#STRask - Why Would You Say Evolution Has No Purpose?

Episode Date: May 20, 2024

Questions about the claim that evolution has no purpose and whether the fact that people who have aphantasia are unable to form mental images shows that the ability to picture something is based in chemistry rather than a soul. Why would you say evolution has no purpose when it’s a fine-tuned process that ensures the propagation of life and is anything but random since it’s controlled by a survival-fitness feedback loop? Since people who have aphantasia are unable to form mental images, doesn’t that mean the ability to picture something is based in chemistry rather than a soul?

Well, I know you've been patiently waiting, and the time has come for another episode of the Hashtag SDR Ask podcast. Here we are. Okay, Greg, we are going to start with a science question. This one comes from Marvin. In a recent podcast, you claimed that evolution has no purpose. Why is that? It is a process that ensures the propagation of life and is anything but random, as it is controlled by a feedback loop called survival fitness, i.e., it's fine-tuned.

Okay, well, I'm only pausing because I'm trying to think of what piece of confusion to go after first. The very foundation of the Darwinian project is naturalistic, and therefore it is not teleological. That is not a Christian assessment of it. It is the very nature of it. There is no telos. There is no goal. There is no end. Whatever end that takes place is what happens accidentally. Now, there is a kind of convenient way of characterizing that, and that is, well, yes, it ensures the survival of the fittest. But then the question could be asked, and by the way, this is not my question. This is a question that has come up in the overall discussion to address what appears to be an incoherence even in the notion of survival of the fittest. Well, what do you mean survival of

the fittest? Well, the fittest survive. And then you could say, well, how do you know who survives? It's the fittest that survive. Okay, well, then how do you know who's fittest? Well, they're the ones who survive. So it turns out that the concept of survival of the fittest can be reduced to a simple tautology. Either the fittest are the fittest or the survivors survive. Now, a tautology is just a repetition of terms. Repetition of terms doesn't tell you anything. A equal A. Law of identity. But that's really the order. Bachelors are unmarried males. Okay. The first equals the second. So it doesn't tell you anything in depth. And by the way, bachelors could be unmarried males, even if there were no such things as males or marriage or bachelors.

It is de dicto. It is true in virtue of the way the words work. So many have raised the issue of saying that evolution secures the survival of the fittest is not to say anything meaningful. Incidentally, this is an objection that has come up for years from many quarters, and it goes to the coherence of the statement survival of the fittest. So to identify that as the goal of evolution, first of all is to invoke what many have considered a useless tautology, and also to invoke something that is completely foreign to any naturalistic system, that is, that there's a goal to it. That would be like saying the goal of gravity is to have apples fall to the ground. Well, that isn't the goal of gravity. It is a consequence of gravity that apples fall to the ground, but it isn't a goal of gravity. It is just the natural outworking of these what might be called forces of nature, but strictly speaking,

naturalistic science can't affirm occultic forces causing other things to happen because those are what we see in so-called laws of nature are just regularities of action. Here's a description of the way things consistently behave, but they're not behaving because there's some law that these inanimate objects are obeying. Okay, that's another issue of confusion in the way a lot of people talk about these things. So I'm trying to be precise here. Darwinian evolution has no goal. You don't believe me? Ask Richard Dawkins. If you don't believe me, ask Richard Dawkins. If you don't believe me, ask, who's the guy from Harvard? Stephen Jay Gould. Of course, you can ask him again because he's gone. But nevertheless,

this is true of every single individual who has advanced naturalistic Darwinian evolution. It has no teleology. That is the point. And like Gould says, hey, you know, you rerun the clock, you start back to the beginning. We can have a whole different array of living things as this unguided process produces a whole different effect than what happened in the run-through that we're familiar with. So when I'm making the case that there's no teleology to evolution, I am reporting the evolutionist's point of view. And in fact, naturalistically, that would have to be the case, because if you have a goal, you have a goal maker. A goal isn't just a consequence. A goal is an intended result. And so you have to have an intendor to construct a system in which there is an intended result,

okay? Some have tried to make the case, Christian theistic evolutionists would say, that maybe the process of survival of the fittest, natural selection, survival of the fittest, is a designed process, all right? I don't actually see that because if you have a genetic mutation, that is a result of serendipitous mutagenic influences on the gene. Radiation or chemical or something like that causes a mutation. Nobody's in control of that. And then the mutation creates some kind of novelty in the morphology of the subsequent creature, new genes, new body, and that morphology

may or may not have reproductive value, not survival value, reproductive value. The importance isn't how long the thing survives. The importance is whether it reproduces that genetic change. Okay, that's why Richard Dawkins calls it the selfish gene. It's all about those genes, getting their genes into the next generation. Okay, so the mutation element is serendipitous. It's by accident. It's not goal-oriented unless somebody wants to assert, well, God caused that mutation for a reason. But you can't just pull that out of thin air. You've got to have some justification for that kind of claim, it seems to me. And then the natural selection.

