Sun, 13 Dec 2020 07:04 UTC Scene from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space OdysseyThink about great movies, novels, and plays. They probe the physical world of flesh and blood and, at the same time, draw us into things spiritual and immaterial: the sublime and the ridiculous; love, heroism, envy and prejudice; good and evil. But a strain of modern thought says that those immaterial things aren't real. Darwinian materialism holds that all species evolved from the first tiny cell in a process without guidance or design. And the human mind is no exception. Harvard evolutionist E. O. Wilson describes it as just a byproduct of the physical brain, and the brain as "the product of genetic evolution by natural selection."