You can read the first part of the article here.
At first glance, mere evolutionism—that is, the assertion that a kind of unfolding is possible in principle within the material world (as the Latin term evolvere would imply)—does not seem to be a principle in irreconcilable conflict with the essence of spirituality. In fact, conservative thought has always included the idea of unfolding, or ‘evolution’ in its original sense.[1]
Conservative Unfolding and Edmund Burke’s ‘Evolutionism’
Conservatives—who, with few exceptions, have always defended a spiritually grounded worldview, often against atheist–materialist adversaries—do not view history as an absolute and exclusive decline. When a culture is in a phase of unfolding rather than decay, they too think in terms of evolution. Naturally, the evolution they propose has little to do with materialism, nor does it contain the possibility of progress open to infinity. The latter is an idea that, on the one hand, is not confirmed by any empirical experience (making it unacceptable from a practical standpoint), and on the other hand, the teleology of infinite progress is fundamentally contrary to conservative scepticism.
‘Conservative evolutionism’ is best linked to the cyclical unfolding process of civilizations. This position was emphasized in its most sophisticated form by the classic of Anglo–Saxon conservatism, Edmund Burke. (Some call Burke the ‘founder’ of conservatism, significantly narrowing the concept, as he emerged after not insignificant antecedents and wrote one of the most influential critiques of the French Revolution.)
The evolution posited by Burke is actually attributable to the ‘accidental’ interplay of favourable circumstances—similar to when a plant seed falls in a place where all conditions are present for it to grow into a mighty tree. However, the internal form of the tree is far from ‘accidental’. It is a latent potential that merely awaits the proper occasion to manifest itself.
The concept of ‘chance’ is uninterpretable in a consistent, metaphysically grounded worldview. If we posit God, the ‘total’ concept of chance is excluded; what we call chance is merely the limited comprehension of the human mind regarding the infinitely complex interplay of causes and effects. The divine ‘will’—like other divine attributes—cannot be interpreted on the model of human will. St Augustine illuminates this regarding divine ‘anger’ and ‘forgiveness’: ‘The change is in the eye, not the light’ (De Trinitate 5,16). God does not intervene in the events of history in an anthropomorphic manner, nor ‘after the fact’, but is present in them from eternity.
In the Burkean sense, this means that historical or environmental ‘accidents’ are merely the secondary causes through which a primary, latent wisdom manifests itself. While the falling of a seed into a particular soil may appear fortuitous to the observer, the biological unfolding that follows is governed by a pre-existing internal form. For Burke, ‘chance’ is the servant of a natural order that is far from random; it is the occasion for the actualization of a transcendent potential.[2]
There is an unbridgeable chasm between Burke’s organic image of development and Darwinism: the question of final causality (teleology). The cornerstone of conservative and classical metaphysical thought is the assumption of order and purpose (telos). Since Aristotle, we have known that things in nature have a purpose: the purpose of the acorn is to become an oak. Darwinism, by contrast, is the philosophy of purposelessness. According to it, the eye did not come into being to see; rather, it evolved this way through random mutations which happened to prove advantageous. This mode of thinking necessarily leads to nihilism: if there is no objective goal in nature, merely the blind mechanism of survival, then human life has no higher, objective meaning either.
Burke’s ‘evolutionism’, however, was closely linked to his conservatism: he spoke fundamentally of the continuity of things. He argued that although the facts constituting our world are constantly modified by circumstances, their essence—and this is the crucial difference—remains the same. The England of the 18th century differed in many respects from that of the 13th, yet in the fundamental continuity of ancient institutions, we can still say we are living in the same state. The aristocracy preserved its power (even if exercised in a somewhat altered form), and the monarchy connected the past with the future. In this continuity, the generations of the dead are also mysteriously present.
