Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Evolution Without Darwin

We had another troll last night arguing that free will doesn't exist. I won't get into his ridiculous arguments -- which he wasn't free to make anyway, nor am I free to accept -- but perhaps they illuminate a central reason why the left doesn't value liberty: it doesn't exist. And they have Darwinism to prove it!

In fact, the denial of free will is a kind of all-purpose dogma for the left, as it is the underpinning for so many of their cherished beliefs: poverty causes crime, America causes Islamist terror, Israel causes Palestinian savagery, etc.

But they never hold this dogma consistently, for they don't apply it to white collar crime; nor have I ever heard a leftist argue that Islamic terror is the cause of "American imperialism," or that Muslim Jew hatred is the cause of "Zionist expansion," or that provocatively dressed women are the cause of rape, or that blacks were the cause of their own lynching. It's always a one-way denial of free will that excuses the left's various mascots while robbing them of their dignity and humanity, i.e., their free will.

Oddly, only the enemies of the left have moral freedom. But they always exercise this freedom in an evil way, in order to exploit and harm their victims. This is what "hate crime" legislation is all about. Leftist mascots have no free will, so "hate" doesn't enter into their crimes (remember, they are passive pawns of "societal forces" and similar ghostly presences). But white European males do have the gift of free will, so they require an extra penalty for having willed their crimes in a hateful manner.

Conversely, the left never wills anything bad, despite the disastrous consequences of their policies. Millions of Africans dead from malaria due to the banning of DDT? We meant well! Destruction of the black family due to welfare and other perverse entitlement programs? Oops! Skyrocketing crime rate due to judicial leniency? Sorry! Hispanic children who are illiterate in two languages due to bilingual education? Lo siento! Real estate bubble due to government-mandated loans to unqualified people? D'oh!

The problem with Darwinism is that it can (if we are generous) account for will, but not free will. For what is free will? It is conscious choice between two actions, including actions that may clearly be counter to our genetic interests. Remember, it only takes one black swan to prove that all swans aren't white, and it only takes one act of free will to undermine genetic determinism.

Another point that persistently eludes our trolls is that Darwinism does indeed reveal evolution, but that evolution undermines Darwinism. For the benefit of careless readers, I most definitely believe in evolution. What I do not believe is that natural selection alone can account for it. I believe that evolution is directional, whereas Darwinism insists that their kind of pseudo-evolution has no direction, meaning, or end.

I believe human beings are the end of evolution and all this implies, whereas for the Darwinian, every organism is transitional -- a means to some other genetic end. Which is why I believe that human beings are infinitely precious, because they are the "last word" of evolution, which is none other than the "image of God" -- and one cannot "evolve" higher than that.

Evolution cannot produce something "higher" than man as such, since man knows the absolute, and the absolute cannot be transcended, whether we are speaking in terms of truth, beauty, or virtue. To imagine that somewhere in the cosmos there is a writer superior to Shakespeare is pure fantasy, but it is also a failure to understand Shakespeare (and timeless and universal art in general).

Please bear in mind that there is nothing "anti-evolutionary" about Christianity. To the contrary, Genesis clearly reveals the workings of a God whose creation unfolds in time. Man does not enter the scene until after light, planets, stars, water, land, oceans, vegetation, and animals. Here is how Jaki describes it:

"What Darwin and the Darwinians failed to see -- and this is why Darwin's theory, though not his vision of evolution, failed -- was that time needed a womb, a purpose, if it was to issue ultimately in the most purposeful activity of science and not merely in its stillbirths. For evolution has a a direction marked by time's arrow, analogous to the one designed to mark direction, which through its very meaning serves as a pointer of purpose" (emphasis mine).

The only answer of the Darwinians is that the second law of thermodynamics does not preclude the possibility of local areas of negentropy. This is entirely true, but transcendental truth, beauty and virtue are not mere instances of local negentropy that will decay with time! It's not as if the radiant truth will eventually rust and decompose into a dusty pile of worthless lies.

