Anthony M. Matteo
The Paradox of the Universe 
"Science & Spirit" January February 2002

Anthony M. Matteo offers his thoughts on the paradoxical nature of the universe.
Matteo begins with an historical perspective on the creation debate, explaining how
the writings of Charles Darwin changed the framework completely. He then
describes the idea that science and religion can exist in a sort of détente: As long as
religion claims no scientific absolutes, and science none religious, they can peacefully
coexist in one person s belief system. Ultimately, however, this is unsatisfying,
Matteo says. He recounts several frequently posed arguments for the lack of a
creator God, then proposes alternative theistic interpretations. His conclusion: It is
just as rational to interpret events this way as to interpret them strictly through
the lens of evolutionary biology.

Historical Background
Darwin s Dangerous Idea
Détente
Emergence of Order
Emergence of Mind
The Problem of Evil

A metaphysical vision or worldview should provide us with a framework
for interpreting the totality of our experience. By its nature it ranges beyond
the restrictive methodologies of individual disciplines such as biology or
physics in the constant, yet always tentative and revisable, search for
complete explanatory power. Metaphysical queries boil down to two
fundamental mysteries that have engaged humanity throughout history:
The existence of the ordered and intelligible universe that surrounds us, and
our own remarkable presence in that universe as intelligent beings who can
raise questions and seek answers about ultimate origins.

Historical Background

For much of human history the pantheon of gods provided the explanatory
framework. But in time, in the West the transforming affect of monotheism
banished these lesser deities and, in their place, established an almighty and
providential God as creator, designer, and master of the universe. According
to this monotheistic metaphysical vision, the regularities we perceive in the
universe or laws of nature are reflections of the creative handiwork of God.
They are the secondary causes by which God, the Primary Cause, operates
in the world. On this scheme, direct divine interventions could occasionally
occur when God elected to bypass the normal causal framework He had
established.

As an ultimate explanation of human experience, such a vision seemed
concordant with the intricacy and majesty of the natural order, but it
likewise generated a troubling paradox rooted in that experience. If the
universe, in the final analysis, is an expression of the cosmic plan of an
almighty and providential creator, what is the source of the natural and
moral evil that have constantly plagued us? Prior polytheists might
attribute such misfortunes to the vengeful decrees of their arbitrary deities,
but such caprice seems utterly inconsistent with the nature of the exalted
Designer-God of monotheism. Devising a satisfactory resolution to this
apparent contradiction has proven one of the most potent challenges to the
credibility of the monotheistic metaphysical vision.

One possible solution is offered by the Deist strategy. Even a committed
materialist thinker like Thomas Hobbes still postulated the existence of God
as a First Cause of the natural order: There must be ... one first mover, that
is, a first eternal cause of all things, which is that which men mean by the
name of God. But for Hobbes, this First Cause was no longer a
providential reality but merely a metaphysical assumption necessary to
explain the genesis of the universe and the initiation of the laws of nature.
Although the sciences increasingly taught us that the internal workings of
the universe could be explained naturally, the origin and orderliness of those
workings still seemed to call for some supernatural foundation. However,
the God of the Deists did not intervene in creation, wherein everything ran in
accordance with inexorable causal necessity.

Darwin s Dangerous Idea

Enter Darwin s dangerous idea. What came to be the historical import of
Darwin s theory of evolution is perhaps best captured by author and
zoologist Richard Dawkins, currently the Charles Simonyi Professor of the
Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University: Although atheism
might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to
be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. If the order and complexity of the
universe can be explained through blind, purposeless forces such as random
mutation and natural selection, then the Designer-hypothesis becomes
excess metaphysical baggage we can readily jettison.

But what of the laws of nature themselves; must they not be the result of
some prior intelligent design? No, because the Darwinian perspective can be
extended from biology to cosmology as well. Given enough time variations
of matter in motion, perhaps in multiple universes, can produce the very
regularities we call the laws of nature. In fact, Daniel Dennett professor of
philosophy and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts
University sees the logic of Darwinism as a universal acid: It eats
through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a
revolutionized worldview. Imbued with this spirit, Dennett, Dawkins, E.O.
Wilson, and a host of others have sought to expound a Darwinian
perspective on numerous aspects of our experience including epistemology,
psychology, ethics, politics, and religion. Their ultimate goal is a completely
naturalized metaphysics from which any concept of cosmic design or
purpose have been banished.

When our minds are cleansed of such superstitions, then we can face
squarely our utter isolation in a blind and purposeless universe. As
Dawkins puts it, The universe we observe has precisely the properties we
should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good,
nothing but blind pitiless indifference. The paradox has been dispelled. In
an indifferent universe, no cosmic answers explain the ills that befall us. We
need no longer struggle to justify the ways of a purportedly benevolent
Designer. We must simply look to ourselves to combat the traditional
plagues on humankind, seeking no transcendent source of aid or comfort.

