"In the first lecture I laid stress on the great importance of
Natural Selection – the selective deathrate – as tending to human
efficiency,"
Karl Pearson
AS COULD BE GUESSED, there are a lot of things that I disagree with the brilliant evangelical Christian apologist, philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig about, though there is much in what he said and has written that I either agree with or come close to agreeing with him. But I always take him seriously even when he asserts ideas I really don't agree with at all because if someone is going to have an argument that refutes me, he's one who is likely to have it. No real belief is possible without serious doubting and testing of ideas.
I used to listen to many of his debates with atheists and others he disagrees with because he is such a rigorous debater who seems to always come fully armed to the arguments he has with them and, most of the time, always can out argue even the most competent of them. He often faces famous atheists who are arrogant enough to have obviously not done their homework and who don't have a chance, he always comes prepared to argue their arguments on their own terms - while refusing to allow them to claim privileges that aren't extended to his position. Famously, when he foolishly made an especially arrogant claim about his abilities as a debater, Craig challenged Richard Dawkins to debate and Dawkins chickened out entirely, no doubt because he knew it was likely he'd have a hard time as real scientists had trying to out argue him before.
One of the things I listened to a while back was an argument that he had with the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein in which she made the rather incredible argument that you can find moral absolutes within a philosophical-ideological framework of naturalism, one of the more popular sects of materialist-atheists. A number of atheists became enraged with WLC when he read her a quote by her husband, the pop-atheist icon and Harvard pseudo-scientist linguist, Steven Pinker that backed up his position that it was impossible to find such moral absolutes within naturalism, it was, apparently held to be a dirty thing to show that her own and more famous pop-atheist husband disagreed with her claims made during the debate. I've had a similar experience, though in my case it was a pop-atheist daughter whose not nearly as famous pop-atheist psychologist Pop made statements within his academic publication that supported my position and not hers. It was called out as dirty pool to use that even though the daughter had used her connection to her dad, she had a sort of sideline career in her dad's old sideline, pseudo-skepticism based on her relationship to him and his old colleagues.
But those are only illustrations of the problem with your objection, you can either have one of the alternatives be true, you can't have both of them be true and if you try to claim them both, it is entirely fair and intellectually responsible to reject your attempt to do the impossible. Either natural selection is true or egalitarian democracy is legitimate, you can't have both. And it goes a lot more than merely the possibility of egalitarian democracy being legitimate, either murder is wrong or it is right, in the end, even genocidal murder.
Well. Which is it? You aren't going to pick fights and then claim you can have it both ways, at least not when you pick fights with people who are not prepared to let you try to have it both ways. I am not prepared to.
Either you can oppress and kill People, entire groups of People without moral violation or consequence or you can't. Either the moral basis forbidding murder and genocide is as real as the motion of bodies in gravity or the products of the most basic of chemical reactions or they are not real and enduring truth and there is no reason for someone not inclined to believe those are wrong. Even if I were to temporarily allow you to pretend you can have both - out of the dainty practice of middle-class niceness that such amoral dispensations are made of - the history of moral depravity by governments in the 20th century, before and to now, proves to beyond a preponderance of the evidence, that eventually others will insist on making that amorality the law of the land and people are going to be enslaved and murdered, accordingly.
