Blogito

After Copernicus dislodged humanity from the center of the universe, Marx asserted that false consciousness -- we do not really "make up our minds" -- blinds us to the fact that we are in the grip of an implacable dialectic of impersonal forces. Darwin placed humanity in a continuum of all protoplasm. Then Freud declared that the individual's "self" or personhood is actually a sort of unruly committee. All this dented humanity's self-esteem.

Still, many people of faith find Darwinism compatible with theism: God, they say, initiated and directs the dynamic that Darwin described.

In the end, Darwin, in spite of perfunctory rhetorical references to "the Creator," disagreed. As a scientist dealing with probabilities, and with a profoundly materialist theory, he had no intellectual room for a directing deity that wills a special destination for our species.

Without attempting to consider here the details of any particular religious belief, I’ve always found it curious that people who were capable of believing that all of the physical laws of the newly created universe came into being in one tiny instant as an ordered whole which we are still attempting to discern fully, they somehow seem to think that “Darwinian evolution” (just to keep the term as simple as we are in when we say “physics,” for instance) cannot be also among them.

The laws of probabilities which Darwin saw in operation are no different in essence than the laws of probabilities which govern the rest of the physical universe, after all, and could just as easily still be operating according to the same rules which apply to everything else derived from the Big Bang. The origin...and there was, you see, a distinct point of origin, or so we believe, whether we call it a “Big Bang” or “let there be light”...could as easily as not have contained within it all of the probabilities we have recorded as having taking place in the past, as well as today, and what little we can foresee of the future., as not.

When it comes to something to which we cannot possibly know the answer, there’s no choice I see which is capable of being determined to be superior to any other with regard to that origin. Before the origin of our universe its laws did not apply because our universe did not exist. Did something else exist with laws we don’t know about? Who can say no with any claim of certainty? Was their a creator then (more likely an unruly committee?) operating according to those different laws? Who knows?

What the people who object to religious belief today object to is the idea not so much that a creative force existed prior to the Big Bang but that somehow it still exists and is having an active effect today, and that the effect is whimsical, so to speak, rather than bound to Darwin’s...wait a second, wasn’t the word “probabilities”?

They don’t mind the changed probabilities of the new ideas (one hesitates to call them discoveries) which one encounters in quantum physics and which are upsetting the previous apple cart of man’s knowledge nearly as much as they do the idea that the same might be true of Darwin’s probabilities, and especially now that they have finally accepted them after such a struggle in doing so.

But both sets of probabilities--which we call “laws” when we think the probability is high enough--surely all had their same point of origin and the eventual creation of species, and therefore the notion of some set of fixed rules which determine natural selection is no different than the notion of Darwin’s belief in a fixed law of gravity. Some set of seemingly new rules which specify, say, that mass and energy are somehow interchangeable according to a laughingly simple formula, or that certain “laws” of physics we find completely reliable under all conditions we’ve found normal so far, such as Newtonian physics, cannot actually behave somewhat differently under conditions we are only dimly beginning to understand.

Just as Darwin noted that life “breathed into a few forms or into one” (an interesting choice of words) then evolved from that point, one should also remember that the planet hasn’t always been the same ball of water and soil we stand on today, complaining about the current temperature. It, too, after all, came from an accumulation of a few rocks or perhaps one, essentially space dust according to what Darwin perceived as a fixed law of gravity, but one which might not be quite as fixed as he thought it was.

Putting us back to the question of whether the instant of origin of the universe was some non-cosmic accident, there being no cosmos at that time, or the deliberate design of some intelligence we have no means of identifying.

For those who find religious belief so objectionable, what really frosts their taters worse than anything is the horrible notion that some group of the believers might actually possess some special knowledge which they do not, an idea they find intolerable. As intolerable as some found the ideas of Copernicus, Marx and Freud.

What I find interesting about today’s unquestioning acceptance of Darwinism is that the believers seem unwilling to acknowledge, let alone accept, all of the implications that were once discussed with some heat back before Darwinism became accepted.

For instance, if we accept natural selection, and Darwin’s ideas, then don’t we also have to accept the truth in what George Will provides for us here?

...Darwin, in the last paragraph of "The Origin of Species," saw beauty:

"Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

They are still being evolved, Darwin told people who are now suddenly not so interested in listening. Nobody really liked the idea that in that case man must be still not fully evolved and hasn’t yet reached the pinnacle of development for his species.

But they like even less the notion that if he has, if we really do represent our final form, the clear story of the evolutionary record says the next word we are due to hear will be “adios”. (How odd that “adios” and “goodbye” both contain theological implications!)

After all, no previous species peaked and achieved its final intransmutable form and then stuck around afterwards, although I hear the cockroach is giving it quite a try, Kafka to the contray.

One of Darwin’s notions which has always bothered me, “the production of the higher animals”, doesn’t seem to explain why the lower animals stuck around at all and still exist today.

Another question is why, then, should it be mankind’s role to try to preserve some species, Will’s elsewhere mention of Tennessee’s snail-darter being a perfect example, when nature’s grand plan calls for its extinction as a matter of natural course for a species when presented with a situation it is no longer designed to survive. You might argue that it is because man finds their existence useful, we can use some of their pigeon feathers and waterproof furs for hats, for instance, but since man will also in due course either pass away or evolve further, why bother?

Man doesn’t like to think that every evolutionary change producing a superior ability of the new type required to survive will include him, as well. He doesn’t like to think that he evolved from an ape, the notion of a “common ancestor” is more pleasant, but mightn’t that imply that the successor for Homo sapiens sapiens is going to appear as a bud on a different branch? Do we know no more about than happening to us today than the apes did?

Well, clearly Darwin doesn’t have all of the answers in part because we don’t know all of the questions. And since we mentioned Copernicus and Newton earlier, they might be good company in which to leave Darwin, somewhat short of Einstein who is still somewhat short of...well, we don’t know yet, do we? Homo sapiens sapiens sapiens?