Dennett's Dangerous Darwinism
Stratford Caldecott

 

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett (London: Allen Lane, 1995). £25.

Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton (Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1994). With a Foreword by Philip Yancey. $14.99.

According to John Locke, writing in 1690, it is impossible to conceive that "bare incogitative Matter should produce a thinking intelligent Being." A century later, the Scottish philosopher David Hume played with the idea that the mere "continual motion of matter" might produce all the appearances of "wisdom and contrivance" in the universe - but in the end he could not take it seriously. Less than a century after that, Charles Darwin formulated the "dangerous idea": evolution by natural selection. Articulated, clarified, qualified and deepened by others, this idea - according to Daniel Dennett - has now swept aside the remnants of essentialist, dualistic and teleological philosophy and shown itself capable of explaining the origins of mind and morality in a blind, purposeless and "mechanical" process - starting from, if not strictly nothing, at least "something that is well-nigh indistinguishable from nothing at all" (p. 185).

As if in order to remove the last leg on which a theist might try to stand, Dennett suggests that even the laws of nature governing the origin of species may have themselves evolved from absolute Chaos through a process of trial and error, extending through a Vast (sic) series of alternative and successive universes governed by quite different laws, in many of which the evolution of life would have been impossible (p. 179). Design can emerge from mere Order and Order from Chaos, "via an algorithmic process that makes no use of pre-existing Mind" (p. 83).

Thus for Dennett, the idea of evolution by natural selection "unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand story". It unifies "the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law" (pp. 20-21). Dennett is a philosopher, but this book is admittedly a work of propaganda for Darwin's idea rather than a book of philosophy. "I want to get thinkers in other disciplines to take evolutionary thinking seriously, to show them how they have been underestimating it, and to show them why they have been listening to the wrong sirens" (p. 12). He tries to do so using "artful methods", which is why he writes the book in the form of a story. "You don't want to be swayed by a story? Well, I know you won't be swayed by a formal argument; you won't even listen to a formal argument for my conclusion, so I start where I have to start."

Why does Dennett call Darwin's idea dangerous? It seems to challenge many ideals that most of us - including Dennett - value and wish to cherish (p. 21). The book opens and closes with a campfire song that the author remembers from his childhood:

Tell me why the stars do shine
Tell me why the ivy twines.
Tell me why the sky's so blue.
Then I will tell you just why I love you.
Because God made the stars to shine,
Because God made the ivy twine,
Because God made the sky so blue.
Because God made you, that's why I love you.

"I want to protect the campfire song, and what is beautiful and true in it, for my little grandson and his friends, and for their children when they grow up", writes Dennett. But the "kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us... and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight - that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must either be turned into a symbol for something less concrete or abandoned altogether.... There is no future in a sacred myth. Why not? Because of our curiosity. Because, as the song reminds us, we want to know why. We may have outgrown the song's answer, but we will never outgrow the question."

One cannot help imagining what G.K. Chesterton would have made of this, Chesterton who wrote that, though he left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, "I have not found any books so sensible since". I am quoting from Orthodoxy, the recently reprinted account of his gradual discovery of Catholic Christianity. Chesterton writes: "When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exacly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o'clock. We must answer that it is magic. It is not a 'law', for we do not understand its general formula. It is not a necessity, for though we can count on it happening practically, we have no right to say that it must always happen." Anticipating the likely reaction to this assertion, he goes on, "I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic. It is the only way I can express in words my clear and definite perception that one thing is quite distinct from another; that there is not logical connection between flying and laying eggs. It is the man who talks about 'a law' that he has never seen who is the mystic."

Chesterton's great gift - and it is one among several not shared by Daniel Dennett - is a sense of the contingency of things, an awareness of the miraculous quality of the present moment: that it is. He does not mean, in the above passage, that there can be no scientific explanation of how eggs turn into birds or why fruits fall in autumn. It is just that all such explanations somehow miss the point. The past does not fully explain the present. We will come back to this. To Dennett, of course, it is Chesterton who is missing the point - though perhaps he could be excused, since he was writing in a time before the great modern synthesis. The idea of evolution by natural selection is like a "universal acid" that eats through everything that we set up to contain it. Time and again religious believers have tried to set boundaries to it: introducing God to set the process going, or to give it a direction. Even among scientists there has been one attempt after another to contain the idea. Exponents of the "anthropic principle" have recently argued that the universe seems designed to make human life possible (Dennett disposes of that fallacy on p. 165). Materialist Noam Chomsky believed in "innate language structures", but not that they could have evolved by natural selection. John Searle claims that there is an unbridgable gap between the "intentionality" or Artficial Intelligence manifested by a machine, and the "original intentionality" exhibited by a person. Bestselling fellow-evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould argues for a "punctuated equilibrium" with mysterious saltations or jumps from one species to another - to leave room, Dennett suspects, for the reintroduction of divine influences.

