Creative Evolution Revisited: A New Theological Theory of Evolution

By Donald C. Austin MD

Henri Bergson was a great French philosopher whose life overlapped that of Charles Darwin. He had serious concerns about Darwins atheistic concept
of man and animals evolution. Bergson
also presented ideas of Intelligent Design almost 200 years prior to it's
regeneration in the 20th century.
My book separates God from Evolution
of the cosmos and all it contains by
espousing the "elan vitale" as "of God"
and the true creater of the Universe.

To Permissions Department:

To complete my book I need permission to insert portions from your Republishing organization of "Science" 2003

Author/Editor Mohamed A.F. Noor, Publisher Nature Publishing Company, an article

Donald C. Austin, MD
[e-mail]

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 6, 2010
• ISBN: 9780595632077

Donald C. Austin MD

Donald C Austin has already published 8 self-published books by other publishers He has an AB Degree and an MD Degree in Medicine. He is a Clinical Professor in the Dept. of Neurosurgery at Wayne State University Medical School. He lives in Grosse Pointe, Michigan,is married and has 4 grown children. His writing for this book involves Evolution, Theology and Cosmology.

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Contents

Biography:

Prelude

Author’s Preface

Introduction

CHAPTER I The Beginning—Intuition and Creativity

CHAPTER II History of Theistic Evolution

CHAPTER III The Origin of Mutation

CHAPTER IV The Concept of Creative Evolution

CHAPTER V The Concept of Good and Evil in Evolution

CHAPTER VI Basic Theological Beliefs of Creative Evolution Revisited

CHAPTER VII Basic Fundamentals of Evolution Espoused by Creative Evolutionists

CHAPTER VIII Dualism—a Continuing Controversy

Conclusion

Addendum #1

Addendum #2

Force Fields

Second Conclusion

Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Man

Third Conclusion

Synopsis #1

#2

#3

#5

#6

Excursus Communication

Design

Cultural Evolution

Exotic Dark Matter

Nanotechnology

The Four Levels of Evolution

Level I—Cosmic Evolution

Level II—Particulate Evolution

Level III—The Earth’s Evolution

Level IV—Societal Evolution

Appendix A

Appendix B

Endnotes

Biography:

Donald C. Austin,MD has spent 45 years as a third generation doctor, specializing in Neurological Surgery.

He is the recipient of numerous awards with his wife Dale, including Humanitarian of the Year for the American Lung Association and the Wayne County Medical Society. He was a member of the Michigan Board of Medicine for 4 years and elected Vie Chairman. He also created the Endowed Professorial Chair for Neurosurgical Research at the Wayne State School of Medicine. As a cheritable philanthropist he has generously contributed to the Karmanos Cancer Center, The March of Dimes and the Detroit Institute of the Arts.

He and his wife have recieved The William Booth Award from the Salvation Army and the Corps Vitae Award from the American Heart Association. They share Board Appointments at the Detroit Historical Museum, The Thanksgiving Day Parade Co., The Michigan Opera Company, the Hearing Impaired Board at the University of Michigan and the Salvation Army Advisory and Harbor Lights Board.

For planned giving they established the Donald & Dale Austin South-eastern Michigan Community Foundation.

His many books are listed at Amazon.com and on his Web site www.thescarletquill.com. His books to date have been medical science mystery novels but his current genra includes Evolution, Philosophy, Religion and Cosmology.

1. A Modern American Tragedy - Kindle Edition and Hard Cover

2. Murders in the Nursery

3. The Ten Commandments

4. The Tower of Babel

5. Jeb, The Modern Job

6. Gandhi Revisited

7. Prejudice and Pride

8. The Deadly Gene

9. Trials and Tribulations

10. The Role of the Expert Witness in Medical Malpractice Cases (ASPATORE)

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THOSE

WHO BELIEVE THE CREATION OF MAN WAS

THE DESIGN OF GOD AND NOT A HAPLESS

MUTATION BY BLIND CHANCE

Because the partial theories that we already have are sufficient to make accurate predictions in all but the most extreme situations, the search for the ultimate theory of the universe seems difficult to justify on praciical grounds. The discovery of a complete unified theory, therefore may not aid the survival of our species. It may not even affect our life-style. But ever since the dawn of civilization, people have been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity’s deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.

The idea was that as the galaxies moved away from each other, new galaxies were continually forming in the gaps between, from new matter that was being continually created. The universe would therefore look roughly the same at all times as well as at all points of space. The steady state theory required a modification of general relativity to allow for the continual creation of matter.

Stephen Hawking

Prelude

There are, of course, other versions of the tale, and not just the autobiographical fictions of other paleontologists who refract the same observations through a different lens of experience. I am thinking of versions that slip free of the factual moorings that guide and constrain my telling—granting us special status by assertion rather than ecology, while simultaneously rejecting almost everything else argued in this book. How do we think about explanations of Earth and life that dispense with science altogether?

The great creation stories of the Bible, or the Upanishads, or the Aboriginal Dreamtime provided ways of comprehending the universe thousands of years before Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein furnished new explanatory language. As eloquent guides to a moral universe, they continue to speak across the generations. Indeed, their power derives from their timelessness— words that inspired an Iron Age shepherd in the Levant can still move a computer analyst in Detroit. Scientific accounts, in contrast, are bounded in time. Today’s start of the arts was incomprehensible yesterday, and it will be out-of-date tomorrow. That these two ways of comprehending should be confused in either form or purpose strikes me as both absurd and unfortunate.

