i get more mail – belief in evolution allows me to ignore my sins

I’ve had another e-mail – with the fastest invocation of Godwin’s Law that I can remember seeing in a while:

The intention here is to smear by association: we’re pretty much all in agreement that much that was done in the service of the 3rd Reich was evil, so if Nazis are associated with evolution, that must be evil too. Which is total nonsense. Hitler didn’t invoke Darwin. And if he had? It doesn’t make evolution wrong, any more than if Darwin had recanted on his deathbed (he didn’t).

My correspondent also seems to misunderstand the nature of ‘facts’ & ‘theories’ in science. In this case evolution is both a fact and a theory. We have ample evidence that evolution has occurred (& is occurred) – this lets us view it as a fact. The theory of evolution is the explanation for those facts. (PS At this point I should have added – & will now – that evolutionary theory is not a ‘religion’. It’s science & thus evidence-based. Religion is a matter of personal faith.)

Now that’s out of my system… My correspondent went on to make several ‘points’:

The ‘article’ mentioned here is a compendium of the usual misunderstandings & misconceptions about evolution, which I may go on to talk about in another post. For b) – the misconception here is that there are no transitional forms; we never see a crocoduck (or an owlcat), for example. I’ve addressed that one previously.

And on c) – remember here that the ‘relatively short time’ is in fact millions of years. Even the Cambrian ‘explosion’ occurred over perhaps 30 million years. (Part of the problem with this one, for many people, may be that such timespans are almost impossible to conceptualise.) The term ‘explosion’ is in fact something of a misnomer. DNA data, for example, suggest that many animal lineages go a lot further back, & there are what appear to be animal embryos that date back around 700 million years or so.

Creationism ‘gives an account for creation’ only to the extent that the Biblical creation tale is just that: an account written much later than the postulated events it describes. (We need to remember that there are actually 2 creation tales, Genesis 1 & Genesis 2; my correspondent mentions only Genesis 1 but why should this one be any more correct than the other?) The other issue here is that other faiths have different creation stories, so who decides which is ‘right’?

Evolution doesn’t give an account for creation – but then, Genesis (either version) conflates creation of the universe & the world with creation of species. Evolution deals with living things & to suggest that evolutionary biologists say otherwise is to create a ‘straw man’. The theory of evolution cannot explain the origins of the universe. It can, however, provide a mechanism to explain the evolution of living things from the point at which life first appeared. (‘Life’ being a fairly loose term: if we take it as something capable of self-replication then we could be considering an RNA world.)

We’re getting a long way from my usual blog topics now (& into Ken’s territory). .. But my correspondent is wrong to say that I ‘want’ there to be no God. That’s putting words into my mouth (another straw-man argument). From my perspective: personally I see no objective evidence that there is a God. What’s more, the question of any god’s existence one that science can address, since science doesn’t deal in the supernatural. (Nor does science deal in absolutes.)

Nor can I understand the need for some external, all-powerful arbiter of right & wrong. It’s perfectly possible to behave in an ethical fashion towards others without worrying about the ultimate consequences of what will happen if we behave badly, & in fact many people do just that, applying what you could call the ‘golden rule’: treat others as you would like them to treat you. It’s also quite likely that there is an evolutionary basis for human morality.

I’ll finish by pointing out that lack of belief in a deity doesn’t mean that I must feel that my life lacks meaning, or hope, nor does it mean that I can’t see the beauty of the world around me. As Richard Dawkins has said:

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite. (from Unweaving the Rainbow, 1998)