The other day I had an exchange with a progressive about Amy Coney Barrett. The exchange was touched off by Ms. Progressive’s comment about Barrett’s faith: “I don’t think her religion is a problem as much as her religious convictions driving her decision making is.”
I encounter this sort of muddled thinking from progressives all of the time. And it is always based on the same progressive myth – the myth that some people (namely, progressives) arrive at their conclusions (whether the conclusion concerns a matter of policy, law, politics or whatever else) from some morally neutral and objectively rational “view from nowhere” while other people’s conclusions are based on their biases (or bigotries if the progressive is not feeling charitable). This stupidity is a close cousin to the perennial canard “you can’t legislative morality,” which is also based on the myth that progressive legislation is morally neutral while conservative legislation is freighted with a moral perspective.
I don’t know if progressives actually believe this myth. Many of them (my interlocutor for instance) certainly act like they do. But whether they actually believe it or not, the myth is certainly useful politically. After all, who are you going to believe – the objectively rational progressive whose views are based on pure unadulterated reason or the biased (or bigoted) conservative? Once the question is framed in these terms, the outcome becomes almost a foregone conclusion. Why, we choose pure unadulterated reason of course.
This lunacy has thoroughly infected our body politic, and the infection has a name: Rawlsian public reason theory. Whether you have heard of John Rawls or not, he has had a profound affect on your life. Rawls posited a theory of justice based on what he called an “original position.” The original position is based on the imagined outcome of policy conclusions made by “human beings” with no knowledge of the actual facts of human existence – this is the objective view from nowhere.
Of course, only a highly credentialed academic (Rawls was a professor at Harvard) could believe something so stupid. Any child should understand that no such “human being” actually exists, and when Rawls came back from the mountain to announce what the “human beings” had decided was fair and just, what he was really announcing is what Rawls had decided was fair and just.
John Rawls, like everyone else, based his political positions on his moral presuppositions. The difference is that Rawls pretended that his views were based on objective reason, and that no rational person could possibly disagree with him. That staggering hubris has had a profound influence on progressives ever since. Following Rawls, they all come back from their individual mountains and announce their objectively true policy conclusions to their poor benighted inferiors.
Consider Ms. Progressive’s take on Amy Coney Barrett as just one example. Of course, Ms. Progressive’s main objection to Barrett has everything to do with abortion. Unsurprisingly, Ms. Progressive is in favor of the practically unlimited “constitutional right” to kill unborn children in their mother’s wombs that stems from Roe v. Wade. And she sees Barrett’s nomination as a threat to that “right.” And like progressives always do, she seeks to set the terms of the debate from the very beginning not as a choice between good policy* and bad policy, but as a choice between the dictates of pure reason advocated by Ms. Progressive and the religious bigotry being pushed by Judge Barrett.
But of course it should be plain that that fact that Barrett is a person of faith should have no more bearing on the matter than the fact that Ms. Progressive is a militant secularist. Both have a moral point of view that is informed by their background and worldview. There is no reason to favor one moral point of view over the other.
Ms. Barrett believes that killing an unborn baby is evil. Ms. Progressive believes that it is good to give a mother a choice to kill her unborn baby. Yes, Ms. Barrett’s position on abortion is based on her moral beliefs that are in turn formed by her worldview, which is in turn influenced by her religious beliefs. But the same can be said of Ms. Progressive. Ms. Progressive’s position on abortion is based on her moral beliefs that are in turn formed by her worldview, which is in turn influenced by her beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality (i.e., her religious beliefs).
The only difference is that Ms. Barrett would undoubtedly concede that her moral views are based on her beliefs about fundamental things, while Ms. Progressive pretends she has no moral presuppositions. And this is what makes people like Ms. Progressive far more dangerous than people like Ms. Barrett will ever be. The most dangerous fanatic is the one who is serenely confident in the absolute purity of her own views, because that confidence allows Jacobins (both ancient and modern) to justify violence to further their political project. After all, if by definition only bigoted and evil people can possibly disagree with you, you are not only permitted to visit violence on them, but you are also practically morally compelled to do so.
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*I am setting to one side the issue of whether Supreme Court justices should even be making policy choices about abortion. They should not, but that is an argument for another day.
People who promote abortion are the very same people who are “appalled” by (Old Testament) God’s action against people of different tribes* 🙂
*who worshipped Moloch by sacrificing children.
