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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).

The Moment of Admission

Where Wilber Finally Draws the Line

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

There is a moment—rare, but revealing—when Ken Wilber drops the rhetoric and states his position with disarming clarity. Pressed on whether scientists he frequently invokes actually support his spiritual interpretation of evolution, he concedes the obvious:

Do I believe Kauffman, May, or Dawkins believe in Eros? Absolutely not.

That admission matters more than any polemic against Darwinism. Because in that moment, the debate shifts from science to worldview. And once that shift is acknowledged, much else falls into place.

Not a Scientific Disagreement After All

Wilber's critique of Darwinism has often been presented as a scientific one: natural selection cannot explain novelty, complexity, creativity, or consciousness. It is riddled with gaps. It “can't explain shit.”

But the admission above quietly undercuts that posture. Wilber knows perfectly well that the scientists he cites—whether orthodox figures like Dawkins and May or more heterodox ones like Kauffman—do not draw spiritual conclusions from evolutionary theory. They remain naturalists.

The disagreement, then, is not about data, mechanisms, or even explanatory reach. It is about what counts as an acceptable explanation in principle.

Wilber parts ways with them not because they misunderstand evolution, but because they refuse to abandon naturalism.

The Charge Against Science

Wilber's deeper complaint is philosophical, not empirical. Science, he argues, endlessly promises to resolve the questions at its frontiers—origins of life, mind, novelty, consciousness—but never delivers. Each generation claims progress; the ultimate answers remain deferred.

From this, Wilber draws a sweeping conclusion: naturalism is not merely incomplete, but structurally incapable of closure. And where science fails to close the circle, metaphysics is invited to step in.

This is the real function of Eros.

Eros does not explain specific mechanisms. It does not generate testable predictions. It does not constrain models or rule out alternatives. It resolves dissatisfaction. It answers impatience.

A Category Error Disguised as Insight

But unresolved problems are not evidence of transcendent causes. They are the normal condition of any open-ended research program.

Science does not promise final answers; it promises better ones. It does not converge on metaphysical closure; it advances through refinement, revision, and sometimes radical rethinking. To fault science for not delivering ultimate explanations is to judge it by criteria it never adopted.

Wilber's move—rejecting naturalism because it remains perpetually incomplete—confuses epistemic humility with ontological failure.

The fact that biology has not solved every problem at its edges does not license the introduction of cosmic purpose. It only licenses further work.

Why Evolution Remains the Pressure Point

This helps explain why evolutionary biology occupies such a fraught position in Wilber's system. Evolution is the one domain where naturalistic explanations most directly compete with spiritual ones for explanatory authority over life's creativity.

If evolution can account—even imperfectly—for novelty, complexity, and emergence without invoking intrinsic direction or purpose, then Eros becomes optional. At best, poetic. At worst, redundant.

Wilber understands this. Which is why Darwinism must be portrayed as exhausted, static, and conceptually bankrupt. Which is why contemporary developments in evolutionary theory are largely ignored. And which is why the debate is framed not as which explanation works better, but as whether science can ever work at all.

The Real Divide

Once Wilber's admission is taken seriously, the contours of the debate sharpen:

• Scientists choose naturalism, despite its incompleteness

• Wilber rejects naturalism, not because it has failed, but because it refuses transcendence

This is not a dispute science can settle—nor one it needs to. It is a metaphysical preference, grounded in dissatisfaction with provisional knowledge and a desire for cosmic meaning.

There is nothing illicit about that preference. But there is something misleading about presenting it as a scientific conclusion.

Closing Reflection

In the end, Wilber does not argue that evolution points to Eros. He argues that science, by never being finished, cannot be enough.

That is not a discovery. It is a temperament.

And once that is recognized, the long struggle over Darwinism in Integral Theory comes into focus—not as a failed scientific critique, but as an unresolved metaphysical impatience with a world that refuses to close its books.

That, finally, is where Wilber and I part ways.