There is nothing mysterious about the limitations of Darwinian explanation: value-free science must eliminate questions of the value domain. But is this legitimate for the question of evolution? Related to this is the attempt to produce purely causal explanations of ethical behavior and its evolution. The positivist methodology of scientific reductionism, by declaring the rigid separation of facts and values, leaves us to wonder if nature itself truly respects this division in all its processes, especially those of evolutionary emergence. Sometimes the naturalistic fallacy is cited here. But how do we know that evolution doesn't process values amidst facts, this is a naturalistic fashion? 

Darwin and his successors, making natural selection the fundamental axiom of explanation, have attempted considerable ad hoc extensions of great ingenuity to make selfishness the source of morality. This dramatic play of opposites has produced some exotic attempts to 'save the paradigm' in the theories of group and kin selection. These theories are essentially logical phantoms attempting to puzzle through the paradox of making selfishness the basis for its opposite. But none of this answers to the real issue, which is to explicate, and show evidence for, the emergence of an 'ethical' agent. The issue of ethics is really one of the freedom or potential freedom to act according to an 'ought', and it is almost by definition not going to be explained by the mechanization of valuation via natural selection. This issue gives us a hint that Darwinian style explanation is wrong in principle and wildly off the mark in practice. We must see if we can find any actual data that will give us a hint as to what the evolution of ethics might be like. We don’t have far to look.

The Axial Age and values As we examine the historical dynamic behind the phenomenon of the Axial Age we see the explicit transformation of values in a complete and balanced spectrum of opposites. Religion, philosophy, science emerge together in a mysterious seeding process that occurs very rapidly, and over independent cultural regions. Remarkably, this seems to show a balanced spectrum of values, a shotgun approach.

In general, a theory of ethical behavior must explicate the consciousness of an ethical agent, and produce a model of choice-based behavior. But theories of evolution cannot yet account for consciousness. To make ethical consciousness an epiphenomenona of natural selection, and to propose that it arises as an adaptation in the game of survival beggars the nature of the phenomenon itself. What’s more, this approach creates a de facto standard of ethics based on the evolutionary ‘value’ of pure selfishness.

Further, a suspicious resemblance to economic ideology arises at this point. Even as you reduce ethics you produce one in disguise, and the implicit ethical character of 'survival of the fittest' and 'competitive struggles' instantly creates a substitute ethics. This fails to account for the facts of the case, which shows that man, at least, is impelled to react against his own (supposed) evolution, in the Darwinian sense. Why is altruism such a problem for Darwinism? Is it any more metaphysical to posit the existence of a selfish beast? 

Selection and altruism One of the most notable challenges to Darwinists lies in the phenomenon of altruism. And why isolate this one character from the totality, unless some agenda is at work? Why is selfishness thought so compatible with physicalism? The contradiction between the implicit selfishness of natural selection and the phenomenon of altruism has been the object of considerable theory in the realm of population genetics, i.e. theories of group selection and kin selection. This bag of tricks to make altruism a secondary derivation from the tenets of selection is a set of abstractions never really verified in practice, and we will soon see another approach to the question based on the evidence of history. There is nothing, however, that prevents two forms of explanation holding simultaneously, in the sense that degrees of mechanized behavior can change gears and become more conscious. However, a purely genetic model to explain altruism is an artificial restriction of basic enquiry, and leaves us with various paradoxes of theory. 

Huxley It is significant that T. H. Huxley, Darwin's great defender, began to sense the problems with strict Darwinism in his later work, Evolution and Ethics. He attempted to work through the seeming contradiction that while natural selection produces one style of behavior, history itself shows that man is forced to act against this principle in practice. His 'evolution' seems to be against natural selection. The question remains, whence this 'second' form of evolution? 

Evolution and religion The Axial period shows clearly that the evolution of religion is more than genetic. Attempts to explain religion and its evolution are forced by Darwinists into a series of ad hoc extrapolations based on the value of religion in the game of survival. But such thinking is stopped in its tracks by the evidence of the Axial Age, where we see two world religions emerge in a complex transformation of short duration.

