History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
An interesting new book on the Resurrection myth, The Empty Tomb. The review notes below are very hostile, but in fact this is a book worth reading. Check some of the reviews at the Amazon site.
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The Times book review tomorrow has a review of Kevin Philips’ alarming new American Theocracy, which looks to be important reading.
American Theocracy : The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury
In his two most recent New York Times bestselling books, American Dynasty and Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips established himself as a powerful critic of the political and economic forces that are ruling—and imperiling—the United States. Now, Phillips takes an uncompromising view of the political coalition, led by radical religion, that is driving America to the brink of disaster.
A Guardian review of Armstrong’s new book has some useful criticism.
The eonic model, a generaliztion of the Axial Age concept, that ‘does it right’, survives every one of these criticisms.
Please note that the establishment will publish Armstrong, and then critique her. My version they will try to ignore, because then they would have to take the questions seriously.
How handy to have Armstrong around: discredit the whole idea, so Darwinian dogma can rest in peace.
It might backfire to suggest it, since Darwinists are already peddling a disguised economic ideology, but they might learn something from economists, as with this challenge to the myth of Economic Man. At least with economists they don’t take themselve so seriously as Darwinians. The reason is obvious: economics deals with real money.
Darwinism is ‘free phooey’, junk science propaganda, whose relevance to the present is marginal, except to legitimate cruetly, perhaps.
This amount of self-criticism is impossible in a Darwin-dominated theoretical environment, and yet there is a close resemblance to the construction of fictitious entities in both cases.
Like all revolutions in thought, this one began with anomalies, strange facts, odd observations that the prevailing wisdom could not explain. Casino gamblers, for instance, are willing to keep betting even while expecting to lose. People say they want to save for retirement, eat better, start exercising, quit smoking—and they mean it—but they do no such things. Victims who feel they’ve been treated poorly exact their revenge, though doing so hurts their own interests.
Such perverse facts are a direct affront to the standard model of the human actor—Economic Man—that classical and neoclassical economics have used as a foundation for decades, if not centuries. Economic Man makes logical, rational, self-interested decisions that weigh costs against benefits and maximize value and profit to himself. Economic Man is an intelligent, analytic, selfish creature who has perfect self-regulation in pursuit of his future goals and is unswayed by bodily states and feelings. And Economic Man is a marvelously convenient pawn for building academic theories. But Economic Man has one fatal flaw: he does not exist.
Since we have no account of language evolution, the burden of proof is on biologists to produce one, til then… Chomsky, Pinker, language and natural selection
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Dennett mentions scientology in an essay in Seed magazine. Scientology is an exceptional vicious but clever outfit that has claimed a lot of Hollywood actors, idiots like Tom Cruise. I remember years ago meetins some sufis spying on Scientology in Los Angeles, shaking their heads in sorrow at the mess created by shit head Crowley spinoff Ron Hubbard.
The Dennett’s would do well to consider what happens when you destroy the infrastructure of religions like Christianity. The wolves close in for the kill, and the wasteland of legal eagle entrepreneurs creating their own disguised gnostic churches, to the great harm of helpless people, begins.
Scientology is pretty awful, but as con men go, Sufis are worse, cleverer by an order of magnitude.
Sam Harris writes a letter to the editor re: Weiseltier’s shellacking of Dennett. I am a little puzzled. Is Harris a Darwinist? His book on the end of faith had a mysterious New Age strain that invoked what seems like Buddhist/Vedantic themes in the background. Let’s hope this isn’t going to be passed as play money in the reign of scientism, which Harris apparently sees as unproblematical…
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An interview with Armstrong in the Independent: now the basis of religion is ‘compassion’. Doubtful. But I can see the PR strategy. To find the common denominator for the ‘Axial Age religions’ takes a bit of doing. Something neutral and Dalai Lamaish like compassion might do it. Buddha was compassionate, so was Mohammed. So it goes.
No “divisions between Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism”? Hinduism and Buddhism spent almost a millennium fighting each other until Buddhists were exterminated in India, almost to the last man. After the occult war to control India climaxing in the empire of Ashoka, the counterrevolution was savage, and broke out into the open.
The Axial Age produced religions only incidentally on the way toward globalization. And that period produced a lot more than ‘religion’. Let us note that Greek polytheism flowered for the last time in the Greek Axial period, along with philosophy, science, the first secularism, democracy, and much else that doesn’t fit into Armstrong’s rip off of the Axial concept.
Junk sells, I guess, and if you sing the right tune you get to part of the ‘touchy feely’ global elite of gurus plotting the way the early Buddhists plotted for the next global concession in the religion business.
It’s possible to overrate Buddhist compassion. The Buddhist Sangha is one of the most violent criminal organizations on the planet, their violence is occult and hidden, tho don’t bother with the front office dummies like the Dalai Lama.
Rajneesh blew the whistle on their occult fascism starting in the nineteenth century.
