Posted on 01/19/2006 2:12:48 PM PST by Zionist Conspirator
We can expect more battles about Darwin before school boards across the country. But who cares? Impatient by now with the legal and religious debate around intelligent design, many of us may wonder just that. In fact we all need to care -- Darwinian theory has practical ramifications beyond the narrow question of what mechanism drives evolution.
Darwinists say the evolutionary mechanism must be purely material. ID theorists find evidence in nature of an intelligent purpose shaping life's history. Which view we convey to our children may affect their adult lives.
The scientific impact: Consider our country's role as the leading exporter of scientific ideas. Modern science from its start has been fueled by religious wonder. In his new book, "The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success," sociologist Rodney Stark points out that real science arose only once. That was in Europe at the hands of devoutly Christian scholars: "medieval scholastics, sustained by that uniquely Christian 12th-century invention, the university."
Unlike the ancient Greeks who believed the universe had no beginning and thus no designer, Christians and Jews read the opening chapters of Genesis as an affirmation that nature is God's handiwork. To understand Him, it helps to understand His creation. Writes Stark, "Newton, Kepler and Galileo regarded the creation itself as a book that was to be read and comprehended."
In erasing God's role from the history of biological existence, Darwinism erases a primary motivation to pursue scientific discovery.
The economic impact: In formulating his theory of natural selection, Darwin said he drew inspiration from the work of Thomas Malthus, the 18th-century political economist. Malthus portrayed life as a "struggle for existence," pitting animal against animal. Darwin added that organisms maximized their chances of survival if they possessed favorable variations (later explained as genetic mutations).
In economics, Malthus's view leads to the dismal belief that people are merely consumers, competing with one another for scarce resources. Similarly, Darwin's theory teaches us to think of life as a fierce struggle against others. It thus subtly undercuts the healthy belief that seeking wealth means providing a service to people rather than a way of robbing them. As my friend Rabbi Daniel Lapin points out, humans do best in careers they consider morally commendable. If we want our children to enjoy affluence as we do, it matters what we teach them about the nobility of creating wealth.
The moral impact: In "The Descent of Man" (1871), Darwin spells out the moral implications of his theory, notably that unguided evolution produced the moral laws as much as it did the plants and animals. Such laws could have turned out differently, as the animals could have turned out differently had chance variations led life's history down a different path.
So there is nothing absolute about our ideas of right and wrong. Wrote Darwin, "We may, therefore, reject the belief, lately insisted on by some writers, that the abhorrence of incest is due to our possessing a special God-implanted conscience." If ethics has no such secure foundation, there can be nothing sacred about doing the right thing.
No, I am not saying that Darwinism necessarily leads to scientific, economic and moral breakdown.
On the other hand, one can hardly deny the sad coarsening of our culture. Whatever its merits as science, Darwinism as a philosophy is far from uplifting or ennobling. Today when young Americans could use a little uplift and an appreciation for what's noble, letting them know about intelligent design, an alternative scientific theory with none of Darwin's drawbacks, couldn't hurt and might help.
Animals are adaptable beings. So are humans (since we actually are animals).
You can train your dog not to poop on the floor, can't you? He isn't an "automaton", he learns. Perhaps he can't learn to do Calculus, but then, neither could I. But to say that an animal can only behave based on hard-coded instructions is patently false. They modify their behavior to fit the specific conditions, at least as far as they can.
But what about those other "biblical types" who don't accept the sacrifice of Christ as perfect and final?
Right, but could you control or design an entire economy or industry if you wanted to? Hayek says no. And history proves him correct, IMO. (Which you seem to agree with.)
But the reason why the planned economy fails is because the market as a whole is much more complex than any individual participant can understand. This is due to spontaneous, subtle, chaotic interactions that change the competitive environments in not-very-predictable ways.
So you're saying here that your feelings are a more objective guide to morality than your intellectual thoughts? Interesting. I disagree: Feelings have their place, and are sometimes uncanny in their ability to provide insightful judgements about people. But I think you cannot rely on them to decide on your overall moral system.
Anyway, who says that feelings are a ruse just because they're a product of evolution? Certainly not me! The fact that we have feelings because of evolution instead of some other reason doesn't help us nearly as much as our simple experience. Do our feelings tend to guide me well in my life, or do I tend to do stupid things when I act on my emotions? Are there types of situations where my emotions help me more, or hurt me more? These are the kinds of questions that only get answered by personal experience.
Atheists cannot conquer this one principle: Life only lasts as long as “now”. And “now” is a very brief period indeed.
But the lives of my children, nieces & nephews, husband, other (younger) relatives, friends, cohorts, colleagues, & compatriots will end much later than my own life does. They will live in the world that I helped build by my actions.
If I am a normal person, and have some positive amount of love & empathy for those people, I have an immediate incentive to make sure I don't do anything that declares a destructive moral principle. Such an act will pollute the moral environment, so to speak, and it'll be left to all those other people I care about to have to live with & clean up.
But if I'm a sociopath, I don't care about any of those people in the first place. And if I'm a sociopath, then I wouldn't care about whether God approves of my actions or not, either. So, again, your "atheism implies nihilism" argument fails.
"So you're saying here that your feelings are a more objective guide to morality than your intellectual thoughts?"
