A bell went off in my head when I heard this. In a later conversation with Raghunath, I asked him whether Aurobindo would support the contemporary idea of intelligent design and related critiques of Darwinian evolution, and he said basically yes: there is a guiding spiritual principle at work in the development of new species, it cannot be merely a matter of natural selection through random beneficial mutation. Throughout Raghunath’s talk I had been noticing Aurobindo’s influence on Ken Wilber, and here I saw a still more direct link.

On page 23 of what probably remains his most-read and best-known work, A Brief History of Everything, Wilber makes this now-infamous claim:

A half-wing is no good as a leg and no good as a wing — you can’t run and you can’t fly. It has no adaptive value whatsoever. In other words, with a half-wing you are dinner. The wing will work only if these hundred mutations happen all at once, in one animal — and also these same mutations must occur simultaneously in another animal of the opposite sex, and then they have to somehow find each other, have dinner, a few drinks, mate, and have offspring with real functional wings. Talk about mind-boggling. This is infinitely, absolutely, utterly mind-boggling. Random mutations cannot even begin to explain this. (emphases in original)

This is exactly the claim of irreducible complexity made by Michael Behe, perhaps the most visible proponent of intelligent design. Certain organs in complex organisms, so the claim goes, are too complex to be explained by random beneficial mutation and natural selection, the centrepieces of evolutionary theory since Darwin. While Wilber has not to my knowledge used the term “intelligent design” itself, he has explicitly admitted the connection of his ideas with Behe’s. In a discussion on his own “Integral Naked” website, now apparently down from that site but reposted on many pages including this one, Wilber told his students: “Instead of a religious preacher like Dawkins, start with something like Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. And then guess what? Neo-Darwinian theory can’t explain shit. Deal with it.”

I am not convinced by intelligent design. Its central idea of irreducible complexity seems to have far more holes in it than Darwinian evolution ever did. This site gives a list of the many possible ways that a half-wing could indeed be useful enough to be an evolutionary adaptation; similar possibilities are out there for the eye, the bacterial flagellum, and pretty much any other examples that design proponents have used. Irreducible complexity turns out to be reducible after all. (It took me a long time to realize that not so long ago God had actually been a legitimate scientific hypothesis.) Nor am I convinced by Wilber’s appeal to (his own) authority:

Folks, give me a break on this one. I have a Master’s degree in biochemistry, and a Ph.D. minus thesis in biochemistry and biophysics, with specialization in the mechanism of the visual process. I did my thesis on the photoisomerization of rhodopsin in bovine rod outer segments. I know evolutionary theory inside out, including the works of Dawkins et al. The material of mine that is being quoted is extremely popularized and simplified material for a lay audience. Publicly, virtually all scientists subscribe to neo-Darwinian theory. Privately, real scientists — that is, those of us with graduate degrees in science who have professionally practiced it — don’t believe hardly any of its crucial tenets.

Until I see actual evidence that “real scientists” believe something more like Behe’s intelligent design than a standard Darwinian account, I’m going to go with the overwhelming consensus of what they actually say in public, as well as the arguments that make sense in my own limited research on the issue. I put a lot more trust in those than in the authoritative “trust me” of a single insightful philosopher-scientist who has nevertheless shown an increasing tendency to the authoritarian qualities of a cult leader. It’s often difficult to follow science as a layperson, but this is one of the cases where it’s likely the easiest.

The question that interests me most in all this, though, is why Aurobindo and Wilber both felt the need to turn to intelligent design in the first place. Did Wilber’s graduate experiments on cow eyes really convince him, as an experimental hypothesis, that they couldn’t have been evolved by chance? Or was his a system like his mentor’s untenable if the universe was a product of random chance?

