The year 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. 2010 marks 400 years since Galileo published The Starry Messenger, his first public comment on Copernicanism and the first popular argument for the revolutionary concept that the earth goes around the sun (rather than vice versa). In the two centuries between these two events, science had contributed to the rise of a rational humanist perspective largely eclipsed in the Western world since the gradual decline of ancient Greek natural philosophy over 1000 years earlier.
In the popular Western mind, Galileo moved humans from the center of the cosmos—and thus from the focal point of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic drama of divine creation and human morality—to its periphery. Further developments in modern astronomy and physics would demote humanity’s green abode to an insignificant speck in a vast and seemingly meaningless cosmos of strings and quarks that came from nothingness and appeared destined to return there. Darwin further displaced humans from the exalted place of being specially created by God in His image and destined for eternity to being the product of a blind, random, and purposeless evolutionary process that has proceeded for eons and is destined to continue with or without them so long as the cosmos continues.
Except for the specifics, nothing in these developments should have particularly surprised the ancient Greek natural philosophers, who had anticipated and debated all of these as general concepts without converting a substantial portion of the ancient Greek people from their traditional religious views. At bottom then and now was the question: What does this mean for human morality? It led to a rich dialogue then as it does now.
In Search of Secular Wisdom: A Greek Drama
For example, nearly 2500 years ago, Aristophanes wrote a popular and enduring comic dialogue, The Clouds, discussing the tensions between naturalistic science and traditional religion that raises many of the issues still informing this debate. In it, an old farmer named Strepsiades has sunk deep in debt due to his son’s passion for horse racing and seeks the secular wisdom for Socrates.
Their exchange begins:
Strepsiades: Throw open the Thinkery! Unbold the door and let me see this wizard Sokrates in person. Open up! I’m MAD for education! […]Strepsiades catches sight of Sokrates dangling in a basket overhead and calls up to him:
Strepsiades: Yoohoo, Sokrates!... What in the world are you doing up there?
Sokrates: Ah, sir, I walk upon the air and look down upon the sun from a superior standpoint.
Strepsiades: Well, I suppose it’s better that you sneer at the gods from a basket up in the air than do it down here on the ground.
Sokrates: Precisely. You see, only by being suspended aloft, by dangling my mind in the heavens and mingling my rare thought with the ethereal air, could I ever achieve strict scientific accuracy in my survey of the vast empyrean. [...]
Strepsiades: O dear little Sokrates, please come down. Lower away, and teach me what I need to know!Sokrates is slowly lowered earthwards.
Sokrates: What subject?
Strepsiades: Your course on public speaking and debating techniques. You see, my creditors have become absolutely ferocious. You should see how they’re hounding me. What’s more, Sokrates, they’re about to seize my belongings.
Sokrates: How in the world could you fall so deeply in debt without realizing it?
Strepsiades: How? A great, greedy horse-pox ate me up, that’s how. But that’s why I want instruction in your second Logic, you know the one—the get-away-without paying argument, I’ll pay you any price you ask. I swear it. By the gods.
Sokrates: By the gods? The gods, my dear simple fellow, are a mere expression coined by vulgar superstition. We frown upon such coinage here. Tell me, old man, would you honestly like to learn the truth, the real truth, about the gods?
Strepsiades: By Zeus, I sure would, The real truth. [...]
Sokrates: [Physical entities, like clouds,] are the only gods there are. The rest are but figments.
Strepsiades: Holy name of Earth! Olympian Zeus is a figment?
Sokrates: Zeus? What Zeus? Nonsense. There is no Zeus.
Strepsiades: No Zeus? Then who makes it rain? Answer me that.
Sokrates: Why, the Clouds, of course. What’s more, the proof is incontrovertible. For instance, have you ever yet seen rain when you didn’t see a cloud? But if your hypothesis were correct, Zeus could drizzle from an empty sky, while the clouds were on vacation.
Strepsiades: By Apollo, you’re right. A pretty proof.
Like any great literary work, the themes raised by Aristophanes nearly 2500 years ago still resonate today. The playwright has Sokrates, the voice of scientific reason, saying there is no god. The view appealed to Strepsiades, the simple farmer, because he thought that it might free him from the duty to pay gambling debts. Denying god undermines morality, this view suggests, while scientific reason could provide an alternative (and surer), basis for ethics. Sokrates certainly thought so in his day, and many modern philosophers of science believe so today. These issues are as old as ancient Greece, where scientific rationalism first flourished, but revived and became even more pressing with the advent of Darwinism 150 years ago this fall.
“I Had No Intention to Write Atheistically”
In November, 1859, within a week of receiving a pre-publication copy of his former student’s bold new book, On the Origin of Species, the great nineteenth-century Cambridge University geologist and ordained Anglican minister Adam Sedgwick wrote to Charles Darwin,
I have read your book with more pain than pleasure. Tis the crown & glory of organic science that it does thro’ final cause, link material to moral... You have ignored this link; &, if I do not mistake your meaning, you have done your best in one of two pregnant cases to break it. Were it possible (which thank God it is not) to break it, humanity in my mind, would suffer a damage that might brutalize it.
