Friday, September 13, 2019

In Which I Possibly Have a Major Disagreement With Hans Kung.

This is certainly the biblical God, but the biblical God perceived in the new view of the world according to Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin.  A God who, as the all-embracing and all pervasive God of the world, i certainly not a person in the way that a human being is a person.  What determines every individual human existence is not an individual person like other persons.  He is not a super-ego or a Big Brother.  God Bursts apart the concept of person  God is more than a person.

My history of public writing, of blogging requires that I deal specifically with this paragraph because, of course, the name "Darwin" in that list.  As someone who, as a result of arguments I had online, took on the shockingly easy task of documenting the link of Charles Darwin's major claim to fame, natural selection, with eugenics, scientific racism and, yes, the genocides of the Nazis, I have to differ IF HANS KUNG MEANT NATURAL SELECTION WHEN HE INCLUDED DARWIN'S NAME ON THAT LIST.   

If he meant, merely, the fact that all known living beings we know today are descended from earlier members of earlier species, that would make this passage non-controversial from my point of view.  The massive evidence of the fact of evolution, a theory which preceded Charles Darwin and which doesn't need natural selection to be established in the evidence of it, is certainly the most well established fact of evolutionary biology, I would say it is either the only fact so well-established in evolutionary biology or close to it.*  I will acknowledge that Darwin's invention of natural selection led, in history, to a wider acceptance of the fact of evolution but that historical fact doesn't alter the problems with the theory which has had an extremely troubled and troubling history along with that influence. 

Natural selection is not either well and solidly defined nor is it all that well documented, most of the documentation I've seen of it consists of creating scenarios which either beg the question, assuming natural selection as an essential premise on which the conclusion is based or an invention of a scenario for which natural selection must be the answer.  Almost everything that would be needed to confirm natural selection as a universal and supreme law of biology is unavailable to us, having been lost forever in the fact that almost all of that information is and forever will be lost to scientific examination.

If natural selection is what Hans Kung meant by his inclusion of Darwin, I have to object in the most strenuous of terms because natural selection, from the earliest weeks and months of it being known, EVEN BEFORE CHARLES DARWIN'S BOOK WAS PUBLISHED IN 1858, was used to attack Christian morality, the teachings of Jesus and religion in general.  The secondary literature of Darwinism begins, almost immediately to take on a polemical character to make that attack and to give it the aura of scientific certainty.   It is notable that its most devastating impact on religious faith was among those who took certain views of the Bible and Christianity while others were entirely untouched by it.  As Darwinism gained fashionability in the university and writing classes, it spawned much of the modern anti-Christian, anti-religion movement.**  And it did so with Darwin's full approval, his foremost followers, so designated by him, Thomas Huxley, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel, wrote books and articles and papers using natural selection to attack not only Christianity on the basis of inequality being a law of nature, an engine of progress, but also egalitarian democracy.   

Reading the attack by Darwinists on egalitarian democracy as they used natural selection to assert the desirability, indeed, the scientific inevitability of inequality  - the alternative in attempts to establish equality being predicted to lead to a catatrophic biologically determined dysgenesis of the human species, led me to conclude that Christian egalitarianism and egalitarian democracy were inextricably linked.  That their remedy inevitably included the exclusion of entire groups of people from the human species, either directly by killing them or passively allowing their deaths through poverty, illness, etc. refusing to maintain them in life or by their medical sterilization was exactly what was put into effect by eugenics laws and boards in the United States, Canada, Germany, and later through he mass murders of the Nazis and others.  

I have documented that in numerous ways, in numerous places, at different times, starting with Darwin and his inner circle and down to today's neo-Nazis and academically approved neo-eugenicists and scientific racists that I could write a book, my posts on that topic in my archive probably are long enough to be edited down to one.  

Natural selection is the opposite of the Mosaic Law which sought to maintain the lowest class of the destitute and the poor, the "alien living among" the Children of Israel, it is certainly opposed to God as Christians are required to believe by the teachings of Jesus, who exists among us AS THE LEAST AMONG US.   There is no way that both natural selection can be true and Christianity can be true, there is absolutely, by the very words of Darwin's own disciples, who he endorsed and agreed with, no way that natural selection can be true and the basis of egalitarian democracy can be true.  And I have documented that any number of times.   

As I hope will become obvious, Hans Kung's own text lays out the essential components of Christianity that are incompatible with natural selection.  As they comprise some of his most potent arguments for belief in Christianity, these are not minor points of possible disagreement.  

*  I have also noted that one of Charles Darwin's major holdings which I believe,  that all known living life on Earth was descended from a single, original organism, is a product of sheer faith and conclusions based on what seems most probable.  That is not evidenced and, I have every certainty, that it will not be evidenced because there is no way to establish that in the physical record.  I believe it because of the enormously staggering improbability of such an original organism assembling by random chance out of non-living stuff is hard to believe happened once, without divine intervention and intent, but to imagine it happened more than once is of even more staggering improbability magnified by however meany such "original organism" arose so improbabily and, even more improbably, that more than one of them was able to combine with another, they would have had to independently include compatible biology that just happened, by random chance, to have assembled into more than one such organism.  

From thinking that through I conclude that believing that life on Earth is a product of divine intent and design is far more parsimonious than believing it even rose once.  If it rose more than once and we are descended from more than one original organism, I'm absolutely certain it is by divine intent and design.  

I don't see any way that my understanding of those mathematical improbabilities is in any way in conflict with accepting that evolution later modified that (those) original organisms to produce all of life we see around us and which are being destroyed by us at a meteoric rate.

** I would say that, by a large fraction, the acceptance and promotion of Darwinism was due to that usefulness it served to atheist polemics and proselytism, most of those who are big fat champions of Darwin probably could't even tell you what natural selection means in a fairly accurate generalization.  I was astonished when I did the experiment of asking several working biologists, some teachers of biology with degrees in the topic, a few of them working scientists for a definition and the answers were all over the place.  One, from a very well respected biologist including genetic drift in their definition, a theory which I can see as nothing except but a diminution of the universal hegemonic belief in natural selection as a supreme law of biology. 

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