‘For Burke, “chance” is the servant of a natural order that is far from random; it is the occasion for the actualization of a transcendent potential’
The evolutionism marked by Darwin’s name asserts no such continuity whatsoever. It does not seek the expression of a spiritual, irreducible common essence behind the ‘changed forms’. Darwinian evolutionism—and especially its modern, ‘progressive’ variants—starts from the denial of essence,[3] thereby aligning itself with nominalist thinking.[4]
This biological ‘liquefaction’, however, points far beyond the boundaries of natural science. If in biology there are no permanent species, no types, merely an infinite series of transitional states, then this logic is destructive when projected onto society as well.[5]
Anyone who examines more deeply what the Darwinian hypothesis entails must soon realize: the theory explicitly reinforces materialist logic. Its most important tenet—the reason its defenders cling to it so tenaciously—is not that ‘species change in time’ (this in itself would not be particularly interesting), but that life itself could have come into existence from the inanimate, and ‘spontaneously’ at that. The ‘spontaneous’ transformation of species into one another (that is, forced exclusively by material factors) implies the repetition of this fundamental thesis.
According to this, ‘the higher originates from the lower’. However, this claim is difficult to justify both logically and empirically. Experience shows that an effect can never contain more or be greater than the cause that produced it. The order, form, and beauty in a painting originate from the idea in the painter’s mind—that is, from a reality of a higher order, transcendent relative to the painting. It would be contrary to both common sense and everyday empiricism to claim that paint splatters splashed randomly upon one another (the lower, chaotic state) could create a masterpiece, a state ordered to a higher degree.
Such a thing never actually happens. If it were to happen, we would have every right to call it a ‘miracle’, since we could not offer a rational explanation based on the known laws of the universe in the scientific sense.
The Trap of ‘Infinite Time’ and the Miller–Urey Experiment
The most important counter-argument of materialist evolutionists in this regard is (‘quasi’) infinite time. As George Wald (Nobel Prize-winning biologist) wrote in the August 1954 issue of Scientific American:
‘Time is in fact the hero of the plot…Given so much time, the “impossible” becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles.’[6]
They assume that what does not occur in a short time (for example, during a human life or a cycle of civilization) may yet come into being in an extraordinarily extended time cycle. This hypothesis, however, bleeds from several wounds.
On the one hand, it violates the strict criteria of positivist-scientific empiricism, as we cannot verify it; we only know its alleged consequences. On the other hand, the chance lies among the most improbable possibilities. Even if we assume that such a relatively stable state could arise once in the context of infinite time, its mathematical probability is almost equal to zero—infinitely smaller than if we reckon with a transcendent creating reality (even if we cannot explain that scientifically). This is an ‘immeasurably small’ chance of reality, which the word ‘improbable’ no longer even expresses. Moreover, we have not yet accounted for factors making further development impossible, merely the emergence of ‘spontaneous stability’. The chance that a stable state unfolding from chaos is capable of further stabilizing, or indeed developing itself, is much smaller still. This ‘immeasurably small’ chance can be expressed in the language of science with concrete numbers, and the results are staggering.
Minds no less than Sir Fred Hoyle, the world-renowned British astronomer and mathematician, have addressed this problem. Hoyle—who was originally an atheist and a proponent of the ‘Panspermia’ theory—calculated the probability of the enzymes necessary for life assembling randomly. For a single simple enzyme to form, amino acids must link in a precise order. Since life requires about 2,000 such complex enzymes, Hoyle calculated that the chance of these assembling through random processes is 1 in 1040,000. To sense the magnitude of this number: the number of all atoms in the visible universe is merely 1080.
Hoyle’s conclusion was devastating for the materialist theory of chance:
‘The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.’[7]
In the field of modern biochemistry, molecular biologist Douglas Axe (director of the Biologic Institute) conducted precise examinations of the ‘combinatorial space’ of proteins. He investigated the chance of a random linkage of amino acids resulting in a single functional (working) protein. His result: 1 in 1077.[8] This number applies only to a single functional protein, not a living organism. This alone borders on the ‘impossible’ relative to the number of atoms. This means that ‘functional’ sequences are so rare in the sea of possible faulty combinations that random mutations (even over billions of years) have practically zero chance of stumbling upon one, let alone an entire organism.
