Of Design and Suchlike Marvels.

MY youngest brother and I had an excellently heated debate upon a time over the nature of evolution; rather, I was debating the nature of evolution and he was debating the theory of evolution. Essentially I maintained the notion of blind forces devoid of intelligence developing into a human being, a bird of paradise, a spider, a mole, or a lion, was absurd, and that this was the glaring flaw to evolutionary theory which I had not as yet seen answered to my satisfaction. My brother, rather tartly, replied something to the effect of saying I did not understand the theory, he said it was random, the perception of intelligence resulted from afterthought, and that in point of fact the highly adapted forms of life we see are not successful because they are highly adapted but that they are highly adapted because they were successful.

   I had already heard this argument and I replied, with the clarifying simplicity I always strive to maintain in my thought processes, that this explained very little. In the first place, I maintained, the notion of randomness was unscientific to its very core in that it is mathematically impossible, as well as being philosophically inexplicable. It is a rejection of rationality in so far as it declines to supply any explanation whatsoever. As for the case that somehow adaptation is an incident to success, I was convinced that was a fallacy indeed. It is like saying the Olympic runner did not win his medal because he was good at running, but that he was good at running because he won his medal. How, pray, does a medal make a man something? It is only an indication of what he is, it does not alter him in any way. It is a very weak argument and it explains nothing, essentially it says: life is because it is, evolution is incidental and there's an end on't. Even Richard Dawkins admitted there was a problem in this view when he said to John Lennox, 'It is not random, by the way.' But the theory, which he so ably espouses, implies it is random at its very core, or rather I should say unintelligent. The mutations which are said to occur from the first are supposed to be entirely incidental, as incidental as the formation of certain elements in a star, and therefore are not specified by any particular process.

   Natural selection of course is another matter, and the evolutionary philosophers admit tacitly, though whether they are themselves aware of it is not always obvious, that there is an intelligence evident in the gradual development of living things. A giraffe has a long neck because it is helpful for eating tall foliage, a gorilla is very strong because that helps to ensure its self-defence and survival, a grasshopper has powerful legs because they are useful for movement and evasion. These examples, and every other such example of creatures and vegetables, show that where there is a possible use for a development there is a rational choice in favour of it, according to environmental suitability. The failures, the ones which end in extinction, only happen to suffer that fate due to prevailing competition. It is not that nature erred, merely that nature refined, as Mozart doubtless played extempore ten thousand times the amount he ever wrote for posterity, and I am sure a great deal of it was worth the listening too, only he chose not to record it.

   Where I differ with the naturalists is simply in the view they have taken of conceiving a compatibility with physics and chemistry and biological evolution, rather than realising that these various branches of study describe the same thing from different perspectives; thus physics would describe the motion of blood in a monkey, chemistry would describe the elements of it, and biology the function of it. These are all so  many different parts accruing to the overall truth, the Whole, whose ultimate imagining is the highest purpose of human intellectual endeavour; as the excellent fable of the blind men and the elephant so acutely describes. Instead of recognising this however, many evolutionary biologists have made it their business to dabble in casual philosophy and often unwarranted invective against certain Forms of Ignorance, as they see them. It is the creationists they particularly detest, but I cannot see why. Certainly I think it odd in anyone to prefer the view that the earth is seven-thousand years of age because that is the figure employed in old literature, merely as a means of emphasising how ancient the world is, rather than the view of a geologist, but when it comes to creation as a philosophical notion it appears to me the creationists misuse it and the evolutionary men misunderstand it.

   This I contend because the necessary implications of theism are indeed such that the concept of temporality is completely defeated except as a product of human imagination. What are the main doctrines of temporality? Number, space, time, creation, and destruction, these all are notions formed out of delineation, that is, we take something and quantify it so that one part is recognised from another. This process has served us well, for the little creatures we are, but does it serve the Universe, the great and complete frame of existence around us? Does it serve God? Does the universe voluntarily kill itself because Stephen Hawking believed it ought, or will it admit to birthing itself with the big bang because that is what scientific consensus thinks it really ought to have done if it had any manners? We try and we stratify, we map and we clap, we draw and we saw, and go about our business, but it is only so much occupation, only the diversion of pastime, it is not Broad enough to be acceptable philosophy.

   The redundant notion of randomness is the defeat of effort due to incomprehension in the face of complexity. Complexity is a perception not a fact, but due to its influence some are inclined to surrender to notions like chance or randomness. In colloquial usage this is quite justified, as conversation would be tedious if instead of calling something a 'chance encounter' we called it 'a most extraordinary encounter doubtless explicable if the many, frankly innumerable, threads of circumstance were all gathered together and unified into one good yarn of comprehension'. Tedious though it seem, that is what we must realise we truly mean by a 'chance encounter'. So by creation we mean that one point of time compared to another point of time is so different as to seem utterly disparate, and therefore we think something sprung out of nothing, a pure creation or uncaused cause. I have been vague about the notion of cause in my writing for the same reason Lady Windermere gave that excellent riposte to Lord Darlington when he said, 'Vileness is a terrible word, Lady Windermere.' 'It is a terrible thing, Lord Darlington.' she replied. Vague I am about cause because vague it is. Any illustration may show this, say I drop a pebble in a lake and it causes ripples. What is the cause of the ripples? The stone? The gravity affecting the stone? Me, for dropping the stone? The water of the lake, for being inclined to ripple? Or all these put together and more? If the last answer then I have no cause but I have circumstances. Effects are even more deceptive fellows. For it is plain that by day they masquerade as causes and by night they wear the clothes of an effect. Take the example of a man drinking an Alka-Seltzer of a Saturday morning, he is the cause of the Alka-Seltzer's formation in a cup of water, but this cause is also an effect of an earlier cause which was an headache, and the headache was a cause caused by the effect of excessive alcohol consumption the night before, which was an effect caused by the cause of wishing to forget trouble and strife. All these entertaining descriptions and definitions, and games played with time and the imagination, prove an enterprise diverting and useful to me; but it demands locality and temporality, two things which the Whole Universe transcends. For they are the offspring of comparison between the universe's parts, but the universe or God in totality is beyond all such inward differentiation, as a sheep is not merely a bag of limbs, organs, wool, and good nature.

