Inquiry

I think one of the major differences between Integral evolutionary spirtuality and Intelligent Design is the position of Spirit within the Universe.

If Spirit is assumed to lie outside of Universe then in order for it to have influence within it would have to suspend normal causal operation of the Universe. God has to descend to earth from heaven, his divine design in hand, go 'ka-pow' and wallah new proto-bacteria. Evolution take it from there.

In Intelligent design this is the underlying assumption and thus it tries to create 'gaps' in evolution theory for God to exist in. In order for Spirit to have presence in the world evolutionary theory has to be partially wrong and Intelligent design attempts to propose just that.

On the other hand Integral evolutionary spirtuality doesn't fight science, its informed by it. It doesn't oppose or try to modify evolution, it includes and transcends it in classic integral style. It doesn't say that scientific evolution is wrong in the slightest, just that its a partial lower-right quadrant view of evolution.

Spirit is not assumed to lie outside the Universe, but is intimately involved in it at every level. It is evolution, or is the substrate for evolution, or provides a subtle lean or push for evolution depending on how you want to view it. But suffice to say its influence is for the most part subtle and continuous. And if you put on your 3rd person objective worldview glasses on, it looks almost exactly like scientific evolution.

Yes, and isn't it aggravating? These are typically people influenced by Richard Dawkins or similar theorists, who can't seem to conceive that anyone might have a view on evolution that regards the whole process as more than natural selective pressures acting on completely random mutations, and not be some kind of fundamemtalist hiding behind dodgy scientific arguments! They completely fail to separate their highly dubious (to say the least) materialist metaphysics from the accepted facts of evolution. Part of the trouble is that the orthodox neo-Darwinian version of evolutionary theory is so tailor-made for materialism, and to deny that the whole show could have just 'happened to happen' (Ken's "philosophy of 'oops'") tends to ensnare you in arguments about probability theory, which few people (includig many evolutionary theorists!) are really competent to adjudicate. Just look at the furious debates about the evolution of the eye, or the wing. The section in 'A Brief History of Everything' where Ken buys into this debate is probably one of the most fiercely criticised passges in his entire corpus. (Not helped, I'm afraid to say, by rhetoric which says that 'everyone' agrees, Ken! You must know that Dawkins and his disciples never will!).

I was brought up a fundamentalist, and have never believed that evolution could have been a completely mindless process, at any stage. When I came to accept the reality of evolution I naturally shifted in the direction of evolutionary spirituality, and when I encountered it knew it to be the only way I could now think of such matters. I agree with the other post that the immanence of the divine in the process definitely separates us from the Intelligent Design people. Such subtleties are lost on the Dawkins mob, however. For them, any deviation from the idea of a completely mindless, meaningless, directionless process is outrageous scientific heresy and evidence of religious fanaticism! Clearly, we have to negate this and point out, as clearly as possible, that they are relying on bad metaphysics and not good science at this point.

Keith Price

Great question. I remember as a teenager being struck by one of those intuitive "Eureka moments": the very meaning of sentient life in the evolving universe is to participate in the process of God's own self-realization... From this very instant, for probably 6 months afterwards, I thought I was the only person in history to realize that "Evolution is a God-in-the-making" - that is, until I eventually discovered Teilhard de Chard, Sri Aurobindo, Whitehead, Frank Tipler and then Ken Wilber... at which point the insomnia subsided.

In regards to ID, the key difference here is that Evolutionary Spirituality insists that evolution is a "fact" while Intelligent Design maintains that it is just a "theory", and so the former is more scientific and open to the wide range of available evidence in cosmology, genetics, biology, anthropology, geology, paleontology, developmental psychology, etc... whereas the latter only seeks to punch holes in the Neo-Darwinian theory and therefore create a God of the gaps....  and room for an alternative theory... and a God that will be dead at any point that evolutionary science fills these so-called gaps with further knowledge...And as many scientists have recently pointed out - there are many, many examples of species that seem not to have been very intelligently designed at all but rather bungled together in a blind, accidental and frankly rather queer manner...

