Evolution: Is This Progress?

Well, not if you are a secular evolutionist, aka an atheist, aka the mythological media creature known as a "scientist." A scientist in this sense somehow transcends the human, and lives in grand conceptual constructions where the merely human has no place. Unfortunately, the whole notion of "progress" is precisely human in content and import, and has no place in any theory of a true scientist – unless of course "progress" is defined as having one's theory published and peer-reviewed and extolled and admired by other scientists. Then the secular evolutionist's theory becomes more than true; it becomes Truth, a large edifice anchored in the granite rock of unexpressed metaphysics.

Except for the approbation of their peers, the secular evolutionists are particularly obsessed with keeping science free of anything remotely human. By and large they do so by erecting around their little garden massive walls of "randomness" and stout gates of "probability." Evolution's processes ultimately must be random, or measurable only in a probabilistic way. Anything less, and evolution might become teleological, and heaven forbid, might even point us towards some sort of theocratic presence. But what are "randomness" and "probability?" Well, whatever they are, I do not think they can be defined without reference to the important Enlightenment (and scientific) concept of determinate causality. They are, in essence, conceptual placeholders for things that happen for which we find no necessary causative precursor. Random events are effects that do not have causes, and probable events are effects whose precise causes are
unknown or indeterminate.

But on this view, randomness and probability are themselves outside of determinate causality, or at least NOT OF determinate causality. How then do such concepts differ from objective teleological concepts, artistic categories such as mystery and beauty, and in deed, theological concepts like divine intervention? But even if they differ from them (and I most assuredly think they do), why on earth do secular scientists think they necessarily exclude teleology, aesthetics, and theology?

Because that's how secular scientists define them in the first place. Or to put it another way, that's how secular scientists want them to function. Careful, Doctor, your metaphysical presence is showing.

Posted by: Whitman via email.