No, I am not saying that.
"I've known quite a number of happy atheists who would not dream of violent behavior. "Or as the behaviorist Frazier, in Walden Two, puts it:That is because they are not very bright atheists. They don't understand the ultimate meaning and end to such a belief. You see, it IS either psychopathic, or just dull thinking.
I remember the rage I used to feel when a prediction went awry. I could have shouted at the subjects of my experiments, "Behave, damn you! Behave as you ought!"
Sorry, I gotta get work done. I'm leaving the water cooler now. Think on what I said for a day or so...
OK. But I'll leave you with the next line from the Walden Two quote, which I hope you will think about:
Eventually I realized that the subjects were always right. They always behaved as they should have behaved. It was I who was wrong. I had made a bad prediction.
Wow! You have evidence of this?
You are aware that many animals show evidence of high intelligence and consciousness.
Very good point, Stultis, very good point. When it comes to education, both sides are committing the sin of spin. The left does it in social studies. The religious right does it in science class. I personally believe that the spin-of-the-left is about 10,000 times more dangerous than the spin-of-the-right, but spin is spin, and deserves to be rebuked.
FWIW, in every instance I can recall where a FReeper has posted a guest editorial written by a "Discovery" Institute fellow since the Dover case was decided last month, they have inevitably left off the end of the editorial where it gives the author's affiliation. This is roughly the third or fourth time I've seen this in the past month.As to whether this failure to include the author's association is a deliberate deception, or an honest oversight, I cannot say. But the fact that posters of these sorts of editorials by DI flaks are batting a thousand in the "ommission department" does start to raise an eyebrow.
That said, I may need to revise my remarks. There are two possibilities: either the people posting these DI op-eds on FR are leaving off the affiliation of the author intentionally, or they are doing it accidentally.
If it is accidental, it is the identical to leaving off the final paragraph of an article when it gets posted. I'm starting my ninth year on FR, and I dare say it is a rare experience to see an article posted in which the last paragraph is inadvertently left out. I feel safe in saying it occurs less one in a hundred articles posted on FR, probably closer to 1 in a thousand, I would imagine. We'll come back to that momentarily.
If it is intentional, there are two possibilities:
1) the poster thought the association of the author wasn't important, so much so that they deliberately left off the information, which in every case appears at the very end of the article. Quite literally, it requires the poster use care to be sure he DOES NOT include it when highlighting the article to copy it into the FR posting form.
2) the poster deliberately left off the the author's association with the "Discovery" Institute in order to be deceptive.
I find intentional case #1 to be highly unlikely; keep in mind that every instance I've seen of an op-ed piece authored by a DI-associated writer posted on FR since the Dover judgement (four, as best as I can recall), the posters ALL decided for some reason to leave out the author's association with the "Discovery" Institute. Did ALL of them somehow independently conclude this information wasn't worth keeping in the article? That's seems a huge stretch.
Which leaves us with either it was an act of intentional deception on the part of the poster, or it was an inadvertent oversight. But if it was an inadvertent oversight we are talking about an event that is equivalent to inadvertnently leaving off the last paragraph of an article when posting it to FR, which as per my previous comments I estimate to occur in something like 1 in a 1000 posts. But since we have about four cases of such articles being posted in the past month we need to examine the probability of four such independent events taking place by chance (I know the anti-Evos will embrace this calculation, since they so thoroughly relish using probabalistic arguments so often against the Theory of Evolution). So that's (10-3)4, or roughly 10-12; that's one chance in a trillion that four such articles were posted with the author's affiliation being left out due to inadvertent oversight.
And that forces me, gentle reader, to conclude that I CAN say without reasonable doubt, that the posters of those four articles were acting with malice aforethought when they left off the author's affiliation when posting the four op-ed articles written by DI-associated writers.
Oh, and lest someone critisize me for not bothering to see exactly how many such articles have been posted in the past month, let me say I tried, but it seems the posters in EVERY instance ALSO coincidentally failed to use the words "DISCOVERY INSTITUTE" in the KEYWORD list when the posted the articles -- NOT A SINGLE ONE SHOWED UP WHEN I TRIED TO SEARCH FOR THEM USING "DISCOVERYINSTITUTE" as a keyword.
RWP, you might want to consider this affair as fodder for you "fib report".... after all, mendacity by ommission is still mendacious.
Reminds me of Skinner's students' first law of pigeons: "Under carefully controlled conditions of heredity, diet, and environment, the pigeon will do exactly as it damn well pleases."
Greater and greater numbers of scientists are joining the ID movement, which is why we keep referring to the same three year after year.Yes, every week or so you see yet another writer from the Discovery Institute making the case for ID.
And on 9/11, we learned the hard way that there are many theists who are happy to commit acts of suicidal violence at the drop of a hat because they believe that God will reward them for it.
The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history. - RAH
Personally, I really don't care what you believe. However, the expression of that belief, stops at the spoken or written word, and you're going to need a lot more than emotive driven conjecture to deny an American citizen of an as yet unknown level of freedom and liberty.
Sorry, but we're not going to become psychopaths just because you tell us that we should want to be. That's your projection, and it's your delusion.
Do the ID supporters consider this to be good or bad? Was it designed? Cui bono? Cherchez la femme!
Not everyone can train a dog.
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