Danger and Onion

Darwin's Dangerous Idea

As presented by Daniel Dennett, (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Simon and Schuster, 1995) Darwin's idea of natural selection is best understood as "a mindless, mechanical - algorithmic - process". Algorithmic meaning, I think, by way of neutral, immutable calculation. Dennett uses an example of such an algorithm the calculations that accompany a tennis tournament: the winner of match "a" meets the winter of match "b"; the winner of that match meets the winner of the match between the winners of match "c" and "d" until, after many reiterations of a rapidly shrinking pool of winners, there are only two winners left to play the final match for the championship. So natural selection, where the most successful members of a species reproduce more than the less successful, can be laid out in a similar fashion. The evolution of species across time is not really controversial, says Dennett, but natural selection proves to have implications beyond evolution. This is because it is a “crane”, and, as Dennett says, a particularly powerful crane; indeed, and this might be the issue, the only crane.

This brings us to Sky-hooks and Cranes. When one looks at the universe and life in the universe and consider how things came to be as they are, there are two general explanations. The first is the idea of Sky-hook, or purpose, or mind, or God. That is, life and the universe shows the unmistakable signs of being designed by an intelligent entity beyond the physical world and that intelligent entity is directing and possibly intervening in the world to affect its design. It was common, for many years prior to Darwin (and continuing on), for observers of the natural world to take the beauty and the wonder of the design evident in the world of plants and animals as proof of the necessity of the intelligent design of God. A pefectly reasonable conclusion that, I would argue, if properly understood, still has some force.

On the other hand, cranes are processes embedded in the physical world itself that affect change in the physical world. It is Dennett's contention, I think, that Darwin was the person who has most turned our attention more fully on the crane concept and away from the sky-hook concept (initially in biology, but more and more in other fields). Indeed, Dennett says that each challenge to natural selection as a self-sufficient crane ends up showing more clearly how natural selection can be shown to be the mechanism carrying out more and more of the work which eventually manifests itself as evolution in surprisingly detailed and elegant ways. Moreover, Dennett says that Darwin largely positioned himself in the middle of the evolutionary process (not worrying much about the origin of life, or the nature of human consciousness) but that natural selection has proved to act as an "universal acid" which has spread both 'down' towards explaining the origins of life, and 'up' towards explaining consciousness. Dennett says that cranes, particularly natural selection, are growing stronger as conceptual tools for explanation as science tests and expands the understanding of natural selection, and there is now no need to resort to sky-hooks. In other words, properly understood, the physical world itself can generate everything without need to a resort to the idea of outside design.

CS Lewis's (via Victor Reppert) Dangerous Idea

CS Lewis is associated with an idea, contrary to natural selection, and in support of God/Idealism, called the "argument from reason". The basic premise here, if I can boil it down, is that the physical world (sun, moon, mud, water, etc.) cannot be the source of the mental world. If the physical world creates ideas, if ideas can be reduced to merely states of the brain, then they aren't ideas at all. Victor Reppert (in the book C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument From Reason, IVP Academic, 2002) expresses it this way:

But can rational inference [human reasoning] itself be genuinely accounted for in terms of cranes? Lewis's contention was that it could not, that if you tried to account for the activity of reasoning as a byproduct of a fundamentally nonpurposive system [the neutral algorithm of natural selection], you end up describing something that cannot be genuinely called reasoning. If Darwin's dangerous idea is a true explanation of how Darwin got his dangerous idea, then the idea cannot possibly be the intellectual monument that Dennet supposes it to be. (p. 8)

In other words, if the crane of natural selection accounts for everything, then this mindless algorithm accounts for Darwin along with everything else, and so it was the pure physicality of his brain tissue that did the mental work, not Darwin himself as a self-aware individual person. Dennett goes on to expand this idea: if we can say that physicality cannot, without becoming self-contradicting, fully explain mental activity and human reasoning (and perhaps other things like abstract ideas, etc.), then it cannot force out, logically, the necessity for something else, being, most likely, theism (the belief in an interventionist God).

What Rick Thinks

There is something to the Lewis/Reppert argument, but I think it is not pointed in the right direction. The nature of mind/the ideal abstraction is something that needs to be maintained and not simply pushed aside. (In fairness, the scientific people aren't exactly saying that and much of the problem is that there is little area of contact between the two camps). The Lewis/Reppert approach is rather legalistic in the sense of being a narrow argument meant to show that, based on strict logic, their position cannot be ruled out. It is, therefore, a last-ditch defence of theism, which, in the final analysis, is only needed to support and sustain a conventional Christian faith. Being such, it is sterile. It is doomed in the longer run to be reduced to a smaller and smaller ambit. Indeed, it is a rather small a beleaguered group even now. Compare this to the fecund and growing scientific area of studies of the physical world, including the connection between the physical and mental worlds. Even if the hypothesis that are the foundations of such study prove to be wrong, or partly wrong, they reflect a wonderful creativity.

