Forget Darwin

My last post took a pretty hard swipe at science, so in the interests of balance I want to take hold now of the other horn of the contemporary culture-wars bull.

The term “fundamentalist” was invented by conservative Christians in the late 19th century as a self-description intended to identify themselves as the true bearers of the real principles of the uniquely true religion. Part of their self-conception was the claim that they were merely carrying forward ideas that were “fundamental” to Christianity from its beginning.

This claim is false, of course, because they were parsing their scriptural sources in an anachronistic way to come up with answers to the challenges raised in their own times. The concerns of the people who wrote the Bible were not the same as the concerns of late-19th-century Christian pastors, who were mainly appalled by the then-new doctrine of “Darwinism.”

What the original fundamentalists were responding to, however, was not just Darwinism but “modernism” in general, including especially the text-critical and historical-critical approaches to Bible scholarship. Studies in these disciplines had severely undermined a naïve belief in the Bible as “the Word of God,” and in many ways this was a more exigent challenge to faith than the findings of physical science.

Darwin’s theory, however, hit people on a more emotional level than arguments about source-texts and exogenous influences. On a gut level, many people just didn’t like the idea that they were cousins of chimpanzees. And we are still dealing with that reaction.

Scientists and their groupies are of course endlessly exasperated by all this. As far as they’re concerned, the theory of the origin of species through natural selection is “settled science,” and everyone should just accept it and get over it. And they’re probably right, though some of them seem inclined to extend this hypothesis to cover matters far beyond the biological where its applicability seems very dubious, as in the logically and morally questionable doctrines of Social Darwinism.

However, the ongoing argument over Darwin vs. the Bible or Darwin vs. God, though it seems to provide people on both sides with some sort of pleasure, is ultimately misconceived.

Even the most fundamentalistically inclined televangelist makes use every day of the theories and discoveries of physics: Their pleas for money are beamed to homes around the world by way of radio waves to satellites in Earth orbit and back again to the TV receivers of their fans. And every step of the way, their broadcasts rely on the laws of motion and electromagnetism and relativity and so on that were discovered and described by science.

For anyone with the slightest intellectual integrity, there’s a hair-raising degree of self-contradiction in this: Fundamentalist preachers are taking advantage of the discoveries of physics to broadcast the message that physics is a lie.

All the quibbling about how to interpret the age of bones and why there are seashells on top of the Alps pales into insignificance when someone asks why we’re able to see stars and galaxies that are millions or billions of light-years away.

From Newton to today, science has discovered the laws of motion and gravity, the values of universal constants like the speed of light, the ways in which bits of matter and energy interact, and so on and so on. Even if science hasn’t come up with a convincing explanation of why all these things are what they are, it’s undeniable that it has come up with stuff that works. Any quibbles one might have about the details of quantum theory seem largely irrelevant if you’re talking with a resident of Hiroshima.

Fundamentalists need to forget Darwin and worry instead about Newton and Faraday and Einstein and Niels Bohr and the rest. They need to explain how the very same science that enables them to generate electromagnetic signals and put satellites into Earth orbit and draw electricity from nuclear generators is wrong about the size and age of the universe.

After all, we can see objects in the sky that, based on measurements using the same physics that enable them to broadcast their appeals for money, are millions or billions of light-years away, when, according to their supposedly Bible-based belief, the universe is only several thousand years old.

This leaves us with only two options: One is that every object in the sky is within 6,000 to around 10,000 light years of Earth, and only appears falsely to be farther away. But this means that all the matter in the universe is contained within a space with a radius of roughly 10,000 light years; based on the laws of physics, it all should have collapsed into a black hole long ago.

The other option, and the one that fundamentalists tend to fall back on whenever challenged, is that it’s all a “test of faith.” God created the universe on that fateful day in October of 4004 B.C. (or some other day, but within the past tens of thousands of years), and when he did, he scattered the stars and galaxies across the sky in such a way as to make us believe that they were farther away and older than they really are.

This is the one that really bothers me, because it says that God is a liar and the whole fabric of the universe is a deception. It says that no one who is not a human being on this one planet, Earth, can ever know the truth about existence, because it’s only here that we have this book, this Bible, that explains the hidden truth behind the falsehood that is the universe.

