What Are Creationists Afraid Of?

The New Individualist ^ | 1/2006 | Ed Hudgins

[jennyp]

...

Third, complexity does not imply “design.” One of Adam Smith’s most powerful insights, developed further by Friedrich Hayek, is that incredible complexity can emerge in society without a designer or planner, through “spontaneous order.” Hayek showed how in a free market the complex processes of producing and distributing goods and services to millions of individuals do not require socialist planners. Rather, individuals pursuing their own self-interest in a system governed by a few basic rules—property rights, voluntary exchange by contract—have produced all the vast riches of the Western world.

Many creationists who are on the political Right understand the logic of this insight with respect to economic complexity. Why, then, is it such a stretch for them to appreciate that the complexity we find in the physical world—the optic nerve, for example—can emerge over millions of years under the rule of natural laws that govern genetic mutations and the adaptability of life forms to changing environments? It is certainly curious that many conservative creationists do not appreciate that the same insights that show the futility of a state-designed economy also show the irrelevance of an “intelligently designed” universe.

...

Evolution: A Communist Plot?

Yet another fear causes creationists to reject the findings of science.

Many early proponents of science and evolution were on the political Left. For example, the Humanist Manifesto of 1933 affirmed support for evolution and the scientific approach. But its article fourteen stated: “The humanists are firmly convinced that existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society has shown itself to be inadequate and that a radical change in methods, controls, and motives must be instituted. A socialized and cooperative economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of the means of life be possible.”

Subsequent humanist manifestos in 1973 and 2000 went lighter on the explicit socialism but still endorsed, along with a critical approach to knowledge, the kind of welfare-state democracy and internationalism rejected by conservatives. The unfortunate historical association of science and socialism is based in part on the erroneous conviction that if humans can use scientific knowledge to design machines and technology, why not an entire economy?

Further, many supporters of evolution were or appeared to be value-relativists or subjectivists. For example, Clarence Darrow, who defended Scopes in the “monkey trial” eight decades ago, also defended Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. These two young amoralists pictured themselves as supermen above conventional morality; they decided to commit the perfect crime and killed a fourteen-year-old boy. Darrow offered the jury the standard liberal excuses for the atrocity. He argued that the killers were under the influence of Nietzschean philosophy, and that to give them the death penalty would hurt their surviving families. “I am pleading for life, understanding, charity, kindness, and the infinite mercy that considers all,” he said. “I am pleading that we overcome cruelty with kindness and hatred with love.” This is the sort of abrogation of personal responsibility, denial of moral culpability, and rejection of the principle of justice that offends religious conservatives—in fact, every moral individual, religious or atheist.

In addition, nearly all agnostics and atheists accept the validity of evolution. Creationists, as religious fundamentalists, therefore see evolution and atheism tied together to destroy the basis of morality. For one thing, evolution seems to erase the distinction between humans and animals. Animals are driven by instincts; they are not responsible for their actions. So we don’t blame cats for killing mice, lions for killing antelope, or orca whales for killing seals. It’s what they do. They follow instincts to satisfy urges to eat and procreate. But if human beings evolved from lower animals, then we might be merely animals—and so there would be no basis for morality. In which case, anything goes.

To religious fundamentalists, then, agnostics and atheists must be value-relativists and subjectivists. Whether they accept evolution because they reject a belief in God, or reject a belief in God because they accept evolution, is immaterial: the two beliefs are associated, just as are creationism and theism. By this view, the only firm basis for morality is the divine edicts of a god.

This reflects the creationists’ fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of morality.

Morality from Man’s Nature

We humans are what we are today regardless of whether we evolved, were created, or were intelligently designed. We have certain characteristics that define our nature.

We are Homo sapiens. Unlike lower animals, we have a rational capacity, an ability to fully, conceptually understand the world around us. We are self-conscious. We are the animal that knows—and knows that he knows. We do not survive automatically, by instinct, but must exercise the virtue of rationality. We must think. We must discover how to acquire food—through hunting or planting—how to make shelters, how to invent medicines. And to acquire such knowledge, we must adopt a rational methodology: science.

Furthermore, our thinking does not occur automatically. We have free will and must choose to think, to focus our minds, to be honest rather than to evade facts that make us uncomfortable—evolution, for example—because reality is what it is, whether we like it or acknowledge it or not.

