ANTI-SCIENCE DARWINISTS CANNOT EVEN GIVE A REASON FOR REASONING! The mind boggles at the hilarity of Darwinist "thought" that denies our ability to actually think for ourselves!
Darwinists do not actually understand their own hypothesis!
I think it should be obvious but I will interject comments to help...When you really think about it, Darwinism in purest form claims that you do not actually think at all...or at least that you are programmed to think what you think. Those two statements are basically synonymous. It is no wonder that Darwin practically worried himself to death in his later years. being so ambivalent about what he had done and sometimes even tormented by the thought that he had done great harm to humanity. Hey, Charles? Yes, you did! Too late for you, but YOU, the reader, can consider this post and really THINK about it, will you? Uhm, if you think you CAN think...
Is Darwinian Evolution Compatible with Free Will and Personal Responsibility?
Discovery Institute
May 1, 2009
“Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly... [including the idea that] human free will is nonexistent... Free will is a disastrous and mean social myth.”—William Provine, Professor of History of Biology, Cornell University.1
In The Descent of Man, Darwin explained human behavior largely as the function of pre-determined—and often anti-social—instincts. For all of Darwin’s praise of man’s sociability, he wrote that “it cannot be maintained that the social instincts are ordinarily stronger in man, or have become stronger through long-continued habit, than the instincts… of self-preservation, hunger, lust, vengeance, &c.”2 What did this mean in practice? “At the moment of action,” wrote Darwin, “man will no doubt be apt to follow the stronger impulse; and though this may occasionally prompt him to the noblest deeds, it will far more commonly lead him to gratify his own desires at the expense of other men.”3
So Darwin recognized that carnal desires would be inherent in evolved humans.
Darwin tried to soften the implications of his view by going on to claim that men will learn to regret their impulsive actions and eventually this regret will create in them a conscience. However, Darwin did not convincingly explain why the conscience would trump instincts he earlier depicted as so overwhelming. Even if conscience is able to counteract the anti-social instincts in some men, presumably those who act anti-socially are only following their own strongest instincts. If this be the case, how responsible are those who act against society?
Darwin in The Descent of Man doesn’t directly address the consequences of his account for free will and personal responsibility. He was more open in his in unpublished notebooks. There he wrote that “the general delusion about free will [is] obvious,” and that one ought to punish criminals “solely to deter others”—not because they did something blameworthy.4 “This view should teach one profound humility,” wrote Darwin, “one deserves no credit for anything… nor ought one to blame others.” Darwin denied that such a fatalistic view would harm society because he thought that ordinary people would never be “fully convinced of its truth,” and the enlightened few who did embrace it could be trusted.
Darwin's idea was to use carrot-and-stick methods to control human behavior, not really sure that mankind COULD be trained any other way.
There is no question that materialists have found inspiration in Darwin’s view that man’s mental faculties arose through a purely purposeless material process of chance and necessity. In the words of nineteenth-century German physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond, “the evolution theory in connection with the doctrine of natural selection forces upon [man]... the idea that the soul has arisen as the gradual result of certain material combinations....”5 Noted evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould expressed the same view, arguing that according to Darwin’s theory “matter is the ground of all existence: mind, spirit, and God as well, are just words that express the wondrous results of neuronal complexity.”6
So now we see that Darwinists are giving evolution not only credit for creating life but the soul and spirit and God and the mind?