But, as I say, there is something to the Lewis/Reppert argument. The problem is that they propose it as something standing in opposition to the scientific world, which, I think, it is not.

The shape of God, to put it simply, is the shape of those things that cannot be explained. This includes, for example, abstract ideas like aesthetics. As I have said in another place, the shape of God is best understood as an onion. Unfortunately, the concept of God begins (thousands of years ago) in relative ignorance. As such, the onion was large and ungainly. As human understanding grows, the onion (the things we need to explain by reference to a supernatural entity or to abstractions) shrinks. But the wonderful irony is that as the onion shrinks it becomes more beautiful, it becomes more perfectly itself, more completely onionish! I don't think the onion will ever totally disappear. And I think that people of faith ought to take a good deal of consolation from that idea.

I predict that in 500 years that the divisions between music/art/science and the shape of God (religion) will be largely gone and that we people of this era will be looked upon as barbarians for thinking these things could ever be separate.

God As A Shape

Bishop John Spong is a Christian reformer. His sought for reforms are based on 12 points, but the first one seems the most interesting: "Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Shelby_Spong

Now, I'm not entirely sure what Bishop Spong means by Theism. According to Wikipedia:

Theism, in this specific sense, conceives of God as personal, present and active in the governance and organization of the world and the universe. The use of the word theism as indicating a particular doctrine of monotheism arose in the wake of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century to contrast with the then emerging deism that contended that God, though transcendent and supreme, did not intervene in the natural world and could be known rationally but not via revelation.

Rowan Williams is just retiring now (March 2012) as the Archbishop of Canterbury (that is, the Church of England Grand Poo-bah). He didn't like Bishop Spong's 12 points and in 1998 on this point about theism, he had this to say http://anglicanecumenicalsociety.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/bishop-spong-and-archbishop-williamss-response/ :

Classical theology maintains that God is indeed different from the universe. To say this is to suggest a radical difference between one agent and another in the world. God is not an object or agent over against the world; God is the eternal activity of unconstrained love, an activity that activates all that is around God is more intimate to the world than we can imagine, as the source of activity or energy itself; and God is more different than we can imagine, beyond category and kind and definition.

Thus God is never competing for space with agencies in the universe. When God acts, this does not mean that a hole is torn in the universe by an intervention from outside, but more that the immeasurably diverse relations between God’s act and created acts and processes may be more or less transparent to the presence of the unconstrained love that sustains them all.

Well, that is interesting. It is odd when people think very hard about all this stuff they never say anything that is completely wrong.

So lets start over then. Bishop Spong says, "we need a new way to think of God that isn't theistic". Theism centres around the idea that God is "... personal, present and active in the governance and organization of the world and the universe". Archbishop Rowan says, "Dude - you can't really know God -- MORE DIFFERENT THAN WE CAN IMAGINE -- but when God acts he is really full of love and he is not in contradiction with all the other actors/agencies in the universe but his love SUSTAINS THEM ALL and, therefore, we need to keep Theism."

I think that, despite all the silly old-man-in-a-beard-on-a-cloud baggage, God is a useful term. But why do we need God? We need to refer to God for the things we don't understand. It is clear, however, that what we don't understand changes over time. Therefore we should not be surprised to find that the shape of God changes over time. Bishop Spong, as I see it, is saying that it is time for a new shape of God to emerge. I agree. And even Archbishop Rowan's observation that God is "more different than we can imagine" can be taken as not really in opposition to this idea.

So when we reject Theism, we are rejecting "God's will". This is important. Because those people who do not believe that God is the shape of the divine unknown want to tell you what God's will is. Dress this way, eat this way, pray this way, and - most importantly - genuflect to religious doctrine and religious authority. If the point about God is to try and reach out towards an unknown and always changing shape, then you cannot kill other people or tell them what to do based on what God wants. That is why God is a best understood as a shape, not a little-man-with-a-beard-on-a-cloud.

And, of course, Archbishop's Rowan's elaborate and sophisticated rumination which is very interesting is, unfortunately, in the end just a screen for bringing the little-old-man-with-a-beard-on-a-cloud back into the middle of religion. I, for one, feel that this is just not acceptable.

The shape of God is best understood as an onion. The shape of God will shrink (as it has shrunk) as time goes by, but it is still an onion no matter how small it gets. Indeed, it gets more onionish -- and more beautiful -- as the layers are removed! So don't despair.


This, I think, is what Spong is about. The God shape is really only needed to explain the origin of the universe and the nature of life. Science, art, music, etc., are all tools to help peel back the onion; indeed, as the onion gets smaller, the differences between God and all these other things start to disappear. Which is good.

Those people who wish to sustain their own authority by relying on God's will (the scowling Islamic fundamentalists, the neurotically bobbing Jewish people praying to a wall, the silly Christian bishops in their funny hats, and on and on) see this as a threat to their hierarchical power, their fortunes, their dominance in God's name. They are right!