A challenge to anti-Darwinism

Regarding the e-mail from a reader which I had declined to read because of its opening paragraph, which was discussed in the thread, “What are the conditions for discussion?,” Kristor writes:

Thanks to this buildup, I am now with child to read your correspondent’s post. It would be interesting to see whether his arguments are any good—despite the fact that, being a convinced Darwinist, he can’t justify either his feelings of disrespect for your arguments, or his feeling that his own are important.

LA replies:

He actually sent me a lengthy apology (I told him an apology was not needed, but that I appreciated the thought).

If you want to see what he originally wrote, here it is.

The reader wrote:

While I would defend with my life your right to have an opinion, I have no respect whatsover for your actual views on evolution.

As others have said in that discussion, it’s not at all surprising that wing development among various winged species resemble one another because of the relative uniformity of air across the globe.

One of the most interesting observations I have read concerning evolution was in Michael Shermer’s excellent book, “Why Darwin Matters.” He reminds us that evolutionary steps are incremental, and do not require a particular organism to “start all over” if some of its members start down a reproductively unproductive path. Past mutations are not discarded, but largely (entirely)? retained as a foundation to be built upon by future random mutations.

Compare this observation to the oft-stated example of a monkey sitting down at a typewriter and typing out the entire Bible with no mistakes. In evolutionary terms, it’s not as if he gets to the last word and types “Ameb,” and has to start all over again. “Ameb” gets discarded as “incorrect,” and perhaps “Amel,” “Ameq” and “Amew,” until he might just (and most likely eventually would) type “Amen.”

A working acceptance of the theory of evolution need not deter one from believing in a concept of something that might as well be called “god.” To me, there is but one thing that might be considered a miracle, if one were to believe in such things. That is the very fact (or at least what seems quite factual) that anything exists at all. A situation in which “everything” was just always in existence is as hard to accept as that in which one minute there was “nothing” and the next minute there was “something.”

It is my fervent hope that one day we humans will figure out how what appears to be “something” comes from what appears to be “nothing,” and we can all stop discussing our various conflicting, mutually exclusive and collectively incorrect opinions about how the cosmos came to be. In the meantime, I believe that the Judeo-Christian god created the world in seven days about as much as I believe that it sprang forth from the forehead of Vishnu, or any other of the competing creationist myths the world has ever seen.

A last thought: I’m going to speculate that you consider yourself a Christian, and consider the Bible to be the infallible word of God. (If that is not the case, I stand corrected).

If one considers the Bible to be such, then one must accept, endorse and believe every single word in it (a difficult task since it contradicts itself repeatedly). As the book itself warns, let no man take away one word of it, nor add any.

This requires the believer to accept, among many other things, that Adam was instantly created from dust, Eve was created from one of his ribs, Jonah was swallowed by a whale and lived inside it for (three days, was it?), every species alive today was aboard the ark, Jesus turned water into wine, anything that two or more people pray for will occur, and of course, Mary was a virgin.

I find it much easier to accept that, as science is learning, chemical substances subjected to electricity formed substances that were capable of replicating themselves, and off to the races we went.

Fundamentalist religion has given us wars, crusades, Shiites against Sunnis, Moslems against Jews, Catholics against Protestants, homophobia, and many other unfortunate consequences of inadequate explantions of “the way of things.”

I look to the scientific method to explain how things are, not religion. Pure science has, by definition, no agenda. Truly scientific understanding will bring about peace here on earth, not religion. And peace here on earth is, in my opinion, all that matters, since I share the view of Einstein that this earthly life is the only one we will ever know. Pessimistic, you might say? Realistic, I would answer. I simply do not require any other experience but the wondrous one I enjoy every day—right down to the flying fish.

Kristor replies:

The guy is obviously new to VFR, or he’d know you are an Anglican. Clearly he knows also very little about religion, or he’d know that, being a member of a church in the Apostolic Succession, you are neither a Biblical inerrantist, nor a sola scriptura Protestant, nor a fundamental Biblical literalist; he would know about such differences. He would also, of course, know that none of the Church Fathers or Doctors interpreted scripture in the jejune way he does. He does however seem to have a chink in his armor: he understands the problem entailed by the fact that something exists, rather than nothing. None of the Biblical miracles to which he scornfully refers are anywhere near as incredible as the idea that first there was absolutely nothing, and then there was a world. He is totally ignorant that this problem has been rigorously parsed, by Christian theologians and metaphysicians, who are, happily, predisposed to accept the conclusion that the solution requires a Creator of the kind the Hebrews and Christians have always worshipped. He argues from war as if it were ever a strictly religious affair, neglecting to add into the balance the hundreds of millions killed by atheist regimes in the course of a single century. I’d refute him happily, but really it would be more efficient just to point him to D’Souza’s book, and tell him to come back when he had done refuting all the apologetical arguments therein.