It should be no surprise, then, that attacks on free will and personal responsibility have featured prominently in Darwinian accounts of human behavior during the past century-and-a-half. For example, Darwinism played a key role in the development of the “new school of criminology” by Cesare Lombroso and others in the late nineteenth century. These criminologists tried to find Darwinian explanations for why people engaged in crime, even labeling some persons “born criminals” because they were supposed to be throwbacks to an earlier stage in evolutionary history. Lombroso and his followers repudiated the traditional idea that “crime involved… moral guilt.” Italian Jurist Enrico Ferri, one of Lombroso’s most celebrated disciples, argued that it was no longer reasonable to believe that human beings could make choices outside the normal chain of material cause and effect given the advent of modern science, particularly the work of Charles Darwin. Ferri looked forward to the day when punishment and vengeance would be abandoned and crime would be treated as a “disease.”7
The diminishment of free will is likewise rampant among today’s purveyors of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. MIT psychologist Steven Pinker, who Arnhart cites with approbation, has argued publicly for more lenient treatment of mothers who commit infanticide. Why? According to Pinker, natural selection made them do it! “[T]he emotional circuitry of mothers has evolved to cope with th[e] uncertain process [of raising children], so the baby killers turn out to be not moral monsters but nice, normal (and sometimes religious) young women.”8
By what measure does this Darwinist measure words like NICE and NORMAL and RELIGIOUS? It is so hypocritical of them to claim to have some kind of morality at all, frankly. What is the standard of Darwinian morality? They keep stealing the morality of the Theists and then chip off the parts they do not like. But when they actually speak to morality, they admit that they have no free will and therefore why should they claim to have a moral code or care to follow one?
In his bestselling book The Moral Animal, evolutionary psychology booster Robert Wright goes even further, declaring “free will is an illusion, brought to us by evolution”9 and “[u]nderstanding the often unconscious nature of genetic control is the first step toward understanding that —in many realms, not just sex—we’re all puppets....”10 Wright does add that “our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer.”11 But if “free will is an illusion,” precisely how can we liberate ourselves from “the puppeteer”? And if human beings truly are “puppets” to their genes, puppets whose “emotions are just evolution’s executioners”12 (again quoting Wright), in what sense can people be blamed if they simply act according to their deepest impulses?
Good point. A real Darwinist must needs be an anarchist then. We are all sociopaths in the Darwinist school of thought (oxymoron alert!) to tell the truth. Except in the Darwinist world, there is no truth or falsehood, there simply is what you do. So why don't we empty the jails and everybody just do what we are evolved to do? Well?
Puppeteer? What a crock! God made man with a free will and the ability to reason and do. We do observe that morality is real and thinking is real and reasoning is real, therefore on that level alone we can toss Darwin into the dustbin.
It is true that a number of Darwinists are likely repelled by the implications of their own theory when it comes to free will. Thus, while evolutionist William Provine at Cornell openly proclaims the denial of free will as a corollary of Darwinism, he concedes that “[e]ven evolutionists have trouble swallowing that implication.”13
The real question is not whether some evolutionists are squeamish about denying free will, but whether their scientific outlook allows them any rational basis to affirm it. Sociobiologist David Barash is more honest than many in admitting the tension between his own subjective experience of free will in daily life and his belief that “there can be no such thing as free will for the committed scientist....”14 Barash is willing to live with what he calls the “unspoken hypocrisy” of preaching materialistic determinism in public even while acting as if he has free will in private. At least he is willing to admit his hypocrisy. The point here is that Darwinists who try to cling to free will do so in spite of their theoretical commitment to materialism, not because of it.
So, frankly, Darwinists have no reason to argue with anyone about science because they cannot actually reason at all, their brains are programmed by evolution to do what they do and Darwinists are helpless to control their own brains or impulses...right?
Darwinian political theorist Larry Arnhart wants to do better than Barash and find a way to make Darwinism actually consistent with free will. Recognizing the debilitating impact of what he calls “strong reductionism,” Arnhart does his best to disentangle Darwinism from it, insisting that “[i]n contrast to the reductionism often associated with modern science, Darwinian conservatism affirms the idea of emergence.”15 By “emergence,” Arnhart means there are “special capacities of the human soul... manifesting the emergent complexity of life, in which higher levels of organization produce mental abilities that cannot be found at lower levels.”16 Whether “emergence” truly helps make Darwinism safe for free will, however, is doubtful.
What would be helpful to Darwinists would be to discover "evidence" instead!
