Wednesday 2 June 2010

Darwinist Self-Deception

Round and Round in Self-Serving Circles

Darwinism rapidly evolved into a cosmology, which is a theory of everything. A theory that explains everything that exists can never be falsified. Its successive iterations (social Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, neo-neo-Darwinism) simply illustrate the religious, non-scientific nature of the Darwinian cosmology. The version of evolutionism is changing all the time: what changes not is the cosmology itself--that matter is ultimate and is randomly auto-existent. When scientific experimentation and evidence calls into question the currently prevailing version of evolution, the version adapts and changes like a wax nose. What never changes is the underlying, framing cosmology. The reason is that the cosmology is religious in nature and that science always conforms to the religious paradigm in which it operates.

Reading Darwinists is tiresome because with a straight face they claim a scientific foundation, on the one hand, whilst qualifiying, bending, re-interpreting, reshaping, redefining, and adapting so that everything fits their deeper truth-commitment, their cosmology, on the other. But the fit is always incomplete and prejudiced. Scientific scepticism is readily supplanted by a willing credulity. The bubbles keep escaping.  What this shows is that to the Darwinist mind, the cosmology is far, far more important than the science. The latter is the garb of hypocritical self-respectability, not substance.

Take the following quotation as an illustration of the point:
Evolutionary thinking is particularly useful in illuminating our view of childhood in the realm of facultative adaptation—a sort of "if then" proposition built into our genes. Evolution and genes sometimes say, This is how it must always be, but often they say, If in such-and-such an environment, respond with this adaptation, but if in this other, very different context, respond with that one. Sometimes the consequences are dire for children. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, of McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, have shown that abuse and neglect, up to and including killing children, are almost 100 times more likely in households with an adult male who is not genetically related to the child. Nothing, I think, could make it clearer that evolutionary explanations must be kept completely separate from moral and legal judgments. Yet this well-established fact about violence committed against children, independent of socioeconomic status and shown across national boundaries, should lead us to a new ways of thinking about abuse prevention. They can be subtle, not draconian, but they should recognize the facts.
(Melvin Konner, How Childhood Has Evolved, The Chronicle Review. (Emphasis, ours)

Observe the self-deceitful, sleight-of-hand. "Evolutionary explanations must be kept completely separate from moral and legal judgments" . . . And the question is, Why? Genetic "evidence" shows that a certain kind of person is predisposed to murder the children in his household. Surely, "scientific" rigorous evolutionary theory would say that this is entirely appropriate and consistent with the theory. But no. Moral and legal judgments must suddenly intrude, and reject the murder of children. Why? Ah, well, even broader cosmological arguments kick in and claim that moral and legal constructs, whilst not embedded in genes, are also part of the gradual evolution of the species to higher plains. Really. And the scientific evidence for that is . . .?

But, further, the inescapable reality is that when Konner and evolutionists talk about moral and legal judgements that would, in this case, be inveighed against a foster parent killing a non-genetically descended child, there can be no fundamental absolute moral or ethical or legal condemnation of such an act from within the Darwinian cosmology. There is only the reality of conflict upon which evolutionary processes proceed. The murderous parent is (presumably) protecting his genetic strain. In this case the criminal justice system is the challenger. In order to proceed higher, combat must take place. If the erstwhile criminal succeeds and gets off scot free, he has advanced the race (or at least his particular genetic strain) and called into question the validity of the current moral and legal code, which would have been proved impotent and weak in this case. Surely. Thus, the evolutionist who appeals to the "higher superiority" of legal and moral codes which must be set against the genetic codes, is simply and comprehensively begging the question. In a universe where matter is ultimate and is randomly auto-existent, the notion of a "higher superiority" of anything is egregious question begging.

Legal and moral codes exist, which, according to the Darwinian cosmology, means that they, too, have to be the product of evolutionary development. But if they are successfully broken and overcome, that too is a development, a step forward, a progression. Darwinian evolution is not uniform and linear. Within the evolutionary process there are many blind alleys. For the evolutionist, today's moral and legal codes may be (and probably are) one of them. No evolutionist can gainsay without being guilty of duplicitous special pleading.

So, the insistence that "evolutionary explanations must be kept completely separate from moral and legal judgments" is an egregious deceit in the light of Darwinian cosmology. To pretend otherwise is contemptible sophistry. You cannot have it both ways. Ah, we long for the good-old-days when Darwinists were more honest and self-respecting. But as for scientific objectivity, it long ago self-defenestrated in favour of an irrational, internally contradictory religion.

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