You should read Rajneesh’s Communism: Zen Wind and Zen Fire. you can quote a Buddha on Stalin’s compassion.
New fossil complicates picture of feather evolution.
Associated Press
NEW YORK — A 150 million-year-old fossil from southern Germany has paleontologists ruffled over how feathers arose in the line of dinosaurs that eventually produced birds.
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I just finished reading Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth. Time’s Up
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The Times has an article on Quantum Mysticism. The abuse of quantum mechanics by New Age, and other, groups is a well-known phenomenon, but is the current understanding by of QM by realists that much better. Read the rest of this entry »
Fwd’d from Science for the people
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Dennett debates Richard Swinburne,How should we study religion.
The self-programmed stupidity of scientists attempting to study religion is often baffling, and Dennett simply makes this more visible. It is small wonder people recoil and end up dialectically propelled back into traditionalism. Maybe if scientists shut up on the subject this reverse gear effect would go away.
For the hundredth time, let it be said, that a theory such as Darwin’s based on natural selection simply CANNOT explain the phenomenon of religion.
But of course scientists trained in Darwinism are incapable of breaking out of their own over-simplifications. Read the rest of this entry »
Paul Gross tells us Darwin’s theory is distinguished by evidence. The Eonic Effect shows clear evidence of evolutionary directionality, witout a design argument, but unfortunately scientists, so-called, haven’t the slightest interest in evidence.
Methodological naturalism — and science — are about evidence. “Truth†without evidence is a philosophical bauble. Contra Teilhard de Chardin and other cited teleologists, there is no evidence for intelligent design in the origins of species. When and if somebody finds it, it will be a part of science. So far there is no evidence.
David Stove’s So You Think You Are A Darwinian Read the rest of this entry »
David Fontana’s review of Stove’s Darwinian Fairytales, now being republished. Read the rest of this entry »
DarkSyde on the tactics of the Darwin wars.
But I think that Democrats ought to do some hard thinking before they expect everyone to share the Talk.Origins view of evolution in their party. The alternative is not intelligent design, but an intelligent social philosophy that is Postdarwinian, and not some adjunct to scientism.
Who is kidding whom here? These legal fees are obviously part of the mix designed to intimidate anyone with a plan to dissent.
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Darwinian Fairytales : Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution has been republished and is well worth reading. It contains one of the most devastating critiques of Darwinism ever written, and should have been better known. But the original edition lingered in the stacks of research libraries generally unknown. This new edition hopefully will have some effect, and I will comment on the book further.
Readers of World History and the Eonic Effect will recall the citation from Stove, here.
I have a review from December 2000 at Amazon.
This is from WH&EE:
The confusion of foundational science as legitimation, ideology, and the basis of ethics neutralized in economic environments, was prefigured in the figure of Malthus, one source of the confused thinking of both Darwin and Wallace. The Malthus debate was an early cousin of the Darwin debate, in the ‘better they starve’ version. A recent philosophic critique of Darwinism by the philosopher David Stove, in Darwinian Fairytales , skewers the mechanization of ethics. The author targets the confusion generated by Darwinism in the sociobiol ogical attempt to derive altruism from adaptationist scenarios. Stove points out the most obvious fact:
If Darwin’s theory of evolution were true, there would be in every species a constant and ruthless competition to survive: a competition in which on a few in any generation can be winners. But it is perfectly obvious that human life is not like that, however it may be with other species.
Nothing in archaeology, the search for fossils, or DNA, is required to see this, or able to contradict this. We have no scientific proof that massive population catastrophes lead to evolutionary advance in the crucial questions under consideration. History shows any number of semi-Malthusian episodes, but its advances spring from a different source.
Was looking at an unusual ‘quick summary’ of the emergence of postmodernism, Read the rest of this entry »
Start of a series on the writer Ouspensky and the world of shark sufis.
This question is from one of the comments, and I am going to begin some posts on this subject, which is quite controversial and distressing–very hard to deal with.
What is the source of your antipathy toward Gurdjieff, if I may ask?
There is a lot to say about this, but the simplest answer is that Gurdjieff is an untrustworthy influence. His own follower, Ouspensky, sounded the warning with his whisperings that he was a criminal. Few people grasp what was going on there, and need help in dealing with this sufistic booby trap.
Fwd’d from Science For The People
On the Front Lines in the War Over Evolution
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Someone asked me about my reference to, and beliefs in/about, reincarnation in the post on the seventeenth Karmapa of Tibet (scroll down). I cannot vouch for the claims of reincarnated lamas of Tibet, the labyrinth is too tricky to figure out. It seems to me however they once had the extraordinary knack of doing what they claimed, then fell into a rut. What a strange way to do things!
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I received a comment (below) in post on Dennett that mentioned Gurdjieff
I said:
You know, the sufis have a special contempt for the West, with its science. They launched a torpedo like Gurdjieff ( a figure I detest, but what to do) over a century ago to try and ‘break the spell’ of scientism on the question of religion. They thought science was so far off the mark the question had future tragic implications.