The modern world provides substantial tests for faith and theology—the Holocaust, crib death, and Alzheimer’s disease come readily to mind. In contrast, the reconciliation of traditional truths and science is almost trivially simple, requiring only that God, if present, be great enough to mix immanence into the nascent universe, enabling it to unfold over the eons, obedient to the laws of special relativity, nuclear chemistry, and population genetics. Science’s creation story accounts for process and history, not intent. Accepting its ancient counterparts as parables, then, eliminates conflict. (St. Augustine said as much in the 4th Century.) But we must be clear: There can be no other resolution that involves science.

Creationists commonly target evolutionary biology as science’s boogeyman, but the account of early evolution presented in preceding chapters necessitates that the Biblical literalists be catholic in his rejection of scientific understanding. He must reject geology because its confluence of pattern and process cannot be accommodated by a Biblical timetable. Physics and chemistry must go, too, because they explain the radioactive decay that dates zircons as millions or billions of years old. And astronomy and astrophysics? Don’t even think about them. Indeed, the Biblical literalist, passing Permian brachiopods, Cambrian trilobites, and 1.7 billion year old schist as she hikes down the Grand Canyon, can only conclude that the appearance of age and order in stratographic successions is an elaborate ruse, part of a great cosmic charade set up to trap the unfaithful. What sort of God would do that? One who can be petty and vengeful, who may love His creation, but doesn’t trust it. A god, in other words, much like ourselves. In his zeal to know the mind of God, the creationist finds only a mirror.

Of course, scripture insists that God made man in his own image, not the reverse. To a nomad seeking oases in a Mid-Eastern desert, or a seamstress laboring in Medieval Europe, this may well have been received as a literal commentary on God’s visage. Philosophers from Aquinas to Descartes saw God reflected in the human mind. But the scientific and technological revolution of the 20th Century suggests a more specific, and perhaps more unsettling, reading. To a remarkable degree, we have come to understand the world we live in and, indeed, to dominate it. Through physics and engineering, we can harness the power of atoms for electricity of mass destruction. Medicine makes lame beggars walk. We can fathom the miracle of birth and the mystery of death, and have the power of life and death over species, as well as people. Perhaps we were made in God’s image after all.

In the end, dialogue between religion and science matters not so much because it holds the prospect of consensus on our past, but because we need to agree about our future. At the dawn of the 21st Century, we stand at the crossroads in Earth history. The technological intelligence that gained ecological hegemony for humans now threatens the products of a planetary lifetime. As a result our grandchildren may know the rhinoceros only from pictures, the rainforest from parks, and coral reefs from history books. Even as we search for life on Mars, we risk losing it on Earth.

Thoughts such as these are disheartening. But the future needn’t be an evolutionary end game. There is another possibility. At the intersection of ecological dominance and planetary history lie the makings of an evolutionary ethics. If we can understand the immensity of our evolutionary inheritance, we may be moved to preserve it. If we can acknowledge our unprecedented role as planetary stewards, we may be able to discharge our responsibility with wisdom and with honor. On this issue, at least, faith and science find common ground. I don’t know whether God decreed the passenger pigeon, but if He did, it was not for us to exterminate.

Copernicus and Darwin profoundly altered the human sense of self. We do not live at the center of the universe, and we cannot claim the privileges of special creation. In coming decades, planetary exploration may even show that we are not unique or, at the very least, not alone. But whatever astronomy and evolution may take away, ecology restores. On this planet, at this moment in time, human beings reign. Regardless of who or what penned earlier chapters in the history of life, we will write the next one. Through our actions or inaction, we decide the world that our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will know. Let us have the grace and humility to choose well.¹

Author’s Preface

I am writing this book even though I am a physician by training and practice. I have been a neurosurgeon for thirty-nine years, removing painful lesions from the spinal cord and devastating tumors from the brain.

I am not a research scientist, a theologian, or a philosopher. My scientific background comes from medical school and medical postgraduate education. My theological background comes from baptism three times—as a Methodist, as a Baptist, and in the Jordan River in Israel—in addition to being a former teacher of a young adult class, member of the board of trustees of Harper-Grace Hospital, and a current member of my pastoral parish committee. My philosophical background comes from an essay contest and a deep interest in evolutionary theory.

Darwin essentially brought natural theology to a close even though he idolized William Paley. In spite of my religious background, I am not a creationist, nor am I an atheistic evolutionist. The battles between creationists and scientific evolutionists persist to the present day. As with almost every dichotomy, there is almost always a middle road.

I call Henri Bergson’s fascinating book Creative Evolution my second Bible. The similar title of this book pays homage to the influence Bergson has had on my position. Following in his footsteps, it is my opinion that God can be brought back into evolution as his élan vital, as the master control of gene mutations from the beginning of life on this planet and up to the present moment. With the appearance of Homo sapiens, evolution continues on a societal basis rather than a physical basis.

I must admit that I have utilized lengthy quotations in this book, which may be criticized, but I believe it a fitting tribute to the works of the great pioneers of the history of evolution.

I anticipate I will be criticized by theologians, philosophers, and evolutionary scientists because I don’t have a PhD in any of those fields, but I will let the general public, who will read this book, be my judge.

Donald C. Austin, MD

Science without religion is lame,

Religion without science is blind.