To make his case, Arnhart draws on the work of Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz of UCLA, whose fascinating research seeks to demonstrate that our mental thoughts can produce physical changes in the brain. For Arnhart, the clear lesson of Schwartz’s research is that “the mind that emerges from the human brain can change the brain itself. This emergent power of the brain for mental attention is the natural ground for human freedom.”17 Yet it is not clear what the word “emergent” adds to Arnhart’s description. Schwartz’s research does try to show the power of the human mind to act on the physical brain. But in and of itself it does not establish how the power of the mind first developed—whether it emerged from a purely purposeless material process, as Arnhart contends, or through a purposeful process directed by a preexisting intelligence, as has been more traditionally believed. Nor does Schwartz’s research demonstrate whether the human mind is purely material (but “emergent”) or the fusion of matter with a nonmaterial entity. Again, the focus of Schwartz’s research is to show that the mind is real by demonstrating its effects on the brain, not to decide the debate over emergence.
Additionally, it is ironic that Arnhart would rely on the work of Schwartz at all, because Schwartz’s research did not spring from Darwinian theory. In fact, Schwartz is openly critical of neo-Darwinism and supportive of intelligent design, and he is affiliated with a pro-intelligent design professional society established by mathematician and philosopher William Dembski, one of intelligent design’s most prominent proponents.18 If Darwinism is so compatible with emergence, why couldn’t Arnhart cite research done by a committed Darwinist to establish his idea of emergence? Why is the most convincing research he could find being conducted by a critic of Darwinism?
Arnhart’s championing of “emergence” notwithstanding, the history of Darwinian explanations of human behavior during the past century has been overwhelmingly a history of reductionism. And although Arnhart claims that there is “no reason to fear a Darwinian science of human life as promoting a reductionist materialism that denies human freedom,”19 his own account provides reasonable grounds for such fears.
Actually Darwinism leads to tyranny. The Darwinist society was modeled by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and the Darwinist individuality by Jeff Dahmer.
By Arnhart’s own testimony, Darwin and his acolytes have had an ambivalent record on the issue of reductionism. While Arnhart fails to mention Darwin’s belittling of free will as a “delusion,” he does cite Darwin questioning why “thought, being a secretion of brain, [is] more wonderful than gravity a property of matter,” and he acknowledges the “strong reductionism” advocated by the dean of sociobiology, Harvard’s E. O. Wilson.20 Arnhart even describes emergence as a solution to what he calls “Darwin’s problem” of trying to uphold man’s unique capacities while insisting they can be completely accounted for through an unbroken chain of “natural causal laws.”21
But if Darwin had a “problem” avoiding reductionism, and if modern Darwinists like E. O. Wilson advocate “strong reductionism,” then perhaps fears of reductionist Darwinism are not so illusory after all. Arnhart concedes this point at least implicitly by urging Darwinists to adopt emergence in order to defend human freedom and dignity against reductionism. Yet as long as there is no proof that Darwinists as a whole have followed Arnhart’s counsel, why should Darwin’s critics relinquish their concerns? If Arnhart wants to add credibility to his claim that Darwinism is compatible with free will and personal responsibility, he first needs to persuade the leading proponents of Darwinism that their reductionistic view of the human person is wrong.
What kind of idiot thinks that his brain is programmed to think in a certain way but yet tries to reason his way around the idea anyway? If you really believe in Darwinism, you believe that you have evolved to think the way you think. So why bother to try to change my mind or worry about someone else believing in God? Why should you care, in fact, are you capable of caring? Do you even know? Seriously, my regard for Dr. Provine is in place because of his honesty, but even he should stop and wonder why he bothers to even opine on things as his opinion is evolved rather than informed. Right?
Incoherence, thy name is Darwinism! As usual, a Darwinist will come up with some cool word like "emergent" as if that solves any of their underlying problems. Either we can think and reason and operate with a free will or we cannot. If we cannot, then Darwinists ought to simply shut their yappers because they are not actually able to have an independent idea anyway. They should leave us all alone and let those of us who KNOW that man can not only reason and have a moral code to live by alone to help the rest of the world find sanity and reason and leave Darwin-babble to the babblers.
