01.02.09
Behind Dawkins’ charm, find Dr. Frankenstein
Dawkins the rationalist, Dawkins the lunatic.
In my experience scientists take an almost sadistic glee in shocking us with radical technological or scientific ‘firsts’. So it is important, perhaps, to not get in a tizzy when Dawkins starts ranting about human/chimpanzee chimeras, etc… At least his proposition has set bounds: he is answering a question posed at
Edge.org, what would change everything?
The issue here in many ways is to have the presence of mind to see through scientific browbeating, and be able to stand up to people who propose things on the basis of their own ignorance. Scientists have learned that they can get what they want by psychological manipulations of various kinds, here in evidence in Dawkins’ Oh So Rationalist weighing of the possibilities.
Here ignorance of the greater tradition of, not only religion, but religion and humanism, the greater humanism we see perhaps in the Pre-Socratics who were rebellious against religion, in some cases, but not so boxed in a mental trap about it as the modern scientist.
We have to face the fact that the Dawkins types simply don’t see a problem with cross-breeding humans and chimpanzees, or creating chimeras.
Why on earth are they so enthusiastic about doing such things? I could be wrong, but I think this is passing the boundary into something dangerous. For reasons that those trained exclusively in modern reductionist science have no further capacity of understanding.
Dawkins intones:
Our ethics and our politics assume, largely without question or serious discussion, that the division between human and ‘animal’ is absolute.
Maybe some people find the division absolute, but I don’t and I doubt if that is the issue. Differences can be relative rather than absolute, and still be critical. I think there is a continuum between man and animal, and a division. What more can I say? Isn’t it a potentially simple question.
But Darwinists have become obsessed with delegitimating man’s ‘humanness’. Why? Perhaps it is simple the legacy of a confused reductionism thinks anything like a human characteristic violates the laws of nature (??). Let us grant there is a dark side to human exclusivity: cruelty or indifference toward animals, or any other problems with the legacy of seeing man as separate from his animal evolution. But biological harping on this theme is getting a bit tiresome. Man appears to have crossed, or is crossing, a threshold into something new and different, and it is time to reconsider the issue after the groundwork laid by scientists as a challenge to human arrogance.
But it is not arrogant to see that man is simply a different case from the chimpanzee.
Dawkins protests against ‘essentialism’, but those protests are in vein, no matter that the issue is hopelessly confused. The question of essence simply won’t go away, and it is and remains the supreme challenge to a Darwinian view of evolution. There is something, we suspect, beyond the space/time categories in the overall framework of man. This question is rarely helped once religionists get a hold of it, so we may wish to change terminology, or understand the issues in a new way. There for example the stance of Kant or Schopenhauer might help. Man’s integrations of experience stand beyond the space-time matrix of that experience. So we are never safe in concluding that a biochemical totality constitutes man, or chimpanzee. In fact, all we can do is confess our ‘Kantian’ ignorance at the limits of science as metaphysics and not be so determined to do all the foolish things ignorant people might wish to do, such as crossbreed man and chimpanzee, or produce chimeras of the type Dawkins so grinningly finds he would inflict on those less ‘rational’ than he.
The question of the ‘soul’, it should be noted, is not simple, and less so after religionists such as the Christians finish their statements on the subject. But the soul question won’t go away just because we can’t answer questions about the ‘soul’ in animals, in early hominids, or in man. It is one of the deepest mysteries of religion, and unfortunately there are no automatic warning signs on the way to mistakes in this question, unless the rote opposition of religionists constitutes such a warning sign, however confused.
It might help to see how impoverished and crackpot the combination of watered down atheism a la Dawkins mixed with Darwinism really is and be a bit wary before embarking on the fate long prophesied by Mary Shelley for the monomaniacal scientist.
Let us note that the modern theory of evolution was first proposed by Alfred Wallace, who was in many ways more balanced and better qualified to propose such a theory, but that he was cheated by the dishonest and cunning tactics of Darwin whose legacy has continued that tradition of dishonest ‘science’.
As we approach difficult questions of the limits of evolutionary theory we should note that Wallace pioneered this warning and its implications. By comparison the ‘Darwin establishment’, still in control to this day via its master of propaganda, is a pack of thieves who can’t be trusted.
Be forewarned. The real founder of evolution as we now know it was Wallace, who rapidly came to the realization that natural selection was an oversimplification.