Describing the natural world has to be accurate and doesn’t involve value judgments. It’s like blaming Copernicus for the notion that we aren’t at the center of the universe (God’s attention). Blaming Darwin for the Nazis is like blaming Newton for the communists - the Utopian principles of engineering a perfect society can be vaguely traced right back to Newton’s vision of a clockwork, mechanistic universe. Same with Einstein and moral relativism. All are silly arguments.
You’d get a kick out of this thread.
“All are silly arguments”
Value Judgment alert. You had a justifiably logical post there until you added a tautological adjective. You have no way proving absolutely that such arguments are “silly” or not “silly”. From what objective lensing can you prove “silly”? Now if you say, well it’s just my own subjective opinion, then at least you are back in the realm of truth, that being that it WAS just a subjective OPINION. (MEANT, OF COURSE BY EXTENSION, to be a psychological pejorative OF those who don’t find all such arguments “silly”!)
So judge and look down on folks much? ;)
re: “Blaming Darwin for the Nazis is like blaming Newton for the communists - the Utopian principles of engineering a perfect society can be vaguely traced right back to Newton’s vision of a clockwork, mechanistic universe. Same with Einstein and moral relativism. All are silly arguments.”
I’m not blaming Darwin for the Nazi’s. But, you say the natural world doesn’t involve value judgements and, I’m assuming, that you believe the naturalistic, evolutionary view of the universe is the accurate one - that there are natural explanations for the existence of the universe and no God is needed as an explanation.
I’m also assuming that the Darwinian view that all organisms are the result of random mutation and thousands of transitional forms that had no outside influence (i.e. “intelligent design”) on how these organisms became what they became. I’m also assuming that you believe the Darwinian view that all organisms, including human beings, carry no inherent “value” beyond the fact that they exist. Organisms are just different in some ways, but regarding human beings, they are just another form of animal life.
Please explain why the Nazis or other eugenics advocates are “wrong” to treat human beings with any more respect that any other animal? Explain why experimenting on human beings, from embryo to full grown adulthood, is any less moral that experiment with fungi or plant life or any other animal life?
Whether you want to admit it or not, Darwinian ideas have moral consequences beyond just mere explanation for the universe.
If it really is true that the universe just is, that matter and energy just always existed, or appeared from nothing, and all that exists in the universe are simply evolutionary “flukes” of physical and evolutionary “laws”, if morality is simply that which promotes the survival of organisms, then why is it wrong to manipulate or experiment with ALL animal life (the human animal included)? Why are the eugenics advocates wrong to make a “scientific” judgement to rid “useless” organisms from society? Why is that wrong, immoral, or a “silly” argument?
You say that Newton’s vision of a “clockwork” mechanistic universe could be just as valid an “argument” for the communist idea of a utopian society as Darwin for nazi eugenics. The problem with your analogy is that Newton’s ideas did not imply a “Godless” universe, in fact it implied the opposite.
The Darwinian view of the how the universe came to be implies a naturalistic, purposeless, undirected, random, always changing universe with all the implications that that idea comes with - no “God”, no transcendent values/morality - the universe just is. In fact, there could just as easily been no universe. The fact that the universe does exist is, well, a big mystery.