Can humanism be made compatible with evolution?
Many atheists I know subscribe to a philosophy/ideology/religion called "Evolutionary Humanism". German philosopher Michael Schmidt-Salomon has even written a manifesto for this movement (already translated into English, in case you are interested).
But what many adherents of 'evolutionary humanism' fail to see is that the two elements are mutually incompatible - if taken seriously and at face value.
"Evolution" means:
- a blind and purposeless process driven by variation plus selection plus reproduction;
- survival of the fittest ;
- the absence of morality (to be a predator or parasite is not reprehensible) ;
- no species is superior to other species (only in the tautological sense that species A spreads at the expense of species B because A has traits that make it "fitter" in a certain environment. In a different environment the roles could be reversed)
"Humanism" - on the contrary - is inherently moral.
- It is morally good to help human beings, even - or especially! - if they are weak and helpless ; - all humans have an unalienable right to live and to flourish;
- all humans have an unalienable dignity - from which "human rights" are deduced (nothing comparable exists in nature!);
- because of their inherent dignity human beings stand out among other animals (if 100 wildebeests die in a flood, that is nature; if 100 humans die in a flood it is a tragedy.)
The conclusion is logically inevitable: Not only Humanism cannot be deduced from evolution: there is no common ground of "evolution" on the one side and "humanism" on the other side; the two have no "interface", just the way an old mechanic typewriter and a computer are incompatible. Both are based on totally different principles.
Therefore, you cannot have it both ways: you cannot embrace a naturalistic world-view and at the same time believe in human supremacy (with its human rights or human dignity).
As Yuval Noah Harari rightly pointed out: Humanism, be it in its socialist, liberal of evolutionary variety, is a kind of religion for modern people who cannot subscribe to any of the traditional versions of religion.
But what many adherents of 'evolutionary humanism' fail to see is that the two elements are mutually incompatible - if taken seriously and at face value.
"Evolution" means:
- a blind and purposeless process driven by variation plus selection plus reproduction;
- survival of the fittest ;
- the absence of morality (to be a predator or parasite is not reprehensible) ;
- no species is superior to other species (only in the tautological sense that species A spreads at the expense of species B because A has traits that make it "fitter" in a certain environment. In a different environment the roles could be reversed)
"Humanism" - on the contrary - is inherently moral.
- It is morally good to help human beings, even - or especially! - if they are weak and helpless ; - all humans have an unalienable right to live and to flourish;
- all humans have an unalienable dignity - from which "human rights" are deduced (nothing comparable exists in nature!);
- because of their inherent dignity human beings stand out among other animals (if 100 wildebeests die in a flood, that is nature; if 100 humans die in a flood it is a tragedy.)
The conclusion is logically inevitable: Not only Humanism cannot be deduced from evolution: there is no common ground of "evolution" on the one side and "humanism" on the other side; the two have no "interface", just the way an old mechanic typewriter and a computer are incompatible. Both are based on totally different principles.
Therefore, you cannot have it both ways: you cannot embrace a naturalistic world-view and at the same time believe in human supremacy (with its human rights or human dignity).
As Yuval Noah Harari rightly pointed out: Humanism, be it in its socialist, liberal of evolutionary variety, is a kind of religion for modern people who cannot subscribe to any of the traditional versions of religion.
Comments (77)
How can humanism be amoral? As I said: if 100 wildebeests die in a flod, that is just nature, but if 100 human beings die (for example refugees drowning in the Mediterranean Sea), it is a tragedy. If you look at the two events with same moral attitude ("shrug it off"), you are certainly not a humanist.
I’m not siding with either of these vague, generalising and rather simple arguments.
I’m also not claiming I disagree with the view that 100 people dying in a flood is worse than 100 wilderbeasts dying in a flood. Nor that I agree with that. I’m not God, I don’t agree or disagree with such things. I have no control over them, so I do what I’m supposed to which is to just take things as they are. I might occasionally choose to not only try and see the world as it is, but also how it ought to be, but I mostly just dismiss such fantasies as useless wishful thinking. But if I could somehow save either the 100 people or the 100 wilderbeests (I don’t know what sort of weird fantastical situation I would be in to be making this decision), then I would choose to save the people. Is this because I’m human, cultured, kind, educated, not a savage, conforming to social standards, soft on the inside, habituated, brainwashed, wise, I do not know. I’d just make that choice, oblivious to the (welcome) side effect that it will make me a more genuine human being, for whatever that means. I also understand that many people would do the same, and many wouldn’t, for this reason or that. The latter contradict your point.