Mathematician and philosopher William Dembski approached the question not from biology, but from information theory. He calculated the Universe’s ‘capacity’ for random attempts. His question was: What is the maximum number of events that could have physically happened since the Big Bang? The Universal Probability Bound is 1 in 10150. According to Dembski, this is the limit of physical impossibility. Since the product of the number of particles in the Universe (1080) and the time elapsed is smaller than this, anything rarer than this can never happen by chance.[9]
Of course, if we do not wish to consider mathematics or the currently empirically observable laws of the universe at all, then it is possible—if we allow that ‘anything’ is possible—but with this, we wander far from the field of science and openly step into the territory of ‘science fiction’ (or rather, fantasy).[10]
Materialists often flee to the argument of cumulative selection—which is none other than Richard Dawkins’s ‘Blind Watchmaker’—saying: evolution achieves complexity not in a single leap, but in ‘small steps’. However, this argument bypasses the essence: selection can only work if a self-replicating, functioning system already exists. The engine of biological evolution cannot explain the origin of the engine itself.
Closely related to this is the so-called Miller-Urey experiment (1953), during which materialists demonstrated precisely the opposite of what they wished to prove.
Scientists working in the laboratory ‘showed’ that by simulating the conditions of the primordial Earth, organic molecules, such as amino acids, could form ‘spontaneously’ from simple inorganic molecules (eg, water, methane, ammonia, hydrogen). Although they emphasized that they did not ‘create’ life, they claimed that it was proven that the building blocks of life can be created by material factors.
In reality, the experiment showed exactly the opposite. The idea of the simulation was born in the minds of conscious, thinking beings (humans), and they created the necessary conditions for it as well. This is exactly the same case as the example of the painter and the painting. In this sense, the scientists are external, transcendent agents relative to the closed system they created in the laboratory. They are not part of the chemical processes of the experiment in the sense that a hydrogen atom is; rather, their consciousness and design capability lie outside the physical system of the test tube.
Today, however, the problem is no longer just chemical but also informational in nature, which spells the ultimate end for materialism. According to the latest scientific theories, life is not merely matter (amino acid or protein), but information. According to our everyday experience and the laws of informatics, information (be it the text of a book, a musical score, or a computer program) never arises from the random movement of matter. Ink and paper (matter) carry the information but do not create it; that is, the DNA code always presupposes a coding mind, an intelligent source. Even the simplest software requires a programmer, yet materialists still claim that the universe’s most complex ‘software’, the genetic code, wrote itself? What is it that would ‘force’ the code to do so, if not the Nagel-ian desire: ‘I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that’?
If a micro-experiment requires a higher-order, conscious entity (the scientist) to create certain conditions and initiate reactions at the lower, material level, then the logical question arises: does the ‘macro-experiment’ of a much larger scale (the universe, life, consciousness as a whole) not require a similarly transcendent element? Is there a need for a higher intelligence or at least ‘cosmic consciousness’ for the reactions to start at all?
A transcendent, non-material consciousness, of course, cannot be examined, measured, or manipulated in a laboratory. However, the fact that something falls outside the scope of the scientific method does not at all mean that it does not exist. Moreover, if we examine the picture by involving other factors, every relevant argument points towards the fact that positing such a consciousness is not only possible but logically necessary. Its existence is not forced by empiricism, as we do not see it directly, physically—because we cannot see it—but by philosophical logic transcending sensory empiricism. Of course, if we absolutize sensory cognition, this is ‘no argument’, but what kind of philosophical or logical arguments lead us to believe only in the cognition of the senses—which is extremely uncertain anyway?[11]
The Failure of Reductionism
The method of Darwinists to trace the ‘complex’ back to the ‘simple’ fails upon unbiased examination. No empirically verifiable fact supports, for example, that human art stands in any genetic connection with the tool use of chimpanzees.[12]
Here, it is worth recalling the important conceptual distinctions of Henri Bergson and Johan Huizinga. The fact that a living being is capable of using or even making tools elevates it at most to the category of Homo faber, which is the level of technical intelligence, and which can indeed be found in traces in the animal kingdom.[13] But this is not identical with Homo sapiens, and certainly not with Homo ludens.
