An anti-evolutionist sent me this long-winded tirade and i thought it amusing enough to share with the denizens of this forum. If the moderators deem it unworthy and send it off to Rants, raves.. be my guest. However, if this generates a worthwhile thread and discussion...
Personally, i thought it wasn't worth the bandwith it occupies. Enjoy!
Quote:
|
Dennet "Do you believe, literally, in an anthropomorphic God? If not, then you must agree with me that the song is a beautiful, comforting falsehood.”
|
Not necessarily a falsehood but the most fundamental desire of man- to be a god invariably projects a scepter complete with a copy of his own morality, of his own sentimentality, and of his judgments.
Quote:
|
Dennet Is that simple song nevertheless a valuable meme? I certainly think it is. It is a modest but beautiful part of our heritage, a treasure to be preserved.
|
The problem is dictating what is beautiful and what is ugly is always subjective and arbitrary, and consequently relies upon the observer’s perspective. This rules out any possible objective standard of determining what is a ‘valuable meme.’
Quote:
|
Dennet But we must face the fact that, just as there were times when tigers would not have been viable, times are coming when they will no longer be viable, except in zoos and other preserves, and the same is true of many of the treasures in our cultural heritage. ... We cannot preserve all the features of the cultural world in which these treasures flourished. We wouldn't want to. ...
|
Historically speaking we haven’t, and instead we have imposed our own ideological biases upon others. What makes Dennet think that he doesn’t carry one that is an implicit version of his own will to power? Dennet also fails to demonstrate what should be preserved and what shouldn’t be.
Quote:
Dennet Ignorance is a necessary condition for many excellent things. The childish joy of seeing what Santa Claus has brought for Christmas is a species of joy that must soon be
extinguished in each child by the loss of ignorance. When that child grows up, she can transmit that joy to her own children, but she must also recognize a time when it has outlived its value. ...
|
How is ignorance to be properly “lost?” is the trade-off in losing an illusion necessarily always better? How is gaining a truth any different from losing an illusion?
Quote:
|
Dennet But how many of us are caught in that very dilemma, loving the heritage, firmly convinced of its value, yet unable to sustain any conviction at all in its truth? We are faced with a difficult choice. Because we value it, we are eager to preserve it in a rather precarious and "denatured" state-in churches and cathedrals and synagogues, built to house huge congregations of the devout, and now on the way to being cultural museums. ...
|
Dennet presumes “truth” is any different from valuation.
Quote:
Dennet But hasn't there been a tremendous rebirth of fundamentalist faith in all these creeds? Yes, unfortunately, there has
been, and I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all the species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections.
|
Does Dennet also presume that he isn’t presenting a fundamentalist view here himself?
Quote:
|
Dennet Is there a conflict between science and religion here? There most certainly is. Darwin's dangerous idea helps to create a condition in the memosphere that in the long run threatens to be just as toxic to these memes as civilization in general has been toxic to the large wild mammals. Save the Elephants! Yes, of course, but not *by all means*. Not by forcing the people of Africa to live nineteenth- century lives, for instance. ....
|
Do I detect “black guilt” which is strictly a property of the Left here? *snorts*
Quote:
|
Dennet We must find an accommodation. I love the King James Version of the Bible. My own spirit recoils from a God Who is He or She in the same way my heart sinks when I see a lion pacing neurotically back and forth in a small zoo cage. I know, I know, the lion is beautiful but dangerous; if you let the lion roam free, it would kill me; safety demands that it be put in a cage. Safety demands that religions be put in cages, too-when absolutely necessary.
|
Epistemological anarchists propose that any dogmatic ideology must be reduced to the level of its enemies in order to promote progress. A tyrannical ideology that snuffs the competition simply repeats history (Roman Catholic Church and modern day Science).
Quote:
|
Dennet We just can't have forced female circumcision, and the second-class status of women in Roman Catholicism and Mormonism, to say nothing of their status in Islam. ... ... We are wise to respect these traditions. It is, after all, just part of respect for the biosphere. Save the Baptists! Yes, of course, but not *by all means*.
|
how can Dennet require *respect* for a tradition while imposing his moral framework upon them? Another case of wanting one’s cake and eating it too. Hypocrite.
