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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Friedrich Schelling

Wilber and Aurobindo on intelligent design

30 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Christianity, Deity, Early and Theravāda, German Tradition, Metaphysics, Modern Hinduism, Natural Science, Vedānta

≈ 31 Comments

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Aurobindo Ghose, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Schelling, G.W.F. Hegel, intelligent design, John Paul II, Ken Wilber, Michael Behe, Pali suttas, SACP, Śaṅkara, T.R. (Thill) Raghunath, theodicy

T.R. Raghunath, a professor in Nevada, gave an interesting talk at the SACP conference explaining Aurobindo Ghose‘s theory of the development of consciousness. There were a number of intriguing points in Raghunath’s talk, but the one that jumped out at me was a point about evolution. Aurobindo, according to Raghunath, accepts “the fact of evolution,” but not “Darwin’s explanation” of evolution. It is a developmental process that has the goal of growth, unfolding. Biological evolution is itself a developmental process of the spirit, in a way that diverges from a Darwinian materialist explanation.

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. Continue reading →

Following science as a layperson

13 Sunday Dec 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Certainty and Doubt, Epistemology, Faith, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Natural Science, Philosophy of Science, Politics, Social Science, South Asia

≈ 6 Comments

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Aristotle, Edward O. Wilson, Friedrich Schelling, G.W.F. Hegel, George Monbiot, John Doris, Ken Wilber, natural environment, Randall Collins, René Descartes, Stephen Jay Gould

Perhaps the trickiest thing about trying to be a philosopher today is the explosion of information in natural science: we are in the era of “rapid-discovery science,” as Randall Collins calls it in The Sociology of Philosophies. Aristotle could write not merely a Metaphysics but a Physics, and his wide range of general knowledge was enough to make him one of the experts on the subject. Even as recently as the 19th century, Schelling and Hegel could have a decent shot at writing “philosophies of nature,” in which they tried to think philosophically through the whole scope of the way the natural world works. But today, not even a professor of natural science can know all the science that’s out there, even in relatively general terms. To some extent, we need to rely on the authority of experts we trust to know their fields well – what Indian philosophers called the śabdapramāṇa, the source of knowledge beyond inference and personal experience. And even if we somehow could know all the science for a moment, we’d lose it almost instantly as the science changes. Continue reading →

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