If you subscribe to his theme, and I am somewhat torn by it, but leaning towards it, then all our ideas of morals and scruples and right and wrong are inventions. Delusions.
God does indeed work in mysterious ways, djf. I empathize with your perplexity.
It would be so easy to say, “Well, Clarence Darrow – of Scopes Monkey Trial fame – bought into Darwin’s vision of nature. No wonder he’s a pessimist.” But that wouldn’t shed very much light on the problem….
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution rocked the world of its time: People then were simply not accustomed to thinking of themselves as animals. It went “against religion” and the common understanding of nature, a view that made man preeminent in the natural hierarchy.
That was one thing, a very big thing. Then as if to add insult to injury, Darwin basically said that all of Nature is at war – members of species fighting within their own species, or with other species; entire species fighting with each other, or with the environment itself. It was all struggle and no grace. Only the fit could survive in the endless, bloody-tooth-and-claw competition for the scarce resources needed to live long enough to propagate offspring. Natural selection improved your chances of surviving and attracting a mate. And that’s pretty much the end of the story. Pretty cut and dried, no?
And then, the piece de resistance -- the Creator was replaced by the Common Ancestor, and human beings were told that, hardly having been created in God’s own image, they all had descended (or “arose,” depending on your point of view) from a lower form of being than themselves.
Just want to get the main points of the “culturally insensitive” Darwinist theory on the table here – insensitive because denigrating of the multi-millennia-worth of “unmanipulated” human living and experience as recorded in the astonishing wealth of works of genius that they bequeathed to us now living.
Of course, time has passed since the mid-eighteenth century; and folks have had to make their peace with Darwin one way or another. Personally, I am sure that Charles Darwin could never have shifted the very axis of Western culture as he did if everything he said was a lie. I feel reasonably certain that some of his observations about certain processes and arrangements of the natural world are valid. But I expect, like all human beings, he had his strengths and also his weaknesses.
My evolutionist friends should speak to Darwin’s strengths. Indeed, they are most cordially invited to do so here. My task is to point out the weaknesses I see.
As far back as the very ancient world, human beings understood man in his essential nature as “half beast, half angel” – material and spiritual, profane (i.e., “secular”) and sacred. Indeed, for countless millennia, man understood himself as comprised by and unfolding his existence between these two dynamic “poles.” When Darwin came along and said that men were only animals, a whole lot of people then living believed him. Possibly not a few of them were relieved by this news. In any case, what he managed to accomplish was a reduction of reality to only one of its “poles,” and left the other in total eclipse.
But the fact is Darwin’s assertion proves nothing. And there are still some six millennia of human experience, culture, and history furnishing evidence tending to falsify his thesis. (That’s a BIG subject. Maybe we can explore it another time.)
What Darwin did, when you boil it all down, was reduce all of life to matter, and to consign the fate of living entities to an infinite series of random causes propagating effects that are in their turn to be further shaped by natural selection and the survival of the fittest. All of which somehow ends up being perfectly “determined” in the end, consistent with the original premise -- although this seems to involve a paradox. Yet nobody asks: Which is it? random or determined? Logically, the two do seem to be mutually exclusive. For it seems they cannot be logically reconciled in principle.
Whilst we dither over the paradox, perhaps we should note that a material, deterministic world can have no purpose, just as a machine cannot originate a “purpose” in itself, but must have it supplied from the outside. Still I gather there are people around who, for some strange reason, derive comfort from the idea of a purposeless Nature. [Reality check: Last time I looked, Nature looked pretty purposeful to me….] Maybe that has something to do with the fact that a world lacking purpose obviates any need of human purpose. Moral law is strangled at its birth. Free will and, with it, personal responsibility die with it.
Darwin was very much a captive of the Newtonian concept of the universe. Which is a marvelously solid, sturdy concept, and incredibly dependable and extraordinarily useful to this day, within the scale to which it is eminently applicable – our “normally perceived,” 4-dimensional world of experience (3 of space and 1 of time). It seems to me the greatest challenge for Darwin’s theory of evolution lies ahead: It has yet to engage and integrate the scientific breakthroughs of the last century that deal with scales of reality that are distinctly non-Newtonian: Einstein’s Relativity, and quantum physics. In short, Darwinism needs to be “renormalized” in terms of the two greatest scientific advances of the past century. My guess is a reconciliation with relativity theory can wait: Its scale is largely extra-planetary. But it seems so very clear to me that the quantum world is the crucible of living matter; and so it follows that anything purporting to be a “life science” must take QM’s investigations and insights to heart.
