Self-creation

Lord Rees, the Astronomer Royal and former President of the Royal Society writes in an article about manned spaceflight in the Daily Telegraph (10 January):

"Even though manned spaceflight will be a diminishing priority for governments, I believe and hope that some people now living will walk on Mars (though they may well go with one-way tickets). Moreover, a century or two from now, intrepid adventurers may be living independently from the Earth. Whatever ethical constraints we impose here on the ground, we should surely wish such pioneers good luck in genetically modifying their progeny to adapt to alien environments.

"Indeed, this might be the first step towards divergence into a new species: the beginning of the post-human era. Meanwhile, machines of human-like intelligence could spread still further into the stars. Whether the distant future lies with organic post-humans or with such intelligent machines is a matter for debate – but these prospects remind us that we may be near the beginning of a cultural and technological evolution that will continue not only here on Earth, but far beyond."

The emphasis is mine. Meanwhile, one of the most horrifying articles in a
recent issue of the RSA Journal is called "Self-Created". It comes from a "transhumanist" who predicts:

"we will modify ourselves to work in a way that is smarter, better and faster. History is the story of human liberation, and design will take us to a new frontier whereby we can liberate ourselves from our very identities... To self-design will be to self-create. New jobs will arise, and modifications will become conditions of employment."

He concludes: "Self-modification will start as tragedy. There will be sad grotesques. But with the tools and the intent, we can design our own personalities. The definition of ‘human’ will expand. Our children’s children will look nothing like us. And that will be by design."

The article exemplifies an attitude that is increasingly common in a secular age, where a sense of the sacred has become attenuated or distorted or lost altogether. If we are merely the material products of evolution, why not take over from the blind accidental processes of natural selection and design ourselves to be the way we'd like to be? What could be wrong with that? Sure, there will be some collateral damage – what the article calls "sad grotesques" – but you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

It is an attitude founded in the fantasies of the ego. Against it stands an attitude founded in reality – the reality of the world and of human nature. The world comes from a mysterious source over which we have no control. It is sheer gift. Conscious life, too, comes from this same mysterious source of Being, which cannot therefore be less than conscious itself. The profound reasons why science and technology should not ignore or usurp this "source", reducing organism to artifact, are laid out in a paper by Michael Hanby, from the Summer 2011 issue of Communio.

Natural selection

A couple of times in this blog I have commented on the theory of evolution and promised to come back to it. Though I did not address it directly in my book, it is one of the big influences on modern education (along with Freud, who deserves separate treatment). But the influence is not so much from the science of evolution as from the "idea", often exaggerated into an ideology that purports to explain everything. One of the most informative and enjoyable presentations of the current state of knowledge and speculation is Nick Lane's Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution. The "inventions" in question are life itself, DNA, photosynthesis, the complex cell, sex, movement, sight, hot blood, consciousness and death. In each case, science is trying to show how these breakthroughs were achieved without intelligent design, by physiochemical processes over long stretches of time. Though many of the answers remain elusive, the search for them has thrown up a huge amount of fascinating information. In this sense the book is a treasure trove. Lane concludes that the "convergence of evidence" from many fields makes it impossible seriously to doubt that life did evolve. Whether this is compatible with faith in God is a question he sensibly leaves open. That is something I debated with Clive Copus in the Catholic Herald last year. Readers interested in this question would do well to look at writings by Simon Conway Morris and Conor Cunningham. You will also find a number of relevant articles on the main Second Spring site, if you look in the online Articles section under Caldecott, Case, Dulles, Fedoryka, Hanby ("Saving the Appearances"), Olsen and Schonborn.

Evolution

When you read Beauty for Truth's Sake, you won't find much about evolution, except by implication. I mentioned this omission before, in an earlier posting triggered by a letter in the Catholic Herald. My own summary article about evolution is online here. Ignatius Press have a site dedicated to this question, called IntelligentProject.net, and they select the following passage from Pope Benedict, which goes to the heart of the question:

Christianity is faith in the Creator Spiritus, from whom comes everything that is real. Precisely this ought to give Christianity its philosophical power today, since the problem is whether the world comes from an irrational source, so that reason would be nothing but a "by-product" (perhaps even a harmful by-product) of the development of the world, or whether the world comes from reason, so that its criterion and its goal is reason. The Christian faith opts for this second thesis and has good arguments to back it up, even from a purely philosophical point of view, despite the fact that so many people today consider the first thesis the only "rational" and modern view. A reason that has its origin in the irrational and is itself ultimately irrational does not offer a solution to our problem. Only that creative reason which has manifested itself as love in the crucified God can truly show us what life is.

There is no question here of setting faith against reason. But the point about evolution is that it tends to transmogrify into "evolutionism", a Theory of Everything that purports to explain even religious faith as the product of material forces. If the evolution of species is more than just a theory, this ideology of evolutionism is less than a theory; it is an hypothesis, and a poorly grounded one. People believe it mainly for the reason that they cannot see any alternative type of explanation as even possible. More on this phenomenon another time.

Theories of Evolution

A letter published in The Catholic Herald points out that in my analysis of the challenge of evangelization in that paper (October 2), I ignored the "elephant in the room", namely Evolution. It says that my piece was "fine as far as it goes, but, like so many Catholic commentators on the decline of belief in this country, he is either unable or unwilling to take the necessary final step and identify the elephant in the room: namely, the Darwinian world-view that underpins our secular culture." It continues:

As Mr Caldecott says, we have lost a sense of who we are and how we fit into the cosmos. There is no mystery about why this has occurred: it follows naturally from the Darwinian view that we are merely the product of blind forces, rather than the deliberate creation of a loving God. The key is not, as he suggests, to highlight the complementary relationship of the arts and sciences, their common search for beauty, and the attraction of elegant solutions that please the heart: much of Darwinism’s superficial attraction lies in the fact that it appears to satisfy all these criteria, while clearly leaving no room for religious belief. Rather, we should be highlighting the latest research in such diverse fields as information theory, biochemistry and cosmology, which provide compelling evidence for traditional Catholic teaching on mankind’s unique status within God’s creation. Until we (and the Church generally) grasp this nettle, it will not matter one jot how many “humane and intelligent alternatives to the increasingly oppressive secularism of our schools” are devised: our children will continue to regard religious belief as fundamentally irrational.

I don't entirely agree. In an article called "Theories of Evolution" I suggest that Darwin does leave room for religious belief. We do not have to take Richard Dawkins at face value, nor ignore the presence of respected theistic evolutionists such as Simon Conway-Morris (Cambridge). Darwin himself seems to have lost his faith for other reasons than the theory of natural selection. Atheistic evolutionism is a symptom and result of the split in our culture that I was writing about in that article and in my book - the three-way split between science, art, and faith. Unfortunately the debate on evolution too often gets bogged down in the discussion of atheism vs creationism or intelligent design. It needs to be broadened out, with reference also to psychology, neurophysiology, the nature of the soul and the human person. Religious believers have nothing to fear from facts discovered by modern science, although we must be wary of some of the interpretations that may be placed upon them.

Materialist theories of evolution in fact make sense only to people who lack a sense of spiritual forms or essences. If that whole dimension is closed to our minds, if there is no conception of what might be meant by “vertical causation” (formal and final causes working together with material and efficient ones), then naturally there is nowhere else for species to come from than below, through a combination of chance and necessity. The successive temporal unfolding of species does not prove the truth of the theories that are adduced to explain it. The inner form that makes a species what it is exists eternally, however it comes to be manifested in space and time.