Albert Einstein

Introduction

Ever since the dawn of history, man has searched from whence he came. When man was created he was graced with consciousness, conscience, speech, memory, and intuition. Intuition deposited in the mind of mankind the concept of a God or gods, a supreme being and a creator. But it was consciousness that gave us intuition.

How did we achieve these wonderful gifts that set us above the animal and plant kingdoms, as well as the insect and microbial worlds? The belief that God was our creator reigned for thousands of years, but since the age of science this belief has been challenged. For the Christian and the Judaic civilizations, the Bible has always been the story of God’s creation of all that exists, including man and woman. Those who believe in the Biblical word are called creationists. Those who now believe otherwise are called evolutionists (biologists, paleontologists, zoologists, embryologists, etc.).

The typical claim of the evolutionist is described graphically by John Maynard Smith, a biologist, in his book Evolution Now—A Century After Darwin, in chapter I, 2 The Origin of Life:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one: And that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved. When one considers the agnosticism of his autobiography and his notebooks, these words of Darwin’s, the closing words of the Origin of Species, can only be seen as a sop to the Cerberus of orthodoxy. The origin of life was, in Darwin’s day, inaccessible to scientific study—so why not credit it to the Creator?

Today the problem with the origin of life, although far from being solved, is being actively studied, both experimentally and theoretically; we can no longer leave things to the breath of the Creator. It turns out that although Darwin did not think seriously about the problem, his theory of evolution provides us with the only satisfactory definition of life, and hence with the only clear way of formulating the problem of its origins. Entities which have the properties of multiplication, variation and heredity are alive, and those which lack one or more of those properties are not. This definition is not arbitrary, because once entities arise which have these properties, populations of such entities will evolve by natural selection, and will acquire the other features of wholeness, self-maintenance, complexity, adaptation to the environment, and so on, which are associated with living organisms.²

Furthermore, Smith quotes his champion, Charles Darwin, in the introduction to his book:

I am conscious that, by concentrating on controversial topics, we may have given unjustified prominence to ideas which will prove to be wrong. In mitigation, let me quote Darwin’s remarks in The Descent of Man: False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.

The battle continues to rage on, even to the present day. Although evolutionists have had their theological spokesmen, modern evolutionists do not accept spiritual theological concepts entering into their scientific field. Stephen J. Gould, a recently deceased paleontologist, and a giant in the field of current evolutionism, sets the stage well in his book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, p. 260–62:

We cannot comprehend the past from the vantage point of a newly constructed present reality. Once the 19th Century had discovered evolution as the primary cause of relationships among organisms, the historical axis not only sprang into being as a pole of explanation, but quickly assumed a primary status. More than a century later, we can hardly imagine a biology without this theme. What kind of questions could be posed before history became an option for resolution? What kinds of explanations could be rendered when a biologist couldn’t ask (or even conceptualize): How has this feature changed from an ancestral state; what do its differing forms in various species tell us about the phyletic relationships; what are the causal bases for both the origin and later alterations of this feature?

Immediate appearance in a fully-formed state provides the only alternative to history—whether such creation be achieved by the direct hand of a divine agent, or by spontaneous organization from elements according to some unknown law or principle of nature. If basic taxa originated as we find them now, then the range of theoretical explanation remains wide. Species might be purposefully ill-designed to suit the black humor of a diabolical creator; or they might be cobbled together with no rhyme or reason by forces of universal randomness. The list of possibilities continues ad infinitum.

But, in fact, Western cultural traditions greatly limited the range of acceptable alternatives. Very few creationists could imagine that species might be purposely ill-formed or constructed in a disorganized fashion. With these attributes—purpose and order—as part of a cultural heritage, the basic explanations for organic form could be reduced to two major alternatives, expressing the primacy of one or the other overarching principles for a rational and benevolent world. These principles have been called structuralism and functionalism, order and teleology, laws of form and adaptation, Unity of Type and Conditions of Existence. These poles set the dichotomy that Darwin expanded by introducing history, but never really fractured because the new axis of time could also be divided into structural vs. functional explanations for ancestral forms. This dichotomy continues to set an important agenda for evolutionary theory at the opening of a new millennium, especially since the overly adaptational Modern Synthesis (representing a temporary triumph of the functionalist pole) has yielded to a pluralism of structural alternatives vs. partners rather than subsidiary forces.

In this light, I find it fascinating that the oldest tradition in modern natural history—the natural theology of so many pre-Darwinian biologists—also existed in two primary versions, expressing the two poles of the same dichotomy. Since Darwin built his evolutionary theory in continuity with the pole favored by the long English heritage—the adaptationism of William Paley—this subject cannot be dismissed as an arcane issue from a forgotten past, but remains a vital presence in our daily concerns (by our own fundamental evolutionary criterion of genealogy and phyletic heritage!). For we shall struggle with adaptation and constraint just as Paley and Agassiz contrasted the comparable positions in natural theology: The Creator foresaw the needs of each species and created just those organs that were necessary to carry them out vs. God had in the beginning established laws and nature was left to unfold in accordance with them. Do not Fisher vs. Wright, or Cain and Maynard Smith vs. Goodwin and Kauffman carry on the same debate, evolutionarily transmogrified of course?

Natural theology held as a central premise that the works of nature not only demonstrated God’s presence, but could also reveal his character as well. We could learn about him, not only persuade ourselves that he exists. Paley’s full title (1802) reads: Natural Theology; or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature. From this shared premise, two traditions proceeded, both pre-adapted to a later evolutionary transformation.

