In their eternal war against religious belief, one of the most popular arrows in the atheist's quiver is the problem of suffering, how could a God who was good allow so much and such extreme suffering. And it is a good point, one for which I'm unaware of an entirely satisfying answer. That is other than to point out that merely because we can't find a universally acceptable reason for suffering is no evidence that there isn't an entirely good reason for a good and loving God to also permit suffering. Our not being able to know something is no bar to its existence.
One idea on that question which I've found somewhat persuasive was that suffering is part of God's giving us freedom of thought and an existence separate from God's own will. The idea that pain, used the right way, can provide a pathway away from selfishness and towards God is part of my cultural heritage as an Irish exCatholic. As much a part of that heritage is admitting that the ultimate answer to the question is a mystery, which is, actually, a sophisticated approach to such an incomprehensible problem. It is far more sophisticated than the faith of scientism that all can be explained with human science. As suffering is personal, perhaps any satisfying answer to the question of suffering is also personal. An answer that meets the needs of the individual might suffice for that person but it wouldn't satisfy others with different experience and thoughts.
Generosity as a problem is one that atheists have taken on with their ideological use of natural selection. Any atheists who don't hold the theory of natural selection as an even more popular arrow against religion, can avoid The Problem of Selflessness but I've yet to encounter one who would give it up. Among the many problems with their expropriation is that in their zeal to force the unselfish, generous behavior of human beings into their materialistic ideology they fall into a mental trap they always present as an exclusive fault in the religious, anthropocentricity. They insist on analyzing the behavior of non-humans as being the same thing as human generosity, clearly maintaining that they can know the minds of animals as foreign to us as the hymenoptera. And, surpassing any other such instance of human presumption I'm aware of, they claim their projection of human experience into ants and wasps is science.
Needless to say, all of this is not done without serious damage to the concepts and experience of generosity, selflessness and love, That abuse of making those into an abstraction in order to force them into the self-interested analysis that constitutes natural selection, is a serious issue. "Altruism" squeezed into natural selection is negated into merely a different order of selfishness. And calling the effort "science" gives those who do the illogical and impossible license to pretend they've explained what they, beyond a doubt, have not. I have to say that this is probably as serious a crime against one of the few truly fine things about us as has been done. I can't believe that any people who would willingly pervert the meaning of love in that way intend anything but a malignant purpose in doing it. Making love selfish, destroying the most basic meaning of love for their ideology, is a damning indictment of that ideology.
**** The case of Karl Marx's enthusiasm for Darwinism is particularly strange as Charles Darwin, in endorsing Ernst Haeckel's Freie Wissenschaft und freie Lehre supported Haeckel's view that Darwinism was a refutation of socialism and, in fact, supports an aristocratic system, not democracy. The overwhelming majority of Darwinists were capitalists, including Darwin. Many of them of them used Darwinism to support the most extreme versions of their ideology, Spencer, an obvious example. I haven't looked into that matter exhaustively but I think, for Marx, the inherent materialism of Darwinism accounted for his enthusiasm for it. If as obsessively careful a scholar as Marx can overlook the obvious truth, that other than it being materialistic, Darwinism is fundamentally destructive of his system, he has to have an overriding, extra-scholastic, motivation. I strongly suspect it is Marx's hostility to religious belief that accounts for his massive oversight. I have come to believe that hostility to religion has been an unstated motivation for a good part of the intellectual activity of the past two centuries.
In science, that is especially ironic, considering the obsessive, paranoid assertions of the ever present danger of religion being covertly inserted into science. I've repeatedly asked atheists for examples of the successful insertion of religion into the formal literature of science and have yet to have them provide support for their contention.
For the insertion of religion into science to work, it would have to be blatantly obvious because science can legitimately deal only with what the physical evidence shows and religion is not primarily concerned with physical evidence. Or, rather, science should be all about physical evidence. It frequently has not been, especially in the alleged study of behavior. Atheism, in the form of ideological materialism, can be far more successfully introduced into science unnoticed. I am not charging all atheists with doing that, some atheists within science have the highest professional integrity and many are simply entirely more interested in their scientific work than in a futile and, frankly, boring ideological war. Not all atheists have made that a major part of their formal work but many, especially in the allegedly scientific study of behavior, have inserted their ideology into their work and it's far past time that looking for that as a source of distortion is taken seriously.
