Author’s note: James Barham is a close friend and colleague. He and I have worked together now for over 25 years, in both scholarly and business pursuits. He is a man of immense erudition, as widely read as anyone I know. A Catholic believer, with a faith come to later in life, he was for many years, even before his religious conversion, a trenchant critic of Darwinian evolution. That said, he has never been an intelligent design advocate. In fact, our approaches to teleology in nature are quite different. 

Yes, we both reject Darwinian reductionism, and we agree that teleology in nature is real. Yet Barham advocates a non-reductive naturalism whereas most design theorists (like me) see nature as fundamentally derivative and incomplete, and therefore reject naturalism in all its guises (my own alternative to naturalism is informational realism). Barham’s approach to teleology in nature is, if anything, Aristotelian. Indeed, Aristotle is the most cited person in the index of The Emergence of Freedom. Despite our divergence of views, I find Barham an important thinker to engage, and the ID community would do well to read his book.

In this book, Barham powerfully critiques scientism, the view that the natural sciences, understood mechanistically, provide a total account of the world, including anything that can pass for human knowledge. At the same time, he makes a powerful case for teleology, showing how it underpins all aspects of culture, society, and ethics. By offering a non-reductionistic account of the world that provides a secure place for objective teleology, this book is a fitting sequel to Thomas Nagel’s 2012 book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.

Interview about The Emergence of Freedom

What follows is an interview with James Barham about The Emergence of Freedom: The Sciences and the Human Spirit After Darwin (Lexington, KY: Inkwell Press, 2024). The interview includes some biographical context for the book. It also includes some extended quotes so that readers of this post will have a better sense of the book and whether they might want to purchase it. The book is available at Amazon. 

Question 1: Who is James Barham?

Answer: I was born in Texas in 1952. Back in the 1960s, Latin was still taught in the public school system, and I credit my high school Latin teacher with opening my eyes to the lacrimae rerum (Aeneid, 1.462), as well as to the wider world of the human spirit.

Thanks to this lucky break, I ended up majoring in Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. While there, I also became interested in the history of science as a way of combining my interest in Classics and the humanities more generally with my longstanding interest in the natural sciences.

I went on to study the history of science at Harvard University, eventually settling on a dissertation on a late Greek astronomical text that mediated between the great Persian scholar Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī and Copernicus. Unfortunately, for health and other personal reasons, I never completed this project.

I spent about twenty years “in the wilderness” — i.e., as an “independent scholar,” working at a succession of minimum-wage jobs to keep the wolf from the door. However, I never stopped reading widely in an attempt to arrive at a world picture capable of providing an adequate account of what Sir Thomas Browne called “the great amphibium” in the Religio medici, that is, our nature as creatures that live in the quite different worlds of matter and spirit. As he wrote:

Thus is Man that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live, not only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds: for though there be but one to sense, there are two to reason, the one visible, the other invisible.

I began to find my way in the late 1980s, publishing my first professional paper in 1990. One thing led to another, and on the strength of my publication record I was able to reenter grad school at the age of 51. I received my PhD on the conceptual foundations of biology eight years later, in 2011, having spent a total of some twenty years in graduate school altogether.

Finally, under the auspices of Inkwell Press, late last year I was finally able to put most of the elements of my systematic viewpoint together between hard covers: The Emergence of Freedom: The Sciences and the Human Spirit After Darwin (2024).

Excerpt from The Emergence of Freedom (re Question 1)

[From the Preface, p. xviii:] Originally, I intended The Emergence of Freedom in its present form to serve as a sort of detailed summary of the encyclopedic work I envisioned in my folie de grandeur. However, the passing years have convinced me that the text should see the light of day anyway, if only because it seems increasingly unlikely that it will ever exist in any other.

Question 2: What are your qualifications to write a book like The Emergence of Freedom?

Answer: When we are considering the bona fides of an unknown author, at least in the realm of philosophy, the proof is in the pudding. Credentials as such mean little. A PhD may serve as warrant of a certain basic expertise, but it is a very low bar to clear.