In this section I shall contrast the two great texts of these alternative traditions—Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) with Agassiz’s Essay on Classification (1857). The two works dovetail with remarkable symmetry in their opposition. Paley, the British adaptationist vs. Agassiz, the Continental formalist. One might almost believe that the two works were explicitly written to flesh out (and fully clothe) the central dichotomy of form, with each awarded exactly half the totality. In a curious sense, this lack of contact almost allows the two texts to speak to each other—as if they formed a sand painting with one (Paley for temporal priority) filling in half the area up to an elaborate and jagged boundary, and the other then pouring sand of a different color right up to the previous boundary, leaving no space between at the contact. I am puzzled that these two texts have not been explicitly contrasted before.³

With respect to the argument that a loving God would not create monstrosities that die because they cannot adapt, I and those who would accept creative evolution have an answer to this criticism, but that will be a subject for a later chapter. There are many scientists who themselves are deeply religious, but claim that there is no room for religious dogma in the field of scientific theory that may be verifiable in the laboratory. Science, however, by this approach denigrates the fields of philosophy and theology. Yes, science has revolutionized our modern civilization, especially in medicine, communication, and travel, but much remains unknown and to be discovered.

In the pre-Darwinian era, there were two natural theologians prominent in the nineteenth century—William Paley and Louis Agassiz. Paley wrote his famous book, Natural Theology, in 1802, and Agassiz his unique document Essay on Classification in 1857. These works will be discussed in more detail in later chapters.

Darwin’s famous evolutionism began with his work Origin of Species in 1859, and Ludwig Boltzmann wrote that the nineteenth century would be remembered as the Century of Darwin. Nothing more than this book has provoked the rage of the Biblical creationists, which continues even to the present day. But like all controversial treatises, even Darwinism has been challenged and even refuted by subsequent investigators and Neo-Darwinists.

The discovery of DNA and the genome has added new dimensions to evolutionary knowledge that Darwin never had available, but still his theory of natural selection has persisted for many current evolutionists. Since the 1970s, when Stephen Gould introduced his theories of stasis and punctuated equilibrium, there has been a pitched battle between the gradualists and the punctuationists. Gould’s epistle spends 1,392 pages defending his revolutionary hypothesis.

Ever since the dawn of Darwinism, science has dismissed any theory that espouses design and direction from above to explain the progress of evolution. God is out! Darwin, who grew up in a very religious atmosphere, has become the atheist evolutionist and the target of attack by the creationists.

A recent interesting book by Richard Milton, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, ⁴ presents a very convincing skepticism about many of Darwin’s theories, but stops short of espousing godly creativity:

In seeking to defend the ideological citadel of Darwinism, the most vociferous critics of this book have allowed their emotions to mislead them so far as to attack me for advocating beliefs that I have never held and do not support. Both Richard Dawkins and Nature have tried to suggest that I do not believe in evolution and that I believe the Earth is merely a few thousand years old.

To forestall any repetition of false claims like these, let me make my position clear on both issues from the outset. I accept that there is persuasive circumstantial evidence for evolution, but I do not accept that there is any significant evidence that the mechanism driving that evolution is the Neo-Darwinian mechanism of chance mutation coupled with natural selection. Second, I do not believe that the Earth is only a few thousand years old. I present evidence that currently accepted methods of dating are seriously flawed and are supported by Darwinists only because they provide the billions of years required by Darwinists theories. Because radioactive dating methods are scientifically unreliable, it is at present impossible to say with any confidence how old the Earth is.…

[In] 1962, Thomas Kuhn astonished his academic contemporaries by proposing that scientific theories should be looked on not only as dealing with pure objective facts, but rather as systems of belief relating to a wider context: A frame of reference consisting of interlocking scientific, social, and even political ideas. This ideological context, which Kuhn terms a paradigm, is implicitly agreed upon by scientists who subscribe to a particular theory and who share the same worldview.…

The power of such a paradigm, says Kuhn, is so great that some scientists will continue to believe it even in the face of contradictory evidence (a phenomenon dubbed cognitive dissonance by psychologist Leon Festinger). This blinkered dogmatism continues until new evidence is overwhelming and a new theory deposes the old—a global paradigm shift occurs.…

In some respects, the evolution of the human species has become almost a taboo subject: Too hot to handle politically, and equally dangerous scientifically. Riddled with doubt and smarting from numerous embarrassing mistakes and forgeries, like Piltdown man, evolutionists have quit the field almost entirely. And apart from heroic individual efforts like the Leakeys and Johanson working in Africa, there have been few scientific paleontological efforts relating to humans since the Second World War.…

Strangely too, this modern confidence and apparent precision in reconstruction is not based on further discoveries of fact, but take place despite the discoveries of recent decades—that the evidence from humankind’s own evolution is actually non-existence.…

Science has achieved miracles in the elucidation of the most complex microscopic structures and the farthest galaxies, yet there are deeper unsolved mysteries in the average suburban garden.…

In attempting to gather the strands of evidence from the natural world that might point the way to an alternative view of evolution, there seem to be three key kinds of observation, three persistently recurring themes that are crying for answers: The unerring accuracy of nature, her lack of trial and error; the presence of a systematic program above the cellular level, controlling somatic development; and the overwhelming probability that environmental factors can in some unknown way directly affect the genetic structure of the individual.