But atheism, in the post-Darwin period, has its own enormous problem, that of unselfish, generous behavior among people. There is no way to reconcile acts and lives lived for the good of other people that costs the generous person, with natural selection. Strict natural selection would dictate that generous acts, unselfish acts, would constitute an impediment to survival of the generous individual, favoring those who benefited from their generosity over themselves. It is also a reproductive disadvantage. The theory of natural selection must see all individuals in terms of their being competitors in the struggle for survival and reproduction. It reduces all individuals to mere machines with an imperative to reproduce.
That problem was apparent from Darwin's time, it has been something wrestled against by some and actively admitted by others who championed selfishness and greed and the opposite of generosity as a means of the superior to flourish and the inferior to beneficially die. Eugenics, which arose directly and almost immediately from natural selection, was and still is one of the most popular themes of those who champion an extreme Darwinian interpretation. The history of biology, both before and after the Second World War is full of eugenicists some, such as Fischer, Haldane and Hamilton, directly advocating it, many others somewhat more coyly and covertly.
Even more obviously problematic and shocking were the assertions made by Darwin, Haeckel and others that infanticide, the murder by parents of their own children, was beneficial to the entire population. Anticipating what is said below, those assertions, especially made in The Descent of Man and in Ernst Haeckel's Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte - which Darwin cited with the highest praise exactly on the issue of infanticide - are a rather enormous problem for anyone who has tried to reconcile "altruism" with natural selection.
That problem was apparent from Darwin's time, it has been something wrestled against by some and actively admitted by others who championed selfishness and greed and the opposite of generosity as a means of the superior to flourish and the inferior to beneficially die. Eugenics, which arose directly and almost immediately from natural selection, was and still is one of the most popular themes of those who champion an extreme Darwinian interpretation. The history of biology, both before and after the Second World War is full of eugenicists some, such as Fischer, Haldane and Hamilton, directly advocating it, many others somewhat more coyly and covertly.
Even more obviously problematic and shocking were the assertions made by Darwin, Haeckel and others that infanticide, the murder by parents of their own children, was beneficial to the entire population. Anticipating what is said below, those assertions, especially made in The Descent of Man and in Ernst Haeckel's Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte - which Darwin cited with the highest praise exactly on the issue of infanticide - are a rather enormous problem for anyone who has tried to reconcile "altruism" with natural selection.
Given the pathological history of eugenics, nihilism, advocacy for infanticide and other and related products of this materialist confrontation with morals, responsible for producing enormous amounts of suffering and murder whenever it has gained legal and political influence, I'd much rather have the problem of suffering to have to explain.
Generosity as a problem is one that atheists have taken on with their ideological use of natural selection. Any atheists who don't hold the theory of natural selection as an even more popular arrow against religion, can avoid The Problem of Selflessness but I've yet to encounter one who would give it up. Among the many problems with their expropriation is that in their zeal to force the unselfish, generous behavior of human beings into their materialistic ideology they fall into a mental trap they always present as an exclusive fault in the religious, anthropocentricity. They insist on analyzing the behavior of non-humans as being the same thing as human generosity, clearly maintaining that they can know the minds of animals as foreign to us as the hymenoptera. And, surpassing any other such instance of human presumption I'm aware of, they claim their projection of human experience into ants and wasps is science.
Needless to say, all of this is not done without serious damage to the concepts and experience of generosity, selflessness and love, That abuse of making those into an abstraction in order to force them into the self-interested analysis that constitutes natural selection, is a serious issue. "Altruism" squeezed into natural selection is negated into merely a different order of selfishness. And calling the effort "science" gives those who do the illogical and impossible license to pretend they've explained what they, beyond a doubt, have not. I have to say that this is probably as serious a crime against one of the few truly fine things about us as has been done. I can't believe that any people who would willingly pervert the meaning of love in that way intend anything but a malignant purpose in doing it. Making love selfish, destroying the most basic meaning of love for their ideology, is a damning indictment of that ideology.
Ever since college when I first read about the then new discoveries of genetic drift, a far more powerful explanation of change in species over time, I've been puzzled over the widespread denial of the possibility that natural selection was not the ultimate and only mechanism of the origin of new species. If you want to enrage many biologists and, even more so, the Darwin fan club, point out that natural selection is just another theory which has changed fundamentally since Darwin first published it and which, like all theories, is vulnerable to questioning, further discoveries and, most heretically, doubt. Nothing must counter the presentation of Charles Darwin as an all seeing messiah of materialism. The ultra-Darwinists either are ignorant of or cover up the fact that Darwin, himself, believed in the inheritance of acquired traits, something that would make natural selection quite impossible*. It was not until the 1930s that natural selection was patched up with Mendelian genetics, providing it with a mechanism of inheritance that would allow it to be possible.
