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Evolutionary theory and nihilism?

Evolutionary theory and nihilism?

Last updated on: July 3, 2019 at 5:26 pm by Dan Peterson

Evolutionary theory and nihilism? 2019-07-03T17:26:17-06:00 Dan Peterson

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A tidal pool on the southern coast of New South Wales, Australia. Charles Darwin proposed that life on Earth may have begun in just such a place. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

In a response to a question posed as a comment on my blog about the ideological baggage that sometimes accompanies presentations of the concept of organic evolution, I gave, as examples of such baggage, “the notions — strictly speaking, not entailed by biological evolution — that life is pointless, that there is no God, that the cosmos is ultimately mindless, that humans and other organisms are essentially gene-replicating machines, and so forth.”

Over at what I call the Peterson Obsession Board, there was an immediate eruption of indignation and astonished incredulity. Doesn’t this merely demonstrate my irrational hatred for, or fear of, atheism? Does it illustrate my desperate need for pie in the sky when I die? Am I even serious? Or am I lying?

Do I really imagine that nihilism is really taught as part of the biology curriculum?

No. I don’t imagine any such thing. Certainly it has never been formally taught in any biology class that I’ve ever taken, whether at the high school or college level. Moreover, I’m fairly confident that, when evolutionary biology is taught at BYU, as it regularly is across the biology and geology curriculum, it isn’t taught as entailing nihilism or atheism.

That’s why I wrote of “the naturalistic and reductionistic baggage that too often accompanies the teaching of biological evolution.” Note the words too often. Note that I didn’t write invariably, or inevitably, or always. That’s why I write that such “baggage” is, “strictly speaking, not entailed by biological evolution.”

But to pretend that some vocal proponents of evolution and some readers of books and articles on the subject haven’t drawn reductionist, naturalistic, and atheistic conclusions in the wake of Darwinism would be plainly risible.

Take, for example, this blog’s resident atheistic dogmatist, who posts comments under the name of gemli. He is enormously admired, even (one might say) lionized, over at the Peterson Obsession Board for his many effortless triumphs here, each and every day, over mindless and irrational theistic obscurantists such as I.

Gemli occasionally likes to refer to himself and other humans as “meat wads,” “advanced simians,” and the like, which seems (to a simple soul like me, anyway) fairly “reductionist.” And, specifically replying to my summation of the ideological baggage that too often accompanies some expositions of evolutionary thought — “that life is pointless, that there is no God, that the cosmos is ultimately mindless, that humans and other organisms are essentially gene-replicating machines, and so forth” — gemli says “You might be surprised to discover that everything you mentioned in your litany of soulless existence is exactly right.”

But, of course, I’m not even remotely surprised that gemli endorses my “litany.” I am surprised, though, that at least some of the folks over at the Peterson Obsession Board pretend to be surprised at such things.

Matthew Arnold, who, like so many other late Victorians, was hit directly in the solar plexus by Charles Darwin’s radical theory of the descent of humankind, summarized his reaction in the final two stanzas of his famous poem “Dover Beach”:

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

“Understanding evolution led me to atheism,” says Oxford’s Richard Dawkins. And what does his atheism entail? He sets it forth rather nicely in his 1995 book River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life:

Theologians worry away at the `problem of evil’ and a related ‘problem of suffering.’ … On the contrary, if the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies . . . are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention. It would manifest no intentions of any kind. In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

“Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something,” writes Michael Ruse in “Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics,” in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), 262, 268-269, “ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. . . . Never the less . . . such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory.”

“The more the universe seems comprehensible,” says the Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg (b. 1933), “the more it also seems pointless.” Or, as he also says, “The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”

Or perhaps we should cite the great atheistic philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), who wrote the following in a famous essay entitled A Free Man’s Worship:

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

And then there’s Adolf Hitler, who was, pretty clearly, a “social Darwinist.” He described human beings as nothing more than “a ridiculous ‘cosmic bacterium’” (“eine lächerliche ‘Weltraumbakterie’”). Not surprisingly, therefore, as his biographer Ian Kershaw observes,

Human life and suffering was . . . of no consequence to him. He never visited a field-hospital, nor the homeless after bomb-raids. He saw no massacres, went near no concentration camp, viewed no compound of starving prisoners-of-war. His enemies were in his eyes like vermin to be stamped out. But his profound contempt for human existence extended to his own people. Decisions costing the lives of tens of thousands of his soldiers were made . . . without consideration for any human plight. [Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2000), 500-501.]

I could multiply such quotations endlessly, but there would be little point in doing so.

Have some of those exposed to evolutionary theory drawn reductionistic, atheistic, and/or nihilistic worldviews from it? Absolutely, yes. They undeniably have. This is beyond reasonable dispute. And it was precisely my point.

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