Another difference (as noted in an above thread) is that evolutionary spirituality affirms that God is present within the world-historical process, just as the entire world-historical process transpires within God (i.e. pan-en-theism: the One-in-the many, and the Many-in-the-one) whereas ID seems to hold to classical theism and super-natural intervention, and ascribes to "creation ex nihilo" which is a 2nd century invention of early Church bishops... In this regards, the notion that God is fully present in the midst of all the accident, waste, pain and suffering of the evolutionary process is profoundly incarnational and fits perfectly well with the gospel of Jesus Christ, but fantasies of omnipotence tend to be much more convenient...

And the key difference between Evolutionary Spirituality and Neo-Darwinian theory (natural selection + random mutations) is the issue of whether or not evolution has a direction, a purpose, a goal, a far-off Omega point... Neo-Darwinians insist that the process is blind and purposeless, Integral Evolutionary Spirituality argues that there is a "secret impulse" to the process, an intrinsic capacity to go beyond what went before, and Eros (Love), an overall direction of increasing complexity/consciousness...

This is a contentious point. The scientific evidence suggests that the evolutionary process is indeed shot through with uncertainty, radical contingency, meaningless suffering and death... Even if there is a direction, it has a horrendous cost - 99% of the species that has ever been evolved on Earth are now extinct, and as S. J. Gould never ceased to remind us: if we re-wind the evolutionary tape of life on Earth and play it over and over again the chances that our species would come into existence are incredibly small...

But there is a new publication (I haven't read it yet) that seems to come close to settling this question: "The Deep Structure of Biology, Is Convergence Sufficiently Ubiquitous to Give a Directional Signal?" Edited by well known paleontologist and philosopher of science Simon Conway Morris... This book (2008) argues against the entrenched Neo-Darwinian orthodoxy and claims that there may indeed be a directional trend towards increasing complexity, so that even if our particular species is not a guaranteed outcome of evolution (divine providence), we can at least predict that something with a nervous system and a complex brain would eventually have come about... and of course, given this - only God knows where the process may be heading...

My position is that if we gather all the scientific evidence (natural selection, mutation, self-organization, chaos/complexity theory, convergence, punctuated equilibrium) then there does indeed seem to be, tucked away within the evolutionary process, an intrinsic capacity for Life to overcome even the most insurmountable obstacles... every catastrophic mass extinction event in the history of Life on this planet has ushered in new kinds of species with new, more complex body plans... These relatively abrupt transformations are indeed radically contingent and shot through with uncertainty, accident, and waste - as dominant species die off, peripheral species take over environmental niches - the normal criterion of adaptive fitness (survival and reproduction) are overturned, and the outcome is structurally unforeseeable... but we can see in the evolutionary process the inherent tendency for Life to go beyond what went before, and almost always in the face of crisis, instability, and vulnerability to destruction... So Neo-Darwinian theory explains the adaptive fit of organisms to their environment (microevolution) but something else is needed to explain the relatively abrupt origination of new species (macroevolution), and maybe this is where we see the creative impulse of evolution at work... The real problem here is not THAT evolution happens, but HOW it happens... how does God act in the world? And on this one there is still a lot of work to do... 

"Become passers-by" (Jesus of Nazareth)

The AQAL approach incorporates the "Systems Theory" models into its conceptions of evolution.  Many of the Systems Theories were developed initially in the field of biology to explain the emergent wholeness of cells.  These general concepts were then applied to pretty much every field.  Ironically it wasn't applied to evolution, where the atomistic view still prevails.  The major difference between "purely random mutation" evolution and "Integral" evolution is the inclusion of these scientific systemic perspectives.  No, conception of Spirit is required to see the isomorphisms of differentiation, integration, emergence, convergence, etc...