I used to think that the vehemence of those who insisted on the absolute supremacy of natural selection was due to professional interest and the inherent conservatism of those with a published record and a professional imperative to not disagree with the common received dogma. But I'm now convinced that is only part of the position that natural selection as an ideological requirement has among the respectable educated population. It is exactly its use as a tool of atheist ideology** that requires it to be held to be an absolute law of nature, the clearly wrong assertion that the fact of evolution is identical to the theory of natural selection.
Natural selection as the first universally influential explanatory mechanism of evolution and a scientific disproof of the literal interpretation of the creation accounts in Genesis became one of the major cultural forces of the past century and a half. It being the first such weapon of academic and popular atheism, any proposal putting its usefulness at risk will be met with rage and derision. That has happened even when it has been atheists who come up with relatively minor modifications to the theory, such as Gould and Eldredge's Punctuated Equilibrium and Gould and Lewontin's Spandrels.
I've also come to believe that a great many of the purportedly scientific assertions of natural selection were motivated by their protection of natural selection as a weapon of atheism. It is absolutely essential for people doing that for natural selection to be the ultimate and only explanation of evolution, the thing that turns people into objects, every aspect of their lives, including their cultural and moral lives into mere expressions of physical objects and forces.
Having looked hard at the history of atheists using natural selection as a weapon against religious belief, I've been struck at how soon after On the Origin of Species was first published that Darwin's theory was used ideologically in that way, asserting the scientific nature of of that ideological use***. Huxley was one of the earliest, followed close on by Ernst Haeckel, Herbert Spenser, Francis Galton, Karl Marx****,etc. Within the first decade of natural selection as a published theory, it had become the foundation of what was probably the most significant advance in atheist belief after the early atomists.
And it is still the major weapon wielded by atheism against religion, even as the vast majority of people who accept the reality of evolution, today, are religious believers. Evolution is only a problem for that minority of religious people who are scriptural fundamentalists. Other religious people, as early as Cardinal Newman and Asa Gray, found it was no problem for their religious belief. I remember in the pre-Vatican II years having nuns in the classroom, in full, traditional habit talking about how their religion was to be understood in terms of evolution. There are few things that infuriate many atheists more than a religious person who believes that evolution is the way in which God effected the creation of living beings on Earth. That belief breaks their favorite weapon against religion in half, it also deprives them of their ability to put all religious believers into the category of science-denying, ignorant, yahoos.
That stereotype, presenting religious believers in an easily understood object of ridicule has probably been far more useful to the use of Darwinism as atheist tool than science has been. And it is extremely ironic in my experience. In arguing about some of these issues with large numbers of atheists in the past several years, some of them with degrees in science topics, it has taken very little questioning to reveal that most of them are quite ignorant of the topic, their information more likely to be taken from popular media than primary source materials. Most of the foremost champions of Darwin have never read The Descent of Man and certainly have not noted or looked at his citations in that book. If they did that, alone, they could not believe what they imagine they know about many of their foremost cultural heroes. If they read the history of the idea of natural selection they could not pretend that the idea, held as the supreme force in evolution, has the power to explain a truly unselfish act done by a human being. They could not deny that the ideological theft of generosity "altruism" by Sociobiology and "Evolutionary" Psychology sacrifices the meaning of the best thing about us, our deepest and most compelling good, on their alter to natural selection.
That stereotype, presenting religious believers in an easily understood object of ridicule has probably been far more useful to the use of Darwinism as atheist tool than science has been. And it is extremely ironic in my experience. In arguing about some of these issues with large numbers of atheists in the past several years, some of them with degrees in science topics, it has taken very little questioning to reveal that most of them are quite ignorant of the topic, their information more likely to be taken from popular media than primary source materials. Most of the foremost champions of Darwin have never read The Descent of Man and certainly have not noted or looked at his citations in that book. If they did that, alone, they could not believe what they imagine they know about many of their foremost cultural heroes. If they read the history of the idea of natural selection they could not pretend that the idea, held as the supreme force in evolution, has the power to explain a truly unselfish act done by a human being. They could not deny that the ideological theft of generosity "altruism" by Sociobiology and "Evolutionary" Psychology sacrifices the meaning of the best thing about us, our deepest and most compelling good, on their alter to natural selection.