The problems here, whose connection to the issues of early evolution is unclear, become very problematical in the attempt to understand the descent of man. Something is missing if we simply declare that the phenomenon of man is generated without meaning or that the emergence of complex consciousness occurs by random evolution or chance mutations. For example, the sudden appearance of highly developed forms of art in the period of the Great Explosion asks for something more than the mutating gene to effect an extraordinary arrival at an unprecedented level of self-awareness. As we explore the eonic effect in the following chapters we will discover a surprise here: evolution in our sense has its finger in the pie of complex art forms and their historical realization.

Thus, one of the reasons for the confusion of the Darwin debate is that the right way to do science might be the wrong way to do evolution. To be sure, there are few ways that are better as a preliminary to a more sophisticated science needed to match the phenomena under enquiry. But the strategy of explanation needs to be something better than the elimination of the problem by making it logically consistent with natural selection. That this should precipitate conflict with religion is hardly surprising, and even if we champion a secular stance toward religion, it is hard to avoid the feeling that the research program of evolutionary biology on this question is a failure step one in the midst of the great success of its expansion of our knowledge. And part of the problem is the confusion of ‘theories’ with ‘protocols of action’. How we should act is not given to us by a theory. A theory proposes a causal explanation of action, but that by definition is not a protocol of action. Action requires choice, and we could choose to act against the theory, raising questions about its claims for causality. We are stuck trying to explain the freedom to act. We could eliminate that freedom in the name of science, but then we would be stuck with a typical situation where we would ‘preach the theory’ to something who choose to defy it. That freedom to act is an obstinate given.

There is actually no mystery here: the subject of evolution is complex, has a different character from that of a point mass in physics. We must reckon with the sense of meaning, consciousness, and deliberation that are, by definition, subject to contra-causal forms of explanation. The issue must be the 'evolution of the freedom' to choose between different courses of action. This would seem to apply to the case of man, or else the later stages of primate evolution, and there the point remains that mechanized explanations of ethics are not ethics. So, is ethical behavior an illusion, as strict positivism must claim? These are actually issues carefully addressed earlier in the Enlightenment, before Darwin, with such figures as Kant standing out by their careful consideration of the implications of the rise of Newtonian physics.  

Practical Reason The philosophy of Kant made a formal distinction of ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ reason. This kind of distinction arises inexorably as we confront the attempts to extend physicalist explanation to human agents.

If a reductionist program essentially demands the mechanization of all phenomena under consideration, then ethical behavior must become an epiphenomenon for a physical process, in this case natural selection. Science defined in this fashion is suspiciously barren in its efforts to explicate the phenomena under consideration. 

One of the ironic twists of the legacy of Darwinism lies in the evolution of T. H. Huxley's own view of this issue. Later in his career he began to point to the paradox that, while we ascribe man's emergence to evolution, our behavior in the present reacts against the implications of this evolution. We are impelled to contradict the very basis of what we claim is evolutionary. It is as if a second evolution has come into being to challenge the first. How do we account for this? What is the source of this second evolutionary process? 

Note: System and free activity The debate over free will often complicates this kind of discussion. In order to proceed we need to detour through the discourse of the metaphysics of freedom. But in practical terms we don’t have to assume anything about the abstraction ‘free will’, and can make do with a simple distinction of the action of a system and the free activity related to it. Freedom itself might be evolving and be ‘unfree’ at the starting gate. The paradox is resolved by considering degrees of freedom, or self-consciousness. The question of causality and freedom is very complex, but there is a simple way to proceed by looking at the question of choice, as a given from our experience. Choice is real, whether or not we ascribe that to ‘free will’ or not. There is also a kind of dynamics of this duality of a ‘system acting’, causally or not, and an agent given choices in that system. Examples are numerous.