Rather, truth is true forever, in this or in any other cosmos. Stephan Jay Gould famously said that natual selection was so random, that if we could unwind evolution and start it over, it would have taken an entirely different course that wouldn't have included human beings. I won't get into that argument, but I can say with absolute certainty that evolution would never have resulted in 2 + 2 equalling anything other than 4, or E equalling anything other than MC squared, or murder being anything other than wrong, or in slavery being preferable to freedom.

Unless you are a Darwinian living in an upside down cosmos. For example, as T.H. Huxley said, "the thief and murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist." Or as Darwin himself wrote -- and nothing could be more contrary to genuine evolution -- "A man who has no assured and no present belief in the existence of a personal God or a future existence with retribution and rewards, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones."

This is a recipe for destroying in a generation what it took eons of evolution to create. But enough about the left.

As Jaki observes, "a society which does not believe in angels cannot lay claim to policemen who behave like angels." Rather, like everyone else, they're just self-interested replicating machines following their impulses: Every cop is a criminal / and all the sinners saints.

But do not despair. Darwin was still an optimist: "Looking at the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world." For genocide is just doing what comes naturally.

63 comments:

Rick said...

Bob,
What's a "lower race"?

Gagdad Bob said...

The indecent.

maineman said...

I continue to be stunned by the inability of well-meaning and otherwise thoughtful individuals (as distinct from the truly malicious leftists) to grasp the truth of what you're saying here and have said so many times before.

It seems as though there must be a foundational belief in place if understanding is to be possible. Without that belief, it must just look like folly. With it, the evidence to support the paradigm becomes overwhelming.

It looks like you must believe in God to understand Him and reality in general. Without that belief, no accumulation of data can accrue to an awareness of the truth, or the receipt of Grace, and only the opposite is possible.

That's the way it looks to me, anyway.

Rick said...

...I wonder in which race Darwin considered himself...hmmm.
The lower one?

Gagdad Bob said...

Darwin was talking about the negro. Later, progressive eugenecists put his ideas into action.

Gagdad Bob said...

And the program is still meeting with some success, since the most unsafe place for an African-American to be is in their mother's womb.

Rick said...

I was just playing Darwin's advocate...

Ho!

Cousin Dupree said...

I don't think Darwin would have advocated ho's.

Stephen Macdonald said...

progressive eugenecists put his ideas into action

How many college students are taught that Margaret Sanger -- the founder of Planned Parenthood -- was a vicious genocidal racist:

"we do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the negro race"

-- Margaret "Valkyrie" Sanger

Stephen Macdonald said...

maineman:

The entire project of postmodernism consists in simply ignoring these philosophical problems and replacing them with a creed which has one purpose: to undergird and promote the ascendancy of "progressivism" through 1. misdirection (which Bob describes today) and 2. accumulation of power (of which the "climate change" trojan horse is the most visible example).

This project is satanic in every possible sense of the word.

Rick said...

Have you guys seen the term “reproductive freedom”?
Guess who uses it.
Guess how much it has to do with reproduction..
Sounds almost noble.. doesn’t it?

Stephen Macdonald said...

One thing occurred to me about the trolls: in several years not one single troll has made one single point which has changed my mind about any major tenet laid out in OCUG.

I am absolutely the LAST person who would blindly follow anyone in a cult-like fashion, so if anyone ever did offer a more compelling vision than Bob serves up (overall, not talking about nit-picky minor differences) then frankly I'd discard the pelt pretty quickly.

However I know that won't happen, because Bob is simply a guide and an amplifier. He basically points at Truth and directs our gaze. In principle plenty of people could fulfill a similar role. Millions of clergy do just that, more or less, for those not so enamored with philosophy as we raccoons.

Anyhow the point is that Truth is amazingly resilient to the onslaught of the benighted trolls -- many of whom are obviously very intelligent (but then, so are demons according to the Church).

Stephen Macdonald said...

"not talking about nit-picky minor differences"

You know... like for example the fact that the designated hitter rule should be made the law of the land...

walt said...

"Bob is simply a guide and an amplifier."

Thus spake NB. Good one!

