I. Part 2
In the middle of his discussion of small-scale Natural selection in the section, Dawkins takes a short detour; stepping back to take in the ‘bit picture’ of large-scale Natural Selection.
That is why birds are so good at flying, fish are so good at swimming, monkeys are so good at climbing, viruses are so good at spreading. That is why we love life and love sex and love children. It is because we all, without a single exception, inherit all our genes from an unbroken line of successful ancestors. The world becomes full of organisms that have what it takes to become ancestors. That, in a sentence, is Darwinism. (p. 2, emphasis added)
This is where I part company with Dawkins as I believe that the reason that animals are so good at what they do is because they were designed that way.
Far more disturbing, however, is the subtle shift into reductionism he makes in the bolded sentences. After listing the optimized capacities of various animals in terms of purely utilitarian ’survival value’, he casts human passions in that same light. Note that he did not write of the human capacity for life, sex and procreation; but rather the love of those things. Therefore, from a Darwinian perspective, these aspects of human nature are purely utilitarian, having no intrinsic value themselves. I don’t fault Dawkins for this shift. Indeed, from his reductionist, Darwinian perspective it is not a shift at all. He deserves credit for not flinching from the logical ends of his worldview.
Now Dawkins would no doubt plead that such passions would be ’selected for’ as they would better enable our species to thrive, but this isn’t necessarily so. First, we have no means of determining that animals love life, sex and their little ones – at least not in the sense that we do*. Dawkins seems to understand this as he only wrote of animal capacity, not passion. Thus, if the vast majority of life thrives largely absent such passion, it is follows that it is not at all necessary for species to flourish. Why, then, did humans develop such passions? Perhaps it became necessary because of the protracted developmental process humans must go through (i.e. childhood and adolescence) before becoming self-sufficient? Perhaps. But what of the fact that, throughout history, humanity has exhibited the capacity for an extraordinarily callous disregard of life, sex and children. Putting all morality aside, what survival value is conferred upon a species by profligate abortion, infanticide, promiscuity or neglect and abandonment of children? And how does Darwinism make sense of the deliberate choice by much of modern Western culture (particularly Europe) to allow their societies to wither away; to have so few children as to knowingly charge headlong towards extinction? And all of this is to say nothing of the mass slaughters visited upon of wide swaths of humanity by tyrants past and present.
If Darwinism is to make sense of these conflicting realities, it must do so exclusively in terms of utilitarian survival value. In other words, Darwinism demands that a given ‘adaptation’ and its opposite must serve one and the same purpose: survival. Worse, since survival is the ultimate ‘good’ from a Darwinian perspective, both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ are, by definition, good.
Any objective basis for morality is thus destroyed.
Agnostic and Darwin skeptic David Berlinski has observed
Darwin’s theory has been variously used – by Darwinian biologists – to explain the development of a bipedal gait, the tendency to laugh when amused, obesity, anorexia nervosa, business negotiations, a preference for tropical landscapes, the evolutionary roots of political rhetoric, maternal love, infanticide, clan formation, marriage, divorce, certain comical sounds, funeral rites, the formation of regular verb forms, altruism, homosexuality, feminism, greed, romantic love, jealousy, warfare, monogamy, polygamy, adultery, the fact that men are pigs, recursion, sexual display, abstract art, and religious beliefs of every description. (p. 23, emphasis added)
Note the bolded ‘opposites’. A paradigm – a ‘view of life’ – that is as malleable and flexible as this doesn’t explain everything, it explains nothing. This is not to say that Darwinians lack ‘explanations’ for how all of this works, indeed they have a multitude of theories to reconcile these conflicting ‘facts of life’ – theories as contradictory to one another as the facts they seek to explain.
Now, how does a ‘Biblical View of Life‘ deal with all of this? Does such a paradigm not suffer the same, or worse, fate? In a word, no. All of that ‘good stuff’, including the love of life, sex and children are all manifestations of the image of God in man. These human passions are pale reflections of the innate, absolute and pure attributes of God. What then of the ‘bad stuff’? These are the manifestations of human sin; perversions of the capacities God endowed us with at creation. God gave Adam & Eve the ‘good’, but it wasn’t enough; they wanted more. So they grabbed the ‘bad’. Thus the paradox of the human condition – we have true and honest ‘good’ and true and honest ‘bad’ all in one flawed package.
Many reject this ‘Biblical View of Life‘ for whatever reason – it’s regressive, backward, primitive, unscientific, what have you. That’s all well and good, but the biblical view has something the Darwinian view doesn’t – coherence. Whereas Darwinism must explain contradictory states of affairs in terms of one ‘metric’ (i.e. survival), Christianity explains each with respect to its own ‘metric’; Creation explains the ‘good’, the Fall explains the ‘bad’. A metaphor might help illustrate why the biblical view outclasses the Darwinian. Think of these ‘metrics’ as eyes. Darwinism has one eye and Christianity has two; only one has depth perception and thus superior vision.
How did Dawkins fair in this section? Again, it’s a mixed bag. While Dawkins again succeeds in giving us a proper view of Darwinism, we see how the paradigm runs aground on the rocks of reductionism and its resulting incoherence. By my lights, this ‘Darwinian view of life’ is not only not inspirational, it strikes me as terribly ‘lifeless’ as we must regard those things which imbue our lives with such color and zest as mere tricks played on us by our genes to get us to reproduce. How utterly dismal and bleak.
*Some animals do evidence a love of some type for their fellows. For instance, elephants have been seen to mourn when one of their herd dies.
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