Détente

Some respond to such wide-ranging proclamations by making a distinction
between methodological and metaphysical naturalism. One can be
committed to natural or scientific explanations within evolutionary biology
without leaping to metaphysical conclusions that go beyond the purview
and methods of biology or, for that matter, any empirical science. One could
then accept random mutation and natural selection as the natural
mechanisms giving rise to life and its diverse manifestations while
simultaneously holding that these mechanisms are God s means for working
his way in the world. Hence acceptance of a Darwinian picture in biology
does not necessarily entail the leap to atheism. As Kenneth Miller, a
professor of biology at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island,
maintains, The discovery that naturalistic explanations can account for the
workings of living things neither confirms nor denies the idea that a Creator
is responsible for them. 

One can employ this strategy and view the realms of science and religion as
separate language-games, seeking through different methods and with
different basic criteria to illuminate divergent aspects of human experience.
This approach has recently be blessed by Harvard University s Stephen Jay
Gould and accorded the impressive title of NOMA (Non-Overlapping
Magisteria). So long as religious beliefs do not dictate specific answers to
empirical questions or foreclose the acceptance of documented facts, the
most theologically devout scientists should have no trouble pursuing their
day jobs with equal zeal. 

In intellectual disputes a territorial partition of this kind may foster
temporary detente and peaceful co-existence. But it is, in the end, merely an
irenic strategy that avoids raising the critical questions that bring about
fruitful intellectual engagement. So, in what follows, I d like to explore
briefly three areas where the Darwinian and theistic world-views
fundamentally collide.

Emergence of Order

Recall that, according to Darwinian theory, natural selection works on
randomly generated genetic mutations, sifting the wheat from the chaff in
regard to survival value in different environmental niches. But as Kenneth
Gallagher notes: Natural selection presupposes that these variations have
occurred, and simply culls and channels them in certain ways. Critics have
long objected that it explains, at best, the survival of the fittest, not the
arrival of the fittest. 

Now we know that most mutations resulting from copying errors in the
DNA code are harmful. Darwinian theory must suppose that on occasion
this is not the case, and that a random mutation offers some fitness
advantage to its possessor. Furthermore, to have any adaptive value, such a
mutation would have to be coordinated with the complex, integrated
systems that are the hallmark of living things from the simplest unicellular
organism on up the evolutionary scale. Little wonder, then, that biologist
Pierre Grasseí has remarked that Darwinian theory forces us to suppose an
avalanche of coordinated and mutually adjusted chance occurrences. 

Of course, the standard Darwinian retort is that, given enough time, such a
stupendous feat is possible. To believe otherwise, we are sternly warned, is
to abandon scientific rigor and to revert to prescientific modes of thinking.
But abstract possibility is a broad category indeed, encompassing anything
that does not involve an inherent contradiction such as, say, a square circle.
However, it would seem more scientific to do our best to calculate the
probability of random processes alone accounting for the order and
complexity that the evolutionary process has generated. Some, who have
made this attempt, come away with deep doubts about the adequacy of the
standard Darwinian story. One such is Lee Spetner author of Not by
Chance: Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution (Judaica Press, 1998) 
who writes, One should not just stand gaping at the long time available for
trials, ignore the small probability, and conclude that anything can happen
in such a long time. One has to calculate. The events necessary for
cumulative selection are much too improbable to build a theory on. The
events needed for the origin of life are even more improbable. This alleged
improbability of the strict Darwinian account has led Stuart
Kauffman chief scientific officer of the Santa Fe-based consulting and
software development company BiosGroup and a visiting fellow at the
Santa Fe Institute to postulate deeper principles of self-organization
acting in concert with natural selection in constructing complex organisms:
Laws of complexity spontaneously generate much of the order of the
natural world. It is only then that selection comes into play, further molding
and refining. Even more dramatically, Nobel prizewinning biochemist
Christian de Duve one of the fathers of cell biology asserts, Life and
mind emerge not as the results of freakish accidents, but as the natural
manifestations of matter, written into the fabric of the universe. I view this
universe [as] ... made in such a way as to generate life and mind, bound to
give birth to thinking beings. 

Pushing this line of thought even further are the proponents of the
Anthropic Principle. They argue that the evolution of life and mind is
intimately linked with that of the universe as a whole. Only a very narrow
range of physical properties is consistent with the evolution of carbon-based
life. On this view, far from being a comic accident generated by the mere
meandering of matter, the evolution of life and mind seem planned and
programmed into the very nature of things. Opponents counter that the
Anthropic Principle reduces to a mere tautology; life and mind exist in the
universe so, of course, the conditions necessary for their existence must be
present, whatever their provenance. But such a retort misses the point.
Those necessary conditions are so precise and exacting that the probability
of such cosmic fine-tuning via chance occurrences alone seems utterly
mind-boggling.