Nowhere do I claim that "human nature is good"
What is your argument that is didn't?
"Nearly 150 years ago, Charles Darwin proposed that morality was a byproduct of evolution, a human trait that arose as natural selection shaped man into a highly social species—and the capacity for morality, he argued, lay in small, subtle differences between us and our closest animal relatives. “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind,” he wrote in his 1871 book The Descent of Man."
In other words, he's saying that morality and evolution have nothing to do with each other. I'm disagreeing.
Precisely the opposite of that. He is saying that evolution shaped humans to be very social, and that required what we would call morality. So it was a sort of byproduct. But I suppose it's not so black and white like that. Being strong, dominating and aggressive might've been often times even more advantageous than just being good to each other and helping each other. But perhaps that is where immorality and savagery came from?
Matias wrote that "Evolution means . . . the absence of morality"
He said that evolution is blind and impartial to such things as morality and only cares about survival and reproduction. He didn't say evolution discriminates against morality, so it'll happily accept morality (or immorality) if that means increased chances of survival and reproduction. For humans it was being moral that was advantageous, or in other words, those that were moral and helpful to each other survived while others perished.
Helping ones kind is not even an exclusively human thing, many other social animals do that, especially herd animals. I don't think buffalos help each other and their offsprings because they read some Greek philosopher on virtue, so it must be an evolutionary thing. Likewise, I don't think lions fight with other visiting male lions in their vicinity because they don't like the newcomer's face. They're built by evolution to do that, because those of their ancestors that did survived and passed on their genes, while those that didn't perished.
If morality is a product of evolution, then what the human is in the order of existing things becomes a puzzle.
But the puzzle is not like describing a quality as coming from different antecedents. Knowing that the source for a particular way of thinking is involved with stuff outside the presuppositions of that thought doesn't mean one has grounds to dismiss it.
To the degree that the assumptions are not compatible with each other should be the caution of comparison as such.
That's just crap.
In prehistory this meant both co-operation and murder, sharing and theft, worship and cannibalism, trading and war. But after civilization, we raised the standard of morality. The very word "civilized" requires some form and degree of morality. Of course this varies from culture to culture and geography to geography. But then again the past century showed us that perhaps we're not all as moral as we'd like to think.
Morality, from an evolutionary standpoint, is a handicap. The person who is prepared to put his morals aside will always stand a better chance than the person who cuts their options by sticking to their morals, however commendable the latter may be.
Now, some of you may argue that morality helps humans survive, but there's a catch here. Being moral means one sticks to their morals no matter what. An immoral person can still conform to morals whenever it suits them, but can also deviate from them if there is more to gain. The key here is flexibility. This is why rich and successful people are often of questionable moral fiber.
That isn't to say being a moral person isn't commendable. It's just nonsense to try and rationalize it from an earthly, evolutionary standpoint.
Are you disagreeing with "Matias wrote that 'Evolution means . . . the absence of morality'"?
I completely disagree with you.
Yes, because Matias never wrote "'Evolution means . . . the absence of morality " as you quote. He simply said he evolution was blind to morality. Evolution means the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations.
Your fallacy here is:
Socrates did not like to read poetry.
Hence, Socrates means the absence of poetry.
Go to sleep.
Weird. On my screen, those words are there, under his name, in the first post, and the way I put "Evolution means . . . the absence of morality" in my own post was via copy-pasting the Matias post. Must be something weird with your computer.
You're quoting a non-existent sentence. Please take your medication. Bye.
Seriously, it's on my screen when I look at this thread.
"As Yuval Noah Harari rightly pointed out: Humanism, be it in its socialist, liberal of evolutionary variety, is a kind of religion for modern people who cannot subscribe to any of the traditional versions of religion."
No it's not. Humanists don't believe in divine beings, magic and other fantastical things. It's a philosophy. Humanism has nothing to do with some mythical being up in the skies. It's a secular thing. What the hell is he talking about?
Do you have schizophrenia?
Can't say that I'm eligible to join your club for that, unfortunately.
it's a perfectly fair quoting of Matias...