The non-existence of transitional types (including the failed monsters) in the fossil record and in the contemporary animal kingdom shows that nature goes unerringly to its target. The human eyelid exactly covers the human eye. The process that made the eyelid grow stopped when the eyelid was the right size. It cannot be maladaptive to have an eyelid a little longer than needed—yet no creature has such an imperfection in this anatomical detail of any of the myriad other details.

(Preface, p. xi, 185, 194, 195, 220, 221)

4

In spite of Milton’s criticisms in Shattering the Myths Of Darwinism, many of which are very convincing, and in spite of his claims to be a religious man, he is not espousing godly direction of evolution:

Darwinists believe that the only overall control process is natural selection, but the natural selection mechanism could not account for the cases referred to above. Natural evolution works on populations, not individuals. It is capable only of tending to make creatures with massively fatal genetic defects die in infancy, or to make populations that are geographically dispersed eventually produce sterile hybrid offspring. It is such a poor feedback mechanism in the sense of exercising and overall regulating effect that it has failed even to eliminate major congenital diseases. Natural selection offers only death or glory: There is no genetic engineering nor holistic supervision of the organism’s integrity. Yet we are asked to believe that a mechanism of such crudity can creatively supervise a program of gene mutation that will restore sight to the eyeless fly.

This is plainly wishful thinking. The key questions remain: What is the location of the supervisory agency that oversees somatic development? How does it work? What is its connection with the cell structure of the body?

Most scientists today earn their living from the public purse in one way or another. In effect, we the community employ scientists to tackle the difficult task of explaining that which we do not understand. This is no easy job to be sure, and one in which success may depend as much on luck as it does on skill and judgment. Because it is a difficult job, a tacit understanding has arisen that it would be bad form or unseemly to criticize science or scientists seriously, as if they were a banker who added up sums wrongly or a grocer who forgot to deliver the sausages.

I reject this tacit consensus. I am a customer for the scientific service that we pay scientists to provide and I have a customer complaint: I am not satisfied with the answers they have provided on the mechanism of evolution and I want them to go back to their laboratories and investigate further.…

Is it really rational to suppose that random mutations appeared which progressively diminished just these organs until they vanished entirely, long after any survival advantage could have been gained? The concepts of mutation and selection are both flawed in explaining the whole field of regressive organs. It seems clear that some systematic process or program is taking place which once initiated, proceeds to a conclusion. Where does the program reside? How does the system know when to start and stop?

In such an atmosphere and in the absence of any scientific or public debate, the only picture of evolution with which informed members of the public are familiar are the views of extremist reductionist writers who strive to turn the mountains of Darwinian improbability into mole hills of scientific certainty.

Looked at in this light, it seems that one of the most important unanswered questions becomes: Why should science resist any radical review of Darwinist ideas so fanatically?

I believe the answer to this question is that to any intelligent, educated, reasonable person, Neo-Darwinism appears to be unassailable because it appears to be the only reasonable theory available. The only alternative appears to be either a religious explanation, as represented by the doctrine of Creation, or half-baked speculations about aliens and quantum mechanics.

In this respect Neo-Darwinism is seen by many of its adherence as the citadel of rationalism against the incursion of the barbarians of the unscientific New Age thinking. One unexpected result of this fanatical defense is that scientific rationalism, which used to be a badge of honor and a beacon of hope for the future, has sometimes become the white sheet and hood of bigoted closed-minded thinkers. And what I find particularly fascinating about this kind of thinking is that it is pretty nearly the exact opposite of the truth.

The attraction of scientific reductionism and the motive for wishing to banish metaphysical thinking is not difficult to understand. Science seems to have provided reasonable naturalistic explanations for many of the most important philosophical questions: How did life arise? Was mankind’s position in the scheme of things? What holds together the physical fabric of the world and keeps the stars in their courses? These answers seemed final, or close to final, after thousands of years of doubt, but it is not the finality of these explanations, or the quality of evidence that supports them that makes them so acceptable. The key word in this explanation of the causes of scientific reductionism is reasonable (p. 226, 276, 248, 274).

The Darwinian theory claims external forces over millions of years bring about evolution gradually by natural selection and survival of the fittest. With the advent of the discovery of DNA and genes, internal controls also became a part of the picture, especially with the discovery of Pax 6 and other controller genes. But the questions this hopes to answer are the following: Where did bacteria, the first known organisms on earth, arise; what caused DNA, chromosomes, genes, and especially controllable genes to come into being? And further, can we bring God back into evolution?

CHAPTER I

The Beginning—Intuition and Creativity

Prologue (Genesis 1:1–31, 2:1–25, KJV)

When God began creating the heavens and the earth the earth was at first a shapeless, chaotic mass, with the Spirit of God brooding over the dark vapors.

Then God said, Let there be light. And light appeared. And God was pleased with it, and divided the light from the darkness. So he let it shine for a while and then there was darkness again. He called the light daytime, and the darkness nighttime. Together they formed the first day.

And God said, Let the vapors separate to form the sky above and the oceans below. So God made the sky, dividing the vapor above from the water below. This all happened on the second day.

Then God said, Let the waters beneath the sky be gathered into oceans so that the dry land will emerge. And so it was. Then God named the dry land earth, and the water seas. And God was pleased. And he said, Let the earth burst forth with every sort of grass and seed-bearing plant, and fruit trees with seeds inside the fruit, so that these seeds will produce the kinds of plants and fruits they came from. And so it was and God was pleased. This all occurred on the third day.

