More than Adaptive

An article in the "Ideas" section of Sunday's Boston Globe (9/3/06) caught my eye: "Survival of the Harmonious." The byline reads, "Mounting evidence suggests that human abeings are hard-wired to appreciate music. What researchers want to know now is why our distant ancestors evolved music in the first place." Researchers have concluded that humans are hard-wired to be musical and they are now shifting tneir focus to the question of how: how did this happen. This is a difficult task given the constraints under which they operate. The only reason allowable that it has to have some adaptive benefit-adaptive for survival, that is. Given the closed material universe in which evolutionary psychology exists, I thought much of the discussion was quite thin and implausible.

Quantum physicist and Anglican theologian John Polkinghorne offers a far more plausible explanation. While holding to an evolutionary view of human development, he does not paint himself into the corner of scientific materialism, the view that only matter and energy exist. As he writes in his book, Exploring Reality, "...elusive to evolutionary explanation are many human aesthetic experiences. What survival value has Mozart's music given us, however profuoudly it enriches our livs in othyer ways?" If you live in a room with only one window, your view of the world will be greatly curtailed. Polkinghorne argues

For the religious believer, the source of these (rational, moral, and aesthetic) dimensions lie in the unifying will of the Creator, a fundamental insight that makes it intelliglible not only that the universe is transparent to our scientific enquiry, but also that it is the areena of moral decision and the carrier of beauty. Those dimensions of reality, the understanding of whose character lies geyond tyhe narrow explanationry horizon of nautral science, are not epiphenomenal froth on the surface of fundamentally mate4ial world, but they are gifts expressive of the nature of this world's Creator. Thus...aesthetic delight is a sharing in the Creator's joy in creation, just as the wonderful cosmic order discovered byscience is truly a reflection of the Mind of God. Thinking about human experience in this way affords the pssibility of a satisfyingly unified account of multilayered reality.

It is infortunate that those stuck in the materialist mindset blind themselves to the greater possibilities to the richness and variety and meaningfulness of the universe.