Rocks of Ages (18 page)

D
ARWIN HAS BEEN READ AS
something of a moral dolt, or at least as a slacker on the subject, for his frequent disclaimers about drawing lessons for the meaning of human life from his revolutionary reorganization of biological knowledge. Shouldn’t such a radical reinterpretation of nature offer us some guidance for the biggest questions of the ages: Why are we here, and what does it all mean? How could anyone look so deeply into the heart of biological causality and the history of life, and then offer us such a piddling dribble—
bupkes
, as my grandmother would have said—on the meaning of life and the ultimate order of things:

Was Darwin just a coward? a desiccated intellect? a small-minded man? the very stereotype of a scientist who can describe a tree and ignore the forest, or analyze the notes and not hear the symphony?

I view Darwin in an entirely opposite manner. He maintained, throughout his life, a basic human fascination for the great questions of morals and meanings, and he recognized the transcendent importance of such inquiry. But he knew both the strengths and the limitations of his chosen profession, and he understood that the power of science could only be advanced and consolidated on the fertile ground of its own magisterium. In short, Darwin rooted his views about science and morality in the principle of NOMA.

Darwin did not use evolution to promote atheism, or to maintain that no concept of God could ever be squared with the structure of nature. Rather, he argued that nature’s factuality, as read within the magisterium of science, could not resolve, or even specify, the existence or character of God, the ultimate meaning of life, the proper foundations of morality, or any other question within the different magisterium of religion. If many Western thinkers had once invoked a blinkered and indefensible concept of divinity to declare the impossibility of evolution, Darwin would not make the same arrogant mistake in the opposite direction, and claim that the fact of evolution implies the nonexistence of God.

I would go further and argue that we have often, and seriously, misconstrued Darwin’s basic view about proper relationships between nature and the meaning of human life. Darwin’s position, rooted in NOMA, is courageous, tough-minded, and ultimately liberating. But we have often misread his vision as defeatist, pessimistic, and enslaving. I propose that we call Darwin’s view the “cold bath” theory of nature.

The basic argument includes three propositions linked in a definite order of implication:

1. The basic statement of NOMA. The facts of nature are what they are, and cannot, in principle, resolve religious questions about God, meaning, and morality.

2. Two alternatives for nature. Unconstrained by our religious hopes and needs, nature remains free to assume any appearance when read in the invalid light of human moral or aesthetic judgment. Consider two extreme possibilities and the different temptations they inspire. Perhaps, by sheer good fortune, nature generally does follow our preferences for warmth and fuzziness. Perhaps most organisms are cute or beautiful in our sight, and perhaps peaceful cooperation does usually prevail over violent competition. Perhaps Isaiah’s holy mountain, where the wolf dwells with the lamb and the
leopard lies down with the kid, does generally record nature’s factual estate, not only our idyllic dreams.

At the other extreme, perhaps nature rarely matches our hopes. Perhaps we can counterpose an ugly tapeworm to every beautiful peacock; an ichneumon larva foraging within a living caterpillar to every dolphin who ever raised an incapacitated relative into breathable air; an evolutionary triumph of adaptation by loss of complexity in an amorphous parasite to every evolutionary triumph of adaptation by increased braininess in a human ancestor.

By the logic of NOMA, the potential validity of either extreme doesn’t make a particle of difference. We still cannot draw moral messages or religious conclusions from any factual construction of nature—either from extreme warmth and fuzziness, or from maximal distastefulness. But we all recognize the primary foible of frail humanity—our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe. In the light of this weakness, we will be sorely tempted to make a serious mistake if, under the first extreme, the facts of nature do tend, generally and fortuitously, to match our desires. We will then be beguiled into violating NOMA and rushing headlong into the error of conflating these facts with values and meanings. Wouldn’t we be better off if nature, for equally fortuitous reasons, happens to refute our hopes and desires most of the time?

3. Better an invigorating cold bath than a suffocating warm embrace. Nature is amoral—not immoral, but rather constructed without reference to this strictly human concept. Nature, to speak metaphorically, existed for eons before we arrived, didn’t know we were coming, and doesn’t give a damn about us. Thus, it would be passing strange if the first extreme held and nature generally reflected our moral and aesthetic preferences. The odds against such a coincidence—the accidental match of an independent system to an entirely different and equally complex institution originating so much later—must be astronomically high.

In fact, and by all honest reckoning, such a match does not exist. Nature conforms to neither extreme of human definition. Nature betrays no statistical preference for being either warm and fuzzy, or ugly and disgusting. Nature just is—in all her complexity and diversity, in all her sublime indifference to our desires. Therefore we cannot use nature for our moral instruction, or for answering any question within the magisterium of religion. We certainly cannot follow the old, intellectually squishy tradition of searching for moral certainties within nature’s supposedly warm and fuzzy ways. We cannot even accept the arch and opposite argument of T. H. Huxley, who held, in his most famous essay
(Evolution and Ethics
, 1893) that, because the rules of evolution violate all standards of human ethical
conduct, the moral lesson of nature must be sought in learning her patterns and then behaving in a precisely contrary manner!