Then God said, Let there be bright lights in the sky to give light to the earth and to identify the day and the night; they shall bring about the seasons on the earth, and mark the days and years. And so it was. For God made two huge lights, the sun and the moon, to shine down upon the earth—the larger one, the sun, to preside over the day and the smaller one, the moon, to preside through the night; he also made the stars. And God set them in the sky to light the earth, and to preside over the day and night, and to divide the light from the darkness. And God was pleased. This all happened on the fourth day.

Then God said, Let the waters teem with fish and other life, and let the skies be filled with birds of every kind. So God created great sea creatures, and every sort of fish and every kind of bird. And God looked at them with pleasure, and blessed them all. Multiply and stock the oceans, he told them, and to the birds he said, Let your numbers increase. Fill the earth! That ended the fifth day.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth every kind of animal—cattle and reptiles and wildlife of every kind. And so it was. God made all sorts of wild animals and cattle and reptiles. And God was pleased with what he had done.

Then God said, Let us make a man—someone like ourselves, to be the master of all life upon the earth and in the skies and in the seas.

So God made man like his maker

Like God did God make man;

Man and maid did he make them.

And God blessed them and told them, Multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; you are masters of the fish and birds and all the animals. And look! I have given you the seed-bearing plants throughout the earth, and all the fruit trees for your food. And I’ve given all the grass and plants to the animals and the birds for their food. Then God looked over all he had made and it was excellent in every way. Then this ended the sixth day.

Now at last the heavens and earth were successfully completed, with all that they contained. So on the seventh day, having finished his task, God ceased from this work he had been doing, and God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because it was the day when he ceased this work of creation.

Here is the summary of the events in the creation of the heavens and earth which the Lord God made.

There were no plants or grain sprouting up across the earth at first, for the Lord God hadn’t sent any rain; nor was there anyone to farm the soil. (However, water welled up from the ground at certain places and flowed across the land.)

The time came when the Lord God formed a man’s body from the dust of the ground and breathed into it the breath of life. And man became a living person.

Then the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, to the East, and placed in the garden the man he had formed. The Lord God planted all sorts of beautiful trees there in the garden, trees producing the choicest of fruit. At the center of the garden he placed the Tree of Life, and also the Tree of Conscience, giving knowledge a Good and Bad. A river from the land of Eden flowed through the garden to water it, afterwards the river divided into four branches. One of these was named Pishon; it winds across the entire length of the land of Havilah, where nuggets of pure gold are found, and beautiful bedellium and even lapis lazuli. The second branch is called the Gihon, crossing the entire length of the land of Cush. The third branch is the Tigris, which flows to the east of the city of Asher. And the fourth is the Euphrates.

The Lord God placed the man in the Garden of Eden as its gardener to tend and care for it.

But the Lord God gave the man this warning: You may eat any fruit in the garden accept fruit from the tree of conscience—for its fruit will open your eyes to make you aware of right and wrong, good and bad. If you eat its fruit, you will be doomed to die.

And the Lord God said, It isn’t good for man to be alone; I will make a companion for him, a helper suited to his needs. So the Lord God formed from the soul every kind of animal and bird, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever he called them, that was their name. But still there was no proper helper for the man. Then the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep, and took one of his ribs and closed up the place from which he had removed it, and made the rib into a woman, and brought her to the man.

This is it! Adam exclaimed. She is part of my own bone and flesh! Her name is ‘woman’ because she was taken out of a man. This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife in such a way that the two become one person. Now although the man and his wife were both naked, neither of them was embarrassed or ashamed. 5

We who call ourselves creative evolutionists believe that much of the Bible is expressed in allegories, among which is the story of creation in the book of Genesis.

The evolution of man is unknown. No missing links between animals and man have ever been found, and as Milton says, the museum glass case entitled The Missing Link remains empty. What we do know is that man is a creation unlike anything else in existence, including animals, plants, insects, bacteria, viruses, and other microbial organisms. Man has been gifted with consciousness, the origin of which we also do not know. Daniel Dennett in 1991 published his book Consciousness Explained. Dennett explains the dilemma:

What, then, is the mystery? What could be more obvious or certain to each of us than that he or she is a conscious subject of experience, an enjoyer of perceptions and sensations, a sufferer of pain, and entertainer of ideas, and a conscious deliberator? That seems undeniable, but what in the world can consciousness itself be? How can living physical bodies in the physical world produce such phenomena? That is the mystery.…

The story that we must tell is analogous to other stories that biology is beginning to tell. Compare it, for instance, to the story of the origins of sex. There are many organisms today that have no genders and reproduce asexually and there was a time when all the organisms that existed lacked gender, male and female. Somehow, by some imaginable series of steps, some of these organisms must have evolved into organisms that did have gender, and eventually, of course, into us. What sort of conditions were required to foster or necessitate these innovations? Why, in short, did all these changes happen? These are some of the deepest problems in contemporary evolutionary theory.…