Well, natural selection depends on serendipitous features in the environment this particular organism finds itself in. If it were in a different environment, that natural circumstance may select differently. Okay, just depends. So neither in genetic mutation nor natural selection, those are the two main features of neo-Darwinian synthesis is anything like intention or goal or teleology in evidence. There are consequences. The consequence, according to that doctrine, is that there is a changing of the creatures, of the creatures, the nature, the biological forms of the creatures that develop and survive, but you can't even say that one is developed better than another. Because better, I mean, well, the human beings, we're at the top of the evolution. Where do you get to top and bottom? All evolution cares about is getting its genes into the next

generation. And every single thing that is alive and flourishing now is successfully getting its genes into the next generation. So by virtue of what do you say one is higher than the other? Now you're imposing values that are unrelated to the natural process. Humans aren't higher. We're just different. That's all. We could do more things, but that doesn't make us better in any evolutionary sense. Okay? We're no better than the cockroaches. The cockroach has been around a lot longer than we have, and other insects and amoebas and stuff like that. So in what sense are we better? There is this tendency to impose teleology and value distinctions on the natural order. The point I'm making is those have no place in the naturalistic philosophical system that undergirds the evolutionary enterprise,

the Darwinian enterprise. Now, I think the observations of value and stuff like that are accurate of the world, but that means you're going to have to adjust your worldview to make sense of those things. And the Christian worldview certainly makes a lot more sense of that than the naturalistic worldview. Even if you say, as Marvin says here, that the natural selection is choosing the fitter, you know, organism. And that's, it's directed towards fitness. Even if you say that, the fact is that this whole system is built on randomness because it's the mutations that supply the new information. And mutations do not occur according to what the organism means or what it needs to survive. It's completely random.

survive. It's completely random. They can only randomly happen and maybe increase the survival or the reproductive ability and then be selected for after they happen to occur. But the actual mutation is completely random. And I have an article on the website. It's called, Yes, the Evolutionary Process Does Depend on Randomness. And in there, I link to an article by Stephen Meyer, and he talks about this because I do get this objection where people will say, yes, there is purpose, but the truth is, no, it is all based on randomness. Natural selection can't choose for anything that doesn't exist, and the mutations don't happen according to what the organism needs. That's right. And even the environmental circumstances, I mentioned this already,

are random. That a mutation in one set of environmental circumstances might be chosen in favor of, following their view. I don't think it works that way, but in any event, that's... Or in a totally different environment, it would not be chosen in favor of. Just think if you were equatorial, the organism was equatorial or Arctic, okay? A change in a gene could create a change in the morphology that would benefit it in a cold climate, but not in a warm climate, or vice versa. And so those... That that serendipity, that's chance, those circumstances will determine what moves forward, not any type of positive goal. And this is where I'm just going to repeat what I said before. A goal is different than a consequence. A consequence is just what happens,

all right? And even if you like what happens and it kind of happens in a way that appears to you as meaningful, oh, that's the fittest survive, which I think there's a question even about the coherence of that statement. Even so, that doesn't mean that that particular array of biological forms was intended by anyone as a purpose of the process. Let's go on to a question from Adam Malinsky. Adam? Yes. You claim in your Bumping into Reality course that being able to picture the color of your mother's blouse is an action that occurs in your soul. I have aphantasia and I'm unable to form mental images. This means that the ability to picture is based in chemistry, right? Well, here's an important distinction, and a lot of times I pause at these things because I immediately see the mistake that's

been made, but I'm trying to distinguish or determine how to best explain it, all right? What the individual is talking about is a physically causal element that produces the pictures that we see when we imagine something, all right? And there is no question at all, and every person, every single mind-body dualist, like myself or J.P. Moreland, who's written extensively on this, or everyone else, fully acknowledges the interdependency of the immaterial substance called the soul with the material substance called the body, functioning primarily with the brain. There is a functional independence while the two are together. Now, when the soul is not associated with the body. And this happens in very well evidentially documented near-death experiences where you have the individual completely not just out but incapacitated

in terms of their sensual input, their physical sensory capabilities. Yet the locus of the self is somewhere else observing things that the body could never see. When the soul is united with the body, it depends upon the body to accomplish its functions. When it's not united with the body—and by the way, you're going to see the interactive elements there. When it's not with the body, it can function all kinds of ways with no bodily interaction at all. There's no bodily activity. There's no EKG. There's no EEG. Everything's flatlined in many of these cases.