Plus one final note on point (1): To expunge “spirituality” is to expunge consciousness, mind itself. There’s nothing material or deterministic about consciousness. It is the most telling and irrefutable evidence that Spirit is active in the world…. Even Aristotle would tell you that.
(2) To me, a huge defect of Darwinist theory is that it makes conflict preeminent in the development of the living world. But this flies in the face of human observation and experience as is has evolved over time. There is enormous cooperation and dynamic mutuality at every level of even the simplest living organism: Body, organs, membranes, cells, DNA, genome – all living organisms are composites of other living organisms which are themselves composites of other living organisms, from top to bottom right on down the line. (If you’d like to acquire a graphic sense of this description, take a look at pictures of the Mandelbrot Set, and then find a comfy place where you won’t be disturbed for a while and think on what you’ve seen….)
Life emerges from a process of mutuality and cooperation at all the levels of being. Just when we think we’ve finally found something that can be regarded as the ultimate principle of life, something that can act “autonomously” – say, the genome – we discover that it is itself a composite of other parts – other living organisms. Life could not be sustained without mutuality and synergistic cooperation of all these hierarchically-ordered living parts – whether at the organic level of the physical body, or society at large, or the biosystem. Death tends to occur when/where the synergistic mutuality of parts is absent.
Darwinism, having expunged consciousness and “spirituality,” sends moral law -- that law pertaining to the good order of the individual and of the society of which he is a part -- right out the window too. Its value as a conflict reduction/resolution tool cannot be recognized absent consciousness. Without consciousness, morality is eclipsed, and free will and personal responsibility perish for lack of proper nurture. The “survival of the fittest” necessarily emerges from conflict, and Darwinist theory gives us no way to alleviate this grim and perilous condition – although human beings often figure out how to accomplish this end all the same.
(3) Now I invite you to turn your rapt gaze upon our Common Ancestor. Why date the birth of this paragon to the emergence of an hairy pre-hominid, an apish Esau? I mean, couldn’t Darwin have taken the common ancestor back further in time? To, say, the lemur? the primaeval muck? or the first helium atom? There’s nothing in “Darwinian logic” that appears to rule out such possibilities (except, perhaps, that it could care less about physics).
Me, I’d take the common ancestor back to the Singularity that the Big Bang blew into an ordered Universe, a One Cosmos of which we, each and every one of us, are parts and participants.
I mean, if you’re going to pluck a Common Ancestor out of a hat, as it were – couldn’t you find him anywhere or even nowhere? Yet here we have as the father of the human race a knuckle-dragging hominid who just acquired an opposing thumb and recently learned how to stagger into an upright position, on two legs. I must say Charles Darwin had interesting taste when it came to his selection of a paradigm for mankind…. I could say more in refutation of the pure speculation that is Darwin’s Common Ancestor; but I’ll save it for another time, ‘cause my time is just about up in the present writing.
Before I close, I find this troubling:
“The real nature, the one that no matter how moral and pure and charitable you are during your life, you still end up six feet under.”
Yes. I know. But here’s the main thing, djf: It has only been within the past century or maybe a little more that mankind has “universally” imagined death as “final,” as the short route to nothingness, to utter oblivion….
Do you realize how recent an idea this is?
“If you subscribe to [Darrow’s] theme, and I am somewhat torn by it, but leaning towards it, then all our ideas of morals and scruples and right and wrong are inventions. Delusions.”
Ah, the recourse to Feuerbach’s argument: All of spiritual reality, and all that God Himself is, is merely the fantastically unreal projection of the human imagination, frantically grasping for a cosmic security blanket….
There’s another way to understanding this phenomenon – and it is a phenomenon, and we can contrast it with the testimony, evidence, of actual thinking and experiencing human beings going back some 6,000+ years, all of which has entered the “empirical” mainstream by now. And we have more recent independent corroboration of this same point: The extraordinary, shreaking hostility that any idea of the divine evokes from “men of the Left” in our day. Certainly that must count as some kind of evidence….