Quoting Matias
Evolution led to the development of morality, first in protomoralities in many animals, perhaps even fully morality in some of the higher mammals, and then in us.
in terms of evolution. IOW all that are alive are adapted to their environments, sure. But outside of evoutionary theory, using criteria that one developes using the brains evolution has given us, one can decide that we are best or most important (to us) and center on that. In fact evolution would tend to lead to creatures most concerned about themselves, and amongst social mammals, most likely to value highly other members of their own species. But, in any case, there is nothing contradictory about valuing our species over others. It would be contradictory, at this point, to say we are objectively better in evolutionary terms than other species, since there are no values in evolution, there is just survival or not. Evolution is a process, in one sense of the word, or a theory. And it is a theory that has nothing to do with values. It's a category error to say that our values must somehow be based on what evolutionary theory describes. It's a category error to say that our values must be based on a description of a process. One could argue that claiming there are objective values becomes problematic for those who believe in a naturalistic realism. But there is nothing to say that valuing humans most highly and developing values from our natural instincts to care about our species more than others and to value our skills and abilities more than others contradicts evolutionary theory. In fact it is fairly predictable that we would. Wolves care about other wolves most.
If this were true, morality would have gone extinct, would have disappeared long ago. But Homo sapiens is an inherently moral animal, moral rules and values are a kind of "operating system" for human societies, and one can even say that morality helped Homo sapiens become the "master of this planet", because this strange naked bipedal animal is only strong as a member of a group, and morality provided (among other things) the social glue for effective groups.
Therefore morality is the outcome of evolutionary forces but evolution itself is not moral.
Humanists believe in the unique value of the individual human being, in human dignity. These are fictions like other religious fictions, they are "superhuman" as karma or spirits or heaven.
Yes, humanists value human beings in a way they do not value other animals, but they are unable to justify this special treatment if they base their philosophy / ideology on evolution. What is the justification for the basic value of "human dignity"? Is humanism just a form of "speciesism"? Do (atheist) humanists prefer and value humans in the same or a similar way that white supremacists prefer and value white people? Just because it is "us"? That would be a strange sort of justification.
Of course: morality is a feature that is the result of evolutionary processes and mechanisms, but that does not mean that the process and its mechanisms (variation, selection, reproduction, drift) are inherently moral. Sexuality is another feature that evolved, but evolution is not sexual.
When referring to evolution, one overlooks the fact that the reason humanity generally seeks to cooperate, is because it often generates a more favourable outcome when compared to the antagonistic option. However, when faced with an "us or them" scenario, humanity universally chooses war.
It varies in degree though. Human morals and magic are hardly the same thing.
agree
These threads are already quite frayed out sometimes.
But where are you getting the idea that humanists are basing their ideology on evolution (thereby committing the naturalistic fallacy)? This is not a rhetorical question: I don't know much about humanism as a contemporary movement, although I suspect that it doesn't have anything like a unified, theoretically motivated ideology.
Quoting Tzeentch
Oh sure, No True [s]Scotsmen[/s] Moral and Virtuous People would be favored by evolution! Which isn't far from the truth, for what that is worth. Evolution is not so much an optimizing process as a satisficing one: it doesn't need to create a population of Truly Moral and Virtuous People, it only needs to create a population of people who are, on the whole, moral enough to get along together in common circumstances - which, not coincidentally, is just what we are.
Quoting Frotunes
Then don't.
Human beings cooperate because going at it alone means missing out on all the things the collective provides. It has nothing to do with morality. The prospect of a more favorable outcome has caused many wars and conflicts, laying bare the weakness in your argument.
But I suppose it is possible, that one can have a spiritual/ evolution view point, where evolution has a spiritual purpose in itself, therefore and possibly some morality.
I generally agree with your post. But I'd like to consider the sense in which morality really is a result of evolutionary processes.
Evolutionary theory is a biological theory devised to account for the origin of species; but there's also considerable cultural confusion and equivocation, because, apart from being a scientific theory, it also directly concerns our identity (unlike, say, physics); and is understood, rightly or not, to have displaced or superseded the previous religious accounts of divine creation.
This has tended to create a dichotomous outcome, on which two mutually-exclusive worldviews are based, as you note in the OP. But a lot of that is cultural, rather than scientific, and those antagonists of religion who use evolution as a tool of philosophical polemics, are strangely like the fundamentalists they often oppose.
I say that to frame my response, which is critical of the approach taken by secular theorists, but which is not, on those grounds, aligned with creationism, either. I don't question the veracity of evolutionary theory in the least, but I do question the basis it provides for moral theory.
