12.31.07
Chance, purpose
All chance, no purpose.
Myers wants to wriggle out of the implications of Darwinism. In general the liberal Darwinists have misleadingly put a pleasant face on the harsh reality of Darwin’s egregious theory.
It is understandable that creationists, ID-ists, and theologians should cause one to adapt to live in a foxhole, and a life of constant dialectical combat. But the sad reality is that these religious types are correct. Darwinism is all chance and no purpose.
As Myers rightly notes, the teleological bilge offered by theologians is enough to give one pause indeed on the subject. Any honest attempt to scope the limits of Darwinism is prone to all sorts of religious efforts to coopt the question.
The answer is to not be psyched out by religionists (an embarrassing tendency in reductionist true believers) and examine the limits of current science, and especially the most obvious fact that nothing can be concluded using Darwin’s theory: it is woefully incomplete, and worse, improperly documented.
Why should science be incapable of addressing the questions of an ultimate purpose? I hear this all the time: science can’t give us meaning, science can’t explain love, science can’t do this or that. It’s usually said by some clueless git who has his own ideological axe to grind, and wants everyone to line up in support of his or her own dictated decrees about the truth, which are usually obtained by revelation (i.e., whim) or dogma, and which are challenged by a process that actually tries to examine reality in search of a truth. And those ideologies, such as Catholicism, have no legitimate claim for better understanding than any other traditional nonsense.
I say otherwise. We have no other, better tool. If we’re going to discover an ultimate purpose, it will be through the process of studying our universe — through science. The only thing these putative other ways of knowing affect our reach is by impeding us.