Reviewing Evolutions Purpose

 Steve MacIntosh has done us a service in writing this book. It's not a Christian book but it is a book that Christians interested in the philosophical implications of the theory of evolution should read. The author aims to write a book that might be helpful to people of many life-stances, spiritualities and religious outlook.

The subtitle helps us to understand what he's up to in this book: An Integral Interpretation of the Scientific Story of Our Origins
All of those words are important: 'Scientific Story' recognises that the theoretical interpretation of the emergence of life -indeed of the emergence of stuff, suns, planets and the rest- tells a story. The interesting thing, of course, is that 'story' implies an audience, and that is part of what the book explores too. Part of what Steve is doing is to try to make a case for seeing evolution as purposeful. Those readers who are aware of the scientific debates will realise that this counters the idea of what Dawkins has famously analogised as 'the blind watchmaker' -precisely that evolution has no teleology it is simply the next adaptation after the last fitness-selection followed by the next survival and the next reproduction.

'An integral interpretation' seems to have two referents: one is (it seems to me) a nod towards the turn to wholism and hospitality to monistic philosophy; the other is working philosophically with emergence. It is the latter that has most prominence and importance, the fact that it can play nicely with the former is interesting but not core to the argument.

A big part of Steve's argument revolves around observing that there is an inherant 'local' teleology in the world when emergence is considered: at each new level, the purpose of the constituent antecedants for the emerged level has also developed. I think that this means that molecules give purpose to subatomic particles and atoms and so on 'up' through the levels. The other part of the argument is that meaning is not either transcendant or immanent but actually dialogical (and emergent?) or rather dialectical. The latter is the term that Steve uses and does indeed hark back to Hegel, Marx and the like and recognises that meaning-making is something that arises from the inter-relating of things.

I was reminded of a good and under-known theological book Ross Thompson's Holy Ground - the spirituality of matter. where the creational characteristic of dialogical/dialectical process is recognised and developed under the term diousia which I think is probably a word Steve MacIntosh would have employed had he known it.

What these things do in Steve's argument is lay the foundations for viewing reality as we know it as modestly purposeful as opposed to 'blind' and for a progressive interpretation of evolution where evolution is understood broadly to include the whole development of the universe and including human cultural development. Sometimes this feels a bit Marxian but isn't because materialism is eclipsed by integral philosophy, sometimes it feels a bit Newagey but it is actually more careful and hardheaded and indeed modest than many New Age philosophies though sharing something of their optimism.

I'm not entirely convinced that Steve has pulled the rabbit out of the hat in terms of grounding teleology in the scientifically-accessible universe, but I do think that (along with Ross Thompson as mentiond above) this is a way of thinking that deserves more consideration and discussion and could be helpful.

Evolution's Purpose: An Integral Interpretation of the Scientific Story of Our Origins