To Dennett, all such attempts are doomed, and (Chesterton's protestations notwithstanding) the mechanism of evolution works without "skyhooks" to attach it to the heavens at any point. Biology is (unconscious) engineering; engineers employ cranes, not skyhooks. Furthermore they use little cranes to build bigger ones. The story of modern science and its inexorable advances has never been told so convincingly. As propaganda it works very well - but how much of the "philosophy" is sheer bluster? The reader of Chesterton will pay particular attention to a passage on page 180, where the author - having established to his own satisfaction that Chaos, given enough time, will produce Order (becuase it does not after all need to get there in one jump) asks, "Does utter Chaos in turn need an explanation? What is there left to explain? Some people think there is still one leftover 'why' question: Why is there something rather than nothing? Opinions differ on whether the question makes any intelligible demands at all. If it does, the answer 'Because God exists' is probably as good an answer as any, but look at its competition: 'Why not?'"

So "Why not?" is to be the final answer to our inextinguishable curiosity. Dennett inclines toward the idea of eternal recurrence: an infinite number of worlds, in which every event, and every possible event under every possible set of rules, is replayed an infinite number of times - a mindless process stumbling, among all the infinities, upon a "timeless Platonic possibility of order". This possibility, being "abstract and outside of time", says Dennett (consciously echoing Malebranche), does not need any explanation because it can have no origin. In fact, the problem is that Dennett is so rooted in the mindset of modern science that he cannot conceive of an "explanation" that is not the explanation of a temporal origin, and which does not look for a cause that precedes the event in time. The story he tells is one that begins with Locke and remains entirely within the world of the Enlightenment: when he ventures outside it is only to caricature religious belief.

Religious thinkers of the stature of Augustine and Aquinas would not have been alarmed by the suggestion that the universe contains spaces and galaxies that shrink humanity to apparent insignificance. (As Chesterton puts it, why should man feel ashamed by the size of the universe when he is dwarfed by the nearest oak tree?) Nor would these men have been shaken by the notion of infinite alternative universes - although I have to say that without any empirical proof of their existence, the notion looks remarkably like an attempt to escape the alternative hypothesis of a single Creator. Being is good, said Aquinas: it might be that God has decided to create everything he possibly can, every variation on possible being. (Indeed he wrote something very similar to this about angels, whose variety "transcends manyness".) But the very word "create" refers to a different kind of cause from the ones sought by science. Aquinas considered whether or not the world must have had a temporal beginning: he concluded that we could know it had from Revelation, but philosophy alone could not resolve the point. Ever since St Augustine wrote his Confessions it had been widely accepted that time was as much in need of a cause (obviously not a temporal cause) as anything else.

Dennett sometimes speaks of the "paths of actuality" meandering through the Vast spaces of possibility. This provokes a further question. What makes a given event actual as distinct from possible? What does Dennett mean by actuality? His section on the possible gives us no clue, and yet this is a crucial question. Either he has abolished the distinction and everything possible is necessarily actual; or there is a distinction, in which case we may wonder why some possibilities are "chosen" to be fleshed out in reality while others are not. In the former case, which he seems to prefer, he still needs to account for our present consciousness of this possibility rather than that. Does our awareness, for example, move through the successive moments of possibility arrayed in time, thus actualizing them for us one after another? The reader becomes increasingly curious to read one of Dennett's other books, Consciousness Explained. As for myself, I date the beginnings of my adult intellectual life to the day I realized that not only the world of physical objects and forces, but also the world of human experiences, exists in reality (for I only know the one by the other), whereupon I asked myself, "But what is consciousness made of?" There is no sign in this book that Daniel Dennett even would even understand the question. On p. 383 he dismisses in a footnote Jerry Fodor's accurate quip, "Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious." This is one example of the way that, trying so hard to eliminate the need for skyhooks, Dennett manages to abolishe the sky at the same time.

For the religious thinker, God is the source of Being in the present. He is not merely the First Mover, not just the first in a series of causes. The idea of Providence and final or "Deep" causation lies, as it were, at right angles to scientific causality. The scientist in Flatland can explain everything around him in terms of chance and necessity, as the interplay of random variation and natural selection. But there is another dimension that we know about if he doesn't. It does not necessarily interfere with the operations of Flatland (if it did that would appear as a miracle to the flat scientist). Where it shows its effect is partly in the very existence of Flatland, which is sustained and surrounded by it as the surface of the earth is surrounded by space, but also partly in those events and patterns that the flat scientist has to attribute to mere chance, accident or coincidence. It is in this third dimension (or for us, let us say, fifth) that the explanation of chance is to be found - an ordering principle that does not conflict with the working of natural laws but shapes the whole unfolding pattern from beginning to end, precisely as a whole, thus giving it a different kind of intelligibility.

