The ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life

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1holycatholic

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Witness the words of philosopher Thomas Nagel, who confessed in The Last Word to a “fear of religion itself.”

“I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning and design as fundamental features of the world.”
Need proof? Check out this bit of pseudo-scientific nonsense.
🤷
 
Richard Lewtonin, uttered **these words in an address at Harvard: **

“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of sciencein spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs…because we have a prior commitment…to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world (i.e., atheism), but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that [idea of] materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

In other words, “Even if the evidence in the universe around us points us logically to the conclusion that there is a God who intelligently designed and created all things, we will not accept that explanation because we do not (and will not) believe in any God. We have eliminated Him from our thinking.”

The current scientific establishment has embraced materialism, and will not even consider the possibility of the existence of God.

We should expect this, who in their natural carnal mind desires God?😉

Words from my former Pastor:

“Don’t be bullied by the so-called ‘scientific’ thinkers of our times. They wear doctoral robes, and prance about as though they truly know, with condescend-ing looks rolling off their brow; and one Day they will bow their knees before the God of all Creation and stammer in their sudden flash of insight, ‘Jesus is Lord!’ In the meantime, in humility before God and man, possess the Truth of God; pursue it; and by your life present it to a world lost in the darkness of sin’s error. Let God’s Truth be the underlying, driving force in your life. Do not try to shape it; rather, let it shape you”👍

P.S. AHH! How DARE I speak badly of the gods (extreme scientists as Richard Lewtonin, Richard Dawkins, Edward O. Wilson, (by the way, all these men are great scientists–scientists I said, not deities) etc. I’m sure going to take alot of heat because of this blasphemy 😃
 
Having read the Richard Dawkins article, I think he makes it kind of easy to miss the irony in his writing. If you made it to the end before labelling it as ‘pseudo-scientific nonsense’, did you happen to notice, a) that he wasn’t writing in his capacity as a scientist, and b) that he indulged in a certain degree of self-mocking by acknowledging that he is just as subject to notions of retribution and responsibility as the next person? As members of the human species, we are hidebound by our evolutionary programming, and even if we could circumvent it, that might not be a good thing for us to do. There is no reason to suppose that our imagination and our sense of spirituality are not just as vital to our survival, in their way, as our ability to make and use tools.

Perhaps there are some atheist scientists who are haunted by the fear that there actually might be an all-powerful, all-knowing creator god behind everything, who has been playing an ongoing practical joke on evolutionary biologists and paleontologists, and who, at the end of it all is going to jump out shouting, “Smile! You’re on metaphysical candid camera!” By the same token, there are other scientists who are content to get on with the business of learning about the natural world, for whom any notions of a god are largely irrelevant to how they lead their lives. There are also atheist ethicists out there who have a great appreciation for notions of choice, responsibility and acceptance of consequences, and see them as vital to the harmonious interaction of our social species.
 
A ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, nah, not really. A ludicrous unnecessary usage of “god” and “god did it” to explain everything about life, yea, totally.
 
Sair said:
Having read the Richard Dawkins article, I think he makes it kind of easy to miss the irony in his writing. If you made it to the end before labelling it as ‘pseudo-scientific nonsense’, did you happen to notice, a) that he wasn’t writing in his capacity as a scientist, and b) that he indulged in a certain degree of self-mocking by acknowledging that he is just as subject to notions of retribution and responsibility as the next person? As members of the human species, we are hidebound by our evolutionary programming, and even if we could circumvent it, that might not be a good thing for us to do. There is no reason to suppose that our imagination and our sense of spirituality are not just as vital to our survival, in their way, as our ability to make and use tools.