[quote=Richard Polt] People can perform extraordinary acts of altruism, including kindness toward other species — or they can utterly fail to be altruistic, even toward their own children. So whatever tendencies we may have inherited leave ample room for variation; our choices will determine which end of the spectrum we approach. This is where ethical discourse comes in — not in explaining how we’re “built,” but in deliberating on our own future acts. Should I cheat on this test? Should I give this stranger a ride? Knowing how my selfish and altruistic feelings evolved doesn’t help me decide at all. Most, though not all, moral codes advise me to cultivate altruism. But since the human race has evolved to be capable of a wide range of both selfish and altruistic behavior, there is no reason to say that altruism is superior to selfishness in any biological sense [sup] 1 [/sup].[/quote]
I think h. sapiens did indeed evolve, but once at the stage of being a language-using, tool-using being, then we're no longer simply animals, as we can consider whether this or that action is the right one. We can consider the meaning of things and not simply react by instinct. That marks the division between conscious, self-aware beings, and animals - a distinction which our secular culture now has difficulty mapping.
Also see this discussion of Thomas Nagel's 2012 book Mind and Cosmos, which is exactly about this topic.
But why do they need to do that? Why must they base their values on evolution or the theory of relativity or any other scientific theory or process that science has described?
They often believe that humans are smarter than other animals and capable of more things. I am not sure if 'human dignity' is one of their beliefs. They value human capabilities and nature. Those are values. People have different values.
I didn't say that evolutionary processes are moral. You seem to be saying that since humanists believe in evolution they must base their values on evolutionary theory. I don't see that. They can base their values on whatever they like.
In most cases it probably is. Though certainly some humanists work to protect other life forms and it is utterly clear that man secular people do.Quoting Matias
From what i can see, just like most non-humanists they value living things are that most like them. From there, like for example religious people, they come up with was of justifying this. I think humanists tend to think they are special becuase of their intelligence and tend to be more empathic regarding other intelligent social mammals. Religious people, like some humanists, often justify the kiling of or the hatred of people less like them. Whether this difference is in belief for perceived intelligence or whatever. It seems to be a universal bias.
An ethical system is typically named after its core value. The core value of humanism is the human being. If they are basing this value on something else, then they shouldn't be called humanists - they should be something else-ists (rationalists perhaps, if they claim to have purely rational foundations for their values).
Love it.
Here you go again conflating the sensible idea that morality evolved (and that moral behavior is not unique to humans) with the silly idea that morality "has a basis" in evolution. The latter is an incoherent notion if by "basis" you mean something like 'justification'; the latter is a category error, whereas the former is obviously plausible.
Can you provide examples of animals acting immorally?
Of course as usual you pick a minor point in my response instead of responding to my main criticism of your conflation.
As I said in my OP: there is a movement called "Evolutionary humanism" and in Germany it is the dominant philosophy/ideology among atheist humanists.
If you take certain capacities of Homo sapiens as your base for human dignity or human rights, you 'll into troubled waters when a person does not have (any more) those capacities. Think of severely mentally handicaped persons, or comatose or demented people: they do not have those typically human faculties, but according to humanism they nevertheless have unalienable rights based on their specific human dignity. That is one of the basic aspects of humanism: that human beings have unalienable rights, regardless of their mental or physical capacities.
The one big question remains: where does this unalienable dignity come from? How can it be justified given that from the point of view of evolution H. sapiens is 'just' another animal?
I am not sure humanism is an ethical system, but it does certainly value humans. However the main point is you are not taking my comment in context. When I say they can value whatever they want, I meant that Humanists are not bound, for some reason, to value based on evolution, which the other poster seems to think. Nor more than they need to justify or rationalize their values in terms of the theory of relativity or in terms of gravity.
I am not arguing that humanists don't value humans higher than other things. I am saying they are not bound to base their morality on evolution - a process in nature - or evolutionary theory. It's a category error to presume they must do this.
I guess that "the other poster" is me?
I never claimed that Humanism per se is bound to do this, only "Evolutionary humanism" which is the topic of my OP.
Of course humanism is much older than the idea of evolution and traditional, pre-Darwinian humanists based their core value on Christian ground: that Man - unlike any other creature - had been endowed with a divine spirit by his creator, and that therefore Man was the mediator between the sphere of the divine and sacred on the one side and nature on the other, lower side,
Evolutionary theory is not a static science. There have been innovations in thinking about evolution among biologists since Darwin. Jean Piaget, Steven Rose and Francisco Varela are among those who posit a self-organizing systems approach to organic as well as cultural history.