We humans didn’t create God. That is a complete inversion of fact. It’s not that we “invented” a divinity to talk to, supposedly to relieve our existential anxiety. The real point is, God wants to talk to us. And people can hear Him when He speaks – in a voice so very soft yet clear and distinct, buried deeply in the remotest recesses of the human heart….
Ya know, if you could just give God one single chance of “finding you,” in faith, I think He’d do all the rest. (This test is more for your benefit than God’s. He already knows where you are. The real point is that you need to know that He does.)
Well, them be my thoughts, FWTW. Thank you so much for writing djf.
Betty, let me gloss over the rest of your lengthy and (as always) never inconsiderable post and say; you're out by 100 years here.
Back to shred the rest of it later. :-)
I agree with you right down the line as always. I would also very much like to see Darwin's theory be reconciled with dimensionality (though clearly a part of relativity) sooner rather than later because string theory reaches all levels of physics - quantum to astro.
I truly appreciated your post and I am pleased to be in the ‘virtual company’ of you and the others you have ‘virtually invited’ again. I have been busy lately and – well… I’m just glad to have a little time to read through and think about the ideals on this thread. I hope you don’t mind if I add a thought or two though.
I agree that Darwin was captive to the “Newtonian concept of the universe”, but unfortunately (as you know) the naturalistic view of the universe was not Newton’s view and was ‘naturalized’ due in part to Fontanelle and Voltaire (and of course Descartes and others were being ‘naturalized’ in realms of science) Now some may disagree but please understand I am criticizing a ‘scientific movement’ and not a individual. With Descartes and Newton’s fundamental ideas forgotten, science forgot ‘their inherent intelligent ideal’, and eventually matter was thought to have all the forces inherent in ‘itself’, existing independent of “Divine Providence” – i.e. naturalism.
Yes, naturalism has been ‘my’ problem with modern science all along and it is not a big secret. When science declares, "Matter and Energy is all there is for eternity” and at the same time states, “Science has no ‘proofs’ and we should only learn from science” – I see a problem. They have created this ‘matter/energy box’ without real proof and limiting the actual learning science seeks by trapping those who seek scientific knowledge into a box of only natural explanations regardless of what they find.
But wait, before I am criticized here I ask of those who adhere to this naturalistic philosophy, “How do you know anything for sure if the only thing you believe to be true is your faith that matter and energy is all there for eternity?” And, “How do you know that you know ‘anything’ considering your very mind and the universe that created it comes solely from mindlessness?”
"One of the awfulest consequences of taking epistemological nihilism seriously is that it has led some to question the very facticity of the universe. To some, nothing is real, not even themselves. When a person reaches this state, he is in deep trouble, for he can no longer function as a human being. Or, as we often say, he can't cope. ---We usually do not recognize this situation as metaphysical or epistemological nihilism. Rather, we call it schizophrenia, hallucination, fantasizing, daydreaming or living in a dream world. And we "treat" the person as a "case," the problem as a "disease."
(Ref. "The Universe Next Door", J. Sire, Inter-Varsity, Downers Grove, p.87)
I apologize if this does offend some, but does it offend ‘you’ or just the atoms that comprise you?
Let me put it this way (as Paul A. Dernavich points out):
Two similar clusters of matter came into physical contact with each other at a single point in space and time. One cluster dominated, remaining intact; while the other began to break down into its component elements.
Well, lets look at this exact same situation here:
A 26-year old man lost his life today in a violent and racially motivated attack, according to Thompson County police. Reginald K. Carter was at his desk when, according to eyewitness reports, Zachariah Jones, a new employee at the Clark Center, entered the building apparently carrying an illegally-obtained handgun. According to several eyewitnesses, Jones immediately walked into Carter's cubicle and shouted that "his kind should be eliminated from the earth," before shooting him several times at point-blank range.
Beyond the naturalistic account in the first situation we have survival of the fittest in the second situation. So how do we determine right and wrong from the second account but not from the first account? Are we to draw upon the ‘clusters of matter’ in the first account to attribute evil, guilt, and justice into the second account of the same situation?
Now I am going to say something to you, Betty, which seems crazy and ridiculous to others.
May God continue to bless you with His Divine Providence.