A review of Jean Staune’s Notre existence a-t-elle un sens? Une enquête scientifique et philosophique (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 2007) and Gerhard Neuweiler’s Und wir sind es doch—die Krone der Evolution (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 2009).
Let us remind ourselves some basic things. When Charles Darwin came out with his On the Origin of Species (please note the correct full title—it is significant in its relative modesty) in 1859, almost immediately a violent battle started between British Protestant intellectuals, clergymen, and believers, on the one hand, and the secular or “scientist” admirers and followers of Darwin. By contrast the Catholic response was by and large tepid, and rightly so, I think. Darwin’s views on evolution were not perceived as a great danger to the faith. It could very well be argued that his “evolution” was a kind of variant to the outline provided at the beginning of Genesis, that the whole difference was one of idiom, and that the Holy Spirit had been fully justified and quite wise in inspiring the author(s) of the Pentateuch to use wording intelligible to the human race during its first millennia. A more sophisticated, more precise, more rational/scientific discourse would come when needed, in the nineteenth century, for instance. So Darwinian views could be treated (almost) with benevolent indifference.
It is only in the past two or three decades that serious frictions began to emerge on a wider scale. Evolution theory was (rather unpredictably) turned into a rock-hard ideology, the intention of which was to act aggressively against religion. On the religious side the response was mostly a defensive one.
Why did things happen this way? I have a pet theory. “Conquering” and “triumphalist” secularist Christophobia used to rely, until recently, on three solid columns: Marx, Freud, and Darwin. We know very well how Marxism began to crumble, both theoretically and in practical ways; right now it is, at best, a phenomenon of the rearguard, of the losers and of the backward or hopeless activists and nations. We know equally well that Freud is treated by knowledgeable people, indeed by the public at large, with a kind of patronizing smile. A great genius? Some would continue to say so, but few would regard him as such in practice. Under these circumstances it became enormously important, even essential, for materialist determinists (and actual Christophobes) to rally around Darwin, to bolster him, to turn a mild scholarly hypothesis into a strict and dogmatic ideology.
One of the unintended supports of the rigid Darwinists came ironically from fundamentalist and literalist “creationists.” These people had never understood or accepted the complex and sophisticated mode of reading the Bible that Medieval Scholastics (and, even earlier, Talmudic scholars of the Hebrew Scriptures) had developed. They ignored the multiplicity of semantic layers (literal, symbolic, moral, anagogical—and sometimes more) to be found in the wealth of meanings embedded in the Sacred Texts. Likewise they were oblivious of the multiple rational arguments vindicating God and His ways. Most of the “creationists” were content with a literal reading of the Bible and with an explanation of Divine existence on the simple level of literal deduction (often described as “Revelation”: many of us may hesitate to label it so). I do not doubt the good intentions of such individuals, nor do I object to their firm faith. I merely note that by their positions they were turned into an easy prey and convenient foil for their adversaries and they opened an unjustified rift between reason and faith.
Fortunately, the response of most Catholics (as well as of a number of Protestants and Eastern Orthodox faithful) was placed on a rather different level and did not resort to a wholesale negation of scientific accomplishments. The mainstream Christian intellectuals sought their support from objective, neutral scholars and researchers, particularly those in “cutting-edge” sciences such as genetics and astrophysics. They simultaneously looked back to the classical arguments of the existence of God, as developed particularly in the Middle Ages. The latter had been considered obsolete or demolished by many in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Some or most of these arguments showed a remarkable resilience, however, and proved that in a renewed version they could be of considerable help in the renewed debate. Thus, for instance, the “teleological argument.”
This argument was fully developed by Averroes and by St. Thomas Aquinas during the Middle Ages, but early, somewhat sketchier outlines can be found already in the writings of Plato (e.g., Timaios and the Republic), Aristotle (Metaphysics), Cicero and the Neo-Platonic movement in general (not least St. Augustine). In simple summary it said that the universe is too orderly, purposeful, even beautiful to be the result of random mechanical causes; the assumption of Divine creation makes sense, it is in fact inevitable. While in its “hard” form it was doubted early on, the teleological argument “expanded” and ramified. In one way it was used (unexpectedly) by British empiricists—and occasionally even by Voltaire (!); in other ways, and more recently, it engendered the “argument from beauty” (at least since the great Chateaubriand on); even more recently, the “anthropic principle” or “teleonomy.” And more generally it provided ammunition for the wider “post-secularist” movement.” Such simple facts should be familiar to all intellectuals who are not hopelessly ignorant or ill-intentioned.