Computer/User GUI's As an example, we might consider the situations in which free choice appears, without getting distracted by the question of free will. One example might be the distinction of two types of computer programs. One is deterministic variety that proceeds from start to finish in a preprogrammed fashion. Another might be the situation created by GUI program where a user interacts with a computer. First the computer acts, then the user responds, and so on. We need not make any claims about free will or determinism to see that this second situation is as natural as any other. And whatever we do, we cannot explain away the existence or possibility of this situation. The context of ethics is similar. We must account for the situations in which ethical agents bifurcate the potential of unrealized events by the very nature of their considered choices. 

The Darwin debate revolves around the claims and definitions of naturalism. The project of science is the discipline of methodological naturalism. We can certainly embrace naturalism, but its definition cannot prejudge the issue of what nature itself shows to be the case. We are stuck with the obstinate Cartesian legacy of dualism, leaving our naturalistic assumptions schizophrenic. Religious critics then proceed to the opposite confusion of spiritualizing the leftovers at the limits of reductionism. The glaring lack of any account of the evolution of consciousness ought to have made Darwinian certainties close to preposterous, but it is assumed in advance that some scenario of adaptation can account for this. 

Even as Darwinism challenges the legacy of metaphysics, its claims for evolution are forced to impinge on this realm with tacit assumptions that belong to the same genre. The problem is, first, the complexity of the organism, and its intangible mysteries such as the nature of the 'will', if such exist, in the human evolutionary development of ethical behavior. 

If we invoke science we should recall its history, and the moment of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. Descartes not only founds the science of analytic geometry, he creates his famous dualism of body and consciousness. This dualism is forever rejected, but never transcended, although the appearance of Spinoza produces a new perspective on the question that will be the undercurrent of a classic Enlightenment debate. Newton, beside his great achievements in physics, nonetheless exempts the human will from his dynamics. In the wake of Rousseau, it is the figure of Kant, beside Hume, who, embracing the system of Newton, formalized a more refined version of this dualism, in a classic gesture arising during the so-called crisis of the Enlightenment. And it is significant that Kant stands at the dawn of the rise of evolutionary biology, with a set of critiques that can mediate the contradictions of causality, freedom, and teleology, especially in the analytical study of organisms. The onset of the positivistic period completely bypasses this important stage in the development of the modern social and biological sciences.

 It is not surprising, and yet remarkable, therefore that the work of the philosopher Kant is too little considered in the dialectical collisions of science and religion, since his system of philosophy addressed wholesale the problematic that pervades not only the philosophies of rationalist theology, but of the empiricist tradition as well. In fact, positivism is a form of collapsed Kantianism and it is a pity that scientific methodology, mostly through reductionist downshifting, has lost his analysis of the boundaries of science. 

In essence the question is simple. The need for a 'science of metaphysics' is the first step to a 'science of history and/or evolution'. But it is just this requirement that proves the stumbling block.  In the preface to his famous first critique Kant isolated the three great issues of the metaphysical tradition destined to get into trouble on the way to a 'science of metaphysics': that of divinity, followed by those of soul and free will. To these we should add the question of teleology, and note the way Kant considered teleology within the bounds of methodological naturalism, albeit ambiguously. The questions of divinity, soul, and free will demand proofs of existence, and Kant exposed the way that the road to these three proofs is beset with contradictions. They are metaphysical because they stand beyond the empirical.

The important issue here is that while we can easily agree, for example, that a 'soul' question (there are a multiplicity of such) is metaphysical, we might forget that its antithesis, the negation of the existence of soul, is equally metaphysical. The very term 'existence' is unclear in this case. The possibility that definable 'soul' has a reality but is beyond the possibility of knowledge would prove a severe check to a theory of the organism, and, unfortunately, that is just where Darwinian theory is going wrong. We can easily predict, then, that a theory such as Darwin's will become ambiguous on these three issues, even as it has banished the fourth. There can be no mystery to the Darwin debate. Each of these questions enters into the ambiguity of evolutionary theory. We see Darwinists attempting to claim that free will rises in the context, once again, of natural selection, and adaptation, a very peculiar approach, one with no evidentiary basis. We should demand the strictest evidence of this, and we rapidly discover just how difficult demonstration would prove there. We need a much broader approach. 