To which, I cry: "Smash yer guitar, Bob!"

Van Harvey said...

"In fact, the denial of free will is a kind of all-purpose dogma for the left, as it is the underpinning for so many of their cherished beliefs: poverty causes crime, America causes Islamist terror, Israel causes Palestinian savagery, etc."

Absolutely true, and it inevitably follows from their having chosen to put what they want reality to be, over what reality really is - at root it is a denial of reality and of truth.

In any variant of leftist thought, it cannot coexist with the existence of free will, because that is the requirement for judging anything as being true or false, and being able to identify something as true or false, puts the entire denial of reality agenda in peril.

Hard to find a more mystical denial of reality than a leftist economic policy, it has no valid basis in fact, not even a valid basis in honest thought... it takes only a few steps of 'thinking past stage one' as Sowell puts it, to discover that it is doomed to failure, misery and poverty, but they so want it to be... that it's a-ok to just force it to be.

The funny thing is, the closest thing you will find among humanity to people who operate by deterministic principles, are leftists! They can't actually engage in proper thinking with their own considered judgment, they have to always think about whether something maintains the appearances they adhere to, not because they are true, but because they are out there like billiard balls that have to be bumped against in order to advance... 'is this politically correct? does it support glowbul warming? does it affirm people of color?... ok... then I'll have the non-fat carmal machiato brewed from 'shared planet' coffee beans (and I'll just ignore how the beans got here from another continent... and fugedaboud the socialist dictator it supports, that's ok, he's anti-western)'.

Sheesh.

Gagdad Bob said...

It goes back to dialectical materialism, the "science" of historical determinism...

Gagdad Bob said...

Now it's just race/class/gender determinism....

Stephen Macdonald said...

Van:

Leftist economics can be understood through the old Soviet-era anecdote:

A poor farmer with one cow looks over his fence and sees that his neighbor has two cows. Furious, he summons the local aparatchik and demands justice. The aparatchik says to the man "ah yes, I think I know what you want". The man replies "Yes! You must kill one of my neighbor's cows at once!"

Anonymous said...

I didn't argue that free will doesn't exist. Read more carefully.

It is a paradox that we appear to both be wholly deterministic yet have something like free will. Putting these together is a hard and interesting problem. It doesn't have much to do with politics. Leftists are not alone in believing that causality has something to do with how humans behave. If leftists believe that "poverty causes crime" (a vast oversimplification of course) then conservatives believe that "permissiveness causes crime" (or in your exact words "Skyrocketing crime rate due to judicial leniency"). Leftists also believe in human freedom; they just have a different interpretation of what that means and how to achieve it than you do.

I believe human beings are the end of evolution and all this implies, whereas for the Darwinian, every organism is transitional...

So the vast universe and the billion-year history of life on Earth is all about you?

On the contrary, there is evidence of relatively rapid evolution of humans in recent history.

To imagine that somewhere in the cosmos there is a writer superior to Shakespeare is pure superstition, but it is also a failure to understand Shakespeare (and timeless and universal art in general).

I've never seen the word "bardolatry" taken so literally before.

evolution would never have resulted in 2 + 2 equalling anything other than 4, or E equalling anything other than MC squared, or murder being anything other than wrong, or in slavery being preferable to freedom.

Mathematical facts not the result of evolution. Neither are laws of physics (except in some multiverse theories). Murder and slavery are human cultural constructs; the qualities you assign them are built into their definitions (ie, presumably there is all sorts of killing that you don't consider murder and approve of, like bombing al Qaeda camps for instance).

"the thief and murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist."

What's wrong with that? Don't you agree that people have propensities for good and evil acts, whether or not they come from evolution or from something else?

Darwin and his followers are honestly grappling with the observed facts of the universe. You, on the other hand, are clapping your hands over your ears and going neeener-neener-I-can't-hear-you.

Gagdad Bob said...

Well, as long as you believe in the reality of free will, that's the important part. The rest will come eventually.

Stephen Macdonald said...

"The rest will come eventually."

Or, maher not.

