Posted on 01/26/2006 1:47:10 PM PST by jennyp
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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.
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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.
Of course.
Of course, there's also the question of whether or not God's defined morality is his own arbitrary choice.
Traditional Christianity and Judaism hold that it is not his arbitrary choice, but is in accordance with his Love for his creation.
Certainly, other religions have a god or gods that act quite arbitrarily. I don't think they're much better than atheism in providing a metaphysical grounding for ethics.
Are you saying that Saddam Hussein is an atheist?
Whether he was an atheist is debatable, but immaterial to my point. I provided him as an example of someone who personally benefited from mass murder.
It's not difficult to justify mass murder for the same reason for a theist. Simply claim that God doesn't frown upon such actions. How can you prove that wrong?
You can't, but it's not relevant to my point, which is that there is no way to logically ground morality without reference to the supernatural. One (of many) fatal flaws of objectivism is a failure to recognize this.
Sorry I'm not a follower of racist darwinism. I'm one of the dangerous defective products of evilution that they talk about exterminating from the gene pool. A Christ believer and follower.
You made the crack. I'm sure any alternate explanation you care to offer would be welcomed.
Random does not equal purpose driven, and vice-versa. The weather system is not random, but that does not make it purpose driven.
It is not purpose driven. Noone sets out with the purpose of creating that system in that state. It just emerges. Yes if you go down far enough there are actions being made with a purpose, but the overall system is not guided or designed. Who would have an economic recession as a purpose?
Did the keyboard that you are typing on just appear out of thin air? Or did someone design it? Did someone manufacture it? Did someone find a buyer for it? Did someone ship it to a distribution center where it was distributed to a retail store where you found it?
I was just looking at the instant oatmeal box on my desk. It probably took the efforts of 150 people to get that oatmeal on the store shelve. It is not a random process. It is an intelligently driven process with dozens of independent intelligent decisions bringing it about.
I am not talking about manufacturing. I am talking about the market system. Ie the kind of stuff the stock people try to predict.
To compare the market to evolution is to admit that "evolution" (such as it is) is an intelligently driven process. Are you willing to admit that FACT?
People compare market systems to weather systems. Would you accuse them of admitting that the weather system is intelligently driven?
Which is also true for evolution. Evolution is not abiogenesis. Abiogenesis is a theory about the origin of life - that it came into being from inanimate objects like "primordial soup."
Evolution is about how living organisms change over time. There's no reason to explain the Creator.
It always surpises me to see you on the CRIDer side of these. I have found you to be one of the most intelligent, rational and thoughtful posters on FR.
I can't see the rationality of discarding or ignoring the huge mass of evidence in support of evolution.
Nor of merging philosophy/mythology with science.
But perhaps I mis-state your position? These threads get long and nuances can be missed.
I think DNA will answer a lot of questions. I just hope scientists are open to all possibilities.
And thanks for not being a "mean" evolutionist! :)
Manufacturing is part of the market system. You cannot separate it. If nothing is manufactued, nothing is marketed.
I don't think you have a clue about what you are posting.
Evolutionists are not, by and large, "mean." But we do get frustrated. We expose most "arguments" presented by CRIDers as being logical fallacies (Strawman #1, followd by Begging The Question, Argument Through Force, Propter Hoc) or outright lies (Darwin's supposed "deathbed recantation").
Creationists tend to say that all Evolutionists are damned souls whose sole purpose is to destroy Christianity, which is, in itself a Strawman and Argument Through Force fallacy.
Creationists are much, much, much "meaner" than Evolutionists (and yes, I can prove it).
It doesn't matter. Evolution doesn't care. By what means could evolution possibly decide: "Ah, an agent is acting purposefully. Since I'm a purposeless process, I must stop immediately!"?
To state that an organism has any inherent "purpose" is ludicrous from a purely naturalistic standpoint.
Why?
Any purpose that an organism has is the result of that purpose being programmed into it.
And yet purposeful actions occur all the time without the specific purpose having been programmed by anyone or anything. Again this is the example of markets. No one "programmed" the incredibly complex and delicately balanced (and, btw, IRREDUCIBLY COMPLEX) system that manages to get just enough food into New York City ever day to feed 8 million people. And yet there it is, fulfilling its purpose almost flawlessly and constantly adapting to innumerable vicissitudes.
Not true Stultis. Markets can and are created by design absent central planners. The derivative market being a case in point. Built in capability, complexity and new functions. And all toward a purpose, that being liquidity for the larger market so they can transfer risk. Oh yeah, and it keeps the gamblers out of the casinos and in front of their MACS.
Moreover, people who are mechanistic evolutionists also have no purpose greater than that of the rock from which they say they came.
The purpose of the rock is...well...just to be there until it isn't...and one day it'll all burn up.
One insight that verifies God is that the mechanistic route removes real meaning from life.
Perhaps.
I was assuming the market is a system that emerges as a result of many people wanting to buy and sell with each other. Throw in a few thousand people and the system becomes very complex and chaotic. Order forms - there appears to be an overall direction and purpose, and the assumption might be that a super intelligence would be necessary to control something that complex. But there is noone guiding the direction of the overall system, and it has no purpose. It wanders of its own accord. What appears intelligently design is simply a consequence of lots of "dummies" trading with each other.
I hope you don't tell your stockholders that. :-}
Many thanks for your compliments. However, any intelligence that I have, or that you have, is not the result of random changes in chemicals over the eons. It is the result of being endowed by our creator with such properties. The chemicals in the brain are not randomly and purposelessly arranged in such a way that they magically produce intelligence, they are specifically and purposely arranged in a manner in which they become the physical means in which intelligence is carried to and through the organism.
I personally am surprised when I see many people who claim to believe in the God revealed in the Bible, yet they reject His assertion that their existence is due to a direct act of creation by that God as he himself revealed in stone on the Tablets that he presented to Moses on Mt. Sinai.
I appreciate the fact that you think I am intelligent, but I am not so "intelligent" that I would dare to pretend that my existence on this planet is not the product of something so much greater than myself that I am wont to describe it.
As far as the evidence for evolution, what evolutionist have is a stack of bones that speak to common design as much as common ancestry. The fact that we can observe that things "evolve" is as much evidence of divine purpose and divine design as it is Darwinistic evolution. To deny the existence of a supernatural cause simply because it does not comport with a purely naturalistic premise or axiom is hardly honest science. Science is the search for the truth. Evolutionists (especially the rabid evolutionists who mock the idea of an intelligent designer) are not on a search for truth. If they were, they would not disallow any premise and they would not blackball anyone who dares to suggest that naturalism does not hold a lock on the truth.
Muleteam1
Why is abiogenesis never discussed?
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