Well Tried, But ?

	Book review on Creative Evolution: A Physicist's Resolution Between Darwinism and Intelligent Design by Amit Goswami Reviewed by Max Payne, 2009 published in Network Review No 100
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Those who seek a reconciliation between science and spirituality will warm to this vision which explains the biological evolution of life on this planet as the expression of an immanent spiritual purpose; in this way scientific materialism and naive Creationism are both disposed of with one blow. The key beginning of Goswami’s argument is the collapse of the wave equation. Quantum theory dictates that the ultimate particles of matter exist in a state of alternative possibilities until an observation collapses one of the possibilities into physical actuality. This is a problem for any philosophy of materialism since the physical reality of the material world seems to depend upon an act of observation which is, by definition, conscious. Goswami considers ordinary human consciousness as a nest of already collapsed wave equations, but the act of creative intuition is where the non-local cosmic consciousness is breaking through and bringing into actuality a previously unrealised possibility. Paranormal experience in the form of telepathy, near death experiences, and the evidence for Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields, all are witness to this non-local consciousness which Goswami equates with God.

Goswami considers this non-local cosmic consciousness to be the driving force which directs biological evolution. In this he acknowledges his debt to Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin. His central argument is that the Darwinian process of Natural Selection is not adequate to explain the evolutionary progress of life on this planet, the fact of which he in no way disputes. Natural selection does not explain what life and sensation are from within the organism, in the same way as brain chemistry does not explain the mind. One of his central arguments is that Darwinism does not explain key gaps in the fossil record between new families and species. These mutations require a special intervention of creative purpose. This is an unconvincing argument. The random chance of fossilisation, the patchy geological record, and small population of any new and original species, are all sufficient to explain the gaps; and in any case many of the gaps have been filled in during the 150 years since the publication of ‘The Origin of Species’. Above all the idea is inconsistent with Goswami’s original vision. If there is an overshadowing spiritual nisus for the whole process of evolution, there is no need to postulate particular interventions, since there is intervention all the time.

The idea of a non-local consciousness driving evolution may solve the problems of biology, but it creates huge problems for theology. The same force which is leading humanity upwards to an omega point of enlightenment, is also the force which drives the evolution of a parasite which inflicts a lingering and unpleasant death on its host. Whatever this force is, it is not the Christian God. The obscurantist Pope who forbade Teilhard to publish at least had a point.

Goswami takes the evidence of paranormal phenomena for granted, but this really is the central issue. There are two alternative standpoints. The first is that it is wrong to build vast metaphysical cloud castles on the shaky foundations of a few uncertain experiments on alleged telepathy. The second is to say that the evidence of paranormal phenomena is like a few smudged photographs of the transit of Venus in 1919. Just as they brought in the replacement of Newtonian mechanics by Einstein’s Relativity, so paranormal phenomena suggest an even greater paradigm shift; that is the recognition of a non-local spiritual consciousness that overshadows all. Those who agree with this will approve of his strategy in the war against materialism, though they may be less happy with his tactics.

 

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