The underlying problem is that while the basic “analytical” style, which pervades the philosophical profession in the English-speaking world and beyond, may be mastered, novel creative solutions to venerable philosophical problems cannot be manufactured to order by such methods.

My book is an effort to bring the medieval philosophical subject known as the “philosophy of nature” up to date scientifically. Such “synthetic” philosophy is far from popular, which, in my opinion, simply means that it has not been properly explored. For this reason, there will likely be considerable a priori skepticism about my project within analytical quarters, not to mention the scientific circles I criticize in the book as prone to “scientism.” My closest intellectual allies are probably the neo-Thomists, but many of them will not be happy with the restricted use I make of Aristotle’s conceptual repertory. Amicus Aristoteles sed magis amica veritas.

In short, I expect few readers to approach the book with the feeling that they are in good hands. Rather, it will be up to me to prove myself through the book itself. In the end, all I can say is that I have done my level best to examine all the main viewpoints on a given topic, to weigh them against each other, and to come to the most satisfactory overall reconciliation of the unimpeachable empirical facts, including the facts about the human spirit.

Excerpt from The Emergence of Freedom (re Question 2)

[From the Preface, pp. xvi–xviii:] This book has grown out of my doctoral dissertation, in which I argued that teleology in biology is objectively real, and that there are cogent reasons for ascribing natural agency to living beings as such. Chapter 5 of the present book develops the argument of the dissertation in greater depth. It constitutes the conceptual axis upon which all the other chapters turn.

. . .

I have been thinking about this book for a very long time. My dissertation . . . already lies more than thirteen years in the past. However, I have been reflecting upon the problem of man’s place in nature for a much longer time — in fact, ever since a chance encounter, nearly fifty years ago now, with the marvelous book An Inventive Universe (1975) by Kenneth G. Denbigh, which first awakened me from my physicalist slumbers.

Around 1989, another happy accident of the stacks brought to my attention the collection Self-Organizing Systems: The Emergence of Order (1987), edited by F. Eugene Yates. This superb volume provided me with a method to work by. All of the essays I published during the 1990s were written under the sway of Yates’s “homeodynamic” account of teleology in living things.

Finally, sometime around 2005, a kind stranger whose name I have forgotten brought to my attention via email the remarkable textbook Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life: A New, Unifying Approach to Cell Function (2001) by Gerald H. Pollack. This book gave me the courage finally to speak openly about a heretical idea I had been entertaining privately for some time, namely, that the sui generis causal powers of living beings depend essentially upon their material constitution, i.e., the living state of matter.

Question 3: What are you trying to achieve in The Emergence of Freedom?

Answer: I’m trying to achieve three things in The Emergence of Freedom.

First, I am attempting to explore a number of the implications of the view of objective teleology in biology that I developed in my doctoral dissertation. The idea that purposeful activity in living things is objectively real is already a highly contested one. However, I am convinced the arguments in favor of taking this view are rock solid. Moreover, if we do accept the objectivity of biological teleology, then our views on a wide range of other issues must be very much altered. The Emergence of Freedom endeavors, above all, to trace out some of the most significant of the many far-reaching implications of this central idea — of the objectivity of teleology in biology.

A second, though equally important, task I have set for myself — and one which I have turned into the chief organizing principle of the book — is the attempt to oppose the wrong-headed and pernicious doctrine of “scientism” all along an extensive front of conceptual confrontation. More specifically, I take up in turn eight specific topics: the nature of time and change; reduction vs. emergence; determinism vs. free will; the fundamental nature of life as natural agency; sentient agency; rational agency; morality, and political community. In each case, I make the case that my emergentist view is superior on strictly rational and even empirical grounds to the current world picture painted by Darwinian reductionist and materialist naturalism.

Finally, my goal is not only to show that the scientistic theses in each of the eight cases are demonstrably wrong, but also to provide a sketch of a positive doctrine of change, emergence, freedom, life, sentience, rationality, morality, and political community to put in the place of the rejected scientistic views. In so doing, I begin the work of building a very different scientific worldview, one which is consistent with the human spirit.