The comment was:
Hi,
Gurdjieff, like Dennett, certainly does provoke strong reactions. My father, a well-known scientist, actually knew Gurdjieff, was quite impressed by him, and seemed to think that his objection was not to science per se, but to the unjustifiably haughty scientific attitudes that prevailed toward the end of the nineteenth century (not so different perhaps, from the rather extreme form of scientism espoused by Dennett, et al., and in particular Dawkins).
What is the source of your antipathy toward Gurdjieff, if I may ask?
Malcolm Pollack
Antipathy? Perhaps not the right word. Let me put it this way. Why are sufis, Buddhists, et al, silent on Darwinism? Actually they aren’t: they get other people to do the hard work. Look at the recent statement of the Dalai Lama (use the search button here for a post). One tidbit on Darwin and he got shut up. He probably won’t make that mistake again.
So I feel wary that my critique of Darwin, hard work, with a lot of opposition, will be exploited by these New Age types in the end. They are deceptively figuring their market share. Look at Ouspensky and Bennett, or Blavatsky. They were the public critics. All these other gurus are too worried about PR to tell the truth.
Beyond that, Gurdjieff was simply not an honest or direct man. I remember all that from the seventies. Few ever see the people manipulating all this. These sufis are exploiting people.
They could have provided a genuine spiritual culture, but instead they are simply parasites, shadowy vultures indeed.
I wouldn’t expect you to agree with me. Keep posted, and I will discuss the issue. Keep in mind the extreme distance between groups, sufis, shadow sufis like Gurdjieff, and the modern secular culture of the West. How create a dialogue here? Not easy.
Dennett wishes to destroy all forms of mysticism, and everything to do with religion. Small wonder the Gurdjieff types, back then, of course, were shifty-eyed about Westerners.
Anyway, it would have helped if people’s first introduction to a sufi hadn’t been someone so shark-finned as Gurdjieff. It was counterproductive.
More on this some other time.
Gene Expression discusses Dennett on religion.
Mentioning Tillich makes one muse–he was raised in the tradition of German Classical philosophy, a student of Schelling, and in the period of Heidegger. They graft ‘god’ onto ‘being’, perhaps deceptively so, yet the point would be that from Spinoza to Hegel the idea of God underwent multiple metapmorphoses, and ceases to be a ‘belief object’. You can be an atheist, but can one avoid the concept of totality and its antinomies. Using Darwinism to uphold one pole of that ‘Dialectic of Illusion’ is poor philosophy indeed, and you get the opposite pole you deserve, Bible Belt fundies, embarrassing for Brights. Many Buddhists find the ‘god debate’ a puzzle. Do the words mean anything on either side? Isn’t it all a distraction of mind?
The Times reviews some of the responses to the Dennett review
At Leiter Reports, University of Texas philosophy professor Brian Leiter challenges Wieseltier’s “sneering” dismissal of the idea that science can shed some light on all aspects of human life. “‘The view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical’ is not a ‘superstition’ but a reasonable methodological posture to adopt based on the actual evidence, that is, based on the actual expanding success of the sciences . . . during the last hundred years,” writes Leiter.
The idea that science can explain all human conditions, mental as well as physical, has so far proven stillborn, sterile. Beyond the realm of what science does best, viz. biochemistry, neurology, nothing has been accomplished that is fundamental. I don’t make that a prophecy, but the pretense that success has been achieved is a delusion.
You know, part of the Dennett motivation (my guess, to be sure) is to break the spell of monotheism–post 9/11 Islam.
You know, the sufis have a special contempt for the West, with its science. They launched a torpedo like Gurdjieff ( a figure I detest, but what to do) over a century ago to try and ‘break the spell’ of scientism on the question of religion. They thought science was so far off the mark the question had future tragic implications.
That was over a century ago.
One thing is sure, the Dennett style fanatics mean to destroy that world, just a surely as Bin Laden means to destroy the West.
Dennett’s book shows that nothing whatever has changed.
I have been critical of the guru scene here on this blog, but these questions are apparently beyond the comprehension of the Darwin indoctrinated.
I was reading Dance of the Seventeen Lives about the Karmapas of Tibet.
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I have been waiting for Karen Armstrong’s new book The Great Transformation on the Axial Age. Based on her previous remarks in earlier books, with a short version in The History of Myth, the result is going to make a complete mess of the material on the Axial Age. Since she has a ready public eager to lap up her brand this is going to make life difficult for anyone who tries to deal with the Axial Age phenomenon.
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I put up a post on Meera Nanda in relation to Sam Harris and Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, whose title comes from Nanda’s Breaking the Spell of Dharma: Postmodernism, Hindu nationalism and `Vedic science’;
The mixing up of the mythos of the Vedas with the logos of science must be of great concern not just to the scientific community, but also to the religious people, for it is a distortion of both science and spirituality.