How can Richard Dawkins illustrate Teilhard’s insights into evolution?

Today’s Post

      Last week we began a series which looks into two contemporary facets of Teilhard’s insights into ‘evolution’ to explore how they reflect both Teilhard’s optimism as well as how his vision for the future is being born out in contemporary thinking and events.

This week we will begin this series by addressing the perspective of Richard Dawkins.

Richard Dawkins and Evolution

Richard Dawkins is a well-known evolutionary biologist, best known for his insights into the role of genes in biological evolution.  His criticism of religion and his defense of atheism is also well known.  In his book, “The God Delusion”, he examines thousands of religious beliefs, mostly those of Christianity, to show examples of illogic, superstition, contradictions, and anti-science content.  From this perspective, he seems to represent a most unlikely common ground with that of Teilhard, much less to provide insight into the larger picture of how the evolutionary processes of the universe continue through the human person.

That said, however, we will look at three aspects of his two books, “The God Delusion” and “The Selfish Gene” which seem to bear out Teilhard’s insights: universal evolution, the genetic replication process, and the continuation of evolution in the human species.  This week we will look at the first.

Dawkins and the Evolution of the Universe

In his book, “The God Delusion” he pauses for a moment in his seemingly endless diatribe on religion to regard a wider view of evolution itself.  In nearly all his writing, he seems content to regard evolution as a process which begins with the cell and continues through the ‘Natural Selection’ of biological species.  He is positioned well within the general scientific population which regards evolution as an Earthly process which occurs along the lines proposed by Darwin.  This perspective restricts ‘evolution’ to a process beginning some four billion years ago, some eight billion years after the ‘Big Bang’ and continues to trickle in the human species.  Dawkins adds some facets to this perspective which opens the door to the wider and deeper insights of Teilhard.

In one section of the book, he refers to a discussion with theologians at Cambridge University on the cause of existence, addressing the question of “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

“Time and time again, my theologian friends returned to the point that there had to be a reason why there is something rather than nothing. There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God.  Yes, I said, but it must have been simple and therefore whatever else we call it, God is not an appropriate name (unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers). The first cause that we seek must have been the simple basis for a self-bootstrapping crane which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence. “

   Earlier, he seems to also acknowledge that complexity does indeed emerge over time, but once again seems to limit such emergence to the ‘life era’:

“Natural science …explains how organized complexity can emerge from simple beginnings without any deliberate guidance.”

   Many of my atheist friends suggest that in these statements, as an atheist Dawkins cannot possibly be agreeing with the idea of ‘God’.  Of course, if one defines God as a ‘supernatural person that creates, judges, rewards, and punishes’, they are correct.  On the other hand, if God is identified not only as a Deist “first cause”, but one which “eventually raised the world as we know it to its present complex existence”, the Deist God is neatly replaced by the God of Blondel and Teilhard.

His caveat that we must “very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers” must be also recognized.  Once again, in such a theology as Blondel and Teilhard propose, this is exactly what they set out to do.  To Teilhard, the best way of making sense of our complex language of Christianity is to do just that, and he offers the ‘reinterpretation paradigm’ of interpreting religious statements through the ‘lens of evolution’ to do so.

Dawkins even echoes Teilhard’s ‘lens’ of such reinterpretation when he says

“Other theories (of religion) miss the point of Darwinian explanations. At the very least, (these theories) need to be translated into Darwinian terms.”

   Not that Dawkins has suddenly become a theist.  He takes on Teilhard’s concept of God as he quotes Carl Sagan:

 “If by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God.  This God is emotionally unsatisfying…it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”

   And of course, he is right.  Restricting God to the agency of gravity (it is of course necessary for cosmic evolution) is like restricting a cake recipe to sugar.  Neither Dawkins nor Sagan acknowledge their own admiration of the marvelous workings of the universe as articulated by Teilhard:

“..I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that the is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him”

   Thus, in our first look at Richard Dawkins’ approach to evolution we find not only threads of thought that resonate with Teilhard, but also seemingly contradictory aspects of his approach to evolution.

First, there is nothing in the natural sciences to explain the aspect of ‘complexity’ as a characteristic of biological evolution.  The theory of Natural Selection only explains replication and differentiation; it does not address how these processes result in increases in complexity of the results of these processes.  He does not offer examples of how ‘natural science’ explains the ‘emergence of complexity’.

Second, it is necessary to understand how complexity increases in the components which evolve in basic matter as identified in the Standard Model of Physics.  Physics and Chemistry articulate how matter ‘develops’ in the evolution from the quark to the amino acid compounds which are necessary to the workings of the cell, but they do not explain how they ‘complexify’ as they do so.

Thirdly, we will see how he himself understands that the theory of Natural Selection does not offer a complete understanding of how the human species continues its evolution, and suggests another slightly different process at work as well.

Next Week

This week we began a look at how contemporary non-religious thinkers can show insights into evolution that not only resonate with Teilhard but can quantify his insights.

Next week we will continue our exploration of Dawkins’ thoughts with a look at how biological evolution, explained by science as ‘Natural Selection’ takes on a more universal aspect when his insights are focused on its roots in the molecular processes of DNA.