Consider what the behavior of our hypothetical primate ancestor looked like at this point from the outside (we are postponing all questions of what it is like to be such a primate ’til much later): An animal capable of learning new tricks, and almost continually vigilant and sensitive to novelty, but with a short attention span and a tendency to have attention captured by distracting environmental features. No long-term projects for this animal, at least not novel projects. (We should leave room for stereotypic long-duration subroutines genetically wired in, like the nest-building routines of birds, the dam-building of beavers, the food-caching of birds and squirrels.) Onto this substrate nervous system we now want to imagine building a more human mind, with something like a stream of consciousness capable of sustaining the sophisticated sorts of trains of thought on which human civilization apparently depends. Chimpanzees are our closest kin—genetically closer, in fact, the chimpanzees are to gorillas or orangutans—the current thinking is that we shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees about six million years ago. Since that major break, our brains have diverged dramatically, but primarily in size, rather than structure. While chimpanzees have brains of roughly the same size as our common ancestor (and it is important—and difficult—to keep in mind that chimpanzees have done some evolving away from our common ancestor as well), our hominid ancestor’s brains grew four times as large. This increase in volume didn’t happen immediately: For several million years after the split with proto-chimpanzees, our hominid ancestors got along with ape-sized brains, in spite of becoming bipedal at least three and a half million years ago. Then, when the Ice Age had began, about two and a half million years ago, the Great Encephalization commenced, and was essentially completed a hundred and fifty thousand years ago—before the development of language, of cooking, of agriculture. Just why our ancestors’ brains should have grown so large so fast (in the evolutionary time scale it was more an explosion than a blossoming) is a matter of some controversy (for illuminating accounts see William Calvin’s books). But there is little controversy about the nature of the product: The brain of early Homo Sapiens (who lived from roughly a hundred and fifty thousand years ago to the end of the most recent Ice Age a mere ten thousand years ago) was an enormously complex brain of unrivalled plasticity, almost indistinguishable from our own in size and shape. This is important: The astonishing hominid brain growth was essentially complete before the development of language, and so cannot be a response to the complexities of mind that language has made possible. The innate specializations for language, hypothesized by the linguist Noam Chomsky and others, and now beginning to be confirmed in details of neuroanatomy, are a very recent and rushed add-on, no doubt an exploitation of earlier sequencing circuitry accelerated by the Baldwin Effect. Moreover, the most remarkable expansion of human mental powers (as witnessed by the development of cooking, agriculture, art, and, in a word, civilization) has all happened even more recently, since the end of the last Ice Age, in a ten thousand year twinkling that is as good as instantaneous from the evolutionary perspective that measures trends in millions of years. Our brains are equipped at birth with few of any powers that were lacking in the brains of our ancestors ten thousand years ago. So the tremendous advance of Homo Sapiens in the last ten thousand years must almost all be due to harnessing the plasticity of that brain in radically new ways—by creating something like software to enhance its underlying powers.…

The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity which prevails on our own planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain other conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process…

These new replicators are, roughly, ideas. Not the simple ideas of Locke and Hume (the idea of red, or the idea of round or hot or cold), but the sort of complex ideas that form themselves into distinct memorable units.…

Intuitively these are more or less identifiable cultural units, but we can say something more precise about how we draw the boundaries—about why D-F#-A isn’t a unit, and the theme from the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh symphony is: The units are the smallest elements that replicate themselves with reliability and fecundity. Dawkins coins a term for such units: Memes.…

Examples of memes are tombs, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which in the broad sense can be called imitation.…

In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins urges us to take the idea of meme evolution literally. Meme evolution is not just analogous to biological or genetic evolution, not just a process that can be metaphorically described in these evolutionary idioms, but a phenomenon that obeys the laws of natural selection exactly. The theory of evolution by natural selection is neutral regarding the differences between memes and genes; these are just different kinds of replicators evolving in different media at different rates. And just as the genes for animals could not come into existence on this planet until the evolution of plants had paved the way (creating the oxygen rich atmosphere and ready supply of convertible nutrients), so the evolution of memes could not get started until the evolution of animals had paved the way by creating a species—Homo Sapiens—with brains that could provide shelter, and habits of communication that could provide transmission media, for memes.

This is a new way of thinking about ideas.…

Human consciousness is to a very great extent a product not just of natural selection, but of cultural evolution as well. The best way to see the contribution of memes to the creation of our minds is to follow the standard steps of evolutionary thinking closely.…

Genes are invisible; they are carried by gene vehicles (organisms) in which they tend to produce characteristic effects (phenotype effects) by which their fates are, in the long run, determined. Memes are also invisible, and are carried by meme vehicles—pictures, books, sayings (in particular languages, oral or written, on paper or magnetically encoded, etc.).… A meme’s existence depends on a physical embodiment in some medium.…

To human beings, on the other hand, each meme vehicle is a potential friend or foe, that will enhance our powers or a gift horse that will distract us, burden our memories, derange our judgment.…

Memes, like genes, are potentially immortal, but, like genes, they depend on the existence of a continuous chain of physical vehicles, persisting in the face of this Second Law of Thermodynamics. Books are relatively permanent, and inscriptions on monuments even more permanent, but unless these are under the protection of human conservators, they tend to dissolve in time. As with genes, immortality is more a matter of replication than of the longevity of individual vehicles. The preservation of the Platonic memes, via a series of copies of copies, is a particularly striking case of this. Although some papyrus fragments of Plato’s texts roughly contemporaneous with him have been discovered recently, the survival of the memes owes almost nothing to such long-range persistence.…

The day may come when non-human meme-evaluators suffice to select and arrange for the preservation of particular memes, but for the time being, memes still depend at least indirectly on one or more of their vehicles spending at least a brief, pupal stage in a remarkable sort of meme nest: A human mind.…

The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.…

Normal human brains are not all alike; they vary considerably in size, shape, and in the myriad details of connection on which there prowess depends. But the most striking differences in human prowess depend on micro structural differences induced by the various memes that have entered them and taken up residence. The memes enhance each other’s opportunities: The meme for education, for instance, is a meme that reinforces the very process of meme-implantation.

