I am trying to understand a linguistic and logical problem with the way we talk about certain positive traits we describe as evolutionary products. The problem is, that is some sense we seem to be saying that the cause of the causes are their effects. That in some sense the trajectory of time was inevitably toward some higher, more complex, better state (whatever that means in materialistic terms rather than human purposive and imaginative terms). Better able to be, I suppose. And in some sense being better able to be is somehow an ontological necessity of the kind of world we live is. It necessarily creates its present self by producing the necessary means to give rise to it in the past. It designs itself retrospectively by necessity.
At least, that is how we perceive it. We perceive present states and then argue that they were favored by virtue of their present superiority to be necessarily produced by the past. Better states have come to pass, they came to pass because they must, therefore the unlikely and difficult production of those future states from the states of the past (where such excellence and complexity did not exist) was not only possible, but necessary. And it did not require any pre-existing or directing design or intention to motivate it or create it from previous non-existence. It was, essentially, self-creating by logical necessity, not design or intention, retroactively.
In a way, it’s like saying that bicycles had to be invented because they’re better than walking, and motorcycles had to be invented because they’re better than bicycles. So it wasn’t unlikely at all that such innovations should take place, standing as we do at the end of such conceptual leaps of imagination. Problems were there to be solved, even if they did not exist as problems for lower organisms but rather as barriers to the existence of higher ones, and those problems were solved to allow those new complexities to come into being, because they must. Why they must, except that because they do, remains unclear.
It is almost as if there were a propulsive spirit that called complexity into existence, in defiance of the general entropic trend of nature. It seems almost like a metaphysical, religious claim. And it is not clear when we invoke it as an explanation that this strange spirit that inhabits our genes evolved us, that we are saying anything different from claiming that some obscure power created us, apparently with a determinate eye to give us some excellence. It is not clear to me that religion and science are really saying anything much different, only choosing their representative imaginative metaphors and grammar differently.
This problem also seems to arise with cosmology, which plucks the same strings as theology to solve the same problems that experience has confronted men with for all eternity, but imagines itself to be somehow more well founded for describing its inaccessible deities in terms of “the landscape” or “de Sitter egg universes” or “dark matter” or “superposition” or “Calabi-Yau Manifolds” or “eternal inflation” . All of which are experientially inaccessible, but have use as metaphors providing ideological explanations for the otherwise unexplainable mysteries of the universe. They are not things we can see or touch, but by them the greatness of creation is called into existence and order.
Why should such physical and biological order arise all around us, as if by necessity, as some have described it like a tornado assembling a 747 by passing through a junkyard? Saying that it evolved (in describing the arising and ordering of withe the physical or biological world) is not clearly so different a statement as saying either that “it just happened” or “it was created”. Possibly it is a way of saying both at the same time, a way of combining an apparent contradiction. For the first argues mere chance, no intention, no order, no design. While the second conceals direction, organization, order, intention, applied in some way retroactively, with the effect producing the cause by necessity of some sort of destiny.
Saying that something evolved basically allows you to express both of these very contradictory concepts simultaneously. It allows you to use the language of intention, of problems being solved, of designs being executed, or purposes being fulfilled, without actually obligating you to a universe haunted by any such actual intention, design, or purpose. You get all the hermeneutics without any of the theology. In this way it might be considers more a sort of intellectual judo than a coherent philosophical or scientific explanation.
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