I’m not ruling out the former possibility, but I’m interested in the latter one. (Aurobindo, at least, did not himself do any experiments dissecting eyes!) A Darwinian biology seems hard to reconcile with an idealist view that spirit guides the workings of the material universe. It is probably no coincidence that Darwin published On the Origin of Species soon after the deaths of Hegel and Schelling, the last great German systematizers who tried to create a “philosophy of nature,” a philosophical understanding of the natural world that (like Aristotle’s) was not just metaphysics but physics. During their lifetimes, nature could still be viewed the way they viewed it, as the progressive self-unfolding of a self-aware world-spirit. Darwin stands roundly at odds with such a worldview. Although the Hegelian worldview involves the kind of development from simpler to complex systems that characterizes Darwinian evolution, there is a conscious teleology in this movement, a progressive intelligence at work, not the scattershot workings of random chance. Aurobindo and Wilber have both seen themselves as continuing Hegel’s project, and as they have tried to do so they have also placed themselves at odds with the confirmed experimental observations of biologists.

In a way the problem parallels the problem of suffering, where the world around us is too full of misery and evil to be the work of an omniscient and omnipotent God. When we look at the physical world, we find no active, intelligent or benevolent spirit underlying it, but careless, callous random chance. If we are to look for a spirit behind the world, perhaps it is more plausible to see what Śaṅkara saw: the world is an illusion, the spirit misperceiving itself, making a mistake. But then that view poses deep problems of its own. Evolution tempts me more to the account of the Buddhist suttas, where there’s nothing particularly good about the world and its suffering, except for the fact that we have a chance to get out of it.

New Atheists often don’t want to admit this point. When they accept common-sense views at odds with their exultation of science as the only true way of knowing, they do it by equivocating on their definition of “science.” One finds the point in a recent exchange on P.Z. Myers’s blog. Responding to Larry Moran, Myers attacks what he calls:

the bizarre claim that “No scientist that is also a decent human being subjects all her/his beliefs to scientific scrutiny.” I think otherwise. There is a naive notion implicit in that statement that scientific scrutiny is somehow different from critical, rational examination. I’d argue the other way: no decent human being should live an unexamined life.

“Critical, rational examination,” eh? If that’s all science is, then every theologian is a scientist par excellence. I don’t think that’s a claim the New Atheists want to be making. Rather, the “science” they are defending is a) completely empirical, and b) based on the controlled experimental testing of hypotheses. So John Pieret responds to Myers by saying:

Really? What tests did you do on yourself to see if you love your wife and children? Hormone testing, eegs, what? Thinking about things is not “science” per se. Science is empiric investigation. Nor is the question whether “love” can be scientifically investigated, the question is whether individual scientists do it before they decide who they love.

Myers’s response:

John, yes, we carried out a long period of empirical investigation. It’s called “dating”. Both my wife and I studied the problem carefully, and if I’d been a jerk or she’d tormented me cruelly, we’d probably have reached the rational decision that we shouldn’t marry.

I really don’t understand how people can fail to recognize that we do carry out critical examinations of others and ourself. Love doesn’t just pop into existence in the absence of knowledge or experience.

And as I predicted, you do have a naive view of what “scientific” means. It does not mean hormones and eegs. You don’t have to put on a lab coat to do it. It’s simple, rational, evidence-based thinking.

An excellent point by Chris Schoen skewers Myers’s attempted defence:

We’re all aware that the practice of science, while it perhaps has some blurry edges, generally relies not just on empirical observation, but also on the testing of hypotheses, and also to the related practices of replicating the results of such tests, and publishing such results for the scrutiny of other scientists. Eliding any number of these steps is a sure way to have your findings (or “findings”) mocked. And it is on these shoals that most “pseudo-sciences” founder. There is plenty of what a lawyer would call circumstantial evidence for things like ESP and homeopathy. What there is not, in support of these phenomena, is hypothesis testing, controlled experiment, and peer review.
…
No doubt the probability of denial was bound to increase in proportion to how personal the counterfactual is (your wife.) But it is remarkable how much a scrupulous scientist has left out of his definition. White lab coats aside, without hypothesis testing and publication and replication of results, Myer’s courtship is about as scientific in its method as UFOlogy. Probably less, given the number of publications devoted to the latter. Which is not to say, of course, that PZ’s love is not real, or that his knowledge of it is flawed.