Excerpt from The Emergence of Freedom (re Question 3)

[From Chapter 1 (Introduction), pp. 1–2 and 10–11:] The aim of this book is to defend a certain commonsense view of the human spirit and of the everyday world of medium-sized material objects out of which spirit has emerged. While the commonsense worldview I wish to defend will take on board the properly warranted conclusions of the natural sciences, it will also acknowledge the cognitive authority of ordinary human experience. More specifically, the worldview presented in this book attempts to legitimate the objective existence, not only of the human spirit, but of purpose, value, meaning, and agency as really existing biological phenomena which are essentially connected with the nature and existence of life as such.

All of this means that, from the point of view to be developed in these pages, the teleological and normative character both of the human spirit and of the wider biological world within which spirit is embedded cannot be properly viewed as “epiphenomenal,” “illusory,” or a mere “projection” of the human mind onto a reality restricted to the ontology of fundamental physics.

A comprehensive defense of such realities as teleology, normativity, agency, spirit, and so forth, if successful, would be of more than purely academic interest. That is because a world in which such commonplace elements of our everyday human experience are “debunked” as cognitively worthless would be a world in which human freedom and moral responsibility are nothing but antiquated myths. It would be a world in which traditional ideas of human nature, flourishing, and virtue are only impediments to the global reign of “experts.” I will refer to the picture of the world and humanity’s place in it painted by such self-styled “debunkers” as the “scientistic worldview,” or just “scientism,” for short.

Note that scientism is not a collection of scientific findings, but rather a philosophical system. It is a metaphysical doctrine which holds that all understanding of anything whatsoever must be sought in the results of the natural sciences — or even just in those of fundamental physics.

. . .

Reformed naturalism does not attempt to “demarcate” the natural sciences from philosophy (and the other humanities). Even less does it suppose that such boundaries as may be drawn at present between natural science and philosophy must remain fixed for all time. Reformed naturalism simply claims the right to rationally criticize the supposed philosophical implications of announced scientific results that in fact lack proper empirical and rational warrant.

At its heart, scientism is the effort to shoehorn the human spirit into a natural science several sizes too small for it. Reformed naturalism must challenge scientism by assisting the natural sciences properly understood. The best way for the philosophy of nature to help the sciences is by rationally criticizing their methods, concepts, and presuppositions.

In short, the aim of the philosophy of nature along the lines of reformed naturalism is to help the sciences to expand their intellectual horizons in order to provide a fuller and more adequate account of reality.

Question 4: Why is this so important?

Answer: I hope it will not sound too self-serving if I point out that — whatever the merits of my own particular proposals — the intellectual, and eventually cultural, significance of the topics I take up in the book can scarcely be exaggerated.

First of all, if I am correct that the “secret of life” lies, not in some mysterious property of natural selection that allegedly transforms the outcomes of ordinary physical interactions into systems which possess purposes or goals (above all, the maintenance of their own existence), but rather in a sui generis dynamics of the “living state of matter,” which renders cells capable of evaluating their own physical states, as well as states of their external environment, as promoting or hampering their goals, and so as being “good” (to be sought) or “bad” (to be avoided). If this is so, then all living beings may be legitimately characterized as normatively structured “agents” in the sense that their activities are somehow under inherent teleological control.

I show that these ideas, though they may sound fantastic to some, can be substantiated by means of hard evidence and sound inference. If they turn out to be correct, the importance for theoretical biology could not be greater.

As for the campaign against scientism, the importance of the ideas discussed in my book can scarcely be exaggerated (always assuming they are correct, of course). Their significance is thus both intellectual and potentially broadly cultural, even political (as I show in chapter nine of his book)

For example, if the general public were to become convinced of the erroneousness of the materialist-reductionist worldview promulgated by Darwinism and other forms of scientism, then the task I endeavor to carry out in the book — or something like it by someone else — might serve as an alternative master-narrative for our self-understanding.

