If it walks like a duck . . .

It might seem that I have tended to speak dismissively of the idea of material evolution.  Such is not the case.  Evolution exists and is the mainspring of development in the physical universe; and it is also the source of the different inbuilt faculties mentioned in the last mailing.  The problem with it, however, is the tendency to see it as the ‘be all and end all’ of knowledge, which of course it is not.

Evolution applies solely to the physical world; to the extent that anything exists outside of it, it has nothing to say.  Nor is it necessarily at odds with any broader view.  If it at first glance appears to be, this is mainly the result of people trying to use it for ideological reasons that have nothing to do with science.

The philosophy that has grown up around the idea of evolution is one that characterises it as being blind and random and purposeless.  Mankind, for example, under this dispensation, exists purely by accident, or as the result of a whole sequence of accidents, one running into the other, onwards through time.  There is no purpose or reason or logic at the root of our being.

And the people who tend to advance this opinion with especial vehemence often have little knowledge of what they speak.  They embrace their view of evolution, not because they have studied and come to believe in it, but because it seems to provide the ultimate weapon against any spiritualised view of the universe.  Read their various blogs and contributions and you quickly come to see that at bottom they are less animated by scientific concerns, than by a naked hatred, no doubt rooted in the circumstances of their own individually pathetic lives.

The fact is that if one looks at the inbuilt language and moral faculties discussed in the last mailing, and looks in turn at the sequence of intermediate forms occurring between the existence of bacteria in some primeval chemical soup and the existence and potentialities of man as he stands today, then one is compelled to allow that it might well indeed have been something purposed from the very beginning.

One does not have to believe it was so, but one surely has to allow that it could well have been.  It is the refusal by the various ideologues involved to allow even this that convinces me that they are driven, not by considerations of a scientific nature, or even common sense, but by something much more obscure and ugly.

And, indeed, on the face of it, it might seem possible to reconcile the idea of a random and seemingly accidental evolution and the idea of an overarching purpose to the whole process.  Look at water running down a sloping landscape after a storm or a flood and notice the way it accommodates itself to the natural balks and channels of the terrain, all without compromising its overall purpose of reaching the ground zero of equilibrium.  In other words, it is fluid (pun accidental) as regards the means it uses to achieve its end.  Everything ultimately can be grist to its mill.

On this analogy, while mankind need not have been an inevitable feature of evolution, it would nonetheless have been something very like it—something with the capacity for conscious thought and all that goes with it.  For it might be argued that humanity may supply nothing more than a convenient channel to some deeper flow of cosmic purpose, whose end we cannot fathom.  It need not have been humanity, it just happens on this scenario that it is.

The primary question of the human mind has always been about the why of things.  It is the question that lies at the origins of philosophy, no matter how much in recent years the latter may have sought to deny it.  And why would we be programmed to ask it, if there was not to be an answer?  Purpose and the finding of purpose are things central to our lives.