It being the Fifth of July in the United States, to the point of your objection to what I said, either the reality of human beings is that they are, in fact, endowed by their Creator - or some other as real entity not discernible with science - with rights and liberties and are created equal or natural selection is the truth of it, with its inherent and merciless inequality and that might makes right or at least the survival of the "fittest" is the basic rule of life because you can't have it both ways. The basis of natural selection, Malthusian economic theory, wasn't based in nature, it was based on the entirely artificial British class system which was a product, not of natural laws but of laws made by monarchs and anti-democratic politicians and judges who flourished under the British class system as it grew out of the putrid Tudor and earlier anti-democratic, aristocratic and royal political and legal systems. In other places Darwinism, once formed, was used to reinforce and enhance native forms analogous to the British Class System, unsurprisingly in Germany it was eventually adopted by their elites who were not much discomforted by its inherent glorification of the already privileged and powerful, scorning those lower in the economic, social scale, ethnic and racial minorities and, of course, those at the lowest end in the class system. What the German educated, Darwinist biologist Vernon Kellogg was horrified to find was the result of Darwinism among the very well educated officer corps in the German army during WWI, his fact finding before America's entry into the war horrified him that he abandoned his pacifist position to advocate the total defeat of that German military elite, some of whom were his colleagues, acquaintances and former friends. Those were, of course, either the instructors of or, in some cases, the actual men who formed the Nazi hierarchy or, having no central core of democratic principles and having had to abandon anything like egalitarian moral absolutes, found they could work under Nazism as it began and, in some cases, right to the vilest ends. That was as true of the German academic and intellectual elites who accepted natural selection as a law of nature as it was the political-legal population so trained.
I've had these arguments with materialists on the basis of Darwinism and also as a consequence of the materialists' intellectually and ideologically necessary position that there is no such thing as free thought or free will and I find the most obvious thing about these people, especially those who are what I have come to see as the otiose herd of secure if not tenured academics and professional scribblers and babblers, is that they want to both claim that their ideological holdings that make absolute morality impossible to believe in while claiming that they and their fellow clean-handed, standard grammar using colleagues, do not hold that there is no such thing as an absolute moral prohibition on genocide, other forms of mass murder, individual murder, the oppression of people on their biological or gender or class assignments. They claim both, depending on which one is temporarily advantageous in the context they are making the claim in. Richard Dawkins does that, Steven Pinker does that, Rebecca Goldstein did it, they all do it. Materialism is the most decadent of all ideologies, it eventually destroys the very foundation of the minds that hold it as well as all moral absolutes. Even in its less directly deadly of expressions in the mild-mannered claims of do-nothing intellectuals.
But the thing is, their very ideological claims make all of those things everything from morally ambiguous instead of forbidden or they eventually get round to making up lists of those who it's OK to kill. That was something that is inherent to materialism, it certainly is inherent to Darwinism which began in Malthusian advocacy of letting the underclass starve to death because they were merely excess population that could not be sustained - something that there was no reason then or now to believe is true, the wealth of the British rich and its basis in non-food production would certainly have been enough to sustain the population. Darwin's second book in which he deals with natural selection's claimed consequences for the human species is full to the top of such homicidal stuff and where he demurred, he could count on those he cited as the most reliable of science, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel and others to make those claims in their most radical forms, including advocacy of murder, for him. And when you add his other writing, especially many of his letters which are more candid than his scientific writing, he, himself advocated genocide as a positive good. I've documented that exhaustively and conclusively. And the subsequent history of Darwinism, up to WWII and increasingly after a short interval in which such talk was not considered respectable, right now among such clean-handed, elegantly writing and speaking Darwinists. While it would be hard to assign the ranking of most depraved among them, among the worst today are the academic and professional "ethicists" who seem to believe among their most important tasks is writing up lists of who it's OK OR EVEN A MORAL NECESSITY! to kill. It is breathtaking how materialist "ethicists" insist on what they insist can't be real to have real existence, such as morality. Have I mentioned materialism is a decadent ideology?
For liberals - those who try to practice the real thing based in egalitarianism and provision for the least among us, not that 18th century lassiez faire perversion of it - you can't have it both ways, either. Either you are, as Abraham Lincoln gave his interpretation of the founding documents of the United States, "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" or you are dedicated to the Darwinist proposition that all are created unequal and that those who are superior should be allowed to crush those who are inferior.
Both cannot be true, no more than a nation divided against itself, half free-half slavery, can stand.