Do such considerations prove that the universe is designed after all?
Certainly not in any strictly empirical sense. The only thing that the
empirical sciences can do is to continue to catalogue the intricacy and
interconnectedness of the cosmos, and perhaps, empirically verify the
deeper laws or principles of self-organization that give rise to such order.
The Designer of such laws or principles, if one exists, is beyond direct
empirical verification and can only be inferred by indirect arguments,
making the case that an intelligent, transcendent source of cosmic order is
the more reasonable metaphysical account of the facts that science
discovers. Such a metaphysical claim is by its nature factually
underdetermined and requires a leap of faith. So those, like Dawkins, who
are inclined to see the matter from an atheistic perspective, can always resist
by continuing to suggest purely naturalistic alternative explanations.
However, at the very least, one can make a compelling claim that a theistic
interpretation of the facts that science reveals has strong rational warrant.

Emergence of Mind

A question can also be raised as to whether the emergence of rational
self-consciousness in human beings and the freedom that it makes possible
can be coherently explained through the physical analysis that is basic to
Darwinian theory. Steven Horst, chair of philosophy and director of
pedagogical renewal at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut,
frames the dilemma well: In short, a naturalist evolutionary story about
consciousness presupposes a physicalist story about the emergence of the
phenotype somewhere in the history of the species. If physicalist theories
cannot address the hard problem, evolutionary theories will provide the
naturalist no solace. 

One can readily see why rational consciousness, once it emerged, would
have adaptive value, but this tells us nothing about how it emerged in terms
of physical properties alone. This latter conundrum has been dubbed the
hard problem by David Chalmers, Professor of Philosophy and Associate
Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of
Arizona in Tucson. Present-day scientific theories hardly touch the really
difficult questions about consciousness. We do not just lack a detailed
theory; we are entirely in the dark about how consciousness fits into the
natural order. 

One can, of course, declare a priori that the materialist assumptions of
science require that rational consciousness is somehow purely an emergent
property of the incredibly complex array of electro-chemical processes in the
brain. However, such a declaration in no way removes our utter perplexity
as to how the mental causality we experience everyday in terms of
reasons for our behavior can be reduced to the physical causality science
finds at the material level. As Colin McGinn, a philosophy professor at
Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, asserts, The mistake is
that we assume our understanding of causation as it applies to physical
causation works in the same way for mental causation ... The fact is that we
have no good theory about the nature of mental causation, no model for
how reasoning leads to choice. So we try to conceive of this in terms we are
familiar with, thus distorting the phenomenon. 

One result of the mistake to which McGinn alludes is the doctrine of
determinism, which denies that we are free and morally responsible because
such spectral concepts cannot be fit into a materialist paradigm. This
doctrine rests on the assumption that our experience of freedom is an
illusion rooted in our ignorance of the complex causal chain that inexorably
directs our behavior. It follows from this assumption that the more we
would uncover the subconscious factors shaping our behavior, the more our
fundamental sense of freedom would dissipate, replaced by a growing
feeling of utter determination. Ironically, I would argue, just the opposite is
the case. The more such factors are brought into the light of critical,
conscious scrutiny, the freer we become. Deeper critical insight into our
behavior s underlying causal structure makes possible more extended levels
of rational self-control.

Such effective mental control of human behavior may seem contrary to
materialist presuppositions; nonetheless, it remains basic to our everyday
internal experience of what it means to be a normal human being. As a
result, determinists can only espouse their doctrine at the theoretical level; at
a practical level even they must act as if they are free. I suppose one cannot
fully discount even the possibility that determinists will one day deliver on
their promise to demonstrate the illusory nature of our overwhelming
internal experience of freedom. But that day's arrival seems exceedingly
improbable. I cannot fathom how rational creatures would simply succumb
to determining factors brought to a conscious level without striving to
transcend them. If this is so, then a strictly Darwinian perspective cannot be
the entire story about the emergence of human mental life and agency. Even
more fundamentally, these considerations point to the necessity of framing
a metaphysical vision more expansive than Darwinian materialism in which
mental life appears like a bizarre aberration produced in some utterly
random fashion from the material stuff of an otherwise mindless universe.
Seeing this sorry state of affairs, the mathematician Alfred North Whitehead
called for a move beyond such a crimped explanatory model. This sharp
division between mentality and nature has no ground in our fundamental
observation. We find ourselves living within nature ... We should conceive
mental operations among the factors which make up the constitution of the
universe. Whether science will follow Whitehead--seeing both mind and
matter as fundamental constituents of the universe--is an open question.
However, when the universe is conceived metaphysically in the way he
deems necessary, the hypothesis of God as a cosmic, creative intelligence
guiding the material realm and serving as the ultimate source of our own
creative intelligence takes on a good deal of plausibility.