I will say, though, that so many Darwinists have admitted that the world "appears to be designed" and then adhere to evolution anyway that there may be a few of them who actually cannot think. It is reasonable to understand why they are not reasonable. Dear God, what a web they weave when they deceive themselves!!!
1William Provine, abstract for “Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life,” talk delivered on Feb. 12, 1998, posted at the Darwin Day Archives, http://eeb.bio.utk.edu/darwin/Archives/1998ProvineAbstract.htm(accessed August 8, 2006).
2Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871), vol. I, p. 89.
3Ibid., vol. I, p. 91.
4Paul Barrett, et. al., Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836-1844 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1987), 608.
5Quoted in Frederick Albert Lange, History of Materialism, trans. by Ernest Chester Thomas (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co. Ltd., 1892), vol. II, p. 312.
6Cesare Lombroso, Crime: Its Causes and Remedies, translated by Henry Horton (Montclair, New Jersey: Patterson Smith, 1968). For a discussion of Lombroso and Social Darwinism see, Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-1945 (Cambridge, Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 74-80.
7Enrico Ferri, “The Positive School of Criminology,” in Criminology: A Book of Readings, ed. Clyde Vedder, Samuel Koenig, and Robert Clark (New York: The Dryden Press, 1953), pp. 137-138.
8Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at MIT, “Why They Kill Their Newborns,” The New York Times Magazine (November 2, 1997).
9Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 350.
10Ibid., p. 37.
11Ibid.
12Ibid., p. 88.
13Provine, “Evolution.”
14David P. Barash, “Dennett and the Darwinizing of Free Will,” Human Nature Review (March 22, 2003), http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/dcdennett.html (accessed August 8, 2006).
15Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Conservatism (Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic, 2005), p. 104.
16Ibid.
17Ibid., p. 111.
18Schwartz is a signer of “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism,” http://www.dissentfromdarwin.org/ (accessed August 8, 2006), and he is a Fellow of the pro-intelligent design International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design, http://www.iscid.org/jeffrey-schwartz.php (accessed August 8, 2006).
19Arnhart, Darwinian Conservatism, p. 111.
20Ibid., pp. 104, 106-108.
21Ibid., p. 110.
The work of Discovery Institute is made possible by the generosity of its members. Click here to donate.
Discovery Institute — Center for Science and Culture
208 Columbia St. — Seattle, WA 98104
206-292-0401 phone — 206-682-5320 fax
email: cscinfo@discovery.org Also: www.intelligentdesign.org
Is Darwinian Evolution Compatible with Free Will and Personal Responsibility?
Discovery Institute
May 1, 2009
“Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly... [including the idea that] human free will is nonexistent... Free will is a disastrous and mean social myth.”—William Provine, Professor of History of Biology, Cornell University.1
In The Descent of Man, Darwin explained human behavior largely as the function of pre-determined—and often anti-social—instincts. For all of Darwin’s praise of man’s sociability, he wrote that “it cannot be maintained that the social instincts are ordinarily stronger in man, or have become stronger through long-continued habit, than the instincts… of self-preservation, hunger, lust, vengeance, &c.”2 What did this mean in practice? “At the moment of action,” wrote Darwin, “man will no doubt be apt to follow the stronger impulse; and though this may occasionally prompt him to the noblest deeds, it will far more commonly lead him to gratify his own desires at the expense of other men.”3
So Darwin recognized that carnal desires would be inherent in evolved humans.
Darwin tried to soften the implications of his view by going on to claim that men will learn to regret their impulsive actions and eventually this regret will create in them a conscience. However, Darwin did not convincingly explain why the conscience would trump instincts he earlier depicted as so overwhelming. Even if conscience is able to counteract the anti-social instincts in some men, presumably those who act anti-socially are only following their own strongest instincts. If this be the case, how responsible are those who act against society?
Darwin in The Descent of Man doesn’t directly address the consequences of his account for free will and personal responsibility. He was more open in his in unpublished notebooks. There he wrote that “the general delusion about free will [is] obvious,” and that one ought to punish criminals “solely to deter others”—not because they did something blameworthy.4 “This view should teach one profound humility,” wrote Darwin, “one deserves no credit for anything… nor ought one to blame others.” Darwin denied that such a fatalistic view would harm society because he thought that ordinary people would never be “fully convinced of its truth,” and the enlightened few who did embrace it could be trusted.
