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For more information:
Shaun Johnston
845-658-8270, shaun@evolvedself.com
March 8, 2008
ARTICLE: FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Is Darwinism the New Calvinism?
How many times can you get suckered by the same scam? How many times are we
going to let a self-selected “elite” persuade us they’re the Chosen Ones and the
rest of us have to do believe whatever they tell us?
It happened with
Calvinism. The Calvinist establishment claimed God had chosen them and them
alone to do His will, which turned out to be making the rest of us believe
whatever they told us. If you challenged their claim to be the Chosen Ones they
accused you of being a heretic, a disciple of the Devil. And nobody wanted to be
accused of that!
Now it’s happening with Darwinism. A Darwinist
establishment claims only they have the judgment to discern ultimate truth. And
that truth is, that the rest of us don’t—don’t have the judgment that leads to
truth. And, because we don’t have that judgment, we have to believe what they
tell us.
I’m talking about scientific determinism. The claim is, you and I
don’t have what used to be called “free will.” So we have to believe what
“science”—what Darwinists—tell us. If you challenge their claim to be the Chosen
Ones they accuse you of being a heretic, or as that’s called now, a Creationist!
And nobody wants to be accused of that!
Without anyone making a big
announcement, “free will” has been relegated to the supernatural. If you speak
up for free will you’re accused of wanting to reintroduce the supernatural into
science. It’s a surprisingly seductive claim, until you start to wonder, how
come Darwinists can come to rational conclusions, and preach them and publish
them, and the rest of us can’t? How come they seem to have free will, but we
don’t?
It’s that same old scam. It’s that same old claim to superior
wisdom.
Here’s that “superior” wisdom. According to science, only something
physical can make anything physical happen. Free will isn’t physical, so it
can’t make anything physical happen. Since it can’t make anything physical
happen it can’t affect our behavior—it can’t make a difference in how we adapt
to the environment. So natural selection can’t select for it. So it can’t have
evolved. Therefore free will can’t exist. It’s an illusion.
Consciousness,
now that’s different. Consciousness does exist. But it has nothing to do with
free will. Consciousness is simply how brain chemistry shows up in conscious
experience. What the rest of us experience as “free will” is simply our
awareness of decisions already made in brain chemistry. And brain chemistry,
like any chemistry, is determined. So what we like to think of as conscious
judgment is really nothing but pre-determined brain chemistry.
Except for the
Chosen Ones! Only they escape being zombies. Only their thinking escapes being
determined by chemistry. Only they have the free will to weigh alternatives and
arrive at “the truth.”
Smell a rat here?
Let’s unravel this scam. Start
with science itself. Can science exist without free will? No. Science consists
of discerning an unknown, coming up with alternative hypotheses to account for
it, figuring out some way to distinguish between them, devising experiments to
make that distinction, coming to conclusions, and deciding how to publish them.
Free will at every step. So the process of science implies—no, demands—free
will. If it didn’t, if it was just chemistry like dissolving a metal in acid, if
its outcome was as determined as that, who would pay any attention to it? No one
in his or her right mind!
What scientists can do, the rest of us can do. If
they have the ability to judge between alternatives and come up with rational
judgments, so do we. Whatever it is that allows them to do that, we’ve got too.
Call it free will, call it volitional consciousness, call it the rational
exercise of choice, call it whatever you want, we exercise the same control over
the physical world through conscious deliberation that they do.
Now it gets
interesting. Let’s agree that we evolved, I’ll go along with science there. Then
free will did evolve. To be selected for, free will must have affected how we
adapted to the environment. Therefore free will can act on matter.
Therefore…
Therefore science, with its denial of free will, is (to say the
least) incomplete. And natural selection too becomes suspect. In a world where
free will exists, in us at least, who’s to say it isn’t involved in the process
of evolution itself? The creaky mechanics of natural selection may not be
telling us the whole story of how and where we came from. Human nature may not
be anything like the picture of it painted for us by science and
Darwinism.
Let’s start off by agreeing, being critical of Darwinism should no
longer be a badge of shame. It should no longer automatically lump us in with
the creationists. There’s a scam to be exposed, let’s not leave that to someone
else. Let’s do the cleaning up ourselves.
I’ve used the word “scam” several
times. I’ve said someone’s claiming superior authority and wisdom in order to
increase their own power and influence. Am I accusing scientists of planning a
scam? Not all of them. I’m talking about a small group of agitators who I see
perverting science to help them impose their world view on the rest of us. It’s
a major scandal, and everyone with a true love of science should be concerned
and work to put it right.
The scandal is, limitations in how science works
are being claimed to be truths about the world itself. The methods of science
don’t work on something that isn’t determined, so science can’t “discover”
anything about free will. But no one in their right mind thinks that means free
will doesn’t exist. Except for those with an axe to grind. And the axe
is—scientific determinism relabeled as “Naturalism” and harnessed to fight
Christianity.
The Victorian skirmish around the Church of England’s monopoly
over entry to the universities and the professions is over. The need to need to
invoke Darwinism in that skirmish is a part of long-ago history. The “Darwin’s
bulldogs” unleashed in that skirmish, it’s time to call them in.
And it’s
time to rethink Darwinism. The passions it arouses are the best proof we have
that free will exists. Free will did evolve. It is not supernatural. A purely
physics-and-chemistry mechanism may not be sufficient to account for it. The
search for how free will could evolve need not necessarily involve the
supernatural. We may need a new kind of science. And a new kind of science education in the classroom.
Let’s start by
calling off the bulldogs.
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