A chimpanzee may use a stick to fish out ants (function, necessity, survival), but it will never decorate that stick or dance with it within the framework of a ritual when it has no biological need to do so. The essence of man is precisely that he is ludens: capable of play, of creation without utility, of symbolic action. Darwinism attempts to derive the faber (technical dexterity) but stands helpless before the ludens, since, from the perspective of evolutionary selection, art, ritual, and play are ‘energy waste’, and thus should have been selected out in principle. The foundation of human culture is precisely this ‘superfluous’ surplus.
The difference is not quantitative but qualitative. An unbridgeable chasm yawns between the tool use of apes and the cave paintings of Lascaux, just as between creativity and instinct. The former stems from a higher order of freedom; the latter is the result of a determinism that only allows for the traversing of certain repetitive paths.[14] We experience this determinism everywhere in the animal kingdom, and there is no empirical experience that it can be broken ‘from the bottom up’. No predator becomes a herbivore as a result of any learning process.
The statement, therefore, that man is ‘a highly developed animal’ is a purely ideological preconception. It could just as well be stated that the ‘animal is a lowly developed (or restricted) human.’ For some mysterious reason, however, modern science is loath to acknowledge this, and refuses to relegate animals to the ‘human world’—perhaps because the ‘superstition of progress’ forbids it. Yet, the premise is entirely logical: why must this process always be approached from the perspective of the ‘lower level’? Why is linear time treated as an absolute determining factor, when—according to the theory of relativity proposed by the very same science—time and space are merely contingent dimensions, rather than autonomous or absolute realities?
‘The statement…that man is “a highly developed animal” is a purely ideological preconception’
If space-time is a unified continuum, then the appearance of species in time is merely a sequence of manifestation, not a process of material causation where the earlier ‘creates’ the later. Just as the chapters of a book exist simultaneously in the mind of the author, although the reader experiences them linearly, the levels of being exist simultaneously in the Logos, even if they appear successively in the four-dimensional world.
Subjectivity and Objectivity as a Metaphysical Fact
The higher degree of freedom present in man is a consequence of what belongs not to the territory of empirical science, but to that of metaphysical principles. We cannot approach the question without clarifying the nature of subjectivity.
The mere existence of subjectivity is inexplicable from nature, precisely due to the fact that it is always the subject who ‘sees’ nature. Thus, the subject possesses a supernatural rank ab ovo. That which experiences the world cannot be derived from the world.
This philosophical conclusion is the metaphysical equivalent of the central teaching of Christian anthropology, the Imago Dei (Image of God). The human spirit, with its capacity for self-reflection and creation, is the image of that supreme (and ultimate) Subject who is the ground of all being and thus the source of every individual subject. Man’s ‘supernatural rank’, therefore, cannot be an evolutionary accident, but is the seal of his origin and mission.
This difference was brilliantly captured by one of the most influential theoretical biologists of the 20th century, Jakob von Uexküll. According to his distinction, the animal is always enclosed in its own environment, which he called Umwelt. The Umwelt is not the real world, but a bubble filtered by sense organs and instincts: for the tick, the world consists only of heat and butyric acid; everything else is non-existent. The animal’s objects are exclusively functional signs: ‘food’, ‘enemy’, ‘mate’, ‘obstacle’. The animal never sees the object in itself (the tree as a tree), only its biological meaning (the tree as shelter).[15]
In contrast, man is the only being who has a Welt (World). Man, as a ‘world-open’ being (to use Max Scheler’s expression), is capable of stepping out of the bubble of biological needs and contemplating objective reality.[16] We are capable of examining a stone or a star without wanting to eat it or use it. This capacity for objectivity—the possibility of pure theory and contemplation (contemplatio)—is what definitively lifts man out of the animal mode of existence, and what Darwinism is fundamentally incapable of accounting for, the utilitarian logic of the struggle for survival.