I am convinced to the marrow of my bones that ideas have consequences. We currently live a world in which some progressive parents give their kids Richard Dawkins apps for their smart phones, which inculcate in them Dawkins’ pernicious worldview. What we need to break the political logjam, above all, is a way of legitimating traditional values in the public square. My work may provide a basis for just such a much-needed political legitimation of a conservative understanding of human life and political community.

The materialist-reductionist worldview that is a main intellectual support of progressive politics cannot begin to be challenged until the identity in those parents’ minds between progressivism and scientific truth has been shown to be a myth. Needless to say, a massive revival of traditional religious belief would be one way to achieve this much-to-be-desired end.

In the meantime, I have tried to offer an alternative worldview that is naturalistic in the sense that it does not involve any explicit theistic component, but which I firmly believe may nonetheless achieve the same end of exposing the philosophical nullity of the theory of natural selection as a means of understanding the place of life and mind in nature.

Excerpt from The Emergence of Freedom (re Question 4)

[From Chapter 1 (Introduction), p. 3:] Plausibly, one of the main reasons why scientism has gained so enormously in popularity in recent decades is because it offers a replacement for the grand narratives of man’s nature, origin, and destiny that used to be provided by philosophy, as well as the world’s great religions. Scientism functions much like a religion in addressing first and last things—matters which most modern philosophy (and too frequently, religion) do not any longer credibly address.

I submit that, given the deep psychological roots of scientism’s appeal, no amount of chipping away at it around the edges is likely to have any lasting effect. Even a systematic refutation of the claims of scientism across a wide front will ultimately be of no avail in the absence of a more convincing narrative of the cosmos and of spirit’s place in it. If that is so, then a successful refutation of scientism can only come in the form of such an alternative positive vision. That is the fundamental reason why I have written this book.

[From Chapter 9 (Political Community and the Natural Law), p. 125:] Why bother about political theory at all in a book like this one devoted to constructing a contemporary philosophy of nature? The reason is simple: It is in the domain of politics that scientism is perhaps most pervasive and certainly most dangerous for the human spirit.

Accordingly, in the present chapter I explore scientism in two of its most basic political manifestations: (1) at what I will call the “metapolitical” level, in the form of legal positivism, which denies the existence of an essential human nature or any form of natural law based upon it; and (2) at the “normative-political” level, in the form of the modern, liberal-democratic doctrine of “neutralism,” which absurdly pretends that that a particular regime’s preferred morality — libertinism — is free from substantive moral commitments.

Question 5: What is the relation between your book and other books on human evolution?

Answer: At present, there are two types of discussions of the evolution of life and mind: the Darwinian and anti-Darwinian. Most of the anti-Darwinian literature is written from either a theistic or a Platonistic perspective. However, over the past two or three decades a “third way of evolution” has arisen, which is not actively hostile to Darwinism but does recognize its conceptual limitations. Broadly speaking, my book may be slotted into this category.

However, to my knowledge no one currently writing on these matters quite takes the bull by the horns and acknowledges the need to seek an understanding of teleology in biology within the framework of an emergentist view of physics. In particular, I am pretty sure I am the only one out on the limb of identifying the internal agency of cells with a sui generis living state of matter.

At any rate, whatever the worth of my own proposals, I am convinced that only further advance along this general line of inquiry has any hope of eventually permitting us to rise to the challenge, posed by Thomas Nagel in Mind and Cosmos (2012), of explaining the roots of objective purpose in nature.

Excerpt from The Emergence of Freedom (re Question 5)

[From Chapter 1 (Introduction), pp. 2–3 and 7–9:] Scientism has been a topic of growing philosophical concern for some time now, and many of the various specific claims put forward by its proponents have already received close, critical scrutiny. . . . In the view of some, the obviously self-refuting character of any philosophical doctrine which denies the very existence of value—and hence of better and worse arguments — is too obvious to bother with. Why, then, cover such relatively well-trodden ground once again?

