In the discussion earlier, I brought up a rather well known quote by Charles Darwin in which he faces some most unpleasant consequences of a materialists' inescapable conclusions about natural selection, conclusions that, as noted, Darwin's foremost colleague, friend and associate on the European Continent, Ernst Haeckel had already drawn from natural selection with Darwin's approval (see the quote from him in the post, below). The quote from Darwin has been discussed quite a bit. I've seen it most often given in this form:
But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?
I would seem to have a higher opinion of monkeys than Darwin seems to have had, I'd rather have a monkey for an ancestor than a British aristocrat, but that's beside the point. What is obvious is that Darwin realized that if his theory were taken as Haeckel and, I would note, most of those I've read on the topic do, it would have to damage the validity of our minds and the products of our minds, including science.
As is so often the case, when you an read a quote in a fuller context, it becomes even more interesting. It's clear that Darwin's qualms about the consequences of "man's mind" forced by his theory was in a wider context of the materialist arguments which so many of those who adopted natural selection seem to have had as their primary motivation in accepting it. Here is the letter as published by the Darwin Correspondence Project:
Down, Beckenham, Kent. | (Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R)
July 3rd. 1881.
Dear Sir
I hope that you will not think it intrusive on my part to thank you heartily for the pleasure which I have derived from reading your admirably written ‘Creed of Science,’ though I have not yet quite finished it, as now that I am old I read very slowly. It is a very long time since any other book has interested me so much. The work must have cost you several years and much hard labour with full leisure for work. You would not probably expect anyone fully to agree with you on so many abstruse subjects; and there are some points in your book which I cannot digest. The chief one is that the existence of so-called natural laws implies purpose. I cannot see this. Not to mention that many expect that the several great laws will some day be found to follow inevitably from some one single law, yet taking the laws as we now know them, and look at the moon, where the law of gravitation – and no doubt of the conservation of energy – of the atomic theory, &c. &c. hold good, and I cannot see that there is then necessarily any purpose. Would there be purpose if the lowest organisms alone destitute of consciousness existed in the moon? But I have had no practice in abstract reasoning and I may be all astray. Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? Secondly I think that I could make somewhat of a case against the enormous importance which you attribute to our greatest men: I have been accustomed to think, 2nd, 3rd and 4th rate men of very high importance, at least in the case of Science.
Lastly I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilisation than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risks the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is. The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world. But I will write no more, and not even mention the many points in your work which have much interested me. I have indeed cause to apologise for troubling you with my impressions, and my sole excuse is the excitement in my mind which your book has aroused.
I beg leave to remain | Dear Sir | Yours faithfully and obliged Charles Darwin.
Note that the often excerpted quote is part of a discussion of materialist ideology and the issue of purpose in the universe, an idea that is about as repugnant as any to materialist orthodoxy:
You would not probably expect anyone fully to agree with you on so many abstruse subjects; and there are some points in your book which I cannot digest. The chief one is that the existence of so-called natural laws implies purpose. I cannot see this. Not to mention that many expect that the several great laws will some day be found to follow inevitably from some one single law, yet taking the laws as we now know them, and look at the moon, where the law of gravitation – and no doubt of the conservation of energy – of the atomic theory, &c. &c. hold good, and I cannot see that there is then necessarily any purpose. Would there be purpose if the lowest organisms alone destitute of consciousness existed in the moon? But I have had no practice in abstract reasoning and I may be all astray. Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? Secondly I think that I could make somewhat of a case against the enormous importance which you attribute to our greatest men: I have been accustomed to think, 2nd, 3rd and 4th rate men of very high importance, at least in the case of Science.
Darwin is compelled to object to the idea that "so-called natural laws" implies purpose and he goes farther in believing that all of the "several great laws" will eventually be expressed in "one single law" which is a materialist-monist project and has been for a long time, now. In doing so Darwin was simply upholding, not science but materialist ideology. There is no means of dealing with the issue of purpose or purposelessness in the universe with science. Don't worry, I won't go back and go over my row with Sean Carroll over his rather too premature prediction that cosmologists were on the verge of a Theory of Everything, unless forced to.
Oddly, enough, right before he states his qualms about the consequences of natural selection for the validity or significance of our minds and thoughts, he back tracks - perhaps a result of his claimed lack of practice in abstract reasoning - that he has an "inner conviction" that "the Universe is not the result of chance". Which is double speak because if it isn't a result of chance then his conviction that it is purposeless is entirely ungrounded.
So, instead of the claim that "no one believes that our minds are the product of chemistry and physics in our head" that is exactly what mainstream materialists have claimed to believe for centuries if not millennia. I will give this to Darwin, he understood that what his friend, scientific colleague and close associate, Ernst Haeckel said was a real consequence of materialist ideology and one with the most serious consequences for what you could rationally believe about the nature of and product of "man's mind" Today you can apparently get a PhD in science and be so philosophically ignorant as to not understand those consequences and so historically and scholastically inept as to claim that "no one believes" that. It makes you wonder how they ever got through college and grad school without doing a research paper, or at least, one which required consulting the relevant literature.
This one letter, especially in its second paragraph, deserves a going over in a way that would take a few posts. I think the enthusiasm with which Darwin went from "The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence." to the chilling enthusiasm with which he anticipated, "Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world." is a direct result of his materialism, his nationalism, his racism and his devaluation of human life in accord with the scheme of valuation that is inherent to natural selection. I won't go into the possibility that that act of valuation would have to be a delusion due to the consequences of materialism.
If you introduced those two sentences on any liberalish-leftish blog and attributed them to someone who is held to have the cooties, their depravity would be roundly asserted and the person they were attributed to would be held to be a neo-Nazi or worse. But, of course, if you told people who said it, that would make it OK or, at most, "a product of a product of his times". Of course there were many people who held such thinking was depraved all during his lifetime. I wonder what Lincoln would have said about it, or the American abolitionists. I can't suspect they'd have accepted it in the name of science.
It didn't take long for Darwin's idea of "an endless number of the lower races" being "eliminated by the higher races throughout the world" for those who did that to adopt his theory as their excuse. That was done as early as 1904. 23 years later, in present day Namibia, as Eugen Fischer collected body parts of members of "lower races" to be sent back to science departments in European universities and conducted experiments on living prisoners in an early death camp. For those who don't read my blog, Fischer was one of the co-authors of the book about such matters that Hitler was reading in prison as he dictated his insane rantings that became Mein Kampf. Fischer's ideas were directly a result of his indoctrination into natural selection and the line of materialism that both Darwin and Haeckel promoted.
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