Wesley J. Smith August 13, 2014 10:28 AM | Permalink
Posted on 08/13/2014 10:47:22 AM PDT by Heartlander
My wife Debra and I have been enjoying the new TNT television crime drama Murder in the First. The other night, the villain articulated his value system -- and it is pure anti-human exceptionalism.
POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT for those who haven't seen the program or the final episode yet.
The villain admits to a friend that he killed his pregnant girl friend. (I will not name the characters.) From the script:
Friend: She was carrying your child!
Villain: She was carrying a fetus. I told her to get rid of it but she refused...
Friend: So, you just killed her.
Villain: Look at it like this, Bill. Two-thirds of all human conceptions are spontaneously aborted by nature. Ten million women die every year in childbirth. I just nudged Cindy toward those probable outcomes, right? It was sloppy, but effective.
Now, the way that I killed my father, that was a work of art...
Friend: You killed your lover, you killed your child, you paid your grandfather to kill your father, and then he turned the gun you gave him on himself. So, you killed them all.
Villain: I didn't kill my grandfather. That's not on me. That was his choice. He was dying of cancer, Bill. He wanted to go out on his own terms, one more final act of defiance. If I were in his position, doomed to a slow and meaningless death, I'd do the same thing.
Friend: Boy, you are insane!
Villain: No, I'm just evolved. Human life isn't as valuable as you think it is, Wilkie. You know that there are 7 billion people walking around on this planet and we're growing exponentially year by year. Humanity is on the vertical part of the S-curve. It is completely unsustainable...We're going to have to cull the herd, pick the winners. People are going to have to die for the rest of us to survive. I'm just getting a head start.
Insane? How often do we see these very ideas -- not the acts of murder, but the values embraced by the villain -- espoused in bioethics discourse, assisted suicide/euthanasia advocacy, radical environmentalism, animal rights, and other public policy controversies?
Of course, people who deny human exceptionalism aren't going to go out and murder their enemies. But the logic of the scene is impeccable. When societies accept these premises -- and they have in history and some do now -- evil soon follows.
Think about it: Eugenics, social Darwinism, the Holocaust, China's One Child policy, the ISIS pogrom against Shia Muslims, Christians, and the Yezidi -- the list goes on and on.
All of these evils are possible only by the denial of human exceptionalism. Or to put it the other way around, decency, morality, and universal human rights depend on adherence to human exceptionalism, both our unique value and our obligations to each other as humans.
So, good for the writers of Murder in the First. In the scene quoted above, they sure captured an important truth.
Cross-posted at Human Exceptionalism.
The whole series was well done. The understated music track reinforced the creepiness of the drama and the villain. The San Francisco settings supported the theme of his amoral, wealthy materialism. But the producers may have erred in framing his character in such extreme dimensions. I can’t imagine how they might believably follow up with another set of comparably engaging dramas featuring the well-cast surviving players — the detectives, district attorneys, etc.
“People are going to have to die for the rest of us to survive. “
Can we start in the ME.
[Think about it: Eugenics, social Darwinism, the Holocaust, China’s One Child policy, the ISIS pogrom against Shia Muslims, Christians, and the Yezidi — the list goes on and on. ]
“We need breathing room” ~ Hitler, 1938
The is a big, big lie in what the killer says. The rate of increase of the earth’s population is decreasing. By mid century, some demographers think that it will have stabilized. Women in all countries are having less children. In many European and Asian countries, more people are dying than are being born. The insanely ignorant liberals are living in the past. Search for Japan and population, and you will see what having more people die than are born does to a country. For industrialized countries, too few people will be the problem.
Cold logic points to gassing, rather than the more satisfying shooting, but if we are to find Emptyness, sacrifices have to be made.
/s
This “villain” has a worldview not unlike most leftists - not a hair’s breadth difference.
“Think about it: Eugenics, social Darwinism, the Holocaust, China’s One Child policy, the ISIS pogrom against Shia Muslims, Christians, and the Yezidi — the list goes on and on.”
This is a wild statement.
1. The theory of evolution makes no statement on human exceptionalism. The value people place on human life is just that, a belief, a moral, a value. Science can neither prove nor disprove it. My Christian values and beliefs lead me to value human life. Science tells me that a unique human life begins at conception. My values condem abortion strongly.
2. Eugenics, social Darwinism and the holocaust, are related abuses of science to prove, support and implement prexisting value prejudices. The bigotry against Jews, blacks, Slaves, etc. Was there long before Darwin. People used the theory of evolution to justify and promote their biases. You can’t justify a value scientifically. Science can tell you the likely result of acting on your beliefs but it cannot label - good - bad.
3. I don’t see anything other than the desire to limit population size and, in so doing avoid mass starvation in China’s one child policy. It is a horrid abuse of life and freedom but not an application of evolutionary theory correctly or incorrectly applied.