My main motive for writing this book is not merely to show what is wrong with the various scientistic theses I discuss — though I will do that. Rather, it is to mount a comprehensive assault on the scientistic worldview across as wide a front as possible. Even more importantly, I will attempt to construct a positive account of the nature of the universe, including spirit, to put in in its place.

Obviously, this is a very tall order. Why stick my neck out to such an extent, when good work in contemporary philosophy is widely supposed to be as tightly focused as possible?

For one thing, the idea that philosophy ought to be narrowly specialized on the model of the natural sciences is itself a thesis within the scientistic world picture I am opposing. But more importantly, the purveyors of scientism to the general public by no means hamstring themselves in this way. On the contrary, I suggest the widespread appeal of their work lies precisely in its sweeping narrative scope.

. . .

Insofar as this book aspires to present an updated philosophy of nature, one might say it ought to count as a species of “naturalism.” However, “naturalism” as usually understood comprises two fundamental principles, only one of which will be accepted here.

First, naturalism assumes the “causal closure” of nature. This means that all appeal to any causal influence emanating from a transcendent or supernatural realm is to be rejected. For the sake of argument, I accept this as a fundamental methodological commitment in the present work. . . .

The other fundamental meaning of the term “naturalism” as it is usually understood today involves the rejection of the objective reality of the human spirit and everything associated with it. This means that purpose, value, meaning, agency, and so forth are considered to be “reducible” to some ontologically more-primitive base, which allegedly entitles us to regard them as mere epiphenomena, that is, as so many ontological fifth-wheels having no bearing on the course of events in nature.

I do not accept “naturalism” in this second sense, for many reasons. First and foremost, it flies in the face of the evidence of our everyday experience. Also, to define naturalism as encompassing this second principle is to presuppose the truth of scientism. Thus, the second principle of “naturalism” as it is usually understood in contemporary philosophical discourse begs the question against the critic of scientism. I offer this entire work in refutation of scientism, and thus of the second principle of naturalism so understood.

Others, of course, have attempted to defend the human spirit and its works within a broadly “naturalistic” setting, by which they merely mean they adhere to the first meaning of “naturalism” distinguished above, that of non-supernaturalism. They have done so under a variety of names. John McDowell, for example, employs the phrase “liberal naturalism.”

McDowell’s liberal naturalism includes the idea that the source of the human difference is our “second nature”—that is, the socially mediated achievement of enculturation or education, also known as Bildung, that is characteristic of members of our species. There is much to recommend such a view, although it needs to be qualified by adding that what Bildung is to an individual intellect, the history of human civilization is to spirit. On that understanding, I would not at all wish to downplay the importance of second nature for understanding the human difference.

However, the proponents of liberal naturalism and similar doctrines mostly avoid grappling with the deep difficulties involved in explaining just how the social character of the human species in itself introduces normative agency into the world, elevating our species somehow above the purely physical goings-on they suppose wholly constitute the “first” or biological nature of all animals, including ourselves. So long as the proponents of liberal naturalism pay little or no attention to the metaphysical underpinnings of human second nature, they cannot but be suspected by their scientistic critics of advancing a form of substance dualism that violates naturalism according to its first acceptation. Such a doctrine would by no means be entitled to the mantle of “naturalism” in any sense whatsoever. For this reason, it will be important to look more closely at the ontological underpinnings of McDowell’s “second nature” — which is more or less the same phenomenal domain I refer to as “spirit.”

To sum up this point, my approach to the philosophy of nature unreservedly accepts the first principle of naturalism — and with it the broad constraint of “monism,” suitably understood as an integrated picture of nature that leaves no gaping holes — while explicitly rejecting the second principle. At the same time, unlike most other contemporary “liberal naturalisms,” my approach seeks to provide a full metaphysical grounding for the human spirit.

Here’s a YouTube interview with Barham about the ideas in his book before it was published:

Cross-posted with permission from Bill Dembki on Substack.