Posted: Mar 28, 2015 3:13 pm
Jayjay4547 wrote:This claim is that the human origin story has been presented as one of self-creation, in reactive opposition to the Genesis story in which human beings were made by something greater than themselves- and which is a basic truth about human origins and the human status.
Bullshit.
The general scientific consensus on evolution is (and seemingly always has been) that humans are one of the products of an extraordinarily complicated process involving all manner of interactions.
Indeed, that's so basic that scientists seem unlikely to see a need to constantly repeat it, especially since few people seem likely to lie and try to pretend that someone failing to constantly repeat the obvious is therefore denying it.
That's the thing about scientists (believers and nonbelivers) - they generally assume a default level of sanity and honesty in their audience.
The philosophical issue is whether someone chooses to consider 'evolution' as being a pseudo-person and god-substitute as opposed to a natural process, but that's really not a matter for science.
To me, it seems a basic category error to try and compare 'humanity' and 'evolution' in terms of 'greatness', since the properties typically associated with 'greatness' in humans don't seem sensibly applicable to 'greatness' in nature.
For a start, 'greatness' in humans is essentially a relative term comparing individuals, and in that sense 'greatness' is meaningless in the context of the evolution of everything, since there is only one 'evolution' and one 'nature'.
The use of 'greatness' with regard to humans is in a context where there are explicit goals and conscious decision-making by individuals to do things like 'work hard', 'benefit others', or 'be self-sacrificing', or to cause other people to work together.
'Nature' can't 'benefit others' or 'be self sacrificing' since there are no 'others' to benefit or sacrifice for, since there is only one nature.
Nature can't cause 'others' to work together since there are no 'others'.
People might choose to call a volcanic mountain 'bountiful' or 'generous' because it has fertile soils and its topography helps generate rains, but it would be pseudo-religious bollocks to start assigning personality or divinity to the mountain when it is clear that there is no choice involved - the mountain is a pile of rock whose properties unavoidably include fertility and rainfall.
Now, within limits it's fine to indulge in pseudo-religious bollocks and superstition for one's own personal use, but the sane person knows deep down that they are indulging.
It would seem to be a significant personal failing to claim that because of one's own wishful thinking, a scientist who took a logical look at what the mountain actually was was being some kind of unbelieving heretic going out of their way to burst one's childish bubble.
Similarly, if one had a pet theory regarding evolution, it would be deeply childish to claim that because that doesn't seem to be a consensus view that that means all of science is in some evil conspiracy - that would seem likely to be paranoid bollocks even if one's pet theory was actually correct, let alone if it wasn't.
Where someone has had a theory which went against the general consensus and was later proved to be right, they don't generally seem to have thrown hissy fits and cried 'conspiracy', rather they manned the fuck up, recognised reality and put things down to a combination of inertia and a lack of killer evidence.
But maybe the causality is the other way - the people who throw hissy fits and start blaming everyone else are likely to be the kind of people who come up with bollocks in the first place.
The basic issue seems to be people lacking the intellectual capacity or willingness to understand that if one changes perspective, such as from an organism to a species, or a species to all of nature, it's bogus to assume that the concepts useful in one perspective are necessarily directly applicable to another.
That basic mental failing seems to underlie all manner of religious and pseudo-religious woo regarding nature - someone trying to imagine themselves or some imaginary entity as 'nature', moronically overanthropomorphising, and then using the results of that moronic overanthropomorphising as 'evidence' that 'nature' is like some single living being, and then moronically concluding that there is something wrong with anyone not stupid enough to agree, or that disagreement is evidence of a conspiracy.