The Problem of Evil

The order of the universe and our presence in it as  rational beings point
beyond the material realm to a Designer-God; the God hypothesis more
plausibly accounts for these facts than the blind workings of random
processes coupled with natural selection. However, another fact of our
experience that must be confronted apparently runs counter to that
hypothesis, namely the problem of evil or imperfection in the world. Darwin
himself pointed to imperfections he perceived in nature as an argument for
the superior explanatory power of his evolutionary theory over design
arguments. According to Gould, The theory of natural selection would
never have replaced the doctrine of divine creation if evident, admirable
design pervaded all organisms. 

What can we make of the simultaneous order yet apparent indifference to
destruction and suffering that the universe manifests? Perhaps blind chance
rules after all, or maybe the ordering power is more akin to a distant and
pitiless Aristotelian Unmoved Mover than the almighty and providential
God of theism. Mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal describes the
paradox with these evocative words: If I saw nothing there which revealed
a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion. If I saw everywhere the
signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But, seeing too much
to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied. 

The German philosopher, mathematician, and logician Gottfried Leibniz
argued that, despite appearances to the contrary, the world that God has
created is the best possible. Of course, this notion was lampooned by
Voltaire through the character of Dr. Pangloss in Candide and has no
shortage of contemporary detractors. William Rowe, professor of
philosophy at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, forcefully
declaims, My own view is that the idea that the actual world is the best
possible world is an absurdity, fit for ridicule ... If theism leads to such a
conclusion, we should abandon it, unless we have very strong grounds in
support of theism. 

In Leibniz s defense, his claim sounds absurd when viewed as a piece of
finite inductive human reasoning. But that is to misread his intention. He is
employing a deductive strategy; given his prior belief in an almighty and
providential God, the evil in the world must somehow be subordinated to
an overarching cosmic greater good. Furthermore, the divine perspective
must be panoramic, encompassing the entire creation, not just a myopic,
human snapshot.

In this latter context we must also keep in mind Leibniz s distinction
between possibility and compossibility. A state of affairs is possible if
it implies no logical contradiction. But not all possible states of affairs are
compossible with other possible states. It is possible for me at this moment
to be sitting at my computer composing this paragraph, and it is separately
possible for me, at the same moment, to be in a classroom teaching Leibniz.
But both states of affairs are not compossible. So any actual world is one
made up of solely compossible states. Thus Leibniz is really arguing that
God surveyed all compossible worlds and chose the one with the greatest
degree of perfection as the actual world.

From this divine vantage point, the earthquakes, floods, and volcanoes we
classify as natural evils may be necessary elements in the overall finely
tuned ecology of the earth that brings forth such a wondrous abundance of
flora and fauna and an awe-inspiring diversity of living creatures. From this
same vantage point, the host of human transgressions that constitute moral
evil may be a necessary condition of populating the earth with genuinely
free and creative beings, not mere automata. In fact, the almighty and
providential God may have freely given His entire creation a measure of
integrity and independence by acting in persuasive rather than coercive
ways in the evolutionary process to bring about higher levels of complexity
and beauty. In Colorado State University distinguished philosophy
professor Holmes Rolston s elegant words, History plus value as storied
achievement in creatures with their own integrity is better than optimum
value without history, autonomy, or adventure in superbly designed
marionettes. 

Of course, none of us share the divine perspective; so such speculations will
always for skeptics have the ring of a Just So Story told by those trying to
justify their prior belief in and almighty and providential Designer. But,
then, in regard to such ultimate questions all of us, theists and non-theists
alike, must engage in storytelling. Nonetheless I submit that the Leibnizian
story at least lays out a plausible claim for believers that the God whose
handiwork they discern in the majesty of the heavens and the mystery of
their own inner lives may in fact care for them after all.

If my musings are correct, our experience of the universe--despite its
paradoxical character--is still amenable to a rationally justified theistic
interpretation. So, in the end, I would reply to Richard Dawkins that even
after Darwin it is still quite possible to be an intellectually fulfilled theist.

Anthony M. Matteo is professor of philosophy at Elizabethtown College in
Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and author of Quest for the Absolute: The
Philosophical Vision of Joseph Marechal (Northern Illinois University Press,
1992), as well as several articles on ethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of
religion.

© 2002 Science & Spirit Magazine. All rights reserved.

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