10.29.05
The Five Commandments
Telic Thoughts
cites Provine’s views on the meaning of evolution:
William Provine is the Charles A. Alexander Professor of Biological Sciences from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University. So what does this representative of the mainstream say? At a Darwin Day event, he laid out his views about the meaning of evolution:
“Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.”
Dawkins bit about ’self-respecting atheists’ got it wrong. No atheist worth his salt could maintain his self-respect if he falls for the Darwin defense of his views. It is always baffling to try and understand why Darwinists think Darwin could have established all these metaphysical truths with a theory as weak as natural selection.
The question of divinity obsesses Western Civilization, less attention is ever given to issues of soul and free will–and ethics.
Noone asks Darwinists to give an ultimate foundation for ethics. Only some consideration of the way in which it must be a part of any true theory of evolution. Ethical behavior, with/without ultimate foundation, is a fact of human existence, and the failure of Darwin’s theory to account for that simply puts it in limbo.