In this approach, evolution is not blind and purposeless, but rather through natural drift and organism-environment coupling the organism is predisposed to mutate in directions that are compatible with its ongoing ways of functioning in its environment. The organizational principle of adaptive self-consistency is the 'morality' and 'purpose' of an organism, rather than blind conformity with an environment. Pragmatists like John Dewy and William James , and evolutionary psychologists like Dennett, also have called themselves humanists.
We know about human meanings of human actions; we can barely speculate about the different meanings of actions for the different kinds of animals.
It is justified by the sentiment that H. sapiens is not just another animal, but our kind of animal. This is analogous to way the different kinds of social animals behave very differently towards their own kind than they do to other kinds. Think of the etymological connection between the words 'kindness' and 'kind'. Generally speaking to behave morally towards another is to behave with kindness.
Yes, although this approach does not advocate believing that evolution is intentional in the kind of way that human actions may be intentional. The kinds of 'self-organizing' 'embodied' 'enactivist' and 'systems' approaches you seem to be referencing generally have no truck with the idea that any supernatural or transcendent governing intelligence is "behind" the workings of nature, at least as far as I am aware. In other words such approaches are not at all transcendentalistic but rather immanentistic.
It comes from the religious conception that "Jesus died for all mankind". When that idea was introduced, it was extremely radical, as ancient Rome certainly didn't subscribe to any such notion, where captured people, slaves, and for that matter even Christians, were routinely subject to the most abominable treatment. Also interesting to note that the Chinese Communist Party seems not to subscribe to any such notion in that individual and group rights are invariably subjugated to the interests of the party-state.
But on a deeper level, it's also a question of philosophical anthropology. Does human kind represent anything more than other species? I would have thought the ability of humans to weigh and measure the Universe might suggest something along those lines. But one of the dogmas of the secular view of evolution, is that it has nothing like an overall direction or purpose, and so the fact of the existence of intelligent self-aware beings has no particular significance in the overall scheme.
I would like to think that it is not necessary to create a barrier between the supposed human and the animal in order to affirm the worth of humanity. Wouldn't it be better to affirm the value of all living things? More specifically, in an era in which so many supposed distinctions between human mental functioning and that of higher animals have been shown to be in error (tool-use, emotion, altruism, language, self-awareness, culture), perhaps the lesson we should take from this is the danger of exceptionalist thinking.
As far as the issue of purpose in evolution, is it necessary, or even desirable, for that directionality to be pre-determined or totalized in a Hegelian sense? Can there not be self-organizational purpose whose direction constantly shifts in ways that maintain self-consistency but do not conform to final cause? Can we not be Nietzschean value-positers, simply there to enjoy the ride? Or Heideggerian disclosers of our ownmost uncanny, mysterious possibilities of being, whithout needing to get closer to some pre-figured end?
Therefore it is conceivable that morality entered the evolutionary process spontaneously or randomly, and as it turned out to be a survival advantage, many organizations (such as species, and Humanism) survived which otherwise maybe would have perished.
There, I just did this from the opening post.
Please note: this negates the point in the opening post which states that there is no room for morality in evolution. it is true that evolution has no principles and no guidance; in that sense, it has no morality. But some systems incorporated morality in their evolution. It's like evolution has no plans for legs to develop, and it has no legs, but those species that have legs are better off than those that don't. As a crude example.
The idea of a messiah predates the identification of Jesus as the Messiah. This was the "messianic age", an age in which it was believed that the messiah would come, and there were many who claimed or others believed was the messiah. The death of Jesus stood for some as evidence that he was not the promised messiah, but Paul, being the masterful rhetorician he was, turned it around and made Jesus' death fundamental to the Messiah's mission.
In any case, I do not see in this mythology the notion of inalienable rights and dignity. That is the language of Liberalism. For Paul there were the elect, those who would be saved, and everyone else. Salvation was open to all, but only those who sought it would be saved.
Quoting Wayfarer
It is not clear what you mean by overall scheme if one rejects an overall direction or purpose. That there are intelligent self-aware beings is a given. One of the challenges of evolution is to figure out how this came to be. It is in this sense no different that figuring out how features, or feet, or lungs came to be.