As between the mob of looters and the iconic local coffee shop, human civilization has never held that there is a morally neutral perspective. That is why we are civilization. Sign up or get out.
No reason to favor? Actually there is a Darwinian reason to favor traditional morality. Traditional morality is the recorded logbook of SUCCESSFUL experimentation and mutation. The civilizations that survived gave us their scriptures. Some of the details are unnecessary, but the broad outlines of all ancient wisdom agree.
Morality for the atheist is not just the absence of morality, i.e. amorality, i.e. “no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference”, as Dawkins put it, and as one would surmise from a quick glance at what atheism entails in regards to morality,,,,
No!,,,, Morality for the atheist is not just the absence of morality, i.e. amorality, ‘pitiless indifference’, but turns out to be, (when you throw the precepts of Darwinian evolution on top of the atheist’s naturalistic worldview of ‘pitiless indifference’), a worldview that turns out to be downright ‘ANTI-Morality’.
Alturistic behavior of any sort is simply completely antithetical to the entire framework of Darwinian evolution.
As Charles Darwin himself stated, “let the strongest live and the weakest die.”
As should be obvious to everyone who is not a psychopath, not only is “let the strongest live and the weakest die” amoral, but it is completely ANTI-moral.
Adolf Hilter himself echoed Charles Darwin’s words when he stated, “Nature,,, wipes out what is weak in order to give place to the strong.”
As should be needless to say, wiping out the weak to give place to the strong is directly opposed to the Christian ethos of looking after the weak.
As Sir Arthur Keith noted shortly after WWII, “the law of Christ is incompatible with the law of evolution as far as the law of evolution has worked hitherto. Nay, the two laws are at war with each other; the law of Christ can never prevail until the law of evolution is destroyed.”
Hitler was hardly the only genocidal maniac who based his worldview on Darwinian evolution. In fact all the Atheistic Tyrants of communist regimes of the 20th century based their murderous ideology on Darwin’s theory
Some Darwinists try to distance Charles Darwin from Hitler, (and other tyrants), and try to claim that Hitler misused Darwin’s theory, and thus try to deny the ANTI-mortality that is clearly and deeply embedded within the foundation of their theory, but Darwin himself bemoaned the fact that “the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind.”
Charles Darwin also, (in regards to the genocide propagated against Aborigines in the name of his theory), stated that, ““I do not know of a more striking instance of the comparative rate of increase of a civilized over a savage race.”,,,
That is simply unconscionable. So don’t ever let a Darwinist try to tell you that Charles Darwin himself was a good, and moral, man. Charles Darwin was, in fact, a moral monster! PERIOD!
Moreover, not only is Darwinian evolution at ‘war’ with Christian morality, but Darwinian evolution is also at ‘war’ with science itself.
Namely, (in a point that is made crystal clear by the current Corona virus scourge), if evolution by natural selection were actually the truth about how all life came to be on Earth then the only life that should be around should be extremely small organisms with the highest replication rate, and with the most ‘mutational firepower’, since only they, (since they greatly outclass multi-cellular organism in terms of ‘reproductive success’ and ‘mutational firepower’), would be fittest to survive in the dog eat dog world where blind pitiless evolution ruled and only the fittest are allowed to survive. The logic of this is nicely summed up here in this following Richard Dawkins’ video:
In other words, since successful reproduction is all that really matters on a neo-Darwinian view of things, how can anything but successful, and highly efficient reproduction, be realistically ‘selected’ for? Darwin himself stated, “every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers;”
The logic of natural selection is nicely and simply illustrated on the following graph:
As you can see in the preceding graph, any other function besides successful reproduction, such as much slower sexual reproduction, sight, hearing, abstract thinking, and especially altruistic behavior (i.e. the ‘strong’ taking care of the ‘weak’), would be highly superfluous to the primary criteria of successful reproduction, and should, on a Darwinian view, be discarded, and/or ‘eaten’, by bacteria, and/or viruses, as so much excess baggage since it obviously would slow down successful reproduction.
Yet, contrary to this central ‘anti-moral ‘survival of the fittest’ assumption of Darwinian evolution, instead of eating us, time after time we find micro-organisms helping each other, and us, in ways that have nothing to with their own ‘survival of the fittest’’ concerns.
The following researchers, since it directly contradicted Darwinian assumptions, said that they were ‘banging our heads against the wall’ by the mutual cooperation that they had found among bacteria.