Darwin's idea was to use carrot-and-stick methods to control human behavior, not really sure that mankind COULD be trained any other way.
There is no question that materialists have found inspiration in Darwin’s view that man’s mental faculties arose through a purely purposeless material process of chance and necessity. In the words of nineteenth-century German physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond, “the evolution theory in connection with the doctrine of natural selection forces upon [man]... the idea that the soul has arisen as the gradual result of certain material combinations....”5 Noted evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould expressed the same view, arguing that according to Darwin’s theory “matter is the ground of all existence: mind, spirit, and God as well, are just words that express the wondrous results of neuronal complexity.”6
So now we see that Darwinists are giving evolution not only credit for creating life but the soul and spirit and God and the mind?
It should be no surprise, then, that attacks on free will and personal responsibility have featured prominently in Darwinian accounts of human behavior during the past century-and-a-half. For example, Darwinism played a key role in the development of the “new school of criminology” by Cesare Lombroso and others in the late nineteenth century. These criminologists tried to find Darwinian explanations for why people engaged in crime, even labeling some persons “born criminals” because they were supposed to be throwbacks to an earlier stage in evolutionary history. Lombroso and his followers repudiated the traditional idea that “crime involved… moral guilt.” Italian Jurist Enrico Ferri, one of Lombroso’s most celebrated disciples, argued that it was no longer reasonable to believe that human beings could make choices outside the normal chain of material cause and effect given the advent of modern science, particularly the work of Charles Darwin. Ferri looked forward to the day when punishment and vengeance would be abandoned and crime would be treated as a “disease.”7
The diminishment of free will is likewise rampant among today’s purveyors of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. MIT psychologist Steven Pinker, who Arnhart cites with approbation, has argued publicly for more lenient treatment of mothers who commit infanticide. Why? According to Pinker, natural selection made them do it! “[T]he emotional circuitry of mothers has evolved to cope with th[e] uncertain process [of raising children], so the baby killers turn out to be not moral monsters but nice, normal (and sometimes religious) young women.”8
By what measure does this Darwinist measure words like NICE and NORMAL and RELIGIOUS? It is so hypocritical of them to claim to have some kind of morality at all, frankly. What is the standard of Darwinian morality? They keep stealing the morality of the Theists and then chip off the parts they do not like. But when they actually speak to morality, they admit that they have no free will and therefore why should they claim to have a moral code or care to follow one?
In his bestselling book The Moral Animal, evolutionary psychology booster Robert Wright goes even further, declaring “free will is an illusion, brought to us by evolution”9 and “[u]nderstanding the often unconscious nature of genetic control is the first step toward understanding that —in many realms, not just sex—we’re all puppets....”10 Wright does add that “our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer.”11 But if “free will is an illusion,” precisely how can we liberate ourselves from “the puppeteer”? And if human beings truly are “puppets” to their genes, puppets whose “emotions are just evolution’s executioners”12 (again quoting Wright), in what sense can people be blamed if they simply act according to their deepest impulses?
Good point. A real Darwinist must needs be an anarchist then. We are all sociopaths in the Darwinist school of thought (oxymoron alert!) to tell the truth. Except in the Darwinist world, there is no truth or falsehood, there simply is what you do. So why don't we empty the jails and everybody just do what we are evolved to do? Well?
Puppeteer? What a crock! God made man with a free will and the ability to reason and do. We do observe that morality is real and thinking is real and reasoning is real, therefore on that level alone we can toss Darwin into the dustbin.