Instead, Darwin argues, we must simply admit that nature offers no moral instruction at all. We must, in other words, take the ultimate cold bath of immersing ourselves in nature and recognizing that, for this particular quest, we have come to the wrong place. Such a “cold bath” may shock us at first. But as we experience the invigoration of such a bracing surround, we should come to view the immersion as neither grim nor depressing, but exhilarating and liberating. If we then stop searching for moral truth in material reality, we may finally
appreciate nature’s fascination and her extensive powers to resolve different, but equally important, questions within her own realm. And when we reject the siren song of false sources, we become free to seek solutions to questions of morals and meanings in the proper place—within ourselves.

I noted in the first chapter (
this page
) that I regarded Darwin’s letter to Asa Gray as the finest statement ever written on the proper relation of factual nature to human morality or, more broadly, of science to religion. I now return to the extended logic of Darwin’s argument in formulating the “cold bath” theory of nature as the liberating principle of NOMA. Darwin, we recall, begins by disclaiming on the meaning of evolution for theological questions—except in refuting the old delusion that an intrinsically beneficent nature records God’s existence and attributes:

How, then, shall we interpret nature’s facts, particularly those (like foraging ichneumons, and cats “playing”
with battered mice) that we view with horror in our inappropriate moral terms:

Two points of this subtle argument deserve special notice. First, Darwin may accept overall design as a personal preference, or even as a guide to his own existence and comfort, but he knows that such issues cannot be adjudicated within the magisterium of science—as expressed in his later suspicion that such questions are “too profound for the human intellect.” Second, Darwin makes a clear distinction between such scientifically unknowable ultimates and particular events and patterns (nature’s factuality) that can be described and explained within the magisterium of science. Then—following the chief precept of NOMA—Darwin denies that we may hope to locate, in these factual events, either the hand of God or a moral lesson for the conduct of our lives. I particularly value the insight and precision of Darwin’s words: “with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.”

Darwin does not mean “chance” in the vernacular
senses of “random,” “without meaning,” or “incapable of explanation.” By stating the proviso “what we may call chance,” he implicates a view of life for which he had no word, but which historians now call “contingency.” That is, nature’s facts (the “details”) exist for immediate, definite, and potentially knowable reasons subject to scientific explanation. But these facts are not integrated into any controlling fabric of a planned and deterministic universe, with intended meaning in the fall of each petal and every raindrop.

The universe, for all we know, may have an ultimate purpose and meaning (“I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws”), and these ultimates may be set by a rational and transcendent power legitimately called God, but the resolvable subject matter of science falls into another realm below the purview of such philosophical (and probably unknowable) generalities. Moreover, these smaller and knowable facts unfold in a world composed of so many complex parts that prediction of the future, not to mention inferences about ultimate meanings of the totality, cannot be achieved with certainty. We may use the laws of nature, and our knowledge of specific conditions, to explain and understand particular events, and even (as the highest goal of science) to construct general theories about factual patterns in nature. We can know “what” and “how,” even “why” in the special
sense of explaining particular facts by invariant laws of nature and properties of materials. But science has no access to questions of ultimate “why” expressed as overarching purpose or eternal value.

To show that I am not presenting an odd and personal exegesis of Darwin’s statement about “details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance,” we may trace his own explication in a beautifully crafted set of examples, moving from undeniable commonplaces to challenging implications that we would rather not accept—all designed to convince his conventionally devout colleague, Asa Gray.

Darwin moves slowly and cautiously, but ever so systematically. If a man, caught on top of a hill during a thunderstorm, dies by lightning, the event surely has a scientific explanation—based on general laws (of meteorology and electricity) and particular conditions (the man’s location at a given moment). But no one would claim either that the man’s death could have been predicted with precision at the time of his birth (or even an hour before his demise), or, especially, that the tragedy occurred for a reason rooted in good morals and the ultimate meaning of things. The poor fellow was just in the wrong place at the wrong time—while nature, morally blind as always, followed her usual rules. Darwin writes: “The lightning kills a man, whether a good one or bad one, owing to the excessively complex action of natural laws.”

If such a tragic natural death has no moral meaning, what about a tragic natural birth? Darwin next argues that a mentally handicapped child may owe his condition to rules of genetics and embryology, as applied to the particular circumstances of his being. His condition can therefore be explained scientifically. But only a moral pervert could believe that the child’s handicap was meant to be because it happened, or that God follows an agenda of overall decency by purposely peppering our lives with such specific misfortune. Darwin writes: “A child (who may turn out an idiot) is born by the action of even more complex laws.” (“Idiot,” in Darwin’s day, was a technical term for a definite level of mental deficiency, not a label of opprobrium.)