Two recent books—one French, one German—expand in highly sophisticated ways this “ramification” of the teleological argument and interestingly undermine the dogmatist and materialist “Darwinism” of the noisy “new atheists.”
Jean Staune, the author of one of these books, seems to be endowed with no less than six degrees and runs an “interdisciplinary” free university in Paris; while some may cast some doubt on his depth, the breadth of his erudition is certainly amazing. His book, Notre existence a-t-elle un sens?—the title may be translated as Does Our Existence Have a Sense?—is divided into six sections. The first and the sixth are mostly philosophical; the second deals with current developments in microphysics, the third chiefly with cosmic astronomy, the fourth primarily with biological issues, and the fifth with neuropsychological matters. Staune’s common procedure in all of these sections is to demonstrate how recent research, conclusions, and theories differ (sometimes in radical ways) from the conventional frameworks of scientific thinking (nineteenth-century and somewhat later) which had been mostly inclined toward materialist paradigms.
Without entering into many technical details (I am not a specialist in any of these domains), let us just point to a few relevant observations. Thus, in microphysics, the deeper research advances, the more it encounters counterintuitional facts: parallel universes, the paradoxes of temporal advance and retreat, the possibility of variable speeds of light, the nonlocality of minimal material units. Genuine reality (with “hard objectivity”), an increasing number of researchers conclude, may or may not exist, but it certainly does not coincide with the phenomenal reality inside which we live or seem to live (the one that we touch, smell, measure); the tendency is to postulate a “veiled reality,” which is much less sensorial and often appears related to spiritual forms.
Section 3 switches to “macrophysics,” or, more precisely, to recent research on cosmic evolution and its beginnings, as well as on the “unified field” theories; it abounds in subtitles such as “God and the absorption length of a neutron,” “Why is the universe so well regulated?” “Materialists endangered by a razor cut,” and “The hypothesis of a creator is no longer outside the field of science.” The chapter focuses on the “anthropic principle,” which postulates that each and all of the evolutionary stages of the universe seem so constituted as to prepare and be compatible with the emergence of the human species. Staune even offers a table of nine variants of the “anthropic principle” as formulated by prominent scientists: Freeman Dyson, Trinh Xuan Thuan, Guillermo Gonzalez, and others.
Section 4 dismantles hard-line Darwinism neatly but with the same meticulous bibliographical care. Staune highlights the numerous gaps, missing links, and unexplained events in the strictly evolutionary scheme of things, and he also points somewhat ironically to the return to the nineteenth-century “skip and jump” theories of Lamarck, which had seemed long dead and buried. His conclusion is not only that Intelligent Design is not absurd, but more specifically that we urgently need “an Einstein of biology.” In other words, Staune is convinced that Darwin’s evolutionary narrative is on the road of Newton’s physics or of Ptolemy’s cosmology: it is becoming a partial (“local”) explanation inside a wider biological framework—still valid, but far from comprehensive.
In Section 5, devoted to neuroscience, Staune conscientiously explains that contemporary research is far from being unanimous on a number of key issues, most notably the exact correspondence between neuronal phenomena and mental events, and particularly conscience. He patiently argues that in humans the animating force cannot find expression without neuronal activity, but is not a mere result of such an activity. Boldly he puts forward the possibility that much current rationalist and scientific research offers again acceptable space for a dualistic hypothesis (body and spirit).
In his philosophical conclusions, Jean Staune tries to be cautious and moderate. He rejects hasty anthropomorphic and “creationist” conceptions. Nevertheless he insists that the concentric effect of research in various “spearhead” scientific fields is that we are on the threshold of a radical paradigm change. Materialism appears to be increasingly ruined and “passé.” A spiritual and religious alternative, for the moment mostly akin to Platonism (presented in some detail), seems to him the most plausible replacement; in any case divine presence and intervention in one form or another have again become, he maintains, fully plausible. I will not enumerate here the powerful voices adduced by Staune to support his conclusions.