The concept may be easier to grasp if we think not in terms of world history or speciation, but of an individual life story: mine, for instance. Clearly my own psychohistory will be of great interest to me personally: the characteristics I inherited from my parents, the effect of childhood traumas and of adult decisions - all the ways my present life was determined (up to but not including the decision I am about to make). But what may be of even greater interest is something different from the deterministic explanation of how I got where I happen to be. It is a shape or inner pattern that seems to make "sense" of that personal history - something we tend to evoke with words such as "meaning" and even "destiny". A chance meeting that changed the course of my life yet "fitted" perfectly; a moment of insight, triggered by the beauty of a sunset over mountains and lakes, seeming to reveal previously hidden depths in reality itself; a dream that was more than a dream, conveying a reassurance that could not be doubted: these are the kinds of experiences that open us to the possibility that our world lies within that other dimension, about which science cannot speak.

The shape given to reality by Providence or Grace, often obscurely glimpsed, is the effect of a cause, but not a confining or oppressive cause. Materialists often try to locate the source of human freedom in some degree of randomness or indeterminism in nature. If that were right, the existence of a "vertical cause" determining even chance events might seem to threaten human moral responsibility. In fact it does the opposite. A human action is not free because it is uncaused or random, it is free because it is caused (in part) by a conscious decision. Those decisions become freer, not less free, the more conscious we become of their meaning in the Deep pattern of our lives and thus of the weight of our responsibility in moments of real choice.

There is quite a lot about evolutionism in Orthodoxy, since an earlier generation of its devotees were among Chesterton's regular sparring partners. What concerned him most was the conclusion of so many of the evolutionists that we have no "free will" - that is, the tendency of materialism to lead to fatalism (as he puts it in the chapter called "The Maniac"). The case of Dennett does not appear to be so simple. He explicitly claims not to be the kind of "greedy reductionist" that religious believers like Chesterton find so easy to parody. The behaviourist B.F. Skinner, the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson and assorted Social Darwinists provide Dennett with plenty of models of such unacceptable reductionism, involving the full-blooded denial of human freedom and responsibility. Dennett's account of freedom would not, however, satisfy Chesterton any more than these. Applying Darwinian principles to the evolution of culture and the units of this evolution (Dawkins' "memes"), Dennett defines the human person as that "radically new kind of entity created when a particular sort of animal is properly furnished by - or infested with - memes" (p. 341). Although he goes on to argue that "what makes us special is that we, alone among species, can rise above the imperatives or our genes - thanks to the lifting cranes of our memes" (p. 365, my emphasis), when he comes to the question, "What happens to personal responsibility?... Where is the autonomy I need to act with free will?" (p. 366), it turns out that this much-vaunted self is nothing but a shifting coalition of memes. It is they that "play the long-term roles in determining which decisions are made along the way" (p. 368).

The little word "love" has not so far been mentioned, except in connection with the ditty that opens and closes Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Why do I love you? Because God made you. Daniel Dennett thinks he has shown how we were made by a mindless, algorithmic process, yet he also thinks he has preserved the essential content of that song - because he leaves us free to admire the beauties that have sprung from Chaos. "Is something sacred? Yes, I say with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred" (p. 520). But if everything is sacred, the word has lost its meaning. In fact Dennett has preserved neither the sacred, nor love, nor the value of personality, not the possibility of human fulfilment. A person is a cluster of memes: a friendly face thrown up by the universe only to vanish the next instant. If we believe this, we may still wish to sit around a campfire teaching our children songs. We may still wish to be kind to one another, for all sorts of complex reasons. But the great religious traditions including Catholicism will be preserved in "cultural zoos" (p. 520), and we will have been deprived of something vital to our humanity: the possibility of a love that is more than some brief feeling of admiration or desire.

God made the stars to shine and the ivy twine, and he made us to love. If that sounds sentimental, it is only because we think of love as a sentiment. In Dennett's world, that is all it could be. In Chesterton's, it is much more than that. The theologians call it a participation in the eternal Act of existing, and it is both deeper and stronger than death. I can love you as a person and not as a passing fancy because you exist as a person. But without the dimension of Eternity out of which you just sprang a moment ago, you could not be a person, and neither would I. Chesterton writes of someone "who has such a passion for proving that he will have no personal existence after death that he falls back on the position that he has no personal existence now. He invokes Buddhism and says that all souls fade into one another; in order to prove that he cannot go to heaven he proves that he cannot go to Hartlepool." Dennett is in the position of the man who cannot go to Hartlepool.

Chesterton would therefore say that Darwinism is dangerous, first and foremost, to Darwinians. "Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolutionism destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subjects of thought. Descartes said, 'I think; therefore I am.' The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, 'I am not; therefore I cannot think' " (pp. 32-3).

I cannot think, but the memes jostle for supremacy in the brains they have infested. Dennett, in other words, has not advanced the cause of philosophy. If anything, he has put it back 2500 years to its Presocratic dawn, to a Heraclitus perhaps: It is not possible to step into the same river twice. - The fairest universe is but a dust-heap piled up at random. - One should know that war is universal and jurisdiction is strife, and everything comes about by way of strife and necessity. - From earth comes water, and from water, soul. But there is one good thing about going back to the beginning of philosophy. At least we have some good arguments to look forward to.

 

First published in The Chesterton Review