Perhaps there are some atheist scientists who are haunted by the fear that there actually might be an all-powerful, all-knowing creator god behind everything, who has been playing an ongoing practical joke on evolutionary biologists and paleontologists, and who, at the end of it all is going to jump out shouting, “Smile! You’re on metaphysical candid camera!” By the same token, there are other scientists who are content to get on with the business of learning about the natural world, for whom any notions of a god are largely irrelevant to how they lead their lives. There are also atheist ethicists out there who have a great appreciation for notions of choice, responsibility and acceptance of consequences, and see them as vital to the harmonious interaction of our social species.
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I am also sure that there are economists and sociologists, investment banks and politcians, nye, plumbers and electricians and accountants for whom "notions of a god are irelevent. But it is probably because nothing has come crashing into their lives to disturb their tranquility. It is when one realizes how little use one’s skills help us cope that we are willing to open our eyes and ears and try to understand how we fit in the scheme of things.
 
morgantj said:
A ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, nah, not really. A ludicrous unnecessary usage of “god” and “god did it” to explain everything about life, yea, totally.
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👍
 
Sair said:
a) that he wasn’t writing in his capacity as a scientist
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Yes, he was. The piece was written when he held the position of Simonyi Professor.

Responsibilities
Because of the importance of communicating with as wide an audience as possible, the Simonyi Professor is not expected to undertake substantial teaching and administrative duties within Oxford University: any such efforts should be directed primarily towards the education of non-specialists. The Professor should communicate scientific ideas through a variety of media, in order to reach a wide range of people. These include, but are not limited to, public lectures, writing articles and books, and television and radio appearances. The Professor’s role in disseminating scientific knowledge is also expected to involve travel from Oxford to other cities and countries.
That piece was part and parcel of Dawkins’ day job.
 
The antropic principle sure sounds like a gap theory to me.
 
One of the interesting things with using evolutionary theory to describe how our psychology works is that it actually undermines the notion that our cognitive faculties are nominally truth producing. For instance, in the article it shows Dawkins explaining the “truth”, i.e. that we are purely deterministic creatures, governed completely by our circumstances, and therefore concludes that retribution is irrational. He then contrasts this with our evolutionary defined psychology which demands retribution. So here we have an evolutionary mechanism causing our cognitive faculties to tend to produce beliefs (i.e. retribution is somewhat necessary or a good) while the “truth” is that retribution is irrational (or “untrue”).

If evolutionary processes can make our cognitive faculties unreliable with regards to truth generation, then how can we trust the truth of any of our beliefs? For the naturalist, these beliefs also include naturalism itself! Therefore I think this kind of evolutionary psychology movement is somewhat self-refuting.
 
AndyT_81 said:
One of the interesting things with using evolutionary theory to describe how our psychology works is that it actually undermines the notion that our cognitive faculties are nominally truth producing. For instance, in the article it shows Dawkins explaining the “truth”, i.e. that we are purely deterministic creatures, governed completely by our circumstances, and therefore concludes that retribution is irrational. He then contrasts this with our evolutionary defined psychology which demands retribution. So here we have an evolutionary mechanism causing our cognitive faculties to tend to produce beliefs (i.e. retribution is somewhat necessary or a good) while the “truth” is that retribution is irrational (or “untrue”).

If evolutionary processes can make our cognitive faculties unreliable with regards to truth generation, then how can we trust the truth of any of our beliefs? For the naturalist, these beliefs also include naturalism itself! Therefore I think this kind of evolutionary psychology movement is somewhat self-refuting.
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It’s only self-refuting in the way the explanation of a mirage of a hot highway surface in the distance looking like water on the road as an illusion refutes science/rationalism. If you look at a rend coming out of the water at the edge of a pond, your eyes might be deceived by the refraction, and the reed may look “bent” at the waterline, when in fact it is not.

Understanding these illusions do not undermine our faith in rationalism and empiricism; it strengthens their case. Science, viewed over centuries of progress, is something of a war against man’s intuition, particularly in the 20th century with strange and highly counter-intuitive discoveries of quantum physics.

Of course the earth is at the center of the the heavens!

*Of course there’s no way all these species could arise from “goo”!