Quote:
|
Dennet Not if it means tolerating the deliberate misinforming of children about the natural world. According to a recent poll, 48 percent of the people in the United States today believe that the book of Genesis is literally true. And 70 percent believe that "creation science" should be taught in school alongside evolution. Some recent writers recommend a policy in which parents would be able to "opt out" of materials they didn't want their children taught.
|
Proof positive of democracy tending to the mediocre. What else is new? It is intriguing to note that Dennet doesn’t even bother inquire in such “lamentable” state of affairs.
Quote:
|
Dennet Should evolution be taught in the schools? Should arithmetic be taught? Should history? Misinforming a child is a terrible offense. A faith, like a species, must evolve or go extinct when the environment changes. It is not a gentle process in either case.
|
I agree with the claim that faith must evolve (change or adapt) according to the environment, but not with the implication that it is counter-intuitive. Sometimes the faith inspires the individual to overcome near-impossible odds. Faith isn’t necessarily the opposite of rational thinking- sometimes it is a byproduct of it (Kantian definition of reason) or a necessary lubricant of existence (Humean analysis of the Uniform theory of nature).
Quote:
|
Dennet We see in every Christian subspecies the battle of memes-should women be ordained? Should we go back to the Latin liturgy?-and the same can also be observed in the varieties of Judaism and Islam. We must have a similar mixture of respect and self-protective caution about memes.
|
Protective of what? Of his own meme? Or does Dennet presume he is meme-free? This is merely another indication of the desire of power is whoever succeeds in imposing their ideology upon another.
Quote:
|
Dennet This is already accepted practice, but we tend to avert our attention from its implications. We preach freedom of religion, but only so far. If your religion advocates slavery, or mutilation of women, or infanticide, or puts a price on Salman Rushdie's head because he has insulted it, then your religion has a feature that cannot be respected. It endangers us all.
|
Dennet exaggerates. Man has progressed to this state NOT in spite of “mutilation of women” or “advocacy of slavery” or “infanticide” but because of them. Cauterizing past episodes in history with a liberal-view only justifies a self-aggrandizing sermon and overlooks the possibility that they were necessary in arriving with that certain viewpoint.
Quote:
|
Dennet It is nice to have grizzly bears and wolves living in the wild. They are no longer a menace; we can peacefully coexist, with a little wisdom. The same policy can be discerned in our political tolerance, in religious freedom. You are free to preserve or create any religious creed you wish, so long as it does not become a public menace.
|
What determines a “public menace” is whatever threatens his ideological bias.
Quote:
|
Dennet We're all on the Earth together, and we have to learn some accommodation. The Hutterite memes are "clever" not to include any memes about the virtue of destroying outsiders. If they did, we would have to combat them. We tolerate the Hutterites because they harm only themselves though we may well insist that we have the right to impose some further openness on their schooling of their own children. Other religious memes are not so benign. The message is clear: those who will not accommodate, who will not temper, who insist on keeping only the purest and wildest strain of their heritage alive, we will be obliged, reluctantly, to cage or disarm, and we will do our best to disable the memes they fight for. ... ...
|
Ah, here’s the real kicker in his rant on self-justification!
Quote:
|
Dennet Until we can provide an environment for all people in which fanaticism doesn't make sense, we can expect more and more of it. But we don't have to accept it, and we don't have to respect it.
|
I am immediately reminded of Popper’s infamous quote: Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.
Quote:
|
Dennet Taking a few tips from Darwinian medicine (Williams and Nesse 1991), we can take steps to conserve what is valuable in every culture without keeping alive (or virulent) all its weaknesses. ... ...
|
What is “valuable” in any culture and what is “virulent” is a matter of interpretation and is determined by one’s ideological bias. Since there is no rational or objective standard of interpretation, Darwinian medicine doesn’t translate equally as well in cultural revisionism.
Quote:
|
Dennet There is much more to learn. There is certainly a treasury of ill- appreciated truths embedded in the endangered cultures of the modern world, designs that have accumulated details over eons of idiosyncratic history, and we should take steps to record it, and study it, before it disappears, for, like dinosaur genomes, once it is gone, it will be virtually impossible to recover. We should not expect this variety of respect to be satisfactory to those who wholeheartedly embody the memes we honor with our attentive-but not worshipful-scholarship. On the contrary, many of them will view anything other than enthusiastic conversion to their own views as a threat, even an intolerable threat. We must not underestimate the suffering such confrontations cause.
|
Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to Dennet that suffering
just might be necessary for progress and he rules it out a priori, based on his sentimentality. Not everything that comes pain-free promises a better methodology of ascertaining truth or cash-value from reality.