Yet there's abundance of activity that's going on in the mind of the individual who's experiencing the NDE. They can be above the circumstance in the surgery room and see all of these things that they wouldn't be able to see if their souls were united with their body. Even blind people can see. We have record of evidentially confirmed veridical experiences of people leaving their body, going to other locations, and gaining information that when they return, they can report after they wake up. And that can be verified to have been the case. Unique information.

Lots of examples of that kind of thing, too. So what I'm saying is, what appears to be the case is, though the soul can operate by itself, separate from the body, and have all kinds of functional capacities when it's united with the body, as is normal for human beings, unless they die, or the rare case of an NDE, isolation of the soul from the body, then the body is an integral part of what's happening with the soul. So, it may be that my image of my mom in my imagination doing some task

and wearing a certain colored blouse may be produced by brain activity, which in the case of, say, Adam here, doesn't happen because he does not have that brain activity capability. All right? But just because it's produced by the brain doesn't mean the result that is produced is physical. And this was my point. However it is, our brains are working to produce this image. In my case of my mom washing dishes with a yellow blouse, the image is not in my brain. Because if it were, I could be able to open it up, in principle at least, and see my mom in there washing dishes. But that's not going to happen. And I made the point that it's not just sight that can be, in a certain sense, reproduced, or I almost said conjured up, but I mean reproduced in the mind.

It's called the mind's eye, by the way. We have a word for it, a phrase for it. You know, in my mind's eye, I see this. Now, maybe somebody can't see that, but you can also feel fur, the texture of fur, and I'm doing it right now. We have cats in our house. I pet cats. I know what it feels like to me. The cat's not sitting here right now, but my hand is moving, and I have a sensation in my mind of what the fur feels like. I can hear Beethoven's Fifth. Dun, dun, dun, dun. Who heard that? Okay. I can smell a rose. I can taste an apple. Now, of course, those sensations are not as dramatic as when we are physically participating and our body is participating in that, but those sensations can be reproduced. And the reproduced element is not physically present in our body. It isn't my

tongue that's tasting. It isn't my ear that's the apple. It isn't my nose that's smelling the rose. It isn't my ear that's hearing Beethoven. You can put any kind of equipment on my head at all. You're not going to hear dun-dun-dun-dun. You might see some things lighting up whenever it is I'm imagining Beethoven, but you're not going to hear what I hear. And that's my point. These sensations and a whole lot more, that's just sensations. What about our thoughts?

What about our acts of will? What about our intentions? These are all real functions of the soul that are not functions of something physical. Consciousness is not irreducibly physical. And this is so obvious now to naturalistic atheists that people like, I almost had his name, Daniel Tennant, now just simply boldly say consciousness is an illusion. Our awareness of self is an illusion. Really? Well, wait a minute. What has illusions? Don't selves have illusions? Don't souls have illusions? But if the soul is an illusion, an illusion is when you're consciously aware of something that's false. But if the consciousness is the illusion, then what's having the illusion of the illusion? Is the illusion having an illusion? It's nonsense.

It's just obvious nonsense. The distinction I'm making here, though, is between the physical aspects that produce the image or the thought or the sensation or that might be correlated to, and maybe constantly correlated to this mental activity is not the same. It's not identical with the activity. Whatever is missing in Adam's physical capability just means he's not capable of conjuring images in his soul, producing images in his soul. But he certainly is capable of thinking, and there may be chemical activity, brain activity associated with that there is, but that doesn't mean the thoughts are physical because the thoughts are not in the brain. Thoughts are propositional. They're not chemical. Well, thank you, Greg.

Thank you, Adam. Thank you, Marvin. We appreciate hearing from you. Send us your question on X with the hashtag STRask or go to our website at str.org. We look forward to hearing from you. This is Amy Hall and Greg Kokel for Stand to Reason.