Petey said...

Freedom converging upon truth is usually sufficient, barring horrible character defects.

Stephen Macdonald said...

Anon:

Your various positions are pretty much par for the intellectual course these days. Been there, done that. (I literally held every belief you state 15 years ago). There are from the point of view of the rest of us here massive gaps in your understanding which -- here's the kicker -- you have no way of knowing are there. Yet you are perfectly capable of transcending this state of flatland conformity -- how's that for a paradox?

It really all depends upon one thing, IMO: whether or not you possess the virtue of humility. Arrogance and pride get practically everyone stuck -- often for life -- where you are now. Those who are open-minded and humble enough to have their intellectual furniture stripped down and/or completely discarded and who are willing to put the years of study needed to become a cosmic catcher when Truth comes at you like a major league four-seamer -- those people can make progress and break free of the tired intellectual rut in which you (unknowingly) run round and round and round and...

maineman said...

And better to strip your own furniture than to have it stripped for you.

mushroom said...

So the vast universe and the billion-year history of life on Earth is all about you?

Not me exactly -- really it's about Christ and redemption -- but you're in the ballpark.

Anonymous said...

I just want to know why comments about comparing Dennis Prager to Navy SEALs get deleted.

Come on, that was awesome! Why can't we talk about it?

Anonymous said...

"It really all depends upon one thing, IMO: whether or not you possess the virtue of humility."

Oh, yeah, it sure is a humble bunch here. *rolls eyes*

Incidentally, I'm not the same anonymous as the other one.

mushroom said...

A non-DH NL ballpark, by the way. I can love Catholics, Buddhists, and even Steeler fans, but Charlie O. should have been burned at the stake in the Wrigley Field bleachers during a Cardinal double-header -- on a pyre of those damned orange baseballs.

Anonymous said...

NB: I understand your points perfectly, I just disagree with them. Is that so hard to imagine? Do you think your hold on truth is so strong that anyone who disagrees with you must be a fool?

And you have the nerve to lecture me about humility.

black hole said...

I question the idea that humans are not going to to evolve further and are at the summit now.

Why is it you believe that? It seems so counterintuitive.

What about larger brains, better minds, stronger bodies, a more fitting instrument for the soul? Not possible? Why not?

robinstarfish said...

NB sez However I know that won't happen, because Bob is simply a guide and an amplifier...

And I so love it when he turns it up to 11.

Gagdad Bob said...

Black hole:

Because man is in the image of the Absolute, so no evolution is possible beyond that. There is no knowledge "beyond" knowing truth, no virtue beyond doing good, and no artistic perfection that can surpass itself. This is not to say that there isn't a gulf in the individual between image and likeness, only that there can be no surpassing what already partakes of absoluteness (unless one makes of man a god, which is a recipe for hell on earth). We can attain to own perfection (with the aid of grace, of course), but never surpass it.

Stephen Macdonald said...

"Oh, yeah, it sure is a humble bunch here. *rolls eyes*"

And you have the nerve to lecture me about humility.

Uh, you came to us, remember? There are zillions of other blogs out there with comment sections of which you can avail yourself (yourselves?).

Part of the raccoon way involves non-stop hazing and insultainment, so you'll need a thick pelt to hang around here.

Van Harvey said...

aninnymouse said "I didn't argue that free will doesn't exist. Read more carefully. It is a paradox that we appear to both be wholly deterministic yet have something like free will."

Lol.... please. Read more carefully. Lets have a look at what you said, shall we?
"... yet have something like free will."
When the word 'like' is used as if it were 'as if', that means similar to, but not really, as with 'pleather is like leather... but it's not'.

Use that 'like' type of free will, and you might just end up a little bit pregnant.

I've read Dennett's positions, theories, and too many of his books. Dawkins too. And Darwin for that matter. I get what they are saying. As Gagdad has said, no problem with the actual science... only when it is used like a philosophical and metaphysical standard.

"Darwin and his followers are honestly grappling with the observed facts of the universe."