Pieret and Schoen do a solid job of demonstrating that Myers’s love for his wife is not based on “science” – not, at least, on the kinds of criteria that scientists use to distinguish science from pseudoscience. In the further comments to Myers’s post, he and his defenders try to argue that Myers’s love was still better than “religion” because it was based on empirical evidence.

But this hardly satisfies. When one is dealing with individual issues in particular lives, the evidence can lead to conclusions that would be unscientific in any sense of science accepted by New Atheists. A grad-school colleague of mine, who was proclaimed a reincarnated lama in Tibet, told me that he as a child had been able to recite things he had no way of knowing without his being a lama. Based on the evidence of his life alone, rebirth was the best explanation. He had based this view on the empirical evidence of his life. I don’t imagine it would hold up under hypothesis testing in controlled conditions; but it was based on as much empirical evidence as Myers’s love for his wife.

Beyond this point, I don’t think it can be said too many times that empiricism is self-refuting. Can statements only be true if they can be empirically tested, even in the sense that Myers tested his love for his wife? Well, the statement “statements can only be true if they can be empirically tested” cannot be empirically tested. Therefore, if it is true, it is false. The appeal to empirical evidence won’t get you out of the hard work of assessing the logic of individual claims made by both “science” and “religion.”

Then, the HMS Beagle made its famous voyage to the Galàpagos Islands, where Darwin observed his famous finches. A huge variety of birds, each on different islands and looking dramatically different, each well suited to the conditions of its own island – but they all turned out biologically to be finches, closely related to each other and to the finches of distant South America. It seemed needlessly complex to suggest that God would create so many different birds in so many different places and yet make them all part of the same family. A more straightforward hypothesis was that the different finches had evolved from a common ancestor, by natural selection. God was no longer needed as a scientific hypothesis – and hasn’t been needed since.

In retrospect, the point that God was once a legitimate hypothesis seems obvious to me now. But when I encountered it, it came to me as something of a surprise, because I’m so used to living in a world where any attempt to find empirical evidence for God’s existence looks like a desperate grasping at straws. The worst of these is the “First Cause” version of the cosmological argument for God’s existence, that you need to have something setting the world in motion. Even if that argument works, it proves nothing like the existence of any God that has been ever worshipped. A mere First Cause is no more significant than any other cause. If God is a mere Divine Watchmaker who sets things in motion and then goes away and is no longer involved – as this hypothesis would suggest – then the universe with him is hardly different from the universe without him. This is not a God that matters.

Rather, nowadays, if you’re going to get rationally to anything like the traditional Abrahamic God, you need to keep science at arm’s length. This is one of the beauties of Anselm’s argument – it has nothing whatsoever to do with empirical evidence, it is 100% a priori, and therefore natural science simply can’t touch it. If it is wrong, its wrongness can and must be demonstrated without reference to natural science. The same seems to be true for ibn Rushd’s First Explanation cosmological argument when properly understood, though not for First Cause arguments in the usual sense. For here the question is not “what caused everything?” but “how can there be causation in the first place?” It is an explanation going much deeper. Unlike Anselm, it doesn’t necessarily get you to an omnipotent or omnibenevolent God; but it does seem to get you to something like the brahman of Śaṅkara’s or Rāmānuja’s Vedānta, a cosmic principle underlying everything, and such a principle does a lot to change the way we see the rest of the universe.

To me it’s been clear for a long time that any attempt to find God must go a priori, must not try to look in the empirical world. But looking back on Darwin’s story, it’s easier for me to realize that many people don’t see it that way. And that helps me understand contemporary views that have always struck me as a little curious. Not just the intelligent design movement, but the arch-materialistic atheists of contemporary analytic philosophy, like Paul and Patricia Churchland, who look at neuroscience and conclude that consciousness and free will don’t exist. They actually think that consciousness and free will are empirical hypotheses whose existence can be refuted with empirical evidence. Once upon a time, they, like God, might even have been exactly that.