Reason and Reality

Dr Ralph Norman

Ralph Norman teaches Theology, Religion, Philosophy, and Ethics at Canterbury Christ Church University. He has taught Philosophy and Theology at the University for nearly 20 years. He also publishes research which explores links between both subjects.

One of the puzzling things about our minds is just how improbable they are. The laws of nature form a very fine-tuned system, and if any of a handful of factors had been even a fraction different there would be no so thing as intelligent life.1 As Stephen Hawking said, “Our universe and its laws appear to have a design that both is tailor-made to support us and, if we are to exist, leaves little room for alteration” . 2 The physicist Paul Davies writes, “The existence of mind in some organism on some planet is surely a fact of fundamental significance. Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor by-product of mindless,

1 M. Rees, Just Six Numbers (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999). 2 S. Hawking and L. Mlodinow, The Grand Design (Bantam, 2011), p. 207.

6

purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here” . 3 Davies thereby expresses a kind of surprise at the fact that we are here in the universe and also something else. He attaches significance to the fact that we are here. Why suggest that we are for some reason supposed to be here?

One of the philosophically significant things about Darwin’s theory of evolution is that it removes purpose, design, or intention from explanations of how our minds came to be. Of course, once our minds came to be we started to use them to re-design ourselves, intellectually, culturally and morally; but the important thing here for many Darwinian materialists is that we can explain the first steps in our coming-tobe with reference to blind biological processes. Complex minds are simply adaptations that have (so far) proved beneficial to the reproduction of one species of animal.

Soon after Darwin wrote The Descent of Man (1871), philosophers started questioning if his materialist explanation of the emergence of mind was entirely convincing. Thomas Hill Green argued that there is a difference – perhaps a great difference – between evolutionary change and the knowledge of evolutionary change. It is one thing to have evolved; another thing to have intelligent consciousness of evolution. How

3 P. Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World (Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 242.

7

should we explain the emergence of minds from blind, unconscious matter? Any mind capable of theorising biological evolution is already somehow “beyond” or “over and above” material things, just as it is “over and above” the processes of change which it perceives and attempts to explain. This is because knowledge of change is only possible for minds which transcend the here and now. In order to perceive the difference between past, present, and future, one has to have some sort of trans-temporal consciousness. If our minds were not like that, we could have no concept of change and hence no concept of evolution. To put the question in simple terms, how can consciousness of change evolve out of a succession of changes?4

Through a finely graded series of almost infinitesimal incremental steps? That seems the most reasonable way forward: we work from the biological evidence we already possess and theorise that any gaps in our knowledge of the evolutionary process can be filled with further evolutionary explanations. The testing of the theory sets us on a quest for more evidence. This is the basis of our biological science. But when it comes to explaining something like the emergence of rational consciousness some basic problems remain. The steps from lower to higher consciousness are always (of necessity) explained from the side of those who are already in possession of higher consciousness. You

4 See T. Hill Green, Prolegomena to Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), § 84.

8