Jerry Fodor, a philosopher, and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a cognitive scientist, have written a book titled What Darwin Got Wrong. The authors are atheists and evolutionists, but their book is an assault on the mechanism of natural selection which they, like many other evolutionists, think to be an inadequate mechanism with which to account for the enormous amount of evolution it's called upon to explain.
Their heresy has drawn the attention of a Darwinian philosopher, Michael Ruse, who writes a rebuke in the Boston Globe taking the two deviants to task for having wandered off the Darwinian reservation. Ruse states that:
Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini fault Darwinians for using the language of design and purpose which is necessitated by their adherence to the doctrine of natural selection and that such teleological terms have no place in science. Thus natural selection, for this reason among others, must be cast aside as a major mechanism of evolutionary change.
This irritates Ruse who concludes his indictment with these interesting words:
Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini will not allow this [i.e. goal-directed natural selection], because apparently we are now ascribing conscious intentionality to the nonconscious world. We are saying the eyes were designed for seeing in a way that the tufts [of hair] were not. And they stress that the whole point of a naturalistic explanation, to which the Darwinian is supposedly committed, is that the world was not designed.
In response, one can only say that this is a misunderstanding of the nature of science. The Darwinian does not want to say that the world is designed. That is what the Intelligent Design crew argues. The Darwinian is using a metaphor [of design] to understand the material non-thinking world. We treat that world as if it were an object of design, because doing so is tremendously valuable heuristically. And the use of metaphor is a commonplace in science.
In other words, as Francis Crick once wrote, biologists must constantly remind themselves that, despite all appearances to the contrary, the miniscule biomachines they're looking at under their microscopes are not really designed but are rather the products of sheer serendipity. Nevertheless, biologists have to talk as if these structures and processes were designed because it's the language of design and purpose that best captures the complexity, beauty, and purposefulness of what they see.
Why then do we have these arguments? The clue is given at the end, when the authors start to quote - as examples of dreadful Darwinism - claims that human nature might have been fashioned by natural selection. At the beginning of their book, they proudly claim to be atheists. Perhaps so. But my suspicion is that, like those scorned Christians, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini just cannot stomach the idea that humans might just be organisms, no better than the rest of the living world. We have to be special, superior to other denizens of Planet Earth. Christians are open in their beliefs that humans are special and explaining them lies beyond the scope of science. I just wish that our authors were a little more open that this is their view too.
Here Ruse reveals the great secret of modern naturalism and scientism. If there's nothing special about man, as Ruse avers, then there's no reason to confer upon him dignity, worth, or rights. He's just a brute like any other, suitable to be manipulated by those who are enlightened, much like a dairy farmer manipulates his herd, and if that means that there must be a culling of the herd, a slaughter, well, then, so be it. There's nothing special or superior about humans that they should be treated any differently than cows.
The naturalist often talks about the quest to liberate man from superstition, to raise him to the level of a deity, but the logic of naturalism leads invariably and repeatedly to man's dehumanization. What a comfort it must be to be an atheist.
RLC