LA replies:

I also had replied to his apology by saying he evidently was not familiar with VFR and its past lengthy discussions about Darwinism and with Darwinians, and that I would send him some previous threads, so as to avoid going over the same ground yet again.

Here is the collection of VFR entries on Darwinism that I’ve sent him.

Adela G. writes:

Your reader writes: “Fundamentalist religion has given us wars, crusades, Shiites against Sunnis, Moslems against Jews, Catholics against Protestants, homophobia, and many other unfortunate consequences of inadequate explantions [sic] of “the way of things.”

Why am I not surprised? I suspect his negative response to religion is as much political—or more accurately, politicized—as it is philosophical or scientific.

Because he writes that “fundamentalist religion has given us wars,” not, “has been partially responsible for wars,” I conclude that he believes it’s solely responsible for the conflicts he names. I find such a statement simplistic, since it discounts the role of politics and geography, among others, in the conflicts he names.

Presumably, since he rejects religion at least in part because of its “unfortunate consequences,” he also rejects totalitarianism, particularly that of the left, which was largely responsible for the bloodshed of the twentieth century, the bloodiest century in history.

Hannon writes:

I must confess I am surprised at the gentle tone of the responses to the reader’s message. Your entreaty to him to read up more in past VFR entries no doubt helps avoid going over much ground already trod. But I would like to address a few points from his last paragraph that I think need answering.

He writes, “Truly scientific understanding will bring about peace here on earth, not religion. And peace here on earth is, in my opinion, all that matters, since I share the view of Einstein that this earthly life is the only one we will ever know.”

It amazes me always how any intelligent person can reduce the unpleasant, even devastating facts of life to the question of man’s outlook on things. Has it not occurred to them that wars and conflict derive from human nature, that aggressiveness or an aggressive response is, from time to time, a natural occurrence? There is no final banishment of violence between people(s) based on a perfected science or any perfect religion, certainly not in the foreseeable future. Preventing conflict, or rather staving it off, is not about “understanding”, it is about a balance of forces, of ideas and resources between different groups. On balance there is peace, or hadn’t anyone noticed?

Going further, I cannot see how one can rationally cleave off the bad (war, fighting, suffering) from the good and not see that this leaves a fundamental imbalance that will right itself, eventually, one way or another. It is as if to say one can have “all happiness” and no pain and sorrow, or all warmth and light and never cold and dark. These polarities are non-existent without their complimentary components. That does not mean we need strive to preserve aspects of human behavior we find awful but it does require recognition that balance—between good and bad in the sense that only religion adequately addresses—is a structural condition we cannot engineer away. Perhaps someday we will be truly civilized and attuned to spirituality above all else, but until then we must remain vigilant against the human foibles of idealism and wishful thinking and, especially, those who would promise lasting peace.

Societies and individuals are stronger for recognizing and accepting this duality. They are weaker for negating the obvious, and sometimes downright evil, aspects of living.

LA replies:

“Truly scientific understanding will bring about peace here on earth, not religion.”

Yes, it’s unbelievable that someone writing in 2008 would say that. As though the dream of mankind being delivered to utopia by the guidance of science, besides being risible in itself, had not been repeatedly shown over the last 300 years to be a dangerous fantasy. Well, it seems each generation has to learn things all over again, huh?. But it used to be that each generation was born into the the world as barbarians, and had to be taught about civilization. But now, under the reign of liberalism, it seems that each generation is born into the world as utopian liberals, and needs to taught about barbarism.

Ian B. writes:

The reader wrote:

“Truly scientific understanding will bring about peace here on earth, not religion.”

It is absolutely ridiculous when an atheist says something like this.

It makes sense for a Christian to say that we have nothing to fear from honest science. After all, God is good and he is the author of reality. All truth is ultimately God’s truth, so the truth is also good, and the pursuit of truth is a noble endeavor.

But what reason is there for an atheist to trust that the truth is good? Why shouldn’t the truth be that some people are less human than others? Why shouldn’t it be that there is no objective basis for morality, and that it would be beneficial to some of us to kill certain other groups of people, and that there is nothing really wrong with doing so? Why shouldn’t the truth be ugly, and the acquisition of it a horrid thing that leads to despair and war? What basis is their for supposing, a priori, that the use of reason will destine us for a peaceful utopia and not the exact opposite?

It seems to me that the atheist is supposing a sort of benevolent Providence that his atheism leaves no room for.

LA replies:

“But what reason is there for an atheist to trust that the truth is good?”

That’s a great insight by Ian B.

The answer, of course, is that liberalism, including the atheist kind, is Christianity without God. Liberals expect the nice things that come from God and Christianity, while denying God and Christianity. But of course they have no right to do this. Just as Darwinians illegitimately borrow teleology to make the radically non-teleological Darwinian theory of evolution believable, secular humanists, while denying the existence of objective moral truth, illegitimately borrow the idea of the good to make secular humanism … human.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 26, 2008 09:02 AM | Send