That, as the universally acknowledged expert in it, Karl Pearson put it, death is the engine of progress under Darwinism. That is the central idea of natural selection, it was from before it was formally defined and it is its central claim right to this very day. You cannot change that without the idea, itself, falling apart, no matter how much you might babble that you can do the impossible in that regard. I think the idea falls apart for any number of reasons, the list I gave for why it is retained, starting with its enhancement of the status of evolutionary biology but, probably most of all, for its utility to ideological atheism, has more to do with it than its enduring success as a defined law of nature, as the Guardian article that was the motivation for Saturday's post showed but wouldn't admit.
I will note in passing, there is much justification in using Lincoln as a contrast to Darwin, they happened to be born the same day. No doubt Lincoln the son of an unfortunate or near-do-well would have been classified as among the intellectually degenerate population of the time by the aristocratic Malthus and, latter, by the aristocratic Darwin if he had been writing about the poor People of the United States. The speculation that Lincoln may have had Marfan's syndrome is worth contemplating in terms of Darwinian fitness, too. Once you start assigning people to a ranking of valuation, there's no end to it.
I have also pointed out that Darwin, among his colleagues and latter day disciples, drew up lists assigning superiority and inferiority to different people based on their race and ethnicity, among others, the Irish were assigned a particularly depraved status, he cites the non-scientist W. R. Gregg's claims about that as if it was reliable science. He was especially hard on those in the South Pacific. He listed the Maoris of New Zealand (see the radio play I posted last Saturday) as only one of many racial groups that would lose in the struggle for existence with the British invaders. Darwin, in letters, enthused about the Brits wiping out native populations around the world.
Those who Darwin and his sciency disciples have marked as inferior, especially those in ethnic, class and biological-medical groupings who they have marked for death, have every reason and right to be skeptical of such badly based science, no matter what its temporary status among those in control of academia and popular science media is. I find Darwinists among those who were explicitly targeted as inferior by Darwin, those whose work he cited and the mainstream, academic scientific Darwinists such as Karl Pearson stunningly ignorant of the history of those claims as made real in such things as the Nazi exterminations. All they have to do is read them and look for the direct links and citations in the relevant literature - including the science that Nazi scientists advocating eugenics cited - it's not hard to find. I'd go into that farther but it would impinge on something else I'm thinking of typing out about Clarence Thomas who is not dissimilar in the basic depravity of that kind of non-thinking. Any Person of Color who holds Darwin up as some kind of icon could only do so out of ignorance of what he said and cited, anyone who is or had ancestors of the British underclass during the 19th century as well, according to Darwin, they would still retain the taint of inferiority which he assigned such People as did his inspiration, Malthus. I thought that when one of my genealogically enthusiastic relatives showed me that one of my great-great grandmothers had been interned in a British work house (death camp for the poor) in the 19th century, during the time of Dickens. It showed where, when she married, she couldn't write her name, as was not uncommon with the Brit underclass of the time, she made her mark. I often wondered how the heritage of that worked out in our family after that but not on the basis of biological inheritance, on the basis of the entirely unnecessary, legal and politically based spiritual and intellectual damage that is passed on by culture, not biological inheritance. But, this is just a quick answer. This is going to be a really busy week for me.
I will point out that I could make exactly the same kind of challenge to evangelical Christians and traditional Catholics, either they can believe in the Gospel of Jesus or they can believe in the politics of Republican-fascism or even that earlier position on the same road, late 20th, early 21st century Republican politics. Because you can't have both and there is no reason for anyone who isn't willing to lie about it to pretend you can. There are moral absolutes that become absolutely clear due to the consequences of them. Anyone who prefers the abstract theoretical musing of scribblers and babblers to the hardest lessons of human experience is a total idiot and very likely morally depraved no matter how nice they seem to those of their own kind.
NOTE: I had a close encounter with a Constitution fetishist over the holiday and I think it should be our position that only Lincoln's definition of what the basis of the founding of the United States is valid and of proven value. The 1776 ideals were overturned in the letter of the Constitution but, as Martin Luther King jr. said, the Declaration was an unhonored promissory note that the Constitution attempted to nullify. It's always time to insist on full payment of the original debt.
