July 29, 2007
Man and Monkey
Wiker and Witt enter debate over design v. Darwin
by Terry Scambray
Private Papers

A review of A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature by Benjamin Wiker & Jonathan Witt. (InterVarsity, 2006, 256 pp.) This review appeared originally in the April edition of The New Oxford Review.

Could a monkey with a computer and a lot of time on his hands, or his paws, whichever, write Hamlet?

Legal scholar Phillip Johnson thinks that's not the right question, for it gives away far too much to any dexterous monkey. He prefers to put the question this way: "Could a monkey with a pencil ever write Hamlet?" Or Spillaine? Or a grocer list, for that matter?

In A Meaningful World, Ben Wiker and Jonathan Witt take their collective turn at answering this question, however it is put. And their answer is a thorough and exhaustive response that demonstrates that the world, including denizens like Shakespeare and Euclid, Robert Boyle and even hard-wired materialists like Steven Weinberg, is too complex to have been produced by time and chance.

Not only is Hamlet beyond the chance creation of a monkey with a computer, but also the immeasurable bounty and beauty of the world reveals untold levels of ordered complexity and sublime simplicity.

Early in the book, Wiker and Witt show that the crisis of the West is not a product of the artists and philosophers who have predicted and encouraged all manner of decay and decadence for the last 150 years. The loss of confidence and the reductionist, cultural relativism that the West is presently enduring are emanations, but not from the flabby, subjective penumbra of art, so defined by some. But rather such emanations come from another source with unquestioned credibility.

The real source of the problem is science or, more properly, a version of science that has patronizingly informed us that, of course, the world made itself. And Darwin demonstrated this truth, and his materialist epigones in physics, chemistry and biology are only providing the details to his 19^th-century certitude. As Wiker & Witt put it: "A poison has entered human culture. It's the assumption that science has proven that the universe is without purpose, without meaning — proven it so clearly that one need not even produce an argument [for] materialism is now part of the cultural air that we breathe."

But in their relatively short but intense book, Wiker & Witt challenge this materialistic assumption by seeing if it matches up to the realities within art, mathematics and chemistry. What they demonstrate is that this assumption is dwarfed by the grand beauty and complexity of our world and the cosmos beyond.

"The more comprehensible the universe becomes the more it also seems pointless," Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate in physics, has famously written. And Wiker and Witt point to this plenary claim because it encapsulates "precisely the meaninglessness that undergirds both philosophical and banal cultural nihilism, providing retroactive cover both for historical figures like Epicurus and Nietzsche while justifying contemporaries from Sartre to Seinfeld.”

However, Weinberg admits that at the quotidian, ‘retail’ level, scientists build satellites and accelerators and sit for endless hours "working out the meaning of the data that they gather."

Of course.

And as the authors remind us: "Science is a meaningful activity precisely because the universe itself is meaningful and human beings have the strange capacity to understand it." Science would not exist without predictable consistencies and the assured knowledge that the universe is not pointless.

One problem is that Weinberg conflates "pointless" with "random"; the relentless movement of atoms is certainly random, but it does not follow that the movements are pointless. Sloppy diction can turn a physicist into a speculative philosopher, albeit an illogical one.

Certainly materialists can argue that science requires no particular philosophic underpinning since it simply works; it produces anti-biotics, artery probes and space probes. But can a material and, therefore, mindless process create the minds that design such items? C.S. Lewis, for one, argued that mindless material processes could never produce a thinking, rational mind. Which is another way of saying that essence will always precede existence.

Moving from this inherent contradiction within materialism, the book confronts Weinberg's counterpart in biology, Richard Dawkins, and his claim that a monkey with a Mac can write Hamlet. But, as it turns out, Dawkins' hagiographic monkeys are all too monkey-like. For when six monkeys had a computer placed in their cage in an experiment at Plymouth University in England, they defecated on the keyboard when they weren't "bashing the hell out of it with a stone", being apparently "less interested in leaving their marks on literature than in leaving their marks on the computer." They did manage long uninterrupted pages of single letters — "Ss" or "Gs"! — a genre of avant-garde poetry or aesthetic happening that, no doubt, the rest of us can only aspire to appreciate once our petty bourgeois sensitivities are eaten away by the liberating acids of scientific materialism that Dawkins promotes in book after redundant book.

But is it that Dawkins and Weinburg aren't serious about their moonlighting in philosophy and social theory in the way that they are serious about their day jobs as scientists? I mean, after all, the monkey story is obviously a conceit, a suggestive device, right?

Not for Dawkins. He apparently takes such monkeyshines seriously, devoting many pages of his work to this as an analogy for the culling and what he regards as the creative process of natural selection.

Such shallow thinking is buried in short order by Wiker & Witt. They point to all the dead-end intermediate words that such erratic key pounding on a computer might conceivably deposit: "functionless, meaningless deserts which Darwinian selection wouldn't allow since each generation has to be functional."

Besides the entire enterprise is rigged from the beginning because "the computer is headed for the target phrase already programmed into the computer. Thus, the program mimics guided or teleological evolution, not Darwinian evolution."

And there is more. Any part of Shakespeare "is a cipher. Only within a larger unit does it function properly." Sure, Shakespeare is merely a string of letters in the way that "every living thing is just a string of chemical letters. But this is a fundamental error." Just as vision involves more than eyes and the simplest living cell requires a larger context that is astonishingly intricate, so also do Shakespeare's words retain their "depth, elegance, harmony and genius" because their meaning can only be manifested as part of a particular play or as a part of Shakespeare's entire work. It is the "particular and the general in constant creative tension" that create meaning.

And what of the elegant beauty of mathematics? Wiker & Witt ask: "If the universe were random and did not have us in mind, and if our own reasoning capacities and love of beauty were likewise randomly produced, could we reasonably expect math to be the ethereal union of truth and beauty" that it is? Thus Wiker & Witt demonstrate how Euclid, "by virtue of the universality of his demonstration" of the truth of mathematics can appropriately be called the Shakespeare of math. And Euclid's limpid explanation cannot be explained away as a need to satisfy any Oedipal urge, historical necessity, or selfish desire to preserve his own genes.

The American flag may have vanished from the front of our science classrooms, but the periodic table, that boxy configuration of letters and numbers, still hangs there. But what appears as gibberish to the uninitiated offers yet another refined tutorial on the underlying symmetry of nature. Thus the great 19^th-century Russian, chemist, Dmitri Mendeleev, expecting such symmetry, began codifying the chemical elements on separate cards, according to their increasing atomic weight. He soon noted a periodic pattern and "when there was a suspicious leap in atomic weight, [between elements] he boldly" anticipated that elements would be discovered to fill the gaps.  Like any great visionary, he has been proven right: in this case by betting that nature operates in an organized and intelligible way.

None of this is to gainsay the enormous productivity of reductionism as a tool in science. Of course, the telescope and the microscope have led to specialization with all of its breathtaking accomplishments. And Wiker & Witt say as much. But from embryology to chemistry, from mathematics to cosmology, life is a symphony, more like a Shakespeare play where "the drama of growth is determined by the overall plot."

In that parable of relativism where the elephant is surrounded by the blind men, each man specializes in the particular feature of the elephant that he has a hold of. But what is often ignored in that parable is that there is, after all, an elephant.   That is, a truth exists that transcends individual perspectives. Wiker & Witt's plenary treatise reminds us of that, abundantly and elegantly.

Terry Scambray lives and writes in Fresno, California.