But we humans do not exercise our minds and our wills for mere physical survival. We have a capacity for a joy and flourishing far beyond the mere sensual pleasures experienced by lower animals. Such happiness comes from planning our long-term goals, challenging ourselves, calling on the best within us, and achieving those goals—whether we seek to nurture a business to profitability or a child to adulthood, whether we seek to create a poem or a business plan, whether we seek to design a building or to lay the bricks for its foundation.

But our most important creation is our moral character, the habits and attitudes that govern our actions. A good character helps us to be happy, a bad one guarantees us misery. And what guides us in creating such a character? What tells us how we should deal with our fellow humans?

A code of values, derived from our nature and requirements as rational, responsible creatures possessing free will.

We need not fear that with evolution, or without a god, there is no basis for ethics. There is an objective basis for ethics, but it does not reside in the heavens. It arises from our own human nature and its objective requirements.

Creationists and advocates of intelligent design come to their beliefs in part through honest errors and in part from evasions of facts and close-minded dogmatism. But we should appreciate that one of their motivations might be a proper rejection of value-relativism, and a mistaken belief that acceptance of divine revelation is the only moral alternative.

If we can demonstrate to them that the basis for ethics lies in our nature as rational, volitional creatures, then perhaps we can also reassure them that men can indeed have morality—yet never fear to use that wondrous capacity which allows us to understand our own origins, the world around us, and the moral nature within us.

Edward Hudgins is the Executive Director of The Objectivist Center.

[dread78645]

How about starting with the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

And why there are still monkeys?

[jennyp]

"Example #1 of my previous post. There are tens of thousands of transitional fossils in collections all over the world, and have been for years."

Bunk, no transitional forms have been found to exist alive, (which would surely be the case if evolution were true), nor has the 'missing link' been found. What you believe in takes more radical, blind faith than believing in a God Who created the universe. In fact, it takes a conscious desire to not believe in God to believe this crap.

Uh, a transitional form that's alive? Well, OK, a chimpanzee is a transitional form between a gorilla & a human. All the great apes (chimps, gorillas, & orangs) are living transitional forms between monkeys and humans.

So there are transitional forms that made it, and others that didn't. Your emotions are strong, but they're supporting a very weak point.

[TheCrusader]

"Uh, a transitional form that's alive? Well, OK, a chimpanzee is a transitional form between a gorilla & a human."

You evolutionists sling more bull s#!t than a bull. There are no transitional forms between apes and humans walking around out there. If humans evolved from apes and there are still plenty of apes and humans alive today, where the hell are the transitional forms living?
Hint: it's in the minds of the evolutionist whackos.

[jennyp]

So the market at large is the sum of all those planning, little intelligent, busy as a bee capitalists. Now take away the intelligence, the indivdual, the planning, the direction and the complexity. What happens to the larger market?

It slows down - all the way down to the glacial pace of biological evolution. And the rampant horizontal meme transfer that occurs as companies copy innovations from each other pretty much stops.

It'd slow down so badly that we'd all be living like savages again. ('course if you removed the intelligence from the actors then that would mean we WOULD be just savages anyway... but I digress. :-)

Since biological evolution is a system where the actors are not very intelligent (the brainpower of the organisms doesn't enter into it much), the whole process takes many generations to produce new biological features or species; whereas industries or economies can make major changes in a couple decades. And before Darwinian evolution was able to get started with the first self-replicating protocell, it probably took 100-500 million years for organic chemistry to reach the complexity necessary for life to get started.

The fact that the actors in biological evolution are not intelligent is not a difference in kind. It's a difference in degree. (Even though a big one.)

[marron]

Sorry. I'll sit out for a bit and see if I can work up a rage.

...

Nope. Can't do it. Music's good, the tea's on, its warm inside...

By the way, I like your new nickname ("jebby").

Cheers, and have a good one...

(signed mabbon)

[jennyp]

The fact that I cannot function as a human being without them. And the fact that the type of society that supports life as a human cannot exist without them.

Nonsense. The vast majority of human beings in history existed in societies that did not recognize natural rights, other that, I suppose, the right of the strong to lord over the week.

And you would characterize life under such a system as supporting life as a human being? (I'm referring to flourishing as a human being, as opposed to living like a drawhorse. A slave or serf may be existing, but they are not living like a human. I was probably not clear about that.)