And as the following study found, “‘survival of the friendliest’ outweighs ‘survival of the fittest’ for groups of bacteria. Bacteria make space for one another and sacrifice properties if it benefits the bacterial community as a whole.”
Again, this is directly contrary to Charles Darwin’s central assumption of “let the strongest live and the weakest die.”
Moreover, and again directly contrary to Darwinian assumptions, we find that bacteria are also directly helping us in essential ways that have nothing to do with their own ‘survival of the fittest’ concerns.
In fact, directly contrary to Darwinian presuppositions, bacteria are now also known to transform the entire ecosystem of the earth for the apparent benefit of multicellular organism.
As Paul G. Falkowski states, “Microbial life can easily live without us; we, however, cannot survive without the global catalysis and environmental transformations it provides.”
Likewise, viruses are also found to be essential to the ecosystem. As the following article states, “Viruses aren’t our enemies,” Dr. Suttle said. “Certain nasty viruses can make you sick, but it’s important to recognize that viruses and other microbes out there are absolutely integral for the ecosystem.”
Moreover, Darwin himself offered this following ‘anti-altruism’ standard as a falsification criteria for his theory, “Natural selection cannot possibly produce any modification in any one species exclusively for the good of another species”… and even stated that “If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection.”
And yet, directly contrary to Darwin’s claim that “Natural selection cannot possibly produce any modification in any one species exclusively for the good of another species” or it would annihilate his theory, it is now known that ” “in thousands of plant species often entirely new organs have been formed for the exclusive good of more than 132,930 other species, these ‘ugly facts’ have annihilated Darwin’s theory as well as the modern versions of it.”
Moreover, to dive a little bit deeper into the molecular level, the falsification of the ‘survival of the fittest’, i.e. ‘selfish’ thinking occurs at the molecular level too.
Richard Dawkins’ ‘selfish gene’ concept is more of less directly based on Darwin’s own ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking about competition. Yet genes are now found to be anything but selfish. Instead of being ‘selfish’, genes are now found to be exist in a holistic web of mutual interdependence and cooperation (which is the very antithesis of selfishness).
Such ‘holistic cooperation’ is, needless to say, the exact polar opposite of being ‘selfish’ as Dawkins had envisioned. (And should, if Darwinism were a normal science instead of being basically a religion for atheists, count as another direct falsification of the theory).
In fact on top of genes existing in a holistic web of mutual cooperation, the genetic responses of humans are also designed in a very sophisticated way so as to differentiate between hedonistic (selfish) and ‘noble’ (altruistic) moral happiness:
That the genetic responses of humans are designed in a very sophisticated way so as to differentiate between hedonistic (selfish) and ‘noble’ (altruistic) moral happiness is very interesting since Darwinian evolution cannot even explain the origin of a single gene and/or protein, much less can it explain how it is possible for highly integrated gene networks to produce such morally nuanced responses between hedonism and altruism.
Moreover on top of all that, (as if that was not completely devastating to Darwian evolution already), if anything ever went against Charles Darwin’s claim that “Natural selection cannot possibly produce any modification in any one species exclusively for the good of another species”, it is the notion that a single cell can somehow became tens of trillions of cells that cooperate “exclusively for the good of other cells” in a single organism for the singular purpose of keeping that single organism alive.
To claim that one cell transforming into the tens of trillions cells, (of extremely cooperative, even extremely altruistic, cells that make up our ONE human body), is anything less than a miracle is either sheer arrogance and/or profound and willful ignorance. (Or a mixture of both)
As Jay Homnick put it, “Once you allow the intellect to consider that an elaborate organism with trillions of microscopic interactive components can be an accident… you have essentially “lost your mind.”
Thus in conclusion, the ‘ANTI-morality’ inherent in Darwin’s theory is falsified on many different levels of biology as far as the science itself is concerned. Indeed life itself would not be possible without extensive altruistic behavior at the molecular level.
And thus the Christian can rest assured that we do indeed live in, as Dr. Martin Luther King put it, “a moral universe, and that there are moral laws of the universe just as abiding as the physical laws.”
Verse:
Today’s progressive isn’t a cool, detached observer of so-called neutral morality; instead, they have a fervent devotion to a religion that is obsessed with secular morality. These progressives, who ironically claim to “believe” in science, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean, practice a truly bizarre faith that has no connection with reality.