Now one can put a metaphysical spin on it and claim something along the lines that in this way nature becomes aware of itself, but this kind of closed circle, teleological self-realization is not inherent in evolutionary theory.
Sure, absolutely. There was a depressing special on Australian TV Monday about the extinction rate here, and it's a national disgrace. It's a strong rationale for environmentalism. A lot of people would say that h. sapiens is currently like a plague on the Earth.
But the point about 'the human condition' is not that we're biologically different, but that we're existentially distinct. We can contemplate life, death and the meaning of it all. It's with that realisation that philosophy started. And one of the ancients remarked that, without the possibility of transcendence, then man would be the most miserable of animals. I think it behoves us to contemplate a destiny beyond that of procreation (although nowadays I think that's become sublimated into the wan hope of interstellar conquest).
Quoting Joshs
Step back a little and recall the original motivation behind philosophy. According to Pierre Hadot ‘The goal of the ancient philosophies was to cultivate a specific, constant attitude toward existence, by way of the rational comprehension of the nature of humanity and its place in the cosmos. This cultivation required, specifically, that students learn to combat their passions and the illusory evaluative beliefs instilled by their passions, habits, and upbringing.’
As for the 'pre-figured end' - I see that very much in terms of how Christian doctrine became ossified into dogma. I think from the viewpoint of the gnostics, the Christian theories of the end of the world and second coming are all the consequence of the misinterpretation of the real facts of Christ's life and resurrection, projected onto the temporal world. What if the 'Kingdom of Heaven' never was a political state in the first place?
Quoting Fooloso4
Of course, but that is very much due to the Enlightenment context of evolutionary theory. Darwin was often equivocal about his philosophical outlook but his desire to conform with the general hard-headed scientific rationalism of the 'Scottish Enlightenment' was a deciding factor. I don’t think Darwin himself was at all strident about philosophy - Darwin was never strident - but his later acolytes were able to adapt that hard-edged rationalism for polemical purposes, which is what gives rise to the so-called 'ultra darwinism' that you find in much atheist polemics. Whereas, there has also been a vein of evolutionary idealism, if you like - in fact even Alfred Russel Wallace was more inclined to that view, with his interest in spiritualism, although of course in current culture, that immediately puts him outside the pale! (Worth being familiar with his Darwinism Applied to Man.)
Quoting Fooloso4
But not quite. Again, I fully accept the biological account - one of my favourite books a few years back was Your Inner Fish, by Neil Shubin, which provided a great telling of how many of our anatomical features can be found in rudimentary form in an ancient fossil and how they evolved through the billions of years since. No question there - except, again, for 'why'? What drove that? Is there any overarching purpose to it beyond survival and propagation? You may or may not agree but whichever view you take, I don't think that's a scientific question.
I would put it like this: there's methodological naturalism, which excludes factors that can't be considered by empirical observation and measurement; but this easily morphs into metaphysical naturalism, which says that, therefore, nothing beyond empirical observation and measurement can be said to be real. That is particularly evident in the polemics of scientific atheism. From the fact of biological evolution, many judgements of meaning are drawn which are actually well beyond its scope. Like, questions of meaning and purpose have been 'bracketed out', not 'discovered not to exist'.
Case in point - there's a well-known and often quoted saying from a famous evolutionary biologist, 'nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution', which was the title of an essay by Theodosius Dobzhansky, criticising anti-evolution creationism. He was one of the founders of the 'modern evolutionary synthesis':
'In 1937, he published one of the major works of the modern evolutionary synthesis, the synthesis of evolutionary biology with genetics, entitled Genetics and the Origin of Species, which amongst other things, defined evolution as "a change in the frequency of an allele within a gene pool'.
So, one of the founders of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. But he also professed the Orthodox faith. Later in life he published a book, The Biology of Ultimate Concern, which argued against any form of orthogenesis (directional evolution), creationism or what would become 'intelligent design' (the term hadn't been coined then), but he remained an admirer of Teilhard du Chardin, and certainly contemplated evolution in light of a spiritual 'summum bonum' (highest good) - hence the title!
Many blurry lines and porous boundaries in this area; never so cut-and-dried as the fundamentalists on both sides would like to think.
I do agree that these are not scientific questions, but whether they are a good philosophical question is open to discussion. The ability to ask such questions does not mean they must have answers.
I second this.