We notice immediately that the conflict of science and religion, notably Darwinians and fundamentalists, impinges on the first, soon followed by the second, the third creating a dilemma even in the context of secular culture. The monotheistic religions have shown an obsessive reluctance to yield ground on the issue of divinity in history, hence evolution. The Eastern religions have not yielded an inch on the question of 'soul' (although Buddhism gives the misleading appearance of rejecting the idea of ‘soul’), would grant the problematic shown by Kant, yet demonstrate methods of enquiry into issues of self. And the core concepts of modernity, its definitional liberalisms, are equally problematical in relation to the causal monism of the defining scientism of the modern era. 

The principle of freedom shows ironically the way in which secular thought is entangled in metaphysical ambiguity as much as the religionist, and this idea creates a more subtle version of the drama of theists and atheists. For the will to freedom soon shades into the hopeless quagmire of the 'will of god'.

Intelligent design The current design challenge to Darwinism offers no relief or clarification of the problems with Darwinism. Note that the design argument is perched ambiguously between the question of monotheistic divinity and some obscure polytheistic 'will to design'. The question of supernatural teleology lurks in mix. Kant and Hume produced some classic (attempted) refutations of the design argument, which is a variant of our first metaphysical barrier, the divinity proof. The design argument has the same problem as natural selection: proper verification.

The concept of freedom, behind that of free will, is indispensable for the proper discourse of secularism itself, with its defense of freedom and autonomy. We can proceed in an indirect way by looking at the historical phenomenon of freedom with or without the far more elusive proof of the existence of 'free will'.

Freedom evolving It is not necessary to assume the existence of free will to posit an ‘evolution of freedom’, since the evolving system might show ‘evolving toward’ rather than ‘result achieved’.  Any such system will provoke a paradoxical question, What causes freedom? This question was directly addressed by Kant. We must distinguish the macro and micro aspects of ‘freedom  evolving’, a strange complication that will in fact lead to the solution of the problem.  And it might be the case that as observers looking backward we are still short of the final stage.  So we need not assume ‘free will’ as yet in the observer, able to document earlier stages of evolution.

We can adopt a double strategy, simply introducing an 'idea of freedom' as an extra axiom, to be used for empirical study of the history of freedom, and/or creating an explicitly dualistic model that learns to live with a contradiction. We will also have still another tactic, a surrogate for 'free will', which we will call 'self-consciousness', which can be taken with chameleon neutrality as either in the causal category, or in the freedom category. 

But Kant's thinking enforces a severe discipline of the limits of our knowledge on these questions, and, this being the case, we can see that while the affirmation of a thesis on divinity is taken as metaphysical, its negation is destined to suffer a similar fate. We can see at once that, if Kant is right, then the theory of natural selection, the spearhead of much secular thought in a post-religious mode, is forced into a task that it cannot fulfill. 

As we proceed to examine history in the light of evolution we might, since our task is a fairly straightforward one of demonstrating an empirical pattern, restrain explicit assumptions on all three of these assumptions. Kant's first critique can be approached in many ways, one of them being simply the question of the 'antinomies' that infest our processes of reason. The classic Third Antinomy expresses the problematic of evolution and ethics directly:

Kant’s Third Antinomy The crux of the contradiction pervading evolutionary and ethical ideas is posed in the classic ‘Dialectic ’ of Kant’s first Critique. “Causality according to laws of nature is not the only kind of causality from which the phenomenon of the world can be derived. It is necessary, in order to explain them, to assume a causality through freedom.” Its antithesis is: “There is no freedom: everything in the world takes place solely in accordance with laws of nature.”