That is the real “fundamental” idea: Challenged by serious and thoughtful investigators of life, the universe and everything, a certain group of Christian pastors decided that the answer was to declare the Bible unarguably true and everything that contradicted it false.

But before conservative Christians invented fundamentalism, even before there was such a thing as Christianity, there were many who understood that the universe was much more “the Word of God” than anything written down in ink. We talk about trees being chopped down to make paper for books; one living tree tells as much truth as all the books ever written.

Loose Morals

So far in this blog, I’ve done a lot of ranting about the role of randomness in the prevailing Western worldview and the resulting lack of “focus,” as defined in my first posting here. As I’ve indicated, I think it’s a wrong view of things, an inaccurate description, account or narrative.

But what difference does it make? What does it matter if scientists and economists and so on are working from a faulty conception of the overall cause and meaning of the cosmos? As long as they get the lower-level details right, and the electricity still makes my lights work and I can still click a link and look at stuff on the Internet, is there any reason to care about overarching theoretical stuff that may not be provable anyway?

Well, certainly in the case of economics, we’re seeing what happens when a wrong theory holds sway: Vast sums of money vanish in the blink of an eye, people lose their jobs, and political consequences follow.

In physics, there’s apparently some possibility that we might see even more disastrous results in a few months, when the big new CERN supercollider is fired up again, after it blew a fuse on the first try several weeks ago. Some physicists have expressed concerns that when their colleagues start smashing tiny bits of matter together, it might possibly cause the end of the world. Others scoff at that idea, though; I guess we’ll find out who’s right eventually.

However, I think we’re already living every day with almost equally disastrous results from this materialist-atomist worldview, because it leaves us with no “higher good,” no center-of-the-universe, no focus. What we’re left with is an absurdist value-neutral universe in which every action is pretty much as valid as any other. If, as Nietzsche proclaimed, “God is dead,” then by what standard do we judge our own or others’ words and actions?

The answer for Nietzsche and many others: the individual will, or what a lot of people might prefer to call the personal ego. From that perspective, “good” is what’s good for me, “bad” is what’s bad for me.

Amazingly enough, this position is in fact the stance of orthodox economics, though in that discipline the concept is sugar-coated with the notion of “rational agency,” which in essence claims that people (or at least those who make economic decisions such as whether to buy or sell stuff) act out of what some refer to as “enlightened self-interest.” Meaning that people are generally aware that the effect of their decisions on other people is something they need to keep in mind; for example, if you’re stealing food from others, you need to leave them enough so they don’t starve to death, if you want to be able to keep stealing from them.

But as we’ve seen in the banking industry, some people don’t get that part of the theory; instead, in their egotistical greed, they’re willing to burn their own house down to keep the fires lit. “Rationality” wouldn’t seem to have much to do with it, except in the sense that some of them were able to find plausible-sounding rationalizations for what they were doing.

Now, I’m not aligning with those upholders of religious orthodoxy who decry “situational ethics” and “moral relativism.” I think any ethics that doesn’t vary somewhat depending on the situation is too limited to be valid, and I think all morality is relative – relative to the true, final good.

I don’t agree, either, with those who claim it’s possible to establish a valid ethical system on a purely materialistic-scientistic basis. Any moral system that posits the “highest good” as some physical thing – prosperity, social order, the pursuit of scientific knowledge – will lead eventually to immoral results. For example, if you suppose that the highest human good is social order, you’ll inevitably end up making utilitarian compromises, seeking “the greatest good for the greatest number,” which means some “lesser number” will be hauled off to prison whenever it’s convenient, without violating your moral rules.

As for “scientific knowledge” as a “highest good,” it sounds nice and noble, but of course in the real world, research gets done when someone – the Pentagon, the pharmaceutical companies, the cigarette makers, etc. etc. – is willing to fund it.

So is there a way to find the true “highest good,” and to do so objectively, without recourse to traditional authority, such as religious dogma? I believe there is, and I’ll go into detail in a posting in the next few days.

Right now, I’d like to make a brief comment about reader comments. I’m delighted anytime anyone wants to leave a comment here. I’ve set it up so you don’t have to register or anything like that. I do say things from time to time that I think are fairly provocative, and I don’t mind anyone disagreeing or criticizing or challenging any of it. However, I won’t allow obscenity, libel or hate speech. So please feel free to critique, but please be grown-up about it.