It is true that a number of Darwinists are likely repelled by the implications of their own theory when it comes to free will. Thus, while evolutionist William Provine at Cornell openly proclaims the denial of free will as a corollary of Darwinism, he concedes that “[e]ven evolutionists have trouble swallowing that implication.”13
The real question is not whether some evolutionists are squeamish about denying free will, but whether their scientific outlook allows them any rational basis to affirm it. Sociobiologist David Barash is more honest than many in admitting the tension between his own subjective experience of free will in daily life and his belief that “there can be no such thing as free will for the committed scientist....”14 Barash is willing to live with what he calls the “unspoken hypocrisy” of preaching materialistic determinism in public even while acting as if he has free will in private. At least he is willing to admit his hypocrisy. The point here is that Darwinists who try to cling to free will do so in spite of their theoretical commitment to materialism, not because of it.
So, frankly, Darwinists have no reason to argue with anyone about science because they cannot actually reason at all, their brains are programmed by evolution to do what they do and Darwinists are helpless to control their own brains or impulses...right?
Darwinian political theorist Larry Arnhart wants to do better than Barash and find a way to make Darwinism actually consistent with free will. Recognizing the debilitating impact of what he calls “strong reductionism,” Arnhart does his best to disentangle Darwinism from it, insisting that “[i]n contrast to the reductionism often associated with modern science, Darwinian conservatism affirms the idea of emergence.”15 By “emergence,” Arnhart means there are “special capacities of the human soul... manifesting the emergent complexity of life, in which higher levels of organization produce mental abilities that cannot be found at lower levels.”16 Whether “emergence” truly helps make Darwinism safe for free will, however, is doubtful.
What would be helpful to Darwinists would be to discover "evidence" instead!
To make his case, Arnhart draws on the work of Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz of UCLA, whose fascinating research seeks to demonstrate that our mental thoughts can produce physical changes in the brain. For Arnhart, the clear lesson of Schwartz’s research is that “the mind that emerges from the human brain can change the brain itself. This emergent power of the brain for mental attention is the natural ground for human freedom.”17 Yet it is not clear what the word “emergent” adds to Arnhart’s description. Schwartz’s research does try to show the power of the human mind to act on the physical brain. But in and of itself it does not establish how the power of the mind first developed—whether it emerged from a purely purposeless material process, as Arnhart contends, or through a purposeful process directed by a preexisting intelligence, as has been more traditionally believed. Nor does Schwartz’s research demonstrate whether the human mind is purely material (but “emergent”) or the fusion of matter with a nonmaterial entity. Again, the focus of Schwartz’s research is to show that the mind is real by demonstrating its effects on the brain, not to decide the debate over emergence.
Additionally, it is ironic that Arnhart would rely on the work of Schwartz at all, because Schwartz’s research did not spring from Darwinian theory. In fact, Schwartz is openly critical of neo-Darwinism and supportive of intelligent design, and he is affiliated with a pro-intelligent design professional society established by mathematician and philosopher William Dembski, one of intelligent design’s most prominent proponents.18 If Darwinism is so compatible with emergence, why couldn’t Arnhart cite research done by a committed Darwinist to establish his idea of emergence? Why is the most convincing research he could find being conducted by a critic of Darwinism?
Arnhart’s championing of “emergence” notwithstanding, the history of Darwinian explanations of human behavior during the past century has been overwhelmingly a history of reductionism. And although Arnhart claims that there is “no reason to fear a Darwinian science of human life as promoting a reductionist materialism that denies human freedom,”19 his own account provides reasonable grounds for such fears.
Actually Darwinism leads to tyranny. The Darwinist society was modeled by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and the Darwinist individuality by Jeff Dahmer.
By Arnhart’s own testimony, Darwin and his acolytes have had an ambivalent record on the issue of reductionism. While Arnhart fails to mention Darwin’s belittling of free will as a “delusion,” he does cite Darwin questioning why “thought, being a secretion of brain, [is] more wonderful than gravity a property of matter,” and he acknowledges the “strong reductionism” advocated by the dean of sociobiology, Harvard’s E. O. Wilson.20 Arnhart even describes emergence as a solution to what he calls “Darwin’s problem” of trying to uphold man’s unique capacities while insisting they can be completely accounted for through an unbroken chain of “natural causal laws.”21
But if Darwin had a “problem” avoiding reductionism, and if modern Darwinists like E. O. Wilson advocate “strong reductionism,” then perhaps fears of reductionist Darwinism are not so illusory after all. Arnhart concedes this point at least implicitly by urging Darwinists to adopt emergence in order to defend human freedom and dignity against reductionism. Yet as long as there is no proof that Darwinists as a whole have followed Arnhart’s counsel, why should Darwin’s critics relinquish their concerns? If Arnhart wants to add credibility to his claim that Darwinism is compatible with free will and personal responsibility, he first needs to persuade the leading proponents of Darwinism that their reductionistic view of the human person is wrong.