   Therefore, creationism is not so strange a notion if it be considered that the nature of creation is alteration, caused cause if one is to use that imperfect terminology, things moving in the manner they do and they must, God's will (which is synonymous with His Being, His Presence, His Goodness, et. al.). But the evolutionary biologist rankles at this because he believes the creationists think there was a finger of God's which physically touched a clod of clay, and lo! a little beetle scurried off, and lo! an elegant gazelle, and hark! the sound of the corncrake, but beware! the snapping of the crocodile. Perhaps some of them do, I cannot say, but I think it would be absurdly mundane to suggest as much, yet that does not mean the notion of an active will or Nature (which word I much prefer) identical with divine Being, is not present and manifest in the works of evolutionary development, quite the contrary.

   Some ready rebuttals I can foresee, that there have been mistakes in certain adaptations of life, or that the nature of life's developments is emergent, so a man has personality and is made of atoms but an atom does not have personality. Well, in the first instance a mistake is a human term and a peculiarly emotive one at that. It is determined by another definition (and whenever a word is not determined in itself, as Spinoza would say, caution is advised), namely by the definition of success. So a penguin has wings and cannot fly and evolution made a mistake. But why must wings ensure flight to be judged successes? I have two excellent fountain pens that cannot write and I use them as pointers to aid in reading. That is all I think necessary to object to this question.

   Emergence is a more tangled objection but in essence I believe it is a confusion of thinking, caused again by temporal logic. A book has no knowledge but it can cause learning by the stimulation it generates in a reader, I we have an emergent property, except no. I only think there is an emergence because I am imagining a layer where the learning does not occur, a base layer of blind and inert matter, but such is not the case. The scene involves a reader. Yet more than this even, an atom no more precludes mentality than a planet precludes mentality, though I sometimes feel materialist doubts when I look at chalk cliffs, however these are but the phases of Form, and the essence of these as all things is identical with the essence of a brain, an emotion, an idea, or an entire personality, only they have morphed in time to their particular shape and nature. One thing's nature is judged for the sake of convenience isolated and apart, but it is not isolated nor apart but inextricably entwined in the greater mesh and the higher purpose. As an animal's mentality commands all the matter which its body makes up, so I conceive God's infinite mentality at work in every apparently inert form of matter (improper word) or 'base clay', so utterly superseding all lower reasoning as to render it non-existent except in the purposes of lesser beings such as ourselves. This reflection lifts my heart.

   But I am not contending idealism, because I hold with Spinoza that the true Substance of existence transcends mind and matter, and that these are but two aspects of it; as the oil puddle is not any one of the rainbow of colours it shews in looking at it, but all of them and none of them at the same time. I believe Spinoza's early definitions can imply that the Substance or true essence of existence is something one must drill down to find, a mere foundation upon which other more interesting things are constructed. However this is the kind of logic which is ever leading thought astray, because it is still treating reality piecemeal, like saying the only real part to Achilles, the only true essence of the hero, was his heel. Whole-part-whole my dear grandmother called the process of learning, but the whole this process refers to is only relatively so. The Whole to which I refer must be God, reality and existence's totality summarised; therefore, by parts we may synthesise a better understanding, but our sieve-like minds cannot hold it all at once but must one moment be looking at this jet of water, the next moment that jet, till all the water has already left the vessel. Although, perhaps this is what makes human learning evergreen, pleasant ignorance and charming forgetfulness.

   I think in regard to design, or the notion of calculated form, which is held up the antithesis to natural processes, perhaps a garden of Capability Brown's would be most illustrative. We English pioneered the natural garden in contradistinction to the continental style of quarters and gridlines, which I still like in herb gardens for example, and surely Brown is the genius and the glory of this grand method. He is the Shakespeare and Newton of gardening and landscape design, and what was his main purpose? To create and to alter an environment so as to look more natural, not less so, strange though it seem. To invoke a kind of Elysium ideal of perfect nature, with seemingly eternal stretches of sweeping meadow, and mythic banks along enchanted lakes, water with air painting the land, complemented and enhanced not sullied by the central presence of great architecture. So we have an example of design being natural, and I argue also that nature is designing. In so saying I am not attempting to enter into Chesterton's Royal Family of Paradox, I only mean to show again that these two terms of nature and of design are but the glinting of lights to perception, two kinds of lens flare, proving the multiple properties of existence. Design seems to imply strain, and nature to imply automation, but these once more are only describing human emotions; and Jehovah revealed the answer to Moses with His own identity when He said those profound reverberant words: I AM THAT I AM.