and purpose in the universe and that can also withstand rational scrutiny. God has been dead for centuries.”