What kind of idiot thinks that his brain is programmed to think in a certain way but yet tries to reason his way around the idea anyway? If you really believe in Darwinism, you believe that you have evolved to think the way you think. So why bother to try to change my mind or worry about someone else believing in God? Why should you care, in fact, are you capable of caring? Do you even know? Seriously, my regard for Dr. Provine is in place because of his honesty, but even he should stop and wonder why he bothers to even opine on things as his opinion is evolved rather than informed. Right?
Incoherence, thy name is Darwinism! As usual, a Darwinist will come up with some cool word like "emergent" as if that solves any of their underlying problems. Either we can think and reason and operate with a free will or we cannot. If we cannot, then Darwinists ought to simply shut their yappers because they are not actually able to have an independent idea anyway. They should leave us all alone and let those of us who KNOW that man can not only reason and have a moral code to live by alone to help the rest of the world find sanity and reason and leave Darwin-babble to the babblers.
I will say, though, that so many Darwinists have admitted that the world "appears to be designed" and then adhere to evolution anyway that there may be a few of them who actually cannot think. It is reasonable to understand why they are not reasonable. Dear God, what a web they weave when they deceive themselves!!!
1William Provine, abstract for “Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life,” talk delivered on Feb. 12, 1998, posted at the Darwin Day Archives, http://eeb.bio.utk.edu/darwin/Archives/1998ProvineAbstract.htm(accessed August 8, 2006).
2Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871), vol. I, p. 89.
3Ibid., vol. I, p. 91.
4Paul Barrett, et. al., Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836-1844 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1987), 608.
5Quoted in Frederick Albert Lange, History of Materialism, trans. by Ernest Chester Thomas (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co. Ltd., 1892), vol. II, p. 312.
6Cesare Lombroso, Crime: Its Causes and Remedies, translated by Henry Horton (Montclair, New Jersey: Patterson Smith, 1968). For a discussion of Lombroso and Social Darwinism see, Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-1945 (Cambridge, Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 74-80.
7Enrico Ferri, “The Positive School of Criminology,” in Criminology: A Book of Readings, ed. Clyde Vedder, Samuel Koenig, and Robert Clark (New York: The Dryden Press, 1953), pp. 137-138.
8Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at MIT, “Why They Kill Their Newborns,” The New York Times Magazine (November 2, 1997).
9Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 350.
10Ibid., p. 37.
11Ibid.
12Ibid., p. 88.
13Provine, “Evolution.”
14David P. Barash, “Dennett and the Darwinizing of Free Will,” Human Nature Review (March 22, 2003), http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/dcdennett.html (accessed August 8, 2006).
15Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Conservatism (Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic, 2005), p. 104.
16Ibid.
17Ibid., p. 111.
18Schwartz is a signer of “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism,” http://www.dissentfromdarwin.org/ (accessed August 8, 2006), and he is a Fellow of the pro-intelligent design International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design, http://www.iscid.org/jeffrey-schwartz.php (accessed August 8, 2006).
19Arnhart, Darwinian Conservatism, p. 111.
20Ibid., pp. 104, 106-108.
21Ibid., p. 110.
The work of Discovery Institute is made possible by the generosity of its members. Click here to donate.
Discovery Institute — Center for Science and Culture
208 Columbia St. — Seattle, WA 98104
206-292-0401 phone — 206-682-5320 fax
email: cscinfo@discovery.org Also: www.intelligentdesign.org