Will Bouwman wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2023 11:32 am
Even if all the above cases were deliberate frauds,
"Deliberate"? No, I wouldn't be sure of that. But I do think that they reflect an obvious desperate attempt to "plug in" data to a thesis that was generated when there was no sufficient data to "plug in," and that subsequent suggestions have a remarkable tendency to be misguided. I think their enthusiasm overcame their judgment.
you have failed to acknowledge the final sentence.
It doesn't really help; that's why.
If Piltdown, Nebraska, Neanderthal, etc. turn out to be frauds or errors, then what's impressive about saying, "Yeah, well, we still have one of those we don't know for sure is a fraud,
yet?"
What we've still got are massive gaps in a narrative constructed without the evidence to warrant the narrative. And we've got a so-called "scientific" authority desperate to see a failing theory propped up. That ought at least to give us pause until sufficient evidence appears...though we have no reason to think it will.
...there is a wealth of evidence for the evolution of creatures that became increasingly human like.
Let's see that "wealth," then.
You are not theologically troubled by evolution in other organisms:
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Nov 28, 2023 6:19 pmLet all other organisms have been "evolved," and man not, and it seems there are no implications for theology that are of any importance.
Therefore, you should not be theologically challenged by the evolution of creatures that are not modern humans.
Well, the human case is quite different. If human beings are a mere product of time-plus-chance, or "random mutation," with no God involved, then mankind is not at all special, metaphysicalloy speaking. Then, they're just another accident of randomness. And like all the lower animals, human beings have zero duty to morality, zero duty to each other, zero assurance they live in a rational universe rather than a random one (goodbye, science), zero duty to the environment, and zero claim on any right to survive, since lower species go extinct all the time.
Nietzsche saw this. He reasoned it out. Then he embraced it. But then, he was one dark little man, and we know he came to a very bad end. Modern Atheists, though, clearly fear to tread the logical path he laid out, based on the hypothesis of the "death of God."
Nietzsche didn't understand evolution any better than you.
You're missing the point.
One does not have to understand the minutae of the theory -- which, in Nietzsche's day, was very clearly premised on early frauds and errors anyway, as the "scientific" now frankly recognize, and you also know -- in order to understand the logical implications for philosophy that flow inevitably out of such a worldview. Nietzsche understood that better than the scientists of the day did. They were still debating the philosophical, theological and ethical implications of Evolutionism for the next century; but Nietzsche saw to the answer from the start. It's just that most people lack the nerve to accept it.
'Survival of the fittest' doesn't mean 'most able to kick the tripe out of rivals'; gazelles don't defy leopards by beating them up, they run faster.
And when they do, the leopards take the hindmost, and gazelles die. Nietzsche, and subsequently, the Social Darwinists and the eugenicists, ask why we shouldn't apply that to humans. After all, if humans are the late products of time-plus-chance, risen from protozoa and monkey-beings, and taken to this point by the power of "survival-of-the-fittest," then what absurd imagining suggests to us that we can jump off the Evolutionary "train" at this station, and say, "Well, even though in our earlier stages we had no rights, moral duties or care for the weak, now that we're evolved to this stage, suddenly we do?"
So those who regard themselves as strong group with the strong. Those who are weak huddle with the weak. And the devouring maw of History consumes the tail end of the "herd," making it possible for the strong at the front to reproduce, control society, eliminate failures, and progress the whole race onto the next stage of evolution. Killing and leaving-to-die become, in some strained sense, meritorious actions, as they were for Hitler...he saw himself as the generative spirit of the Third Reich, and as the saviour of the trajectory of human evolution. And, of course, as a case of Nietzsche's
ubermensch.
It all makes such simple, clear, inescapable and diabolical sense...if Evolutionism were true.
In some cases timorousness is an evolutionary advantage. Forthright gazelles get eaten.
Yes, that's also true. Good point. The "survival of the fittest" story is too simple...simplistic, even. It assumes the right gazelle always wins...or wins often enough to "progress" the herd. But that sometimes doesn't happen...and species even go extinct because even the front runners lack the means to adapt to things like environmental destruction by humans.
But then, because humans are only animals, why would we feel any concern about that? Animals do what animals do. Humans do what animals do. And things die all the time...as this world is bound to to, given enough time. And when it does, will there be any entity left to care? There will, in fact, no longer be a "place" for such an entity at all -- just the homgeneous, eternal quietness of equally-distributed energy, with no possibility of alteration, for all time. Heat death.
