The Blind Biologist and the Reality of Purpose

By Annie Crawford

“Teleology is like a mistress to the biologist;

he dare not be seen with her in public

but cannot live without her.”

~ J. B. S. Haldane

More and more theistic evolutionists argue that Darwinism and Christianity are compatible. They propose that the transmutation of species through natural selection acting on random variation could be the secondary cause through which God, as the primary cause, created the world to develop. There are many important ways to approach this issue but here I will focus on the incompatibility of the meaning inherent in the two worldviews. Christianity is built on the affirmation of teleology, or the ontological reality of purpose, while Darwinism is built on its denial. Christianity insists that the God-created world is inherently purposeful and meaningful while Darwinism takes as its methodological principle that it is not.     

Richard Dawkins famously described biology as “the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”[1] Most modern biologists admit that life appears intricately designed yet claim that this appearance of purpose and intentionality is ultimately an illusion.[2] Neo-Darwinists argue that the theory of natural selection acting on random mutations has adequately explained the appearance of design without reference to any supernatural designer or metaphysical teleology. While we never directly observe things moving from a state of higher entropy to lower entropy without the intentional work of living organisms, Dawkins claims that Darwin’s great achievement was to discover the way in which “that very counterintuitive thing” did indeed happen. Dawkins contends that the mechanism of natural selection creates order from chaos and “shatters the illusion of design.”[3] Life may seem intelligently designed, but it isn’t really.

Metaphors Shape Perception

This Neo-Darwinian denial of teleology has radically transformed the dominant metaphors that shape our understanding of the world. By denying the ontological reality of design at even the biological level, modern science has fundamentally changed the meaning of nature. While the psalmist perceived a world that declared the glory of God, modern biologists perceive only aimless mechanisms producing randomly derived adaptations. This profound difference in imaginative framework matters; it changes the very lenses through which we look at the world. It shapes what we will see and what we won’t see. The Darwinian lens is reductive, always deconstructing life to its material parts while the psalmist’s view is constructive, always seeing divine purpose manifest in how parts fit together to create meaningful wholes. The Darwinian imagination breaks down; the biblical imagination builds up. Darwin himself confessed later in life that, although he began his study of biology as a theist, and he could “well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body, … now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind.”[4] Darwin formulated a theory of life that trains the imagination in blindness, to see design but not perceive it.

While the doctrinal difficulties related to evolutionary theory have been well-addressed by many, little attention has been paid to the way in which Darwinism shapes our cultural imagination and shifts the very meaning of the words we use. Owen Barfield argued that “of all devices for dragooning the human spirit, the least clumsy is to procure its abortion in the womb of language.”[5] The way we interpret our empirical observations of nature will depend upon the way we imagine the world, and the way we imagine the world will depend upon the metaphors that give meaning to our words.

The Inescapable Language of Purpose

Because reality is made by a purposeful God and is therefore fundamentally teleological, the Darwinian imagination does not provide an accurate analog for understanding the cosmos. Darwinian theory lacks the metaphorical and linguistic resources necessary to fully explain the nature of life. Consequently, while outwardly denying teleological causality, Darwinian biologists must still default to the language of teleology, to metaphors that imply purpose and design in order to define function, explain physiological processes, and describe behavior. They can’t describe life without it. Even on the cellular and molecular level, biologists rely liberally on the services of their intentional handmaiden, describing “insights into the ‘thought’ processes of a cell” and the “perceptual components of a cell” which are “making decisions about the appropriate use of resources.”[6] Thus it is not only in the science lab but also “in the womb of language” that we can perceive the falsehood of the Neo-Darwinian argument and recover the true nature of nature.

If biologists find it impossible to ignore, eliminate, or redefine teleology, it is reasonable to conclude this is because life is teleological. Life appears purposefully designed because it is purposefully designed. If a creature looks like a dog, behaves like a dog, and was born from a dog, it is only sensible and rational to conclude that is because the creature is a dog. Likewise, if an organism looks purposeful, behaves purposefully, and reproduces other purposeful organisms, it is only sensible and rational to conclude that the organism is in truth purposeful. Biologists compromise the integrity of their science when they deny the meaning of the very language on which their discipline depends.

