Dhamma

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Darwinism as a spiritual poison

Note: The article in no way undermines validity of Kevin MacDonald's work.

On the level of worldview Dawinism is a spiritual poison, it is animalisation of the man, and it replaced morality received from divine power with that of animal, blindly insisting on survival, and so it is in total contradiction with Dhamma, where the highest goal is the cessation of being in space and time.

Today a naturalistic approach to knowledge is being applied to virtually every field. Some say we’re entering an age of “universal Darwinism,” where it is no longer just a scientific theory but a comprehensive worldview.

It has become commonplace to say that America is embroiled in a “culture war” over conflicting moral standards. But we must remember that morality is always derivative, stemming from an underlying worldview. The culture war reflects an underlying cognitive war over worldviews—and at the core of each worldview is an account of origins. ↓

The pragmatists were among the first, however, to face squarely the implications of naturalistic evolution. If evolutionary forces produced the mind, they said, then all beliefs and convictions are nothing but mental survival strategies, to be judged in terms of their practical success in human conduct. William James liked to say that truth is the “cash value” of an idea: if it pays off, then we call it true.

Pragmatism Today 

This Darwinian logic continues to shape American thought more than we might imagine. Take religion. William James was raised in a household with an intense interest in religion. (In the Second Great Awakening his father converted to Christianity, then later converted to Swedenborgianism). As a result, James applied his philosophy of pragmatism to religion: we decide whether God exists depending on whether that belief has positive consequences in our experience. “An idea is ‘true’ so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives,” James once said. Thus, “If theological ideas should do this, if the notion of God, in particular, should prove to do it, how could pragmatism possibly deny God’s existence?”3 (...) As Lutheran theologian John Warwick Montgomery puts it, “Truths do not always ‘work,’ and beliefs that ‘work’ are by no means always true.”4

If James’s religious pragmatism has become virtually the American approach to spirituality today, then Dewey’s pragmatism has become the preferred approach to education. Virtually across the curriculum—from math class to moral education—teachers are trained to be nondirective “facilitators,” presenting students with problems and allowing them to work out their own pragmatic strategies for solving them. Of course, good teachers have always taught students to think for themselves. But today’s nondirective methodologies go far beyond that. They springboard from a Darwinian epistemology that denies the very existence of any objective or transcendent truth.*

NANCY PEARCEY How Darwinism Dumbs Us Down. Evolution and Postmodernism

* Revilo Oliver: By denying the concept of truth, Pragmatism necessarily denies the possibility of moral values. With the abolition of right and wrong, man can consult only his appetites and his calculations of expediency. The only test of an action is whether "it works". Logically a Pragmatist must condemn himself for a foolish weakness if he refuses, for example, to grind up his grandmother and sell her for hamburger in circumstances in which it is certain that he could get away with it and either realize a profit or have fun in the process. (...)

There are less spectacular, though not less baneful, applications of the doctrine to daily life. When the practicing Pragmatist expounds an argument, his words are merely the cover for his purposes. They are the flag hoisted by the pirate while stalking or approaching his victim. Where there is no truth there can be no rational debate, and the function of speech is to befuddle the gullible. And when the disinterested pursuit of truth is recognized as the Quixotic pursuit of an illusion, colleges must become hunting grounds for petty scoundrels. From: America's Decline 

Jonas Alexis:

... according to Darwinism’s fundamental principle, whatever is, is right in the animal kingdom. As Crook again puts it, “Struggle and competition, violence, bloodshed, and cruelty were the filtering mechanisms, crude, chancy, wasteful, by which species change and natural progress occurred.”[92]

In other words, according to the Darwinian mechanism, there cannot be “progress” without violence, bloodshed, and struggle. If Darwin is right, then “violence is a constant human potential, war is not aberrant and may even be commended as a biological necessity.”[93] So Darwinists, including Crook, have to do a lot of mental gymnastics in order to avoid Darwin’s fundamental principle. (...) Wilson is commonly known as the father of sociobiology. Yet listen to what Wilson has to say on ethics or morality:

“Ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to co-operate. It is without external grounding. Ethics is produced by evolution but not justified by it, because, like Macbeth’s dagger, it serves as a powerful purpose without existing in substance.”[96]

For Wilson and other staunch Darwinists, morality is just a product of sociobiological evolution which has been ingrained in us and which has no serious objectivity. As Ruse again puts it, “Morality is just a matter of emotions, like liking ice cream and sex and hating toothache and marking student papers.”[97] If you think that Ruse is just joking, then think again. He elaborates on these in his work The Darwinian Paradigm:

“Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth . . . . Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says ‘Love their neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves . . . . Nevertheless such reference is true without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory . . .”[98]

As we have argued in the past, Darwin saw almost the same thing. He argued in the Descent of Man that “If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering.”[99]

The Edinburgh Review quickly saw the logical conclusion of Darwin’s point here. It declared then that if Darwin is right, then:

“most earnest-minded men will be compelled to give up these motives by which they have attempted to live noble and virtuous lives, as founded on a mistake; our moral sense will turn out to be a mere developed instinct…If these views are true, a revolution in thought is imminent, which will shake society to its very foundations by destroying the sanctity of the conscience…”[100]

Science writer Robert Wright agrees that Darwin’s Descent of Man “has indeed sapped the moral strength of Western civilization” and replaced it with something else.

“Sympathy, empathy, compassion, conscience, guilt, remorse, even the very sense of justice, the sense of doers of good deserve reward and doers of bad deserve punishment—all these can now be viewed as vestiges of organic history on a particular planet. What’s more, we can’t take solace, as Darwin did, in the mistaken belief that these things evolved for the greater good—the ‘good of the group.’ Our ethereal intuitions about what’s right and what’s wrong are weapons designed for daily, hand-to-hand combat among individuals. It isn’t only moral feelings that now fall under suspicion, but all of the moral discourse.”[101]

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2023/04/02/david-duke-meets-jared-taylor-and-michael-hart/


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