Of course solid objects are solid, really solid!

Of course Schrödinger’s cat is alive, no dead, wait…!

*In the case of Dawkins’ treatment of the criminal, I think the expectation is that lots of the “magic thinking” about that kind of behavior is likely to get chased out by progressive discoveries about cognition, psychology, and the biology of ethics and morality. But just like the understand that refraction makes a straight reed coming out of the water look bent, the understanding of criminal or evil behavior in less mistaken ways doesn’t make such behavior go away, and it doesn’t make it any less of a social problem. The reality is the same, but our understanding of it is enhanced. If we look back and think about the “illusion of free will”, that won’t make murder, or theft or assault any more workable in terms of social order and personal liberty. Measures will still have to be taken to prevent, discourage and sanction bad behavior, even if that behavior is no more attributed to a cosmic sin nature.

The reality being uncovered by science is that our senses and intuitions are reliable at the scales and practical levels humans operate. Once we get out of “comfort zone” perceptual, whether that’s deep time, quantum scales, or the exquisite complexities of the human brain, our intuitions fail us, and are guides of dubious quality, sometimes just flat wrong. Per evolution, we are well honed by nature as “truth machines” in terms of intentionality, hunting, assessing risk, making tools and evaluating practical planes. But there’s a big swath of reality that evolution hasn’t prepared us for, intuitionally, and that’s where reason and science can be important tools, to aid our “truth seeking” through method and instrumentation, where our “gut” fails us.

-Touchstone
 
Sair

Perhaps there are some atheist scientists who are haunted by the fear that there actually might be an all-powerful, all-knowing creator god behind everything, who has been playing an ongoing practical joke on evolutionary biologists and paleontologists, and who, at the end of it all is going to jump out shouting, “Smile! You’re on metaphysical candid camera!” By the same token, there are other scientists who are content to get on with the business of learning about the natural world, for whom any notions of a god are largely irrelevant to how they lead their lives. There are also atheist ethicists out there who have a great appreciation for notions of choice, responsibility and acceptance of consequences, and see them as vital to the harmonious interaction of our social species.

Please name one and cite the book or article in which he makes such claims. Thank you.
 
I have been thinking for a long time that atheistic scientism is not real knowledge so much as fear and rebellion. These warriors have found Occam’s Razor and wield it for all they are worth.
 
1holycatholic said:
Yes, he was. The piece was written when he held the position of Simonyi Professor.
That piece was part and parcel of Dawkins’ day job.
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Yes, except he wasn’t disseminating scientific knowledge as such, but taking a concept from a scientific discipline and using it as the basis for a philosophical discussion. This is an important distinction to bear in mind. Likewise, The God Delusion was not a scientific textbook, but a work of philosophy that happened to be written by a scientist.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
Sair

Perhaps there are some atheist scientists who are haunted by the fear that there actually might be an all-powerful, all-knowing creator god behind everything, who has been playing an ongoing practical joke on evolutionary biologists and paleontologists, and who, at the end of it all is going to jump out shouting, “Smile! You’re on metaphysical candid camera!” By the same token, there are other scientists who are content to get on with the business of learning about the natural world, for whom any notions of a god are largely irrelevant to how they lead their lives. There are also atheist ethicists out there who have a great appreciation for notions of choice, responsibility and acceptance of consequences, and see them as vital to the harmonious interaction of our social species.

Please name one and cite the book or article in which he makes such claims. Thank you.
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Peter Singer would have to be an obvious choice.