Life All the Way Down

The endeavor to redefine or remove teleology from the phenomenon of life is an attempt to deny what an organism essentially is: an animated, integrated being full of will and intention and purpose. Stephen Talbott of The New Atlantis contends that “the misrepresentation of this organic coherence in favor of supposed controlling mechanisms is not an innocent inattention to language; it is a fundamental misrepresentation of reality at the central point where we are challenged to understand the character of living things.”[7] Whether it is the DNA that “regulates” or “controls” the functions of the cell or whether epigenetic factors “inform” and “regulate” the DNA, what all these cellular descriptions imply is not merely the “appearance” but the reality of design and purpose and intent. Something beyond mere physical mechanisms, something metaphysical, is at work at every level in the origin, development, and functioning of living organisms. This “something” is what differentiates a living organism from a dead one. Both a living and a dead organism have the same component parts, but the dead organism is the one fully yielded to the inanimate processes of physics and chemistry, not the living one.[8] What makes a creature alive is its teleological process: a material form animated by the striving of a unique being to become and remain itself.

Biology resists transformation into a “hard” law-based mechanistic science because it studies the realm of life wherein the laws of physics and chemistry mingle with the psychic realities of will and mind. It is the purposeful desires of the organism as a whole that guide and direct its interaction with the material world of efficient causality. Where living beings exist, no physical law can ever adequately predict and account for their real ability to exercise willful activity in the world. We observe physics and chemistry together with cognitive intention in living organisms. To deny the fundamental reality of the latter is an a priori philosophical assumption that must be brought to and imposed on the study of biology; it cannot be based upon empirical observation of life, for living organisms clearly demonstrate intentionality and purpose.

The more our biological understanding grows, the more we are confronted with the teleological nature of life. Modern biologists have peeled back the skin of life, expecting to find robotic, mechanistic realities at work beneath the living exterior. However, as Talbott explains, biologists have “plunged headlong toward the micro and molecular in their drive to reduce the living to the inanimate” only to “find unapologetic life staring back at them from every chromatogram, every electron micrograph, every gene expression profile. Things do not become simpler, less organic, less animate.”[9] It is “life all the way down”[10] to the molecular level where biologists still perceive the fluid, dynamic, intentional, responsive activity of a cognitive being animated by its purposeful striving to become and be its unique self.

The assumptions we make about the world will shape the way we imagine the world. The Darwinian imagination assumes the world is at its root devoid of purpose while the Christian imagination believes that “Earth’s crammed with heaven, / And every common bush afire with God.” Moreover, Darwinism is not only incompatible with the Christian view of a purpose-filled world designed to inspire us to see and wonder at the Hand of God, it is incompatible with biology itself. To avoid becoming blind biologists who insist on looking for randomness when purpose is staring at us in every aspect of life, we must look for a new paradigm to structure our unifying biological theory.

Notes

[1] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015), 4.

[2] By modern I do not mean biologists currently doing research but rather those who adhere to the modern paradigm.

[3] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 143.

[4] Charles Darwin, “Autobiography” in The Portable Atheist, ed. Christopher Hitchens (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2007), 95-96.

[5] Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 23.

[6] Daniel R. Hyduke and Bernhard Ø. Palsson, “Towards Genome-Scale Signalling-Network Reconstructions,” Nature Reviews Genetics 11, no. 4 (April 2010): 297-307.

[7] Stephen L. Talbott, “The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings,” The New Atlantis, number 29, fall 2010, 29.

[8] Considering the difference between a living dog and a dead one, Talbott writes, “Virtually the same collection of molecules exists in the canine cells during the moments immediately before and after death. But after the fateful transition no one will any longer think of genes as being regulated, nor will anyone refer to normal or proper chromosome functioning. No molecules will be said to guide other molecules to specific targets, and no molecules will be carrying signals, which is just as well because there will be no structures recognizing signals. Code, information, and communication, in their biological sense, will have disappeared from the scientist’s vocabulary.” “The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings,” 29, emphasis in the original.

[9] Stephen L. Talbott, “Getting Over the Code Delusion,” The New Atlantis, number 28, summer 2010, 24.

[10] J. S. Turner, Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain it (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 181.

The above is an adapted excerpt from “Metaphor and Meaning in the Teleological Language of Biology.” Blyth Institute. Issue 2:2. Active Information: Mathematics and Biology. August 2020.

— Annie Crawford is a Christian apologist and classical educator holding a Masters of Arts in Cultural Apologetics from Houston Baptist University. She writes regularly for An Unexpected Journal and Classical Academic Press and is co-founder of The Society for Women of Letters where she serves as Senior Fellow.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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