[jennyp]

The Mother of Objectivism herself, Ayn Rand, did not exibit a morally upright lifestyle...those morals arising simply from human nature always tend to corrupt and run downhill--and good minds (like Hudgins) are easily able to rationalize away selfishness and avarice--or all kinds of evil, especially (unlike Objectivists) if they have a utopian vision. Show me someone who is convinced they are ultimately under no other authority than themselves...and I'll show you someone with serious flaws in character...every time.

I'm curious. What kind of evil does Ed Hudgins rationalize, since you know him?

[jennyp]

Well, the current party line is that "evolution has nothing to do with abiogenesis." I say "current" because I've been on these threads long enough (I used to spend weeks at a time in these debates) to know that that's a lot of bunk--there was a time, not too many years ago, when the Evos on FR and elsewhere thought that abiogenesis was just a matter of having the right chemicals in the right place at the right time, perhaps with some sort of crystalization forming the matrix necessary for primitive DNA or RNA.

They distanced themselves from that when they started getting killed in the debates.

(<sigh> How soon they forget.) Abiogenesis is NOT part of the theory of evolution. But you guys keep throwing the origin of life at us as if were a talisman to ward off the eeeevil eeeeeevilushunists, so naturally sometimes we get sucked into the side-issue.

[TheCrusader]

"Uh, a transitional form that's alive? Well, OK, a chimpanzee is a transitional form between a gorilla & a human. All the great apes (chimps, gorillas, & orangs) are living transitional forms between monkeys and humans."

I'm beginning to think that Darwinists are certified lunatics. Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, all are apes, all of the family Pongidae. To claim that any one of these is the transition form between the other two and humans is, well, bananas.

I'm still waiting for you evolutionists to point out the living transitional forms that link apes and humans. Chimpanzees are every bit as much a primate as their larger cousins are, so there exists no viable claim to chimps being living transitional forms of apes to humans. In case you haven't noticed, CHIMPS ARE STILL APES.

Since the core principle of 'evolution' claims an extremely slow, gradual metamorphosis, not an immediate leap from one species to another, any living transitional forms between apes and humans would necessarily have to be something other than an ape or a human, something like, um, Piltdown man if he weren't a Darwinist fraud. Because of the so-called 'evolutionary' process, these more latent transitional forms would be far more intelligent than apes, would not be dragging their knuckles and masturbating on a tree limb. So once again, where are they? Why did their less intelligent 'ancestors', the apes, survive but they did not?

[jennyp]

I think you misunderstand markets. Markets are simply the sum total of individual initiative, profit motive, direction and planning (preferably not the central kind). Take away those and there is no market.

Now what happens if you remove individual initiative, profit motive, direction and planning from evolution?

Everything dies.

But as it is, every living thing has just enough intelligence to interact with their surroundings well enough to reproduce & in some cases eventually evolve. Every living thing has a profit motive. There is no direction to evolution. There is no planning. Just individual actors going with what they're endowed with at birth, and the ones whose "business plan" works for them, get to spin off new copies of themselves, which may or may not be the same as themselves. Ad infinitum.

What a system!

[jennyp]

The irrational brigade has managed to toss your excellent thread into the smokey backroom. Never fear. The intellectual value of this thread will persist. I shall henceforth vigorously point out the intellectual connections between Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, and the Founding Fathers. If the creationists squeal, it's because their totalitarian worldview is exposed for all to see.

The thread is dead. Long live the thread!

[dread78645]

Transitional thread placemark

[jennyp]

Hudgins is saying here that there need be no spiritual basis for morality; that the source is "our own human nature" and that this is enough.

The raises the question of what to do with someone with no or very few moral impulses. If there is no morality external to man's nature, then on what grounds do we judge the morality of a man who does not posess this trait? If morality is simply part of man's nature, then what makes one man's nature better than another? We would have to appeal to something outside man to make the call.

No, we need to appeal to something outside this man to make the call. He's a sociopath. The very concept of a moral principle is alien to him.

This is generally not a problem, since nearly all men acknowledge virtually the same morality, with the deviations among cultures and individuals being in the details. Examples of people with no sense of morality are very rare. But when they appear there is no means of measuring the "rightness" of one man's nature without an appeal to some kind of objective standard outside of man.

I'm not using this argument to prove the existence of God, because I don't think it does, but it is very problematic for those who claim that no source of morality external to man's nature is needed.

No, the standard just has to be based on something objective. The objective basis for morality is that we are all members of the same species.