If we accept that the specificum of man is precisely this world-openness (the capacity to contemplate things for their own sake) and the Homo ludens (creation beyond utility), then the expansion of modern, purely functionalist-rationalist civilization signals not progress, but dramatic regression, a kind of spiritual involution.
The logic of modern industrial society forces man to treat the world not as a World (Cosmos) but as a mere resource. As Martin Heidegger pointed out: in the modern technical view, the river is no longer a river, but ‘power plant material’, the forest is not a forest, but ‘timber stock’ (Bestand). When modern man views everything—including himself (‘human resources’)—exclusively from the perspective of utility, reduced to mere function, he voluntarily renounces his human privilege.
Paradoxically, the man of ‘advanced’ industrial civilization thereby locks himself back into a global, technologically amplified Umwelt. He approaches the animal mode of existence again, where (as with the tick) only that which serves survival, consumption, or function has a right to exist. The civilization that expels sacredness, art, and play in the name of ‘efficiency’ is, in reality, building not the world of the superior man, but that of the super-complex animal. Darwinism thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: man believes himself to be an animal because his civilization slowly weans him off everything that made him human.[17]
As Ferenc Buji writes in his study The Human Who Became Human — Outlines of an Anthropological Theory of Unfolding, the correct interpretation of evolution (unfolding) requires an anthropological turn. Correcting the Darwinian phylogenetic tree representation, Buji demonstrates that there is a central, upward-arching ‘evolutionary main path’ leading towards Man. The common ancestor is a point on this main line. The line of apes, however, is a side-branch that ‘diverged’ from this main path. With this divergence, it lost its ‘evolutionary momentum’, became stuck, and indeed declined. According to this, it was not man who evolved from the ape towards uprightness, but from the common, already upright ancestor, the ape declined back into a specialized, tree-dwelling lifestyle. The ‘animalistic’ traits (eg, the long arms of apes) are thus not ancient, primitive features, but later, degenerative specializations. The measure of development cannot be mere survival (since a gorilla is more vulnerable than a bacterium). The entire process of biological development is meaningless if its goal is merely the maintenance of existence. The process only gains meaning if its goal is Man himself. The true measure of an animal’s development is thus its ‘proximity to the Human’.[18]
[1] The worldview of many conservative thinkers is actually cyclical, including phases of both ‘evolution’ (unfolding, ascent) and ‘involution’ (degeneration, decline), in contrast to modernity’s optimism proclaiming linear, infinite progress.
[2] It is crucial to distinguish this Burkean ‘unfolding’ from what is commonly termed ‘theistic evolution’. While the latter suggests that God creates through the blind process of random mutation and natural selection, the organicist view holds that ‘chance’ is never a creative force. For Burke and the conservative tradition, favourable circumstances (historical or environmental ‘accidents’) merely provide the stage or the occasion for a pre-existing, transcendent potential to manifest itself. Here, the creative power resides not in the chaos of selection, but in the internal Form—the Logos—that precedes and governs the material process. In this sense, the unfolding of an organism is the actualization of a latent wisdom, rather than a fortuitous byproduct of a trial-and-error mechanism.
[3] It was one of Darwin’s own fundamental theses that, in a strict scientific sense, ‘species’ do not even exist, only individuals, and the infinite series of continuums and transitional forms between them. This is a direct denial of the permanence of species (the Platonic eidos).
[4] For the connection between Nominalism and modern natural science, as well as Tamás Molnár’s critique, see Part I, Footnote 8. Darwinism here merely applies nominalist logic to biology: just as the reality of universals was denied in philosophy, Darwin denied the existence of the biological ‘species’ (as a permanent essence), reducing it to a mere aggregate of individuals and transitional states.
[5] If ‘species’ is merely a social construct or a momentary state, then why would the concepts of ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘family’, or ‘nation’ be permanent? The denial of biological essentialism opens the door to modern gender theories and extreme social constructivism: if there is no permanence in nature, then everything in society is also relative and can be reshaped at will.