You can find his views about choosing to take responsibility for the consequences to others of our actions or inactions in this article, entitled Famine, Affluence and Morality

utilitarian.net/singer/by/1972----.htm

You can find a wide range of his writings here: utilitarian.net/singer/
 
I studied evolution at the college level as deeply as I wanted to get into it, and am so disappointed by what I learned. I can’t even get myself to waste time on the Dawkin’s article. (I’d rather spend my time reading Aquinas or the Bible.) It’s sad that our scientists are so willing to put man and their materialism at the center of our universe and not our God and Father who is the Designer, First Cause and Mover in all creation. It doesn’t even make sense that we could have been produced by mere chance and randomness out of nothing. These atheist will have to account for their denial of divinity on their day of judgement. Then they’ll see how wrong they were. I will never buy into their nonsense. I know better than to get on a boat with a blind captain, even if it means looking like a fool.
 
Sair said:
Peter Singer would have to be an obvious choice.

You can find his views about choosing to take responsibility for the consequences to others of our actions or inactions in this article, entitled Famine, Affluence and Morality

utilitarian.net/singer/by/1972----.htm

You can find a wide range of his writings here: utilitarian.net/singer/
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Lord have mercy…

The same Mr. Singer that has beliefs such as:

Similar to his argument for abortion, Singer argues that newborns similarly lack the essential characteristics of personhood — “rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness”[27] — and therefore “killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living.”[28]

answers.com/topic/peter-singer#Abortion.2C_euthanasia_and_infanticide

Mr. Singer is a hollow shell. To attempt to use him to support a side in a debate shows a lack of discernment.

God bless
 
Highwayhound said:
Lord have mercy…

The same Mr. Singer that has beliefs such as:

Similar to his argument for abortion, Singer argues that newborns similarly lack the essential characteristics of personhood — “rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness”[27] — and therefore “killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living.”[28]

answers.com/topic/peter-singer#Abortion.2C_euthanasia_and_infanticide

Mr. Singer is a hollow shell. To attempt to use him to support a side in a debate shows a lack of discernment.

God bless
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Apart from the obvious accusation of ad hominem argument on your part, if you actually read a lot of Singer’s work, you’ll notice that he, unlike many anti-choicers, actually thinks seriously about the suffering of people who are already born, and acts accordingly (if you read the article I linked, it’s all about combating extreme poverty…).

There is actually a lot more internal consistency in Singer’s arguments than in those of many I’ve seen on these forums. For one thing, he is prepared to look at actuality rather than sentimentality when it comes to human foetuses and infants, and takes seriously the notion that sentient life is valuable because it’s sentient life, regardless of species. You may feel that humans are given pretty short shrift in this analysis, but we certainly fare better with Singer’s approach than other animals do with the approach taken by many posters here.

Furthermore, if you noted the context in which I referenced Singer, it was in response to a request to name an atheist ethical philospher who cares about choice, responsibility and social harmony. Singer ticks all the right boxes.
 
Hi Touchstone,

Sorry for delayed reply (still thinking about our other discussion by the way).
It’s only self-refuting in the way the explanation of a mirage of a hot highway surface in the distance looking like water on the road as an illusion refutes science/rationalism. If you look at a rend coming out of the water at the edge of a pond, your eyes might be deceived by the refraction, and the reed may look “bent” at the waterline, when in fact it is not.
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I think you have misunderstood my point (or rather, Plantinga’s point which I am paraphrasing). If evolutionary processes are what molds our cognitive faculties i.e. our psychology, then the beliefs produced by our cogntive faculties are not setup to necessarily be true, rather they are setup to be survival promoting. There is no essential connection between survival and reliable truth promoting cognitive faculties, this is especially the case for higher order beliefs, such as those regarding logic, worldviews and any beliefs regarding evolutionary psychology themselves. Therefore the point is that if evolutionary processes have indeed fashioned our minds to such an extent that they govern our belief tendencies, then such beliefs should possibly be doubted. These beliefs of course also contain beliefs about evolutionary psychology for the evolutionary psychologist. Hence the possible self-refutation.

You can’t show that such beliefs are rational (and therefore not an “illusion”) by using the same kind of beliefs, that would be like using a possibly faulty thermometer to check whether another possibly faulty thermometer is functioning correctly.
 
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