I believe that many if not most sincerely believe what they are saying, but the problem is that they are building their ideas and theories on top of a fundamental error in philosophical method and fact (see Descartes, Rousseau, Hume, Kant), and all the sincerity in the world isn't going to make the theory (as they take and apply it) come out right, any more that it would help 2+2=3... or 5.

"You, on the other hand, are clapping your hands over your ears and going neeener-neener-I-can't-hear-you."

Heh... both ears, and eyes as well, are wide open here, you however have closed yourself off to One... you might want to ask yourself what is the sound of one hand clapping - since you have philosophically disarmed yourself, you are probably in the best position to know... (my guess is it sounds something like 'neeener-neener neeener'.

Van Harvey said...

aninnymouse said "NB: I understand your points perfectly, I just disagree with them. Is that so hard to imagine?"

(blink)

"Do you think your hold on truth is so strong that anyone who disagrees with you must be a fool?"

(stare)

And you have the nerve to lecture me about humility.

ROFLOL!!!

"Incidentally, I'm not the same anonymous as the other one."

Yes you are (look at your name). Would an aninnymouse be an aninnymouse by any other name? YES! And just the same.

Anonymous said...

Bob wrote:

"Because man is in the image of the Absolute, so no evolution is possible beyond that."

But isn't everything an image of the Absolute? Does the Absolute have only one image? And how do you know that?

Your statement seems like the type that comes from revelation rather than thought. What is your source here?

My sources tell me man IS a transitional formation. You have said so yourself in previous posts. By no means are we even close to a position from where we may storm the final objective(s), one of which is Supermind.

Have you lost your edge here and succumbed to Christian orthodoxy my good man? Wake up, your scaring me....

walt said...

Bob,

Your tight response just above to black hole was, to me, an expanded version of the passage from Matthew: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."

Complementarity!

Statements of "absoluteness" seem to beckon, and invite something finer from the individual looking in their direction.

Gagdad Bob said...

Anon:

Just worry about becoming a perfect man. The superman can take care of itself.

Gagdad Bob said...

BTW, my source is traditional metaphysics and the principial truths contained therein. Revelation embodies these truths -- or at least cannot contradict them.

Anonymous said...

Because man is in the image of the Absolute, so no evolution is possible beyond that.

What a sterile, limited, and hopeless worldview.

Helps explain the closed smugness around here though.

I prefer a spirituality that is in the process of approaching the absolute, rather than one that thinks it is already there.

Gagdad Bob said...

Don't worry. You're not close to the Absolute.

Rick said...

Bob,
Lil OT, any Azam Ali in the collection?

Stephen Macdonald said...

What a sterile, limited, and hopeless worldview.

Yeah, I'm inclined to follow your worldview rather than that of 1.2 billion people, which is 2,000 years old and constitutes the foundation of Western Civilization, and which has produced the greatest art and philosophy in history.

People who snidely dismiss Christianity are simply the stupidest human beings alive. I should know, I was one.

Gagdad Bob said...

Rick:

No. Hadn't heard of her. But she certainly evokes Dead Can Dance, which I do have.

Gagdad Bob said...

"a sterile, limited, and hopeless worldview."

Yes, go through the complete works of Balthasar, as we spent last year doing, and get back to us.

Rick said...

Bob,
Seems she did the vocals for The 300.
Her album Portals of Grace is great.

Gagdad Bob said...

Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance did Gladiator. Very similar vibe...

Gagdad Bob said...

Hear.

Anonymous said...

NB: Sorry, is it a fundamental tenet of Christianity that evolution has stopped? That is certainly news to me. Better let Francis Collins know.

Van Harvey said...

aninnymouse said "What a sterile, limited, and hopeless worldview."

Which goes so well with,

"By no means are we even close to a position from where we may storm the final objective(s), one of which is Supermind."

We got a really funny crop of aninnymouses with this whether pattern.

Joan of Argghh! said...

Just found a wonderful movie for Lent: The Island. (A Russian movie about The Raccoon Way. It involves a prankster orthodox monk, the rest is sheer delight and somber pain.)

Rick said...

