Lives of Meaning

Can biologists find spirituality without finding a creator? Prof. R.I. Vane-Wright

My position as an evolutionary biologist

Despite a Christian upbringing, I am an agnostic. God, if it does exist, is ineffable, knowable only through personal conviction. I do not believe science is capable of proving or disproving either the existence, or the non-existence of God. I therefore disagree with fellow scientists when they suggest human logic will eventually reveal some materially-based answer to everything. Science cannot offer such assurance – which would be just another act of faith [1]. With others, I am also sceptical about any certainty of science [2], and even its unity [3].

This lack of belief in science as a source of ultimate, objective truth does not lead me, however, to insist on some divine creator. I am content to be a tiny part of the cosmos, a small nexus in the great web of life on Earth, one of the current 7 billion living individuals of Homo sapiens. Others seek “the meaning of life” and “salvation” in something beyond. While I personally find this unnecessary, I do not object to their recourse to faith to satisfy their spiritual yearning.

As a natural scientist, my task is to contribute to describing the universe (pattern), and understanding how it works (process). I use no more assumptions than necessary, and depend on the minimum number of seemingly inexplicable factors – such as the physical constants that make life on Earth possible (see [4] Does God Have a Monopoly on Spirituality? SiS 49). I also try to explore specific elements of the universe by abstraction from the whole, and not to derive the whole or subsystems by abstraction from its parts. In other words, while reductionism may offer the scientist a valuable tool, it does not provide a satisfactory framework for explaining complex phenomena.

Thus, although I do not see science as the ultimate source of wisdom or understanding, I still find myself in opposition to those who believe that evolution without the intervention of some supernatural force or “intelligent designer” is incapable of bringing about the adaptation seen throughout the living world. Such a belief rests on an outmoded view of adaptations as perfect, each “meticulously designed for its function”, carried over from natural theology [5]. This mistaken view is encouraged by an understandable reaction against normal-science when it reductively insists that organic evolution is a process driven solely by genes – selfish or otherwise.

As the late Brian Goodwin suggested [6], whole organisms act out “a life of meaning” based on a mixture of inherited and some learned understanding of their world. Each organism, in its own special way, is highly intelligent. To me, specific organismal intelligence is the source of the seeming “design” seen in all living things [7]. Each individual organism contributes, through its own particular life of meaning, to the adaptation of the evolutionary lineage to which it contributes – the evolving, adaptable and adapted species. Although mediated, constrained and ultimately passed on by the selection of available mutations working within genetic mechanisms, this process is not controlled by genes alone.

Once life has begun, intelligence about the surrounding environment leads inevitably to the sequential, cascading adaptation of living organisms as an emergent process. While mutation may be blind and perhaps random, once started, even though it is not pre-determined, the course of evolution is not driven by chance alone [4, 7]. The ‘eyes that see’ are the sensory perception systems of the organisms themselves, which are not passive but creative. As Richard Gregory [8] put it: “Perceptions may be compared with hypotheses in science.” I believe this applies as much to the perceptions of a jellyfish as those of a Nobel prize winner.

Can biologists find spirituality without finding a creator?

Being concerned with the nature of biological reality, my question is inevitably metaphysical. And, potentially, it leaves me marooned in an “excluded middle” – lost between those on the one hand, including numerous fellow scientists, who still operate in an essentially logical-positivist framework in which it is believed there will ultimately be a material or rational answer to everything [e.g. 9, 10], and those on the other convinced that the universe can neither exist nor make sense without a non-material creator [e.g. 11, 12]. Is it rational for me to accept that there may not be an ultimate creator while, at the same time, not accept that conventional materialism (as expressed, for example, by the hard-line neo-Darwinism of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) is sufficient to make sense of “life, the universe, and everything”? Is my position hopeless, am I a boneless mediocrity simply flapping around in the middle? [10, p. 46].

There are those who believe that consciousness may be a fundamental property of the universe [13]: “Thus we could come to the germ of a new notion of unbroken wholeness, in which consciousness is no longer to be fundamentally separated from matter.” As stated above, I believe that creativity, or problem solving, is a fundamental property of biological systems, ultimately responsible for all adaptation seen in the living world. For physicist/philosopher David Bohm consciousness is framed as a property of the implicate order, the “immediate and primary actuality” from which the familiar material world of the explicate order can be derived “as a particular, distinguished case” [13]. For me, as a biologist, what links the two is simply what I propose to call connectivity – or just connection.

The story of Aldo Leopold and the dying wolf is a dramatic example. Leopold, now acknowledged as a founder of the deep ecology movement, started out in a US government wolf eradication programme. One day in New Mexico he shot an old wolf. As he ran to it in its dying moments, he recalls “. . . there was something new to me in those eyes, something known only to her and the mountain. I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunter’s paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf, nor the mountain agreed with such a view.” This experience, which I would call a connection, profoundly altered Leopold’s worldview, and everything that he did subsequently [14]. Such a shift in perception could represent a step in the evolution of a new moral understanding that underpins deep ecology [15] – a higher dimension of existence realised directly through experience [16].

In my worldview, connection is more “spiritual” than the separation of mind-body dualism – which seems to me like a devaluation of my own life experience. The feeling of connection to the rest of the universe and its entire unfolding – atoms in my body that could only have come from a supernova [17], a physiology inherited from pre-Cambrian oceans, an ecology that involves the entire biosphere [18], and a culture going back beyond stone-age ancestors that continues to develop in the living community of which I am a part, all ongoing and ever changing – is to me the supreme spirituality: protean connection.

While I do not deny the possibility of an ultimate creator, my sense of what is right and wrong, and emotions such as joy and sadness, can come simply from being part of the universe. This realisation, this sense of connection, is for me sufficient – and a source of liberation. Those committed to dualism or materialism will say that I am deluded, that I am denying God or the power of hormones. But for me the connection I have tried to describe is my spiritual reality. Do other biologists share the same feeling?

The author is a Scientific Associate of the Department of Entomology, Natural History Museum, London, and Honorary Professor of Taxonomy at the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE), University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

Article first published 16/04/12

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