Harmony and beauty, disease and suffering: indeterminacy a necessary condition for free will.

• Author: Zatti, Mario

The order and harmony of the universe could be much more easily reconciled with the iniquity of nature (incomprehensible natural calamities) if we were to accept without thought that the universe is accidental and not something responding to a deliberate creative project. The exercise of free will, however, is possible only in the presence of a certain measure of indeterminacy, and this necessarily entails the possibility of unpredictable disaster. It follows, then, in the light of the Anthropic Principle, that, if man is to exist as a subject endowed with free will, the iniquity of nature, pain and suffering must also exist. The latter, it will be argued, are profoundly related to free will, not only because they may stem from an evil use of it, but also because they are the sine qua non for its very existence.

Introduction

In addition to the evil directly due to human perversity, we also witness the cruelty of nature. In addition to the victims of the ravages of war, we see those afflicted by the violence of hurricanes and earthquakes, or by the malignant nature of innumerable diseases. And it is by no means so easy for the rational mind to accept the many faces of nature itself, the beauty and order of which, according to many, are the expression of a creative divinity.

Unquestionably, the harmony of the universe requires the changing of its parts, and St. Augustine identifies the fundamental human limitation of being confined to a temporal existence as the metaphysical root of all evil. But St. Augustine himself, when recounting the death of Tagaste's twenty-year-old friend, expresses desperation and an inability to attribute any meaning to it.

It is indeed comprehensible that the process of becoming and of being in time may already be a form of dying and suffering, but what is outrageous, as Moschetti has noted (1989), "is often the absurd way people die. Death does not always come about simply as a natural biological process, as when a ripe fruit drops from the bough, but often it occurs in circumstances which our sense of piety finds most repugnant." Moschetti adds: "The tragic thing ... is indeed tragic, in that, whenever an incomprehensible calamity occurs, it profoundly undermines any religious sentiment, giving rise to the suspicion of a profound disconnection of being ..." (Moschetti, 1989).

It is this aspect of pain and suffering and its relation to the order of being that we wish to address in this article.

The Darwinian response

The Darwinian response to the iniquity of nature is precisely along the lines described by Moschetti as "tragic." Natural philosophy, as influenced by post-Darwinian biology, is, in fact, mainly a philosophy of human desperation. As Jacques Monod says (1972), "It is true that science attacks values; not directly, since it is no judge of values and has to ignore their existence, but it destroys all the ontogenetic myths or philosophies on which the animistic tradition ... has founded its values, morality, duties, rights and prohibitions. The ancient alliance is shattered; man is at long last aware of being alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe from which he has emerged by chance."

In effect, there is no reason to wonder at the coexistence of harmony and precariousness if everything is governed by chance and the universe is accidental.

The same philosophy has been voiced more recently by D. C. Dennett (1995), who writes that Darwin has changed for ever what it means to ask and answer the question Why? There is no future for any of our sacred myths. And he cites a passage from Locke, defining it as the "conceptual block" existing prior to the Darwinian revolution: "Matter can never begin to be; if we assume that it exists ab aeterno as Matter pure and simple without Motion, Motion cannot begin to be; if we assume that Matter and Motion are pre-existent or eternal, then Thought can never begin to be." Darwin, on the other hand, says: give me time, and I will produce evolution, complexification, design, and thought through a process of selection among mutations produced by chance.

In the generalisation of the use of the algorithm (selection among equally probable variants) discovered by Darwin and soon to become, in its application to prebiological and cosmological evolution, "omnivorous" (according to the definition of Dennett himself, 1995), lies the reason for the evolution of Darwinism itself from a scientific model to a fully fledged philosophy of chance and necessity.

According to Atkins's application of this algorithm (Atkins, 1997), "universes are created all the while and the present collection of universes is infinite." One deduces that it is necessary that our apparently ordered universe should exist, because, Atkins claims, "any event occurs, whatever its likelihood, so long as it is not absolutely impossible," or, in other words, the selection among infinite variants is a game where success is assured, a game in which the Darwinian algorithm leads to a kind of metaphysics which is the metaphysics of material actual infinity. (1) But with such arguments--i.e., those invoking the condition of infinite time and matter--the concept of probability is annulled and everything can be demonstrated.

Intrinsic laws of order of complex unities

Darwinism ignores inner causes of evolution--forms, archetypes, attractors--which are preferential laws for the stability of structures without which, even if such structures formed, their permanence would not be explained.

The fundamental integration, for a theory of evolution, requires the acknowledgement of the unity of sets capable of self-organisation: thus, life may have originated in a kind of sudden phase change, in which a network of...