[6] George Wald, ‘The Origin of Life’, Scientific American, August 1954, p. 48.
[7] Fred Hoyle and N Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space: A Theory of Cosmic Creationism, London, JM Dent & Sons, 1981, p. 24. Sir Fred Hoyle, an astronomer of Nobel Prize-equivalent stature, started as a hardline atheist and a critic of the ‘Big Bang’ theory, and was forced to accept the intervention of a ‘Superintellect’ exclusively by the fine-tuning of interstellar carbon atoms and the improbability of the cell.
[8] Douglas D Axe, ‘Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds’, Journal of Molecular Biology 341/5 (2004), pp. 1295–1315. He was quasi-‘exiled’ from mainstream academia due to his research at Cambridge University because his results were too dangerous for Darwinism. This is why he founded the Biologic Institute.
[9] He developed the concept of ‘Specified Complexity’. He asserts that Information (Logos) cannot originate from matter.
[10] This logical somersault is illustrated by the favourite caricature of Richard Dawkins-style atheist evolutionists, the ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster’. Their argument is that God’s existence is just as improbable as that of such a creature. Yet the reverse of the materialist argument strikes back here: if ‘anything’ can come into existence from matter given ‘infinite time’, provided its mathematical chance is not zero, then why could such a being not have come into existence? The materialist argument appealing to the infinite time paradoxically legitimizes precisely the fantasy world it attempts to mock: if the impossible is merely ‘improbable’, then in infinite time any absurdity can become reality.
[11] In the absence of assuming a transcendent consciousness, science is forced to engage in increasingly strained, tautological explanations, or hit walls insoluble for materialist reductionism, such as qualia (the quality of feeling) or the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ formulated by David Chalmers. We will examine this topic in detail in a later writing.
[12] See, for example, the case of the captive chimpanzee named Congo, who learned to paint. Following the canvases he created, an English evolutionary biologist used the term ‘lyrical abstract impressionism’ (Waldemar Januszczak, ‘Congo the Chimpanzee’, Times Online, 2005). Besides the grotesque nature of the example, this phenomenon fails to prove precisely what it wishes to illustrate: namely, that the chimpanzee is capable of art ‘spontaneously’. This is trained imitation, not creation stemming from internal necessity.
[13] Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, Mineola, NY, Dover Publications, 1998, p. 139. The quote: ‘If we could rid ourselves of all pride…we should say not Homo sapiens, but Homo faber.’
[14] G K Chesterton recognized this chasm as the most important fact of human history. For him, the prehistoric man drawing on the cave wall was not an ‘advanced ape’, but a metaphysician, an artist repeating the act of creation at his own level. This ‘sub-creation’—as Chesterton put it—is a divine spark that is completely missing in the animal kingdom, and which does not blur the borderline between man and animal, but infinitely deepens it.
[15] Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, trans Joseph D O’Neil, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2010, pp. 41–45.
[16] Max Scheler, The Human Place in the Cosmos, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2009, pp. 37–39.
[17] Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans William Lovitt, New York, Harper & Row, 1977. According to Heidegger’s analysis, the essence of modern technology is ‘Gestell’ (Enframing), which reduces nature and man to mere ‘standing-reserve’ (Bestand) available for exploitation, depriving them of their own essence. According to conservative criticism, this utilitarian reduction signifies the narrowing of the human spirit, its relapse into the ‘Umwelt’.
[18] See: Ferenc Buji, Az emberré vált ember [The Human Who Became Human] (available online). This perspective, worked out in detail by contemporary philosopher Ferenc Buji, fits organically into the line of intellectual history represented by Nándor Várkonyi in his monumental work, Az elveszett Paradicsom [The Lost Paradise]. Várkonyi—referencing the heretical biologists of the early 20th century (Klaatsch, Westenhöfer)—pointed out decades ago: man is not the ‘improved’ descendant of the ape, but quite the reverse: the preserver of the biological ‘Central Stem’ (Központi Törzs), from which apes diverged as merely specialized, ‘derailed’ side-branches.
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