Self-Aware Science: Evolution is Intentional

I have hitherto sometimes spoken as if the variations [...] had been due to chance. This, of course, is a wholly incorrect expression, but it serves to acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause of each particular variation.

—Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

Materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

The standard view of evolution says that evolution is random, that life is accidental, and that nature has no purpose. But what about its purpose, its goal, its intent?

Science is surely searching for something, and is it not also of nature?

Materialism was unable to form a coherent picture of the world because it ignores that there is something forming pictures of the world: it lacks a useful understanding of Man because it ignores Man’s striving for understanding.

Materialism failed because it is blind unto itself. It falls for the illusion and chases idols on top of idols in eternal return. So we get a knowledge with no meaning, a culture with no purpose, and a world with no light.

It is by no quantum probability, special relativity, weak force, strong force, genetic drift or chemical reaction that you are reading this piece: it is because you want to that you are reading this.

The Will exists.

It is real, palpable, it is a part of nature. But it is not visible or touchable. It is beneath and beyond the physical spectrum of perception—a non-visible force, a meta-physical natural phenomenon.

And it is observable.

It is the snail slithering up the tree, the tree digging down through the Earth. It is the orchid opening up, the infant learning how to walk. It is our getting up in the morning, and it is you reading this sentence.

But because it is not visible, touchable, or measurable, the Will does not exist for the materialist worldview. And you will not see this in a scientific journal because it is the blind-spot of contemporary science, its yearned-for substratum, its buried keystone.

What kind of world-picture leaves out the world-creating force? An innocent one, a naïve mentality, one that is not yet self-aware.

But we are self-aware, and evolution continues.

And as we see beneath the surface and embrace the Will to live into our understanding of the organism, then we see that Life and evolution are not all that accidental, coincidental, random, etc. No—we are nature. The universe is intelligent. Reality is organic. And evolution is intentional.

The end, the goal, the finality of evolution is nothing physical though, which is why materialism sees it not.

The purpose is pre-physical: biological evolution is the adaptation of mind; the calibration of consciousness; the unfolding of reality; the unraveling of existence.

The self-creation of the world. An embodied world.

And it is more trial and error than it is random mutation. For how random is science? Did Einstein randomly come up with his great theory, Darwin accidentally write On the Origin of Species, and Copernicus un-intentionally put the Sun as the center of his system?

No, science is the search for truth; the exploration of experience; the purposeful proliferation and natural selection of psychological adaptations. And a perfect microcosm for evolution: the natural progression towards ever more conclusive living drafts of this embodied world.

The free market of mentalities; the cross pollination of ideas; the natural selection of belief systems—the increasing perfection of the walking universe.

So when people have a problem with the materialist conception of evolution, it is with good reason: when researchers and educators claim that life is accidental and purposeless, they are professing plain ignorance—in the words of Darwin. Ignorance served as science.

But creation continues, and science evolves.

Are we ready to embrace intention, purpose, responsibility? Does science dare uncover itself?