The Forbidden Universe (35 page)

The latest scientific thinking about the origin of life in the universe is very compatible with the concept of a designer universe. Rather than life being a billion-to-one fluke, it seems to be a common – even a
universal
– phenomenon. And the different parts of the universe play vital roles in the creation and dissemination of life.

We must be careful, however, not to put words into the mouths of the likes of Louis Allamandola and Christian de Duve. When they use the expression ‘life is a cosmic imperative’, they are saying that conditions in the universe mean that wherever life can evolve, it inevitably will. This is emphatically not the same as saying that the ‘purpose’ of the universe is to produce living organisms. Scientific objectivity and a strict adherence to current evidence could never allow them to draw such a conclusion. But if the universe
is
designed for life, would we be able to tell the difference between that more Hermetic kind of cosmic imperative and de Duve and Allamandola’s version?

It is unlikely. If the universe is fine-tuned to produce the chemical elements and right physical conditions for intelligent life, then that same delicate balancing act would have to also include the imperative that biochemistry is now beginning to recognize. It would be pretty pointless otherwise.

Unlike many in the biological sciences, de Duve does give houseroom to the more metaphysical interpretations of the cosmic imperative. In
Vital Dust
he discusses the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit priest and
palaeontologist who put forward a theory of cosmic evolution very similar to the designer universe, albeit with a Christian gloss. To Teilhard, creation evolves from simple matter, to life and on to consciousness as part of a divine plan, which de Duve considers a valid possibility.
²⁰

As biochemistry has become increasingly sophisticated, it has found nothing to contradict the idea of intelligent design. Quite the reverse. However – and to many this will be a very big caveat indeed – the evidence for life as a cosmic imperative is, like that for the fine-tuning of the big bang, hard to square with the image of the biblical God. This is far too limiting for that kind of personal entity, with his alleged omniscience but
all-too-human
emotions.

An alternative to scientific atheism, which also fits this evidence, is the Hermetic interpretation, in which the cosmos was specifically built for life. Some of de Duve’s statements even read like an expression of Hermetic cosmology – a belief in the living universe – albeit in biochemical terms:

To de Duve most of the universe exists simply to provide the scaffolding to support life. In his view, the universe is effectively a super-organism in much the same way that, according to James Lovelock, the Earth is. Just on an unimaginably vaster scale.

But what about evolution? Surely the current
understanding
points in the opposite direction to ideas about life as a universal imperative, or inevitability, good as they may sound. The development of life, especially into anything more complex than a bacterium, is, we are told purely down to chance. If the evolution of life is dependent on random factors, then the idea of design in the universe as a whole is instantly and completely undermined.

Evolution is so often presented to the general public by the Dawkins school as the final coup de grâce, not merely to religious creationism, but also to any idea of design behind the universe, that it may seem perverse even to begin to challenge it. But what happens if you dare do just that? The results are rather surprising, although they won’t turn you into a creationist. In fact, quite the reverse. As we are about to see, the theory of evolution so beloved of Dawkins et al., by no means proves atheism to be right.

Today’s only accepted and acceptable scientific theories about the origins and development of living things reject even the slightest degree of design. Instead, the whole process that has fashioned the dazzling display of animals, plants and micro-organisms that cover the Earth is, we are told, driven ultimately by blind chance.

Evolution has become the really big battleground for the righteous – or perhaps, more accurately, the self-righteous – in the conflict between science and religion, particularly between militant atheists and Christian fundamentalists.

For those who take Genesis literally, evolutionary theory has not only to be rejected but also actively anathematized. The first book of the Bible states that God made all plants, sea creatures, birds and land animals (in that order) ‘according to their kinds’ – as individual, and by implication, fixed species. If, as science now understands it, different species developed one from another, then the biblical account is basically just wrong. Even worse to the Genesis literalists is the notion that humans – to whose creation God is supposed to have devoted special care and attention, making us ‘in his own image’, no less – are part of that scheme, that we have evolved from lower animals.