These antinomies are posed in the form of a debate whose thesis and antithesis are both established by logical argumentation, provoking a dilemma that can only be resolved by a transformation of our basic perspective on space, time, and the representation of them in our commonsense perspectives. But if we take the simple duality of the statement of the antinomy directly as given in the starting point of observation and reflection we can see that our questions about evolution and ethics are simply variant confusions of Kant's dialectic. That the question ‘What causes freedom’ suffers ‘logical collapse’ requiring a new language is no final objection to this approach. Our difficulty with the depiction of the evolutionary agent rises from the way in which we take the antithesis given by Kant as the sole mode of explanation. It is entirely problematical to be bringing in two forms of causality, but the dilemma is there, that we cannot reduce the potential of freedom to the level of causality and produce an account of evolutionary ethics. That this issue should prove the clue to any theory of evolution as such will become clear as we proceed. 

One of the earliest stages of the confusion over evolution lay in the conflict with the outstanding 'Nature Philosophy', especially the Hegelian version that was influential at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This reaction to the great foundation created by Kant has obscured his contribution, which is very well adapted to the needs of science. The sudden collapse of this tide of idealism, so visible in the generation of Feuerbach and Marx, left its mark on evolutionary thought as it absorbed the influences of Comte and the new positivism. But even as it embraced this rejection of metaphysics Darwin's theory of natural selection unwittingly adopted a metaphysical stance of its own. This springs from the totalizing character of the theory, which is required to reduce all organismic phenomena to scenarios of adaptation. That is not a realistic research project.

Transcendental idealism Lost in the progression of modern philosophy, next to the emergence of positivism, is the Kantian tour de force, transcendental idealism, a unique hybrid (with a misleading terminology) of causality/freedom issues, and easily taken as a superset of standard scientific thinking. The ‘positivism done right’ allows us to restate, if not fully solve, the issues of human action and scientific law in a workable form.

Despite the endless theological controversies over evolution, Darwinists, by and large, with important exceptions, tend in fact to adopt a proper stance on the issue of divinity. Darwin's theory merely wishes to explore the naturalistic implications of evolution without ad hoc theistic explanations. This is not a commitment to atheism, or some claim to have disproved the existence of god, but simply the perception that the data of evolution strongly suggest a naturalistic interpretation. And this approach has proven fruitful indeed. However, it is true that many Darwinists attempt to extend this formulation to use natural selection as argument in favor of hard claims on theistic issues. This is not in itself illegitimate but, by and large, simply creates a new metaphysical myth, and an egregious ambition that simply provokes the dialectic ad infinitum that we see in the history of Darwinism.

Questions of soul are the real nemesis of Darwinism. These are the most insidious, because materialism overwhelmingly tends to the negation of the soul idea. This should not be confused with the 'soul beliefs' espoused by monotheists. Such beliefs are as open to challenge as any religious doctrine, in a secular age. But this is tantamount to a declaration of the non-existence of soul, crossing the tripwire of metaphysical claims.

Buddhism/Hinduism The ambiguity of the term ‘soul’ is highlighted in the religions of the Indic stream where the object of religion is to transcend the ‘soul’ taken as an envelope of natural man, an aspect of his self within nature. Soul is an aspect of nature, although beyond our immediate psychological introspection.

The question of 'soul' is very provocative, and it is more fruitful simply to think in terms of the organism, and its definition. Is the organism a purely space-time entity, or does it have a complex dimensionality? This issue is especially vexacious because it suggests that we cannot properly observe the organism at all. But this then preempts any theory in closed form. We might consider the bare minimum issue here, the distinction of computer and computer program, to see that such issues resemble those of mathematical Platonism, for example. 

Transcendental Deduction A classic moment in Kant's thinking is the attempt to infer something beyond the boundaries of the temporal/causal in the realm of self. This deduction (which is a legal term with another meaning, and not a proof) tries to infer a something that in integrating experience must stand beyond experience. We will not pursue this here except to note that the term 'transcendental' is not the same as 'supernatural' and is distinguished from 'transcendent'. A crucial issue here is that our intuitive sense of self is a represenation of a noumenal reality beyond our sensibility and understanding. We must confront the problematic possibility that the 'core self' of man, or indeed of the organism, is beyond knowledge, a disastrous possibility for evolutionary theories. And theory of adaptation fails at once if the 'core self' has no spatial or temporal extension. 

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