See, morality is all about principles. The purpose of having a moral code is to sustain the kind of society where you can flourish. This has nothing to do with ad-hoc, spur of the moment calculations of what will profit you in the immediate term. Everyone knows what actions would profit them in the immediate sense. Knock me unconsious & steal my purse? Of course; that would profit you immediately. That kind of calculation is a no-brainer. What morality is all about is deciding on what principles of behavior to live by.

A sociopath is incapable of thinking in terms of moral principles. So the question of morality really doesn't even seriously enter his head. The only really relevant question is for the rest of society: What do we do with a person like this?

Thanks for the comment. I hope you stick around these threads for a while. It'll raise the level of discussion. :-)

[TheCrusader]

"What would a living transitional form look like? Why would it look that way?"

The Darwinists have already answered that question in the elaborate hoax of their "Piltdown Man", (fastening an ape's jaw and various human skull fragments together to dupe the world.

Any transitional form or links between apes and man would obviously have to resemble both to varying degrees, depending on how far along the alleged 'link' has progressed from ape to man.

It's all hooey anyway; it's an escape for the imaginations of the young, a waste of time for the honest and serious minded, and a drag on confused people who are trying to find faith. And it's the latter that Darwin's Piper, Lucifer, wants the most.

But I do believe in devolution, where intelligent human beings become Darwinists and begin thinking with the rationality of apes.

[spunkets]

Loring Brace argues instead that Neanderthals simply evolved into modern northern Europeans. His skull measurements show that Neanderthals cluster with one and only one modern population: that of Britain and Scandinavia. Robust features of the skeleton, such as brow ridges, simply vanish when the selective force of evolution is no longer active. That the process of that reduction in robustness by which modern appearance arose, he argues, is why virtually all early Upper Paleolithic groups present a kind of 'mixed' appearance.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

Morality and all of those associated ideals are rooted entirely in the presupposition some higher power defines what is correct for human behavior.

[spunkets]

"Morality and all of those associated ideals are rooted entirely in the presupposition some higher power defines what is correct for human behavior."

Morality is defined by men. There's no presupposition, there are only reasons presented by men to justify the content of the moral code.

[mlc9852]

Why do you want to mix politics and science?

[mlc9852]

The ones that crash are the result of random chance. :)

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

The objective basis for morality is that we are all members of the same species.

That is false.

Morality and all of those associated ideals are rooted entirely in the presupposition some higher power defines what is correct for human behavior.

Plato’s Euthyphro is a great illustration. Socrates advances the argument to Euthyphro that, piety to the gods, who all want conflicting devotions and/or actions from humans, is impossible. (Socrates exposed the pagan esoteric sophistry.)

Likewise, morals are such a construction of idols used by the Left (and yourself here) as a rationale for them to demand compliance to their wishes in politics, which most often are a skewed mess of fallacies in logic. Morals are a deceptive replacement for the avoidance of sin.

And, since I am such an amoral atheist, you would attempt to falsely label me as “sociopath” - - just as the constipated psychologists want to label anyone they see as “homophobic” with a mental illness for opposing the radical homosexual activists.

Today, “morals” are defined by a religious pagan philosophy based on esoteric hobgoblins. Transfiguration is a pantheon of fantasies as the medium of infinitization. Others get derision for having an unwavering Judaic belief in Yahweh or Yeshua, although their critics and enemies will evangelize insertion of phantasmagoric fetishisms into secular law.

A greater number of “atheists” and “pagans” adopt the same hackneyed tenets of a false Judaic-Christian ideal (golden calf). They also subscribe to the Judaic fetishism of “sin,” but will fight to their death in denial of it. Most of them are so wrapped up in their own polemics that they have become nothing more than pathetic anti-Christians with the same false hypocritical philosophy.

They just slap a new label on it hoping nobody will notice - - they replace the idea of “avoiding sin” with “morals.”

Anyone who says I am immoral is no different than any preacher or rabbi saying I am a sinner. I am not an orthodox atheist, nor am I an ecumenical atheist - - there is no such thing!

Objectivists have failed to see that gaping hole in the philosophy of Ayn Rand, whose egotism is taken directly from Thomas Hobbes, minus the Biblical arguments, and with a smattering of nihilism from Neitzche thrown in to sell books.

The Geneology of Morals, borrowing from Neitzche's title, is much like the geneology of drama from the ancient Greeks - - it is nothing more than an extension of religion, a psychodramatic game.