A pro-religion Darwinian

Richard Hoste, a Darwinian blogger and sometime commenter at VFR, has an article at Taki’s Magazine in which he takes apart his fellow evolutionist Richard Dawkins for his attacks on religion. Hoste points out that from the point of view of evolution, religious people reproduce themselves and therefore are successful in evolutionary terms, while secular liberals do not reproduce themselves and are evolutionary failures. Therefore Dawkins’s anti-religion campaign is absurd and self-canceling. In arguing against religion and for secular liberalism he is arguing for the extinction of Western man, since a secular liberal West will not survive.

Hoste concludes:

Even if it was granted that the modern world, with its feminism and secularism, produced all the happiness one can imagine, it cannot last.

A baby born today may live to see the extinction of the Lithuanians (projected to be a population of 760,000 by 2100, possibly all assimilated into other ethnicities). Any philosophy that guarantees that those that adopt it will be gone within a few generations can only be embraced by nihilists. The patriarchal and god-fearing will inherit the earth, one way or another.

I would just add this. Hoste justifies religion in terms of Darwinian evolution. But what he really means is survival, not evolution. We don’t need Darwinian evolution or the belief in Darwinian evolution in order to survive and to want to survive. Indeed, that’s the very point of his article, that the people who don’t believe in Darwinian evolution survive better than those who do.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 16, 2009 02:11 PM | Send