Rethinking The 'Secular Perspective' On Biology

Going Beyond The Monopoly Of Materialism

ABSTRACT

Our ideas about the future of life are undoubtedly linked with our beliefs about its past. The way we explain the origin of life will have an impact on what we regard as right or wrong about it, and thus, bioethics.

As for the origin of life, Judaism, Christianity and Islam accept and assert a theistic view — that life is created by God. Modern science, on the other, has adopted the materialistic view that regards life as a product of the blind forces of nature. The clash between the two views has been a major bone of contention in the past two centuries. Hence comes the "science vs. religion" dichotomy.

But in the recent decades, unexpected scientific discoveries about the origin of the universe and life have led some scientists to reconsider the materialist paradigm and its core theories such as neo-Darwinian evolution. The overwhelming evidence for design in nature suggests that the a secular perspective on biology may well end up accepting the theistic view; that life is indeed intended and designed by an intelligent Being.

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It is truly a wise decision for The Islamic Organization for Medical Sciences to bring together Muslim, Christian, Jewish and secular perspectives for this remarkable symposium. The wisdom is, of course, based on the obvious: We need to develop a common ethical standard, at least commonly accepted acceptables and unacceptables in the area of bioethics and you can build these only through dialogue. Yet I think through dialogue we can achieve something even further, even more fundamental: The reconciliation of the Muslim, Christian, Jewish and secular perspectives themselves.

Actually the first three are already quite "synoptic": they are based on the common premise of theism — the idea that there is a God who created the universe and all living beings, including, of course, we humans. Human life is regarded as the handiwork of the Almighty God, and, consequently, it has a purpose and every human being has divinely ordained rights. When one accepts a Creator of life, he also would accept it is only the Creator which has the right to take it back.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam accept and assert this theistic view of life, and although they might have differences in details, their basic doctrine converges on it.

It is the secular perspective which might differ and has done so throughout the ages. Unlike the aforementioned theistic religions, the secular perspective is not based on any religious text, and therefore it does not have to take theism and its creation account as its premises. The tools of the secular perspective is, not the Bible or the Koran, but objective human knowledge and experience. In the modern world, this basically means modern science.

However, this does not mean that the secular perspective is destined to disagree, let alone clash, with the theistic perspective. Science is the study of the natural world and this is a value-free and premise-free enterprise. Of course science has some basic premises, such as that there is a thing called natural world and one can study it, but besides from that, science is neither theistic nor atheistic.

Or is it?...

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Many people would agree on the statement that science should be neither theistic nor atheistic, but there are others who disagree. They actually think that science is inherently atheistic, and, moreover, that it is a fatal weapon against theistic beliefs. And some of them are quite frank about this. One such case is the famous Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg from the University of Texas. In accepting an award from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Weinberg said, "I personally feel that the teaching of modern science is corrosive of religious belief, and I'm all for that! One of the things that in fact has driven me in my life, is the feeling that this is one of the great social functions of science — to free people from superstition." When Weinberg's idea of science triumphs, then "this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams . . . will come to an end, [and] we'll see no more of them. I hope that this is something to which science can contribute and if it is, then I think it may be the most important contribution that we can make."

One can find many quotations like this from prominent figures in modern science such as Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett. The common attitude among these scientists is to define theism as superstition and to argue that it is refuted by science.

However, as I mentioned before, science has no inherent hostility to theism. Moreover, it was actually theism that fostered modern science. Much of the forerunners and makers of Western and Eastern sciences were Muslim, Christian or Jewish believers who regarded nature as God's handiwork.

This theistic framework of modern science was challenged in the 19th century, when theories of Darwin, Spencer, Marx, Engels or Freud attempted to explain the universe, the natural world and human nature as the product of purely random and purposeless material forces. Such theories, at least for a time, prevailed over the pre-existing theistic explanations and beliefs. Hence came Friedrich Nietzsche's famous assertion, "God is dead."

The gist of the "God is dead" idea was the equation of science with materialism. The latter is a philosophy which argues that the material world is all there is and there is simply nothing beyond. Also known as naturalism, materialism envisions the universe as a closed system of material causes and effects and leaves no room for an immaterial cause, mind or purpose that might influence the universe.

Since the 19th century many scientist take materialism as granted and see it anonymous with science itself. The very widely accepted definition of science implies that: It is defined as the quest for finding natural causes for all natural phenomena.

But there is problem with this definition: It is based on an unproven premise; that the whole natural world is the product of purely natural causes. Perhaps the natural is really the product of purely natural causes; but perhaps it is not. Science should not make an a priori decision and, instead, should try to find out the truth.

Scientific materialists like Steven Weinberg — who is looking forward to see the end of all religions — will tell us that science has already found the truth by explaining all natural phenomena by natural causes. However, in the recent decades, modern science has revealed two unexpected discoveries that give good reasons to challenge Dr Weinberg and all other scientific materialists.