Gerhard Neuweiler, author of Und wir sind es doch—die Krone der Evolution (“We Are It: The Crown of Evolution”), is not necessarily one of these voices. Neuweiler was perhaps the world’s leading authority on research in bats until his recent retirement, which he seems to be using for raids in the realm of general evolution. The defects and genuflections of his writing in front of currently still hegemonic clichés (shaky and crumbling as they may seem to Staune) are easy to notice.
Thus in the last few pages of his conclusions Neuweiler incongruously includes an attack against Russia, some thinly veiled sentences of admiration for the so-called European Union and its social-democrat dimensions, as well as a prophecy that the human species is fast moving toward uniformity and coherence. More seriously, the author avoids (out of prudence or ignorance) coming to terms with any “alternative” developmental model, one in which the spiritual should play a significant role. The deepest-going defect of this book is the hilarious frequency of passages or formulations that indicate the radical uncertainty and the rickety construction of any comprehensive evolutionary system. I counted literally dozens of cases (particularly in the early chapters) when Neuweiler has to fall back on expressions such as: “in principle this is possible,” “acted presumably,” “we can imagine it as follows,” “might have begun,” “it may be assumed,” and many others. Equally grave is Neuweiler’s patent inability to explain the causes of evolutionary changes: many of his presentations are based on quantitative increases (number of cells in the brain and the like), but why such increases occurred is literally never elucidated.
Why then even bother with a book of this kind? Because hidden behind the façade are a number of interesting and solid comments that, I am convinced, distance the theoretical scientist from sheer materialism and bring the reader closer to more complex understandings, to views in which the spiritual dimension can be legitimately taken into consideration. Neuweiler is far from acting just as a more neutral and objective Carl Sagan. Not the least signal of where he really stands is the author’s repeated critique of the pathetic (and often hysterical) materialist rants of Richard Dawkins (and implicitly of other writings of this kind). Moreover, Neuweiler (for whom the human species is “the crown of evolution,” as he emphasizes by the title of his book) conscientiously notes the points on which current research does not offer answers, and is not likely to, as well as the points where the “trans-rational” might seem to present itself as a credible alternative.
While he mentions the oft-adduced cases in which various mammals appear comparable to humans, he always underlines the radical and qualitative differences (linguistic or signaling actions, occasional use of tools, etc).
Likewise, the author, who in some ways resembles the great Frederick Turner, even when he shows much more philosophical restraint, adheres to a moderate form of ecologism (as opposed to the “ecotheology” unleashed upon us by patent demagogues). For him nature is largely (83 percent is the figure he uses) domesticated, shaped by human imagination, history, and needs, and an attempt to “return” to some kind of pristine condition must be harmful, reactionary, and lead to failure.
Neuweiler is a declared follower of Konrad Lorenz, and is influenced by the composer Gyorgy Ligeti (with whom he coauthored a book on the mutual relevance of music and neurobiological functions). For him evolution in general and human development in particular are founded on informational processes. Any kind of growth and development is the result of increasingly complex self-organization and informational accumulation and assemblage. These are clearly not material building blocks. And while Neuweiler describes clearly and (for a layman like me) convincingly which parts of the human brain correspond to which functions, emotions, perceptions, and the like, he is equally careful not to claim a causal relationship between synapses and cortical subsections to the human activities of which the former are the instruments. His neutrality is infuriating at times to the reader, but it is also evidence of a prudent calm and of a refusal to ideological commitments.
One of Neuweiler’s key conclusions is that “Darwinism is no longer alone in this world”; he is surprised that concepts such as progress and aim are systematically avoided by biology schoolbooks. At the same time, he argues in some detail that religious and ethical values prove themselves to be important, perhaps indispensable, factors in the stabilizing and socializing of our species—the only one, he never tires to repeat, that understands and is based on time, on individual freedom, self-consciousness, and responsibility.
Reading these and other books on their wavelength, one may find reasons for optimism. A much larger number of serious specialists are drawing closer to the basic principles of “faith and reason” (and—significantly—coming out of their own fields of research) than one would suspect following merely the information selected and filtered by the “mainstream media.” The ideological imposition of secularism and of “Darwinism” has fewer judicious supports than it claims so loudly. Those of us who take our faith seriously will soon, I predict, be able to do so without nervous side glances toward scientific research, and without any hesitation or doubt.
To learn more, visit the ISI short course on Western Civilization.