But if it is true that human minds are themselves to a very great degree the creations of memes, then we cannot sustain the polarity of vision with which we started; it cannot be memes versus us, because earlier infestations of memes have already played a major role in determining who or what we are.…

To sum up: Meme evolution has the potential to contribute remarkable design-enhancements to the underlying machinery of the brain—at great speed, compared to the slow pace of genetic R and D.…

All three media—genetic evolution, phenotypic plasticity, and mimetic evolution—have contributed to the design of human consciousness, each in turn, and at increasing rates of speed. Compared with phenotypic plasticity, which has been around for millions of years, significant mimetic evolution is an extremely recent phenomenon, being a powerful force only in the last hundred thousand years, and exploding with the development of civilization less than ten thousand years ago. It is restricted to one species. Homo Sapiens, and we might note that it has now brought us to the dawn of yet a fourth medium of potential R and D, thanks to the memes of science: The direct revising of individual nervous systems by neuroscientific engineering and the revision of the genome by genetic engineering

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Finally, on page 210 of Consciousness Explained, Dennett states his theory of consciousness:

Human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes (or more exactly, meme-effects in brains) that can best be understood as the operation of a von Neumannesque virtual machine implemented in the parallel architecture of a brain that was not designed for any such activities. The powers of this virtual machine vastly enhance the underlying powers of the organic hardware on which it runs, but at the same time many of its most curious features, and especially its limitations, can be explained as the byproducts of the kludges that make possible this curious but effective reuse of an existing organ for novel purposes.

All well and good, but where do memes (ideas) come from? It would seem to me that to have an idea, it is necessary to first be conscious, and thus the dilemma.

Man has also been graced with speech, long-term memory, conscience, altruism, and intuition. There are claims of altruism in some members of the animal kingdom, but all these other qualities are distinctive to man. Therefore, we as creative evolutionists believe the homo species developed spontaneously and independently from all other living organisms.

But what about this concept of a God? From where did it come? I believe that consciousness and intuition were its source. Karen Armstrong has written a detailed and compelling book called A History of God

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⁷ She makes the following personal observations in her introduction:

Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life, and, once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slipped quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so. Now that I no longer felt so guilty and anxious about him, he became too remote to be a reality. My interest in religion continued, however, and I made a number of television programs about the early history of Christianity and the nature of the religious experience. The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings appeared justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God, and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine. As an epileptic, I had flashes of vision that I knew to be a mere neurological defect: Had the visions and the raptures of the saints also been a mere mental quirk? Increasingly, God seemed an aberration, something that the human race had outgrown.…

Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo Sapiens is also homo religious. Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognizably human: They created religions at the same time as they created works of art. This was not simply because they wanted to propitiate powerful forces; these early faiths express the wonder and mystery that seem always to have been an essential component of the human experience of this beautiful yet terrifying world. Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to. Like any other human activity, religion can be abused. But it seems to have been something that we have always done. It was not tacked onto a primordially secular nature by manipulative kings and priests but was natural to humanity. Indeed our current secularism is an entirely new experiment, unprecedented in human history

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⁷

As Armstrong begins her history of God, she, as expected, relies on some speculation:

In the beginning, human beings created a God who was the First Cause of all things and Ruler of heaven and earth. He was not represented by images and had no temple or priests in his service. He was too exalted for an inadequate human cult. Gradually, he faded from the consciousness of his people. He had become so remote that they decided that they did not want him anymore. Eventually he was said to have disappeared.

That, at least, is one theory, popularized by Father Wilhelm Schmidt in The Origin of the Idea of God, first published in 1912. Schmidt suggested that there had been a primitive monotheism before men and women had started to worship a number of gods. Originally they had acknowledged only one Supreme Deity, who had created the world and governed human affairs from afar. Belief in such a High God (sometimes called the Sky God, since he is associated with the heavens) is still a feature of the religious life in many indigenous African tribes. They yearn toward God in prayer; believe that he is watching over them and will punish wrong doing. Yet he is strangely absent from their daily lives; he has no special cult and is never depicted in effigy. The tribesmen say that he is inexpressible and cannot be contaminated by the world of men. Some people say that he has gone away. Anthropologists suggest that this God has become so distant and exulted that he has in effect been replaced by lesser spirits and more accessible gods. So too, Schmidt’s theory goes, in ancient times, the High God was replaced by the more attractive gods of the pagan pantheons. In the beginning, therefore, there was One God. If this is so, then monotheism was one of the earliest ideas evolved by the human beings to explain the mystery and tragedy of life. It also indicates some of the problems that such a deity might have to face.

It is impossible to prove this one way or the other. There have been many theories about the origin of religion. Yet it seems that creating gods is something that human beings have always done. When one religious idea ceases to work for them, it is simply replaced. These ideas disappear quietly, like the Sky God, with no great fanfare. In our own day, many people would say that the God worshiped for centuries by Jews, Christians and Muslims has become as remote as the Sky God. Some have actually claimed that he has died. Certainly he seems to be disappearing from the lives of an increasing number of people, especially in Western Europe. They speak of a god-shaped hole in their consciousness where he used to be, because, irrelevant though he may seem in certain quarters, he has played a crucial role in our history and has been one of the greatest human ideas of all time. To understand what we are losing—if, that is, he really is disappearing—we need to see what people were doing