(copied this from Faith's Corner)
Debate/discussion between evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and Bret Weinstein I found on You Tube. A political question came up among other things. Dawkins called the election of 2016 a "disaster" and the audience applauded. Weinstein had applied his evolutionary biological interpretation to the event as an expression of tribalism and implied dire consequences. Huh? Making America great again is just tribalism? Too often people on the left confuse this objective with nationalism in the Nazi sense, which is insane to begin with, and then the evo biologists explain THAT in terms of the "selfish gene" that wants to populate the world with itself. I feel all the cells in my brain cringeing in consternation. Can brain cells cringe? I think maybe they can shrivel up from sheer sorrow. But I digress. To make America great again is to restore the liberty and prosperity that underlies America's benevolence. America is benevolent, as benevolent as is possible in a fallen world and it's done pretty well. America is the opposite of a conquering empire, it is the antidote to Nazism and all other forms of fascism but there is nevertheless this concerted effort to paint her with the same brush. And if you're restricted to the biological explanations for everthing you'll pack it all down into a tiny little box and soon be able only to grunt inanities with a severely restricted vocabulary. Darwinism, Marxism both. Killers of meaningful thought.
It was Dawkins who said more than once that he doesn't think it helpful to try to explain everything in terms of biology, and Weinstein who kept finding ways to do it anyway. I'm certainly no fan of Dawkins but he's the one with the sane position in this case.
I don't understand how evolutionary explanations hold the attention of an intelligent person. It's such a cramped way of thinking, reductionistic, procrustean -- hard to find a word apt enough to convey its claustrophobic effect. Survival: what a mindnumbing straitjacket of a concept to make the explanation of all life. No wonder if its aficionados must flee to art and poetry to escape the crawlspace from time to time. Some of them have that much good sense. But then they have to explain the art and poetry from within the same airless little box.
Sometimes they ask questions that really should collapse it in on itself, but don't because of the tenacity of the theory and its basic unfalsifiability. Why do the females of some species require beautiful and dramatic displays from the males to qualify them as mates? Why does all life grow senescent and ultimately die?. All these questions must be answered in terms of biological survival advantage. That's the mental exercise demanded of each. Suffocating.
So they put their imagination to work to answer such questions. Funny how they think this is science. Well it is a part of science for sure but with evolutionary biology it never gets past this stage and yet whatever conclusions become popular get reified into "fact." Answering any question is just a matter of imagining it in terms of survival value. Same sort of thinking describes the Marxist "analysis" of everything as class conflict, but the class conflict is a total mental fabrication used as a battering ram to destroy everything good in civilization. Marxism never comes down to earth, never touches actual reality. Neither does evolutionary biology. The theory is an unprovable imaginative construct and every issue is answered with an imaginative construct. The actual realities of biology are better explained by creationism.
The tribalism shrinking mechanism got pursued through a few examples. Hutus and Tutsis. Must be something primordial built into the genes that caused that genocide. Nope, it was a Catholic priest who got on the radio and called one of the tribes cockroaches and stirred up hatred toward them in the other tribe. Before that they'd got along together just fine. Both tribes were Catholic too. And then Catholic celibacy was discussed in the same procrustean terminology. Gosh, it must somehow promote the survival of the "lineage," not that I have any idea what the lineage is. But that's what evo biology decrees is the explanation of everything in existence. But priestly celibacy is nothing but an incubator of all kinds of sexual sins and it's completely contrary to biblical teaching, in fact "forbidding to marry" is specifically denounced in the Bible as a fruit of the false teachers prophesied to infiltrate the Church and undermine the truth. But such real historical facts must give way to the shriveling idea that it *really* serves Survival somehow.
How liberating is the revelation of Creation, Fall and the Flood, death and disease as the consequence of violations of the Moral Law of God, biological systems retaining much beauty though crippled by the Fall. Too much to say about all that. Mostly the deathly death brought about by evolutionism is what this post had to be about.
