Evolution and Spirit: The Spires of Form

Must Darwinian evolution entail materialism? Can evolution and the hypothesis that there are nonmaterial dimensions of existence both be true?

Why not? The notion that life forms develop through mutations under the pressure of natural selection is an elegant complex of ideas that is mutually contradictory with some spiritual notions, especially with a simplistic literalist reading of the Bible’s creation story, so-called creationism. But that is not the only spiritual view. There are other, subtler versions of the nonmaterial hypothesis that seem compatible with the idea of evolution.

While the theory of evolution powerfully explains the material and efficient causes of physical forms and some attributes of those forms, it cannot, nor can any materialist theory so far, compellingly explain or explain away the phenomenon of consciousness itself, which in human experience is felt as the subject, the self, more immediately than is the body.

In the writings of Emerson and the Persian poet Rumi, we find spiritual conceptions that actually embrace the idea of evolution.

Emerson

A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.

Rumi

I have again and again grown like grass;
I have experienced seven hundred and seventy moulds.
I died from minerality and became vegetable;
And from vegetativeness I died and became animal.
I died from animality and became man.
Then why fear disappearance through death?
Next time I shall die
Bringing forth wings and feathers like angels;
After that soaring higher than angels—
What you cannot imagine. I shall be that.

Not only is there in such spiritual conceptions no creationist denial of evolution, but the view of these poets is that the life of the soul is an unfolding analogous to evolution. As Emerson and his compatriots, the Transcendentalists, held, nature mirrors spirit. In this view, similar dynamics drive both form and essence, anatomy and psyche. From this perspective, development in consciousness mirrors physical, morphological development, almost as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, in every case progressing from rudimentary to subtler and more powerful. Bits of consciousness that currently experience themselves as human beings thus are spiritually like larva, then chrysalis, then butterfly, or mineral, plant, fish, mammal, primate, human, angel, god.

But this is still a bit vague, an approximation based on a general notion of development. To make the spiritual analogy to Darwinian evolution more specific, in the place of evolutionary mutation we can posit spiritually transformative experience, James’s and Maslow’s peak experiences, and corresponding to natural selection we have the crucible of physical life, what Emerson in Nature called “discipline” and Keats in one of his remarkable letters named the “vale of soul-making.” Just as natural selection drives fitting mutations in physical life forms, an intentional and adaptive encounter with the phenomenal world (including the inner phenomena of consciousness) drives transformative spiritual experience.

Simplistic superstitions and irrational fundamentalisms aside, there remains in many thoughtful human beings a primal and primeval urge toward the transcendent that endures all the empirical discipline and prowess of the Enlightenment. Spirituality is not limited to faith nor necessarily at odds with science and experiment. On the contrary, the experimental attitude can prevail in exploring the spiritual as well as the physical worlds; many spiritual conceptions advocate testing theories through personal practice and experience, renouncing blind faith for meditation practice and other sorts of so-called inner work. Though Kant, the theodicist of both science and religion, the great mediator between faith and the Enlightenment, might not have approved, branding this middle way mere and unaccountable mysticism, such practices can evidently be fruitful, or at least suggestive. And perhaps Kant, for all his magisterial insight, had not covered all the bases. Perhaps such experimental spirituality, or higher empiricism, if you will, can show the way forward through the apparent impasse of conflict between science and religion, without our having to give up one for the other. When such work is fruitful, evolution stands unperturbed, coexisting with direct, first-hand, apparently transcendental experience, and blind faith is a superfluous impertinence.

The fact that such experience is subjective and cannot be put under objective empirical protocols is grounds for ignoring it as a legitimate factor in the shaping of a public scientific consensus, but is not in itself sufficient to conclusively deny the validity of the experience. We do, after all, leave this life on our own, and in such a personal plight we need not limit ourselves to majority opinion or to objective shared knowledge regarding our confrontation with the great unknown. One can refuse to be persuaded by another’s allegedly transcendent experience, but one cannot, without assuming more than empiricism justifies, assert that the other’s experience is illusory. And one is free to test the hypothesis oneself, in one’s own laboratory, as it were, of consciousness, under similar test conditions and protocols.

The world and its species of life were certainly not created in a period of six solar days, but evolution versus creationism is a battle with a man of straw that seems hardly conclusive regarding the question of whether there are nonmaterial dimensions of existence.

10/14/06