Selling Out Our Souls

Confused Mess of Pottage

The modern scientific academy appears to be populated by the self-deluded.  On the one hand, particularly when it comes to the human species, there are a series of propositions about human beings which represent professional hypotheses and claims.  Then, on the other hand, there are truths which the scientists actually believe.  All too often the two never meet.

Take, for example, that doyen of evolutionism, Richard Dawkins.  Professor Dawkins "discovered" a previously unknown human gene--which, he titled the Selfish Gene.  It was such a neat idea, it took the world by a hurricane.

When it was first published, Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene took the intellectual world by storm.  Conversion experiences among young men were widely reported.  They still are.  The idea that we are all "lumbering robots" designed by natural selection to advance the interests of our genes has become one of those things widely believed because widely believed.  [David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009),  p.176.]

OK.  So what's the big deal?  Who could be opposed to such a great idea?  Well, it seems that everyone who espouses the idea is also opposed to it.
 From the beginning it was "widely believed because it was widely believed".  How's that for a neat tautology?  Have you ever seen its better?  Fortunately that great lion of biological freedom--our old friend, Professor Richard Dawkins--does not believe it--at least when it come to himself.

What is remarkable in all this is that no one taking selfish genes seriously takes them seriously.  Richard Dawkins has gone out of his way to affirm that he, at least, is not under the control of his genes. "I too am an implacable opponents of genetic determinism," he has written.  His genese are not so selfish as to tell him what to do.  What knows what might happen if he gave them a free hand?  He may lumber, but if he does, the dead wood is under his control. [Ibid., p.176f.] 

Old Richie Dawkins is most subject to mockery.  On the one hand, he champions evolutionism; on the other he exudes at every breath an Upper Class English fastidious moralism to which his evolutionism does not give him any title or right to hold whatsoever.  And even if he does insist upon declaiming against child abuse, its only patrician English culture that would be doing the talking.  There are  no moral principles involved.  All that comes out of his mouth is genetically determined and controlled, like any other animal really.

Berlinski goes on:

The most unwelcome conclusion of evolutionary psychology is also the most obvious: If evolutionary psychology is true, some form of genetic determinism must be true as well.  Genetic determinism is simply the thesis that the human mind is the expression of its human genes.  [Ibid.]

But what about "environmental factors" such as temperature or the pervasive outpourings of the Chattering Classes in the media?  Sorry.  Evolutionists must object.

If the environment controls how men are made and how they act, then they are not born that way; and if they are not born that way, an explanation of the human mind cannot be expressed in evolutionary terms.  How could it be otherwise?  On current views, it is the gene that is selected by evolution, and if we are not controlled by our genes, we are not controlled by evolution.  [Ibid., p.177] 

What a confused mess of pottage for which the secularists have sold their soul! Nature or nurture? Well, the evolutionist insists it is Nature:  matter under the control of  evolution.  That's what the evolutionists insist upon in their professional capacity.

When Steven Pinker writes that "nature does not dictate what we should accept or how we should live our lives," he is expressing a belief--one obviously true--entirely at odds with his professional commitments.  If ordinary men and women are, like Pinker himself, perfectly free to tell their genes "to go jump in the lake", why pay the slightest attention to evolutionary psychology?  Why pay the slightest attention to Pinker?

Either the theory in which he has placed his confidence is wrong, or we are not free to tell our genes to do much of anything.  If the theory is wrong, which theory is right? If no theory is right, how can "the idea that human minds are the product of evolution" be "unassailable fact"?

If this idea is not unassailable fact, why must we put aside "the idea that man was created in the image of God"?

These hypotheticals must now be allowed to discharge themselves in a number of categorical statements:

• There is no reason to pay attention to Steven Pinker.
• We do not have a serious scientific theory explaining the powers and properties of the human mind.
• The claim that the human mind is a product of evolution is not unassailable fact.  It is barely coherent.
• The idea that man was created in the image of God remains what it has always been: And that is the instinctive default position of the human race.  [Berlinski, ibid., p.178f]