Andrew+Week+7

I will begin my response to Kenneth Miller's article "Finding Darwin's God" by saying that his is what I would define as a religious man's argument. It grasps for a reason to keep the belief in a God and for a supernatural purpose for man's existence. Religion generally ingrains the idea that humanity is special, that we have a higher reason and purpose for existence. This idea comes only from religion, by nature we are just another species in an evolutionary struggle for survival. Our path has lead us to sentience, intellect, and civilization but gives us no purpose beyond continuing our existence. The believer would say that this means there's no grounds for "humanity," meaning morals, ethics, self control, etc. But this probably is because they are indoctrinated to believe there must be a source for these things, a God, a heaven, a hell. However by natural selection and basic logic it's easily understandable why cooperation, self control, sharing, and similar would improve a species chance of survival. There's the old adage "there's strength in numbers" which sums it up pretty well. Those that genetically had the disposition and temperament to work together and the mental ability to learn and pass on a culture, using the term loosely, were better able to battle it out in the war zone of the natural world. Otherwise, if your own kind is your enemy then you have enemies on all sides. So there is a natural basis for morals and the heaven/hell system of reward and punishment in secular society is the judicial system and your peers. Coming down to the gold rule, in general, how you treat others determines how they'll treat you. All bases are covered. In truth Miller's article does agree with a lot of this. His exact words being "More to the point, any accurate assessment of the evolutionary process shows that the notion of one form of life being more highly evolved than another is incorrect. Every organism, every cell that lives today, is the descendant of a long line of winners, of ancestors who used successful evolutionary strategies time and time again, and therefore lived to tell about it - or, at least, to reproduce. The bacterium perched on the lip of my coffee cup has been through as much evolution as I have. I've got the advantage of size and consciousness, which matter when I write about evolution, but the bacterium has the advantage of numbers, of flexibility, and most especially, of reproductive speed. That single bacterium, given the right conditions, could literally fill the world with its descendants in a matter of days. No human, no vertebrate, no animal could boast of anything remotely as impressive. What evolution tells us is that life spreads out along endless branching pathways from any starting point. One of those tiny branches eventually led to us. We think it remarkable and wonder how it could have happened, but any fair assessment of the tree of life shows that our tiny branch is crowded into insignificance by those that bolted off in a thousand different directions. Our species, //Homo sapiens//, has not "triumphed" in the evolutionary struggle any more than has a squirrel, a dandelion, or a mosquito. We are all here, now, and that's what matters. We have all followed different pathways to find ourselves in the present. We are all winners in the game of natural selection. //Current// winners, we should be careful to say." and "To survive on this planet, the genes of our ancestors, like those of any other organism, had to produce behaviors that protected, nurtured, defended, and ensured the reproductive successes of the individuals that bore them. It should be no surprise that we carry such passions within us, and Darwinian biology cannot be faulted for giving their presence a biological explanation." So in this sense he gives a compelling argument that I would point to in any debate of the subject but he goes on as what I was saying before, a religious man. His words drift into the "God laid the seeds so we'd end up this way by natural process" idea. He goes on saying "If he so chose, the God whose presence is taught by most Western religions could have fashioned anything, ourselves included, //ex nihilo//, from his wish alone. In our childhood as a species, that might have been the only way in which we could imagine the fulfillment of a divine will. But we've grown up, and something remarkable has happened: we have begun to understand the physical basis of life itself. If a string of constant miracles were needed for each turn of the cell cycle or each flicker of a cilium, the hand of God would be written directly into every living thing - his presence at the edge of the human sandbox would be unmistakable. Such findings might confirm our faith, but they would also undermine our independence. How could we fairly choose between God and man when the presence and the power of the divine so obviously and so literally controlled our every breath? Our freedom as his creatures requires a little space and integrity. In the material world, it requires self-sufficiency and consistency with the laws of nature." Miller seems to be saying for man to truly love him and be free, God needed to have us develop through evolution. He insists on adding purpose to humankind which is something I've yet to have explained to me. Why do we need a "higher" purpose? As a nonbeliever I don't understand and it seems to me to stem only from religion. Yes it's a nice, comfy, and maybe semi natural idea to feel wanted and like you belong, like there's some reason for you to exist as you are. That's it however, it feels good to have a purpose, but there's no need for it and nothing making it required. You can compare it to having cake and presents on your birthday. Everyone enjoys it but there's no real purpose. While I'm not advocating that we get rid of birthday's, I'm trying to say that not everything has a deep, "higher" purpose or needs one. My purpose in life is to live, I only have one so no matter what it's like, that's it, I might as well run with it until the end. Every religious argument trying to disprove science or even reconcile the two, including Miller's, all seem to me to be religion fighting it's own losing battle of natural selection.