Was just thinking again of the confusion I have around some of the rhetoric and thinking from the “save the world” evolutionists. You know, the folks who ardently hold to naturalistic materialism but who nonetheless agitate for “social change” or global warming mitigation, or the homeless, etc. etc. I guess what I’m not following is how on the one hand, they believe the universe is a closed system come about by happenstance, but on the other, they are bothered by what goes on in the world. What we see is what is there and what is, is. But yet they are always trying to change what is. Huh.
If, for example, man is just another animal among thousands of species of animal on this planet, then in a high-level sense, there’s nothing really different about him vis-à-vis the rest of the “animal kingdom.” The Yellow-bellied Sapsucker does what it does, and you never see protesters complaining about its actions. The wolf will sometimes deplete an area of prey and while some might try to correct or offset that (why?) I never see anyone angry at the wolf or attempting to make it change its desires. But then, there’s man. “Oh,” the do-gooder evolutionist says, “But man is destroying the rain forest and all manner of rare or unknown flora and fauna are perishing because of it!” to which I scratch my head. After all, whatever man does is what man does because of what he is, and there’s no higher “ought to” to say otherwise. Man got here through the same process that the wolf does and has no higher “law” governing him that stands over the wolf, right? I mean, if the wolf just kills and kills, well, maybe man just destroys rain forests until they’re all gone. What’s wrong with that? Don’t evolutionists maintain it was just such a confluence of actions on the part of lower order creatures that gave rise to the present world? Why not let man just be man (rain forests be damned) and see what comes of it? Isn’t that “the process” that evolutionists believe in?
But by bewailing man’s actions and attempting to change them towards some desired “ought to,” aren’t evolutionists trying to apply exactly what they deny is inherent in the universe—design??
So on what basis should men change? If I shun the homeless person and let him die from exposure to the elements, what of it? Isn’t that precisely something man does? Let me continue on in that way;, surely the “process of evolution” will bring about something else. This is the destructive/creative evolutionary process modern science assures us is the regnant principle behind all that is, no?
No Neutrality 