Quote:
Dennet To watch, to have to participate in, the contraction or evaporation of beloved features of one's heritage is a pain only our species can experience, and surely few pains could be
more terrible. But we have no reasonable alternative, and those whose visions dictate that they cannot peacefully coexist with the rest of us we will have to quarantine as best we can, minimizing the pain and damage, trying always to leave open a path or two that may come to seem
acceptable.
|
It’s far more than likely a tranquil and benevolent society will not generate geniuses as often as a high pressurized and cutthroat one has.
Quote:
|
Dennet If you want to teach your children that they are the tools of God, you had better not teach them that they are God's rifles, or we will have to stand firmly opposed to you: your doctrine has no glory, no special rights, no intrinsic and inalienable merit.
|
i.e. whatever doctrine’s glory or special rights or intrinsic or inalienable merit has been equated with whatever Dennet’s liberal tendencies has authorized. In other words, Dennet has only inoculated his own ideology with the same demands every other ideologue has.
Quote:
|
Dennet If you insist on teaching your children falsehoods-that the Earth is flat, that "Man" is not a product of evolution by natural selection-then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teaching as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at our earliest opportunity.
|
First thing I agree with Dennet so far. I am all for ideological competition, not for erecting a tyrannical one.
Quote:
|
Dennet Our future well-being-the well-being of all of us on the planet-depends on the education of our descendants.
|
Incorrect. We’ve stumbled about in ignorance and fanaticism for the better part of human history. Another byproduct of enlightenment bites the dust.
Quote:
|
Dennet What, then, of all the glories of our religious traditions? They should certainly be preserved, as should the languages, the art, the costumes, the rituals, the monuments. Zoos are now more and more being seen as second-class havens for endangered species, but at least they are havens, and what they preserve is irreplaceable. The same is true of complex memes and their phenotypic expressions. ... Shall we deconsecrate these churches and turn them into museums, or retrofit them for some other use?
|
Perhaps I should recommend Dennet Arthur Danto’s
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691002991/qid=1017711536/sr=1-6/ref=sr_1_6/104-6142323-4062323" target="_blank">After the End of Art</a> as a possible alternate.
Quote:
|
Dennet The latter fate is at least to be preferred to their destruction. ... And there's the rub. What will happen, one may well wonder, if religion is preserved in cultural zoos, in libraries, in concerts and demonstrations? It is happening; the tourists flock to watch the Native American tribal dances, and for the onlookers it is folklore, a religious ceremony, certainly, to be treated with respect, but also an example of a meme complex on the verge of extinction, at least in its strong, ambulatory phase; it has become an invalid, barely kept alive by its custodians.
|
Did he just echo Arthur Danto and anticipate moi?
Quote:
|
Dennet Does Darwin's dangerous idea give us anything in exchange for the ideas it calls into question? ... Spinoza called his highest being God or Nature (Deus sive Natura), expressing a sort of pantheism. There have been many varieties of pantheism, but they usually lack a convincing *explanation* about just how God is distributed in the whole of nature. .....
|
Spinoza was an atheist and his equation of God as Nature was more of a byproduct of his time than any intellectual short-sightedness.
Quote:
|
Dennet . . . You could even say, in a way that the Tree of Life created itself. Not in a miraculous, instantaneous whoosh, but slowly, slowly, over billions of years. Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm's "Being greater than which nothing can be conceived," it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. “I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred."
|
Looks like the fundamental desire to “be” God has been invoked in a translation of Dennet’s convictions into metaphysical euphemisms. Anyone? Anyone?
~Theothanatologist~
(from Dennett D.C., "Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life," Penguin: London, 1995, pp.514-517, 519-520. )
(((edited at Kevin Dorner's behest)))
[ April 01, 2002: Message edited by: Ender ]</p>
04-01-2002, 03:05 PM
Excerpt from Darwin's Dangerous Idea