Thanks, Bob.

Thanks, Joan. “The Island” is on Netflix and available for instant viewing. What a country.

Stephen Macdonald said...

In fairness to Anonymous, there is some confusion re evolution here. Bob uses the term "evolution" in a different way than do Darwinists (in fact, Darwinism precludes the possibility of true evolution). Of course Christianity does not claim that changes in heritable traits in organisms has stopped. Wrong category.

What has "stopped" is the possibility of mankind "evolving" any further in relation to God - the Absolute. We are now adequate to the Absolute (we were literally made for it) and we may know God in a way no animal can. We've arrived at the deustination, metaphysically speaking. Sure, we could replace large parts of our bodies with robotics, and I suppose given a million years or so our bodies could change and adapt through biological evolution (though we would not "evolve" into that which we are not). We might even become "smarter", but again this has no bearing on our relationship to the Divine -- many spiritually retarded atheists have stratospheric IQs. So what?

Once man "arrived" in the presence of the Lord, there was literally nowhere to evolve TO that matters.

Now, there are other senses in which history and the cosmos are evolving, but I'm already above my pay grade here and will let another raccoon chime in if they like.

maineman said...

NB, you have the patience of Job.

Let's put it this way, Anon: Evolution, as it's being discussed here, is in complete opposition to Christianity. And so, apparently, are you, although you seem not to have realized that yet.

WV: diahaud. Isn't that a Bruce Willis movie?

Van Harvey said...

Maineman said "diahaud. Isn't that a Bruce Willis movie?"

Only in Boston.

Van Harvey said...

NB, I think you've got the gist of it.

Putting on my Dr. Mengele labcoat, could I imagine 'improvements' to the human body? Well, sure I suppose so... stronger arches would be a goodie... more durable hearing would be a plus (I mean really, little teensie tine hairs that once blown down don't get back up? That's what I'm depending on to hear all of Mozart?! Come on!)... a more stable memory platform would be a definite plus, if it can be augment with silicon in the same way we can lazik the eyes... cool.

But what would be the substantive improvement? These would help us move around in life more efficiently, but the quality of life that could be lived, it's meaning grasped, the grin on a six month old babies face, or his 21 year old face as he prepares to finally shave off the beard he grew, just to grow it (and taunt you with) before entering the airforce in two weeks... what... what in the heck does anyone expect to evolve there?

2+2 isn't going to get any more Four'er, what is Good, Beautiful and True isn't going to get any Gooder, Beautifuller or Truer.

And if in some completely un imaginable way such a thing actually is possible, it's not going to be known untill thousands or millions of years after I'm able to give a damn about it.

Evolution is for the past, I'm for the present, and the future is it's own problem.

Gagdad Bob said...

NB:

Very well put. I was going to explain further what I was trying to say, but that pretty much expresses it: that man is not only adequate to the Absolute, but was made to be. The rest is commentary.

Ilíon said...

Gagdad Bob: "... whereas for the Darwinian, every organism is transitional -- a means to some other genetic end."

To be more precise, shouldn't be something like "... whereas for the Darwinian, every organism is transitional -- a "means" to no end at all."

Gagdad Bob said...

Excellent point. Duly noted.

Tigtog said...

Why do Darwinist dislike Hitler? Never understood that. If they were honest, would they not defend the concept of a superman, a super race, evolving to a higher level of existence? Why do they quibble on the means of evolution, I thought they were academically neutral on such issues? Why do Darwinists want to save a spotted owl? Very confusing when you think it through.

Rick said...

I think you are implying there is a lack of “think it through”.

In which case, “bingo”.

Rick said...

When they call Bush “Hitler” maybe they mean it as a compliment. Or… “why can’t you be more like your brother Hitler?!”

Ilíon said...

"When they call Bush “Hitler” maybe they mean it as a compliment. Or… “why can’t you be more like your brother Hitler?!”"

Ah! That may be it. After all, until quite recently, huge numbers of "Darwinists" didn't much mind Stalin. And they tend still to like Mao and Castro.

Theme Song

Theme Song