That is of course Charles Darwin, born 201 years ago today. There isn't much of a mite I can add to the commemorations and analyses, but I might as well make a personal statement.
Many people maintain that it is more important to convince people of the truth of our origins than to disabuse them of their religious delusions, so it is best to pretend that there is no conflict between science and religion, that they simply address different spheres of meaning or address different questions. I find that disingenuous if not downright dishonest.
Once you accept that humans are the product of a process that may have occurred over nearly 4 billion years, in which purely stochastic events were shaped by indifferent forces into increasing complexity which could have led to infinitely many different outcomes but just happened to produce us, you are forced to a philosophical position which is incompatible with every theistic system I know of. This conclusion is only reinforced by our discovery of the universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies.
Religions insist that we are uniquely important to a vast, sentient power whose scope and domain is that of the entire universe; and that power is the source of meaning, human purpose, and morality. Plainly, in the world of Darwin and Hubble, that cannot be so. The source of meaning, human purpose, and morality, is us -- humans -- as we happen to be.
That is a very humble position. It is the religious who are arrogant, by insisting that we have a special place in the universe. We don't. We are what we are, which is nothing to anything or anybody but each other. To me, that is plenty.
If anyone wishes to disagree, please bring it on.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
No disagreement here Cervantes. Well said.
:) i don't get it,.
"Religions insist that we are uniquely important to a vast, sentient power whose scope and domain is that of the entire universe; and that power is the source of meaning, human purpose, and morality."
I think you will get some argument from my father, who I describe as a turbo-catholic. He would argue that earth is not unique in the universe but that god does care very much about us: "Just because one has a lot of children does mean that you love each any less."
But I agree with the rest. God strikes me as an obvious human construct.
Post a Comment