> In his recent book, Carson Holloway demonstrates the inability of neo-Darwinian theory to undergird the moral framework that is essential to a liberal democracy's survival.
How about the Theory of Relativity? The Laws of Thermodynamics? Quantum Theory? The Germ Theory of disease?
Attacking a scientific theory because it does not provide a "moral framework" is stupid and dishonest, and any conservative should be ashamed and apalled to be associated with such a ridiculous effort.
Attacking a scientific theory because it does not provide a "moral framework" is stupid and dishonest, and any conservative should be ashamed and apalled to be associated with such a ridiculous effort.
Agreed.
I must confess to an astonishing naïveté in my past - I used to believe that only liberals insist that facts conform to political dogma.
Imagine my surprise and shame when I learned that some sefl-described "conservatives" eagerly do the exact same thing.
The author is basically saying, "life is better with religon as a moral basis than neo-Darwinism" because there are no moral absolutes if they are Man-made.
Since when do any of these theories purport to account for human origins, including the origin of morality?
Cordially,
Attacking a scientific theory because it does not provide a "moral framework" is stupid and dishonest, and any conservative should be ashamed and apalled to be associated with such a ridiculous effort.
I hope you noticed that I specifically rejected the "utilitarian" argument altogether. To argue that G-d doesn't really exist but we must pretend He does so for utilitarian social reasons is no different from the argument that we should dispense with belief in G-d because we don't "need" him to for society to function smoothly.
So far as I know, the other theories you cite are theories about how the world works in the present. Evolution is retrojected into the distant past in order to explain how everything came into existence. That's a little different.
I'm still waiting to hear how the "big bang" could be a purely natural phenomenon when "nature" was not in existence until afterwards. Are you really saying that it was caused by its result? How is this logical?