Origin of Species, of course, was the book that Darwin used to launch his theory of evolution by natural selection—a product of over two decades of painstaking, largely private research, which (in turn) followed in the wake of Darwin’s famous four-year round-the-world voyage as a young naturalist aboard the British survey ship, the H.M.S. Beagle. It was during that voyage that Darwin first took seriously the idea that current plant and animal species evolved from preexisting species rather than each having been specially created by God. As an idea, evolution was as old as science itself, but had never gained widespread acceptance among scientists; at least until Darwin’s day.
Writing to Darwin after he received his advance copy of Origin of Species, Harvard University botanist Asa Gray also expressed concern about the book’s theological implications. “I had no intention to write atheistically,” Darwin replied to Gray.
But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do... evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that the cat should play with the mouse [before killing it].
Alluding to William Paley’s analogy between a crafted telescope and the human eye, which was a key part of the Anglican theologian’s famous proof of an intelligent designer behind organic creation. Darwin then added, “Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressing designed.” Even human nature and mental ability might result from natural processes, he concluded.
Tags: aristophanes, atheism, darwin, dawkins, evolution, origin of species, socrates
"Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution,” he wrote. “Man was not created with an instinct for his own degradation, but from the lower he had risen to the higher forms.” For people like Carnegie, Darwinism became a religion, or at least an alternative source of human moral or ethical values."
The writer is incorrect- what Carnegie found, as he helpfully puts it explicitly, is truth, not morals or ethics. This truth explains how things are and most critically how we came to be the way we are, with animal natures at every corner. Thus Carnegie embarked on his own brand of philanthropy, which was to build libraries, the better to cultivate improvements in the human condition through higher consciousness and knowledge.
"Similarly, the noted American geneticist Francis Collins, who directed the human genome project and now heads the NIH, wrote in 2002, “Science will certainly not shed any light on what in means to love someone, what it means to have a spiritual dimension to our existence, nor will it tell us much about the character of God.”"
Since god does not exist, science could hardly tell us much about him, her, or it. But about love, science is telling us more every day. It is curious that people who have no problem with a thorough knowledge of how nerves tell us a stove is hot have a mental block when it comes to other experiences such as love. Not a single non-material element of the mental experience has ever been demonstrated- it all happens in our brain, and this bare fact should be neither a difficulty nor an affront.
"Dawkins: With your money, did you reproduce, raise children and leave your genes? If so, you were right. "
Here the writer engages in rank tomfoolery. The whole point of atheism is that humans are morally free- as free from supposedly divine dictates as from natural imperatives. Understanding our factual nature is a way to improve it and our condition, (remember Carnegie), not an excuse to revert to bestiality.
I reiterate from a similar and previous topic:
Ádam/man (ruddy), in his intial state (first Adam) was nothing more than a 'brute animal' (before the garden, Gen. 2:7):
- had to have been a 'primate' because humans have such a large percentage of primate DNA
- similar physiology and behaviour
- primates are the only mammals to have 'fingerprints'
At some time ruddy (soul) wandered into a garden and gained a spirit (God's image, higher consciousness, otherworldly spirit, aura, sixth sense, etc.), which caused him to change (second Adam, Gen. 2:8).
We have God's image, primates do not thus the reason why primates don't hold church services. This happened to a 'single' primate only (ruddy), thus the reason other primates have not, and are not, evolving.
soul = 'animal' principle
spirit = otherworldy, metaphysical
animal = soul
human being = soul + spirit
People who've lost limbs say they can still feel pain (or itch) in the severed area. How can that be, unless something is still there? The higher consciousness, spirit, retains its same shape though the body may change.
How can a phantom limb exist? By the nerves which formerly had senstive endings in that limb sending signals which the brain interprets -- as it always did when the limb was there -- as being from a real, existing limb.
Philosophers have a whole genre of "brain in a bottle" thought experiments that investigate the relation of our ideas of the universe to the sensations we get from the world via the nervous system. There's even a humorous version of that sort of argument.
And I simply cannot figure out what is meant by asserting that other primates haven't evolved and aren't doing so now. I mean, of course you can assert that nothing has evolved, and tell stories about a world created so that it looks as if creatures evolved; but primates in particular not evolving, for lack of a spirit?
A good essay if one stops before finishing the third page (as the essay is broken when shown on the website); or if the last dialogue did not have labels so completely false.
The views with the label "Dawkins" are so far from those of the well-known Professor Dawkins as to be virtually libelous. Who knows?--under the awful English laww on the matter, it might really be libel. To the real Dawkins, of course, the truth is very definitely not relative to one's own survival; a thing is true or not true, which is to be judged according to the evidence. If you want to see him apoplectic, you could do worse than tell him his views are essentially the same as those of the post-modern philosophers like Bruno Latour, who asserts that it's silly to say that a pharaoh died of tuberculosis, because baceria did not exist until people like Pasteur and Koch started talking about them!
Dawkins also says that a government based on principles of "survival of the fittest" [a phrase Darwin did not use] would be intolerable. Of course, his moral ideas (or ethical or whatever one calls them) are utterly different from the defense of torture shown here.
You may argue that his position is illogical based on his scientific views. Go ahead. Lots of people do that, and you can too. But argue it; don't pretend that your version of what he ought to say is what he says.
Perhaps I should mention that I will not defend a lot of his views. But even where he's wrong, he shouldn't be misrepresented. If this is an abstract platonic ideal of a Dawkins, call it that.
As to the Benedict character, I'll leave that to someone else. All those Jesuits behind him could doubtless do better on the subject of the unsavory past behavior of his church than we see here, so let them do that.
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