But scientists have made evolution a battleground too, seeing it as their greatest victory over the forces of
superstition and irrationality, and raising the fear that undermining it will see the end of their intellectual triumph. In the last couple of decades there have been good reasons for scientists to be anxious, as the recent political controversy in the USA over intelligent design (ID) has shown. The well-organized and generously-funded ID movement aims to undermine evolutionary theory by picking on its flaws, but it does so as part of a Christian fundamentalist – creationist – agenda. So, if biologists admit that the theory is anything less than cast-iron, their
opponents
will pounce and, particularly in America, use such admissions for political ends, their immediate objective being control of the education system.

The ID movement emerged as the result of a series of reversals that Christian fundamentalists have suffered since the 1980s, in which attempts to have creationism taught compulsorily in state school science classes were
successfully
challenged in the Supreme Court. These were ruled unconstitutional because the United States’ constitution – its First Amendment, which dates back to 1791 – explicitly separates Church and State.

Creationists then began to recast their argument in more scientific-sounding terms, basically crossing out ‘God’ and ‘creation’ and replacing them with ‘designer’ and ‘
intelligent
design’. The phrase ‘intelligent design’ was carefully chosen, as it has occasionally cropped up in the scientific literature over the years. Charles Darwin himself used it.

The ID movement’s strategy is to highlight apparent gaps in Darwinian theory and biological phenomena that are either hard to explain in Darwinian terms or which seem to actively contradict it. It goes for the weak spots and then offer, intelligent design as an alternative. Of course, it is possible to believe in intelligent design without being a Christian fundamentalist; it’s just that virtually all ID-ers are.

But – and this is an important point – many of the ID movement’s claims about Darwinism’s weaknesses aren’t its own, but are lifted from the works of bona fide scientists. The notion that some creative, guiding and purposeful factor influences biological evolution has been proposed by dispassionate and objective thinkers with no religious axe to grind. Indeed, that great proponent of the ‘intelligent universe’, Sir Fred Hoyle, could have given Richard Dawkins a run for his money in the anti-organized religion stakes. The ID movement is cynically twisting such challenges to serve its own agenda.

Given such resolute opponents, small wonder that the scientific community sees any attempt to challenge Darwinian orthodoxy as dangerous and religiously
motivated
. Anyone who argues against it is assumed to be hiding a creationist agenda. This makes the whole subject a minefield for those who fully intend to get to the bottom of the subject, no matter where it might lead.

Of course there will be many who disapprove of
non-specialists
investigating the subject in the first place. But often those who devote decades to one aspect of a complex discipline end up simply not being able to see the wood for the trees. We, on the other hand, can stand back and see the wider picture. One way of doing so – especially where academic sacred cows like evolution are concerned – is to revert to childhood. One specific, fictional childhood in particular will provide some much-needed perspective. We are assuming the role of the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s fable, the lone critic of the Emperor’s ‘new clothes’. In this tale, everyone agreed they were magnificent – except for the young outsider who saw that they were, in fact, completely non-existent. Following his lead, we also find ourselves standing towards the back of the crowd, ignoring the cheering to see what is really there.

Famously, the cornerstone of evolutionary theory is natural selection, or survival of the fittest, as proposed by Charles Darwin (1809–82), most prominently in his
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
in 1859, which has since become the bible of modern biology. Actually ‘survival of the fittest’ was coined by the philosopher Herbert Spencer as a way of avoiding the implication of design in the phrase ‘natural
selection
’. Even back then people were cautious about giving ammunition to creationists.

In Richard Dawkins’ hands, natural selection has been moulded into a quasi-religious revelation. To him natural selection also achieves a very rare thing: it proves a negative by showing that God does not exist. Natural selection provided Dawkins with his atheist epiphany, as well as being the catalyst that ‘raised his consciousness’,
¹
to use one of his favourite phrases.

To Darwin’s natural selection, modern biology has added genetics, the mechanism of heredity first proposed by – another irony – a Catholic monk, Gregor Mendel, in 1865 (although the term ‘gene’ was only coined in the first decade of the twentieth century), and since the discoveries of Francis Crick and James D. Watson in the 1950s known to operate through DNA. ‘Neo-Darwinian theory’ or ‘
Neo-Darwinian
synthesis’ is basically natural selection plus genetics.