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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Beyond Appearances

Why Science Looks Deeper than
the Face Value of Things

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that in the real world, disorder always increases. Yet simple observation tells us that, in the real world, life creates order everywhere: the universe is winding up, not down. -- Ken Wilber[1]

It is an enduring human habit to trust appearances. The ancient Greeks saw the sun rise in the east and set in the west and concluded that the sun revolves around the Earth. Today, creationists look at DNA and see information, and because it appears to be coded like human language or computer software, they conclude it must have been written by a mind. Likewise, Ken Wilber looks at the apparent complexity, creativity, and directionality of evolution and concludes there must be an Eros in the Kosmos—an inherent spiritual drive toward higher forms.

The parallels between these two lines of reasoning are instructive. Both make the same basic move:

• Notice a pattern or direction in nature.
• Interpret it in familiar, anthropomorphic terms (as design, intention, or purpose).
• Conclude that the pattern is caused by an external or inherent guiding mind or force.

In both cases, this is reasoning from surface appearances—what philosophers call prima facie reasoning—rather than from deeper investigation into mechanisms. And in both cases, science has a long track record of showing that the appearance of purpose or design can be accounted for without invoking a purposive agent or cosmic will.

Face Value Thinking and Its Pitfalls

The strength of "face value" thinking is that it's intuitive and emotionally satisfying. We humans evolved to detect agency—to hear a rustle in the grass and imagine a predator rather than a random breeze. This hyperactive agency detection system kept our ancestors alive, but it also left us prone to seeing design where none exists.

When creationists say, “DNA is information, therefore it must come from a designer,” they are applying the same kind of intuitive leap as someone saying, “The Grand Canyon is beautiful, therefore it must have been sculpted by an artist.” In both cases, the inference seems natural because our brains are wired to project human categories onto nature. But that's a shortcut, not an explanation.

Wilber's claim that there is an “Eros in the Kosmos”—an inherent upward pull toward greater complexity and consciousness—follows the same logic. We see life diversifying, complexity increasing, and consciousness expanding over geological time, so the “face value” conclusion is that evolution is striving toward some goal. The fact that Wilber dresses this in philosophical and spiritual language doesn't change the basic structure of the argument: apparent directionality is taken as proof of real, intrinsic purpose.

Science: Looking Beneath the Surface

What science does differently is refuse to stop at appearances. It asks: What mechanisms could produce this pattern without assuming the very thing we are trying to explain?

In the case of DNA, molecular biology has revealed that the “information” it contains is the result of cumulative processes like mutation, recombination, and natural selection—no mind required. The resemblance to human-created codes is superficial; the underlying process is blind and self-organizing.

In the case of apparent directionality in evolution, evolutionary theory explains complexity as a side-effect of branching diversification under natural selection, not as the outcome of a cosmic plan. The arrow toward complexity is neither universal nor guaranteed—many lineages remain simple, and complexity can decrease as well as increase. Stephen Jay Gould famously argued that complexity's increase is partly a statistical inevitability once life begins at a baseline of minimal complexity, not evidence of cosmic Eros.

Case Study: Self-Organization—Science Meets Spiritual Spin

Self-organization is one of the most important concepts in contemporary science. It refers to the spontaneous emergence of order out of local interactions between components of a system, without any central control. Examples range from convection cells in heated fluids, to spiral galaxies, to termite mounds, to the intricate patterns of life's molecular machinery. In physics, chemistry, and biology, self-organization has become an established field with its own mathematics, experimental evidence, and predictive models.

From the scientific perspective, self-organization is striking precisely because it dispels the need for an external guide or pre-existing blueprint. In dissipative systems far from equilibrium, order can emerge naturally from the interplay of energy flows, constraints, and feedback loops. Ilya Prigogine, who pioneered much of this work, emphasized that this is a physical process rooted in thermodynamics, not a mystical force.

Ken Wilber, however, reframes self-organization as evidence of an underlying Eros—a spiritual drive within the universe itself. In his writing, the empirical finding that order can emerge without a designer becomes a rhetorical stepping stone toward affirming that there is a designer of sorts—only now it is an immanent, purposive principle rather than an external deity. Wilber's move is subtle: instead of rejecting the science, he overlays it with a metaphysical interpretation, turning “self-organization” into “Spirit's way of working through nature.”

The trouble with this move is that it reverses the very achievement of self-organization theory. Science's contribution was to remove the need for inherent purpose as an explanatory factor. By re-injecting purpose—under the name of Eros—Wilber takes an explanatory framework that stands on its own and folds it back into a teleological worldview. This is not an advance; it's a reinterpretation that changes the meaning of the term without altering the underlying science.

This case illustrates a broader pattern: scientific discoveries that eliminate the necessity for purposive explanations are reappropriated as if they support purposive explanations. Creationists do this when they cherry-pick biological complexity to argue for a Creator. Wilber does it when he takes self-organization's natural emergence of complexity as proof of a cosmic evolutionary urge. In both cases, the scientific insight is acknowledged, but its philosophical implications are reversed.

Why the Parallel Matters

Creationists' arguments have been widely criticized for confusing appearance with cause. Scientists point out that complexity, adaptation, and apparent “design” can all arise through unguided processes. Yet some of the same critics may not notice when a spiritual philosopher like Wilber makes a structurally identical inference in the domain of cosmology or evolution.

The danger is that once you permit yourself to equate appearance with explanation in one domain, you weaken your ability to apply rigorous inquiry across the board. If you reject the creationist's “DNA is information, therefore God” argument because you value empirical explanation, consistency demands you also reject “Evolution looks purposeful, therefore Eros in the Kosmos.”

From Intuition to Evidence

Both creationism and Wilber's Eros rely on what cognitive scientists call teleological thinking: the tendency to assume that things exist “for” something. Children do this naturally—they say mountains exist “so that animals have somewhere to climb”—and adults retain a weaker but still potent version of this bias. Science, by contrast, has repeatedly shown that teleology in nature often dissolves when we uncover the underlying mechanisms.

This is not to say that awe, wonder, or meaning vanish when we abandon surface-level purpose. On the contrary, the real explanatory depth of science often inspires a more profound sense of wonder than any tidy, prepackaged story about cosmic intention. The grandeur of evolution lies precisely in its ability to produce life's tapestry without a script.

Conclusion: The Courage to Look Deeper

At face value, DNA looks designed; creationists conclude it is designed. At face value, evolution looks purposeful; Wilber concludes it is purposeful. Only science insists on looking deeper, refusing to confuse how things look with how they are. And it is precisely in that refusal—in the commitment to explanation over intuition—that our understanding of reality advances.

The irony is that Wilber frequently frames his project as looking deeper than “flatland” science—seeing the inner dimensions and spiritual depths that empirical methods allegedly miss. Yet in the case of Eros in the Kosmos, his own conclusion rests on what science would consider the shallowest layer: how things appear on the surface. Far from plumbing deeper explanatory depths, this move circles back to the same intuitive, face-value reasoning that science has worked for centuries to overcome.

By recognizing the structural similarity between creationist arguments about DNA and Wilber's metaphysical arguments about Eros, we see more clearly the role that rigorous, evidence-based inquiry plays in keeping us from mistaking the shimmer on the surface for the depths below.

NOTES

[1] Ken Wilber, A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality, 2000, p. x.