A Deeper Dark Age
by Adam Robbert
“Texas Gov. Rick Perry is taking a hard line on the campaign trail when it comes to the environment. He has dismissed global warming and climate change.” NPR with audio HERE. On this particular issue, I count Richard Dawkins as an ally. He slams Perry for dismissing evolution HERE. I found Dawkins’ opening salvo to be particularly appropriate.
I might count Dawkins as a political ally, but not as a cosmological ally. And since I, like you, struggle to separate cosmos and polis, in the end I have to critique Dawkins as quickly as I do Perry. Jung said he was glad he was not a Jungian; I think Darwin would say something similar were he alive today. Dawkins represents a minority position in the ecology of ideas circulating in the rather large academic aquarium of the contemporary life sciences. His assertion that “natural selection” explains life, the universe, and everything seems no less fundamentalist to me than creationism. Darwin assumed much about the nature of reality in order to offer an account of the origin the variety of species. His assumptions were empirically justified, I’d agree, but not theoretically explained. His conception of life-itself is quite Romantic (yes, in the capital “R” sense; see Robert Richards’ work on the influence of Schelling and Goethe on Darwin). Darwin’s theory of the origin of species by natural selection assumes self-producing/autopoietic organisms capable of reproduction (E. Thompson makes this case convincingly in “Mind in Life”). Natural selection, in the neo-Darwinist genocentric context that Dawkins employs it, offers no explanation whatsoever even for how genes can produce individual living cells, much less animals or a potentially freely creative, self-reflective species like us. Creationists may not know how to rationally articulate their intuition that scientific materialism is inadequate, nor even how to rationally construct an alternative account of cosmogenesis; but nonetheless, their intuition is correct. Civilization cannot survive without a more adequate answer to the Biggest Question.
i should have said “I, like you, struggle to AVOID separating cosmos and polis.”
“The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms; it cares not for itself; asks not if it’s seen.”
[...] Knowledge-Ecology recently posted his lament about the scientific ignorance of GOP presidential candidate Gov. Perry, who denies both evolution and climate change. Adam also mentioned his support for Richard Dawkins’ rebuttal. [...]