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The Philosopher and the Fossils
 The
lead story on the front page of the New
York Times on April 6, for once, wasn’t political. It was about
fossils.
“All the news that’s
fit to print,” eh? But why fossils on the front page, overshadowing
immigration, war, and even Katie Couric? Doesn’t that belong in the
Science section on Tuesday? Or is  there, as we say, some agenda at work here?
The headline tips us off:
“Fossil Called Missing Link from Sea to Land Animals.” Sure
enough, the fifth paragraph explains that some scientists — this is
Science speaking, at which every knee should bow — say these fossils,
found in Arctic Canada, 600 miles from the North Pole, constitute “a
powerful rebuttal to religious creationists.”
How so? The critters’ four
fins appear to be “limbs in the making,” enabling them to come
out of the water and lumber around on land. Here at last is a missing link
between fish and other beasts, such as “amphibians, reptiles and
dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans.”
Take that, you creationists!
You’ve been saying that the fossil record lacks crucial transitional life
forms, and here is the proof that Darwin was right!
Just the other day, the
Times’s Science section reported a new theory that
the Sea of Galilee used to freeze up, so when Jesus walked on water (Mark
6:51), maybe he was actually walking on ice. No miracle at all, you see. Once
again, Science has spoken.
For all that, I still think Science is
sometimes (pardon the pun) a bit fishy, especially on the subject of
evolution. And I don’t ask anyone to take my word for it. Just read
Darwinian Fairytales, by David Stove, just republished by
Encounter Books in New York.
![[Breaker quote for The Philosopher and the Fossils: 'Science' meets straight thinking.]](2006breakers/060406.gif) Stove,
who died in 1994, was a noted
Australian philosopher. He was neither a scientist nor a creationist, but an
atheist. He didn’t entirely reject the theory of evolution, and in fact
had great respect for Darwin himself. But as a rigorous practitioner of
linguistic analysis, he thought Darwin and his successors, from T.H. Huxley to
Richard Dawkins, had relied less on scientific method than on the abuse of
language.
The result was what Stove called
“Darwinism’s Dilemma.” The facts simply didn’t
— and couldn’t — square with the claims of the theory,
particularly in its account of human life. And the Darwinians, while claiming to
explain evolution and “the descent of man” as an enormous
accident of a blind struggle for survival, have had to keep smuggling
teleology — purpose — into their arguments.
They reject the idea of God as an
intelligent designer, but they persist in using such expressions and
metaphors as intelligent genes, selfish genes, tools,
tactics, devices, calculated, organized,
goal, and design. By implication, these words transfer the notion of
purpose from a benign, superhuman God to subhuman entities like genes and
“memes.” Dawkins, who posited (he’d say
“discovered”) memes, flatly calls “altruism”
“something that does not exist in nature.” After all, altruism
would be a fatal handicap in the ruthless struggle for survival.
Well, if altruism doesn’t
exist in nature, why does it exist at all? How can it? Aren’t we still in
nature? How can we escape it? When did we cease being pitiless competitors
and start being cooperators, building hospitals and charities and all the
institutions that preserve the people whom Darwinism’s nature, red in
tooth and claw, would deem “unfit” for survival? How can we be
so utterly unlike the fierce creatures from whom we are allegedly
descended?
And if the drives for
self-preservation and reproduction of our species are built into our genes,
why do we do so many things that frustrate these drives? Not only altruism,
but heroism, celibacy, abortion, contraception, alcoholism, and a thousand
other things are, from a Darwinian point of view, self-destructive and in need
of explanation.
The Darwinians are aware of these
problems, and Stove shows, with hilarious irony and savage sarcasm, how
they have tied themselves in knots of circular thinking trying to explain away
the most intractable difficulties their theory entails. Stove calls that theory
“a ridiculous slander on human beings.”
As Samuel Johnson says,
“When speculation has done its worst, two and two still make
four”; and “Sir, we know the will is free, and
there’s an end on’t.” That’s the kind of unawed
common sense with which David Stove retorts to nonsense posing as
“Science.”
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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