4. ISIS is a practical application of the Koran and, as such, has nothing, zilch, zero to do with science or evolution. The jihadis want to go back to the time before modern science in the seventh century. This attribution of an evil to evolution is just bizarre.
It was quite interesting that the actor playing the villain, Tom Felton, was the same actor who played Draco Malfoy, Slytherin House opponent to Harry Potter. It seemed a bit of a type-cast. It was not hard to believe him portraying that kind of evil.
If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.To natural selection killing your siblings and offspring is all the same as loving them. Selection only favors what works to enhance survival and reproduction, and it does not matter if it is nice and moral, or harsh and brutal.
- Charles Darwin, Descent of Man, and Selection in Regard to Sex
In Europe, the Muslims are poised to take over.
What Darwin believed, his values, have nothing to do with the theory of evolution, particularly today. The confusion of science and values bring with it great abuses. As a person of his time and culture, I’m sure he had lots of bias and prejudice. A lot of people then looked to science to prove or disprove sets of beliefs and values. It didn’t work any better then than it does now.
I can take the uniqueness and intelligence of humans to “prove” their exceptionalism but that wouldn’t be correct. I can believe it but can’t prove it.
What part of his statement is incorrect or is in conflict with the current TOE?
The statement says that there isn’t any morality implied by evolution. You could say the same thing about the theory of gravity. Evolution has no implied faith or favored values. Physics gave us the tools to build an atomic bomb. Physics says nothing about how it should be used. Evolution doesn’t favor an ant over a fish or a human over a rat. It just tells us where they came from, how they got here and who their close relatives are.
Science doesn’t do values.
The comparison to gravity and physics is dishonest. The TOE is about how we came to be human and how our minds developed.
Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly.I could give dozens of quotes - but let's cut to the chase - do you somehow believe you are educating me on the TOE? (you are not) - Are you, as a Christian, so enamored by this theory that you feel a need to spread the good news of Darwin and truly unaware of the moral implications?
1) No gods worth having exist.
2) No life after death exists.
3) No ultimate foundation for ethics exists.
4) No ultimate meaning in life exists.
5) Human free will is nonexistent.
- William Provine (from Darwin Day speech)
Tell me, Christian to Christian, what are you trying to accomplish? As I explained earlier - the article is about the denial of human exceptionalism and evolution was just part of the story.
What is the real argument here?
One. The TOE is an accurate description of what has happened with life over the last 4+ billon years.
Two. No scientific theory can have moral content. It cannot prove God exists and it equally cannot prove he doesn’t exist. Good and bad aren’t the province of science. The statement tells me that science is neutral, not involved in the battle over religion and morality. It can predict the consequences of some beliefs but cannot say if those consequences are good or bad. That is up to us and our theology.
Three. To me, Darwin was saying just that. Perhaps he saw the horrors of social Darwinism and Eugenics coming and was saying they could have no basis in science. I hope that would be it. Margaret Sanger saw abortion as a way to eliminate people she saw as being bad. She, among other things wanted to exterminate blacks. She saw good and bad from a very warped perspective but not one evolution would have validated. See what Darwin said about the limitations of science.
Four. I would go back to my religion, if I were you, to get my ideas of good and bad and leave science alone to find out what is, not what should be.
the biggest problem is that leftists will choose “those who survive” and 90% of them are totally unproductive
Again, are you familiar with Descent?
Moral Darwinism: Ethical Evidence for the Descent of Man
It cannot prove God exists and it equally cannot prove he doesn’t exist.
Tell that to the writers of this college textbook:
Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism…Or Professors Ruse and Wilson:
-Douglas Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology (1998, 3rd Ed., Sinauer Associates), p. 5
The time has come to take seriously the fact that we humans are modified monkeys, not the favored Creation of a Benevolent God on the Sixth Day. In particular, we must recognize our biological past in trying to understand our interactions with others. We must think again especially about our so-called “ethical principles.” The question is not whether biology—specifically, our evolution—is connected with ethics, but how. As evolutionists, we see that no [ethical] justification of the traditional kind is possible.Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will…. In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding. Like Macbeth’s dagger, it serves a powerful purpose without existing in substance.
Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place.
- Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson, The Evolution of Ethics
Very simpily, I don’t agree with either statement as quoted. They are theology and not science. Calling a human a modified monkey is simply provocative. We could be equally accurately be called modified fish. Our last common ancestor with apes was some 7 mya and with monkeys quite a bit further back. Freud and Marx have both been decisively proven wrong. Should we indict Newton for demonstrating the utility of naturalistic cause and effect?
This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being….Beyond this, very simply – they don’t care that you don’t agree. Items like this are being taught and they aren’t asking you…
There are more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible than in any profane history. It must be expressed in the very form of sound words in which it was delivered by the apostles. For men are apt to run into partings about deductions. All the old heresies lie in deductions….
The true faith was in the Biblical texts.
—Isaac Newton
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