* The geneticist H. Allen Orr's elucidation of the problem is the best short one I know: This substrate neutrality argument is supremely important to Dennett. It -- and nothing else -- explains why selection can be lifted from its historical base in biology. It is what makes Darwinism so dangerous. But Dennett slips here. While it is true that many different kinds of substrate can be selected, it is simply not true that Darwinism works with any substrate, no matter what. Indeed Darwinism can't even explain old-fashioned biological evolution if the hereditary substrate doesn't behave just right. Evolution would quickly grind to a halt, for instance, if inheritance were blending, not particulate. With blending inheritance, the genetic material from two parents seamlessly blends together like different colored paints. With particulate Mendelian inheritance, genes from Mom and Dad remain forever distinct in Junior. This substrate problem was so acute that turn-of-the-century biologists -- all fans of blending inheritance -- concluded that Darwinism just can't work. Modern evolutionary genetics was born in 1930 when Sir Ronald Fisher cracked this problem: Population genetics shows that particulate Mendelian inheritance saves the day. It is just the kind of substrate needed for evolution by natural selection to work.
** As pointed out in an earlier post, the atheist blogger John Wilkins has admitted as much.
*** As a long time admirer of the great geneticist, Richard Lewontin, the frequent accusation made by today's ultra-Darwinists, that he inserts Marxist ideology in his critique of Sociobiology and "Evolutionary" Psychology, rings as supremely ironic. Malthusian ideology was the origin of Darwin's natural selection, its use by atheists to attack religion began immediately upon its publication and has continued, unabated ever since. Much of that ideological use of natural selection has been presented as science, a species of "science" which has its own history of being extremely liable to becoming fashionable before it is utterly junked.
** As pointed out in an earlier post, the atheist blogger John Wilkins has admitted as much.
*** As a long time admirer of the great geneticist, Richard Lewontin, the frequent accusation made by today's ultra-Darwinists, that he inserts Marxist ideology in his critique of Sociobiology and "Evolutionary" Psychology, rings as supremely ironic. Malthusian ideology was the origin of Darwin's natural selection, its use by atheists to attack religion began immediately upon its publication and has continued, unabated ever since. Much of that ideological use of natural selection has been presented as science, a species of "science" which has its own history of being extremely liable to becoming fashionable before it is utterly junked.
**** The case of Karl Marx's enthusiasm for Darwinism is particularly strange as Charles Darwin, in endorsing Ernst Haeckel's Freie Wissenschaft und freie Lehre supported Haeckel's view that Darwinism was a refutation of socialism and, in fact, supports an aristocratic system, not democracy. The overwhelming majority of Darwinists were capitalists, including Darwin. Many of them of them used Darwinism to support the most extreme versions of their ideology, Spencer, an obvious example. I haven't looked into that matter exhaustively but I think, for Marx, the inherent materialism of Darwinism accounted for his enthusiasm for it. If as obsessively careful a scholar as Marx can overlook the obvious truth, that other than it being materialistic, Darwinism is fundamentally destructive of his system, he has to have an overriding, extra-scholastic, motivation. I strongly suspect it is Marx's hostility to religious belief that accounts for his massive oversight. I have come to believe that hostility to religion has been an unstated motivation for a good part of the intellectual activity of the past two centuries.
In science, that is especially ironic, considering the obsessive, paranoid assertions of the ever present danger of religion being covertly inserted into science. I've repeatedly asked atheists for examples of the successful insertion of religion into the formal literature of science and have yet to have them provide support for their contention.
For the insertion of religion into science to work, it would have to be blatantly obvious because science can legitimately deal only with what the physical evidence shows and religion is not primarily concerned with physical evidence. Or, rather, science should be all about physical evidence. It frequently has not been, especially in the alleged study of behavior. Atheism, in the form of ideological materialism, can be far more successfully introduced into science unnoticed. I am not charging all atheists with doing that, some atheists within science have the highest professional integrity and many are simply entirely more interested in their scientific work than in a futile and, frankly, boring ideological war. Not all atheists have made that a major part of their formal work but many, especially in the allegedly scientific study of behavior, have inserted their ideology into their work and it's far past time that looking for that as a source of distortion is taken seriously.
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