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One of those discoveries is the Big Bang cosmology.

Before the Big Bang, the common view about the universe was that it was eternal and static. This, of course, was compatible with materialism that denied any beginning, in other words, a creation of the universe.

It was Georges LeMaitre (1894-1966) who discovered that creation. A monsignor in the Catholic Church, he studied physics, and in 1927, proposed that the universe is expanding. This thesis, which was confirmed by later discoveries, meant that the universe was smaller back in time and that at the very distant past, it was just a single point, a primordial atom that had contained all the matter in the universe.

It wasn't hard for scientists to realize that this primordial atom, also called singularity, is a theoretical construct and that in fact matter and time as we know them came into existence from nihility with the Big Bang, some 17 to 15 billion years ago.

It appears that Big Bang cosmology is driving science to theological conclusions. In the oft-quoted words of astronomer Robert Jastrow, the mysterious abruptness of the universe’s beginning means, “science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

Moreover the “bang” was unimaginably, ingeniously fine-tuned, down to the smallest detail. Physicists have begun to recognize this fact since the 1970’s. They noted that the physical, chemical and biological laws of the universe, basic forces such as gravity and electro-magnetism, the structure of atoms and elements are all exactly as they have to be for human life. This is called the “anthropic principle”, that is, every aspect of the universe is designed with a view to human life.

Of course this again points to an immaterial cause beyond the universe. As astronomer Fred Hoyle famously stated, “a commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”

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While teleology — the view that there is a purpose and design in nature — has returned back to physics, it is on its way in biology, too.

In the recent decades, modern science has demonstrated that living beings are imbued with ingenious architecture, databases, and operating systems that construct, repair, and replicate themselves. This amazing design of the biological world challenges the Darwinian theory of evolution, which argues that life is the product of the blind forces of nature such as natural selection and random mutations. The challenge is raised by the new scientific theory called Intelligent Design, which is creating a lot controversy right now in the US.

In a nutshell, Intelligent Design is the theory that argues life on Earth is the product of natural laws, chance and intelligence. Darwinism, on the other hand, accepts only the first two causes, because, according to materialist philosophy, intelligence does not exist unless it evolves over time from mindless matter.

Therefore Intelligent Design and Darwinism are mutually exclusive theories. They both try to explain the origin of biological designs, but in different ways. Actually Darwinians also acknowledge that there is design in nature, but they argue that this is only apparent design. Richard Dawkins began The Blind Watchmaker, his influential restatement of Darwinism, with the observation that "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." Dawkins does not consider the possibility that living organisms give that appearance because they actually were designed, because he thinks that the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection is enough to design all life forms on Earth.

But is natural selection really that powerful? The proponents of Intelligent Design don't think so and they base their argument on Darwin's own criterion for falsification. "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications," said Darwin, "my theory would break down." ID theorists, such as biochemist Michael J. Behe, apply this criterion to complex biochemical systems such as the bacterial flagellum or blood clotting and explain that they could not have been "formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications" — because they don't function at all unless they are complete. This means that they are "irreducibly complex" and thus they cannot be explained by natural selection or any other known natural mechanism.

Since there are no known natural mechanisms to explain the origin of biological complexity, we are justified to infer that they give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose because they were designed for a purpose. This is the basic tenet of the Intelligent Design theory and today it is pushing for a major paradigm shift in modern biology.

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The re-discovery of design and thus purpose in the natural world has immense consequences. The most profound one is the unraveling of scientific materialism and atheism.

An interesting indication of this phenomenon is the fact that the most famous atheist in the academic world over the last half-century, Professor Antony Flew of England's University of Reading, now accepts the likelihood that a Deity brought the universe into existence. Flew's paper, "Theology and Falsification," which grew out of a 1950 presentation to the Socratic Club, had set the agenda for modern atheism for decades. Now, in a remarkable evolution, Flew accepts the existence of a God who "possesses most of the usual defining characteristics of omnipotence, omniscience, immateriality." His newfound "theism" is the product not of a personal conversion, but of reasoned analysis of the latest scientific data.

"What I think the DNA material has done is show that intelligence must have been involved" in the origination of life, he states. "The enormous complexity by which the results were achieved looks to me like the work of intelligence."

This is a manifestation of what I meant in the beginning of this paper when I said that the secular perspective in biology could indeed agree with the theistic perspective. One does not necessarily need to start with religious texts to see that life is intended and designed. One just has to start with a dogmatic faith in materialist philosophy for not being able to see that.

Once such dogmatisms are left behind and we all agree on following the evidence wherever it leads, we can see that the "secular perspective" on biology ends up reaffirming the theistic perspective; that there is really a Creator who made the universe and the living beings.

And from that premise, which we can define as a self-evident truth, we can start building a common view of human nature and destiny.