In the tradition of other humanist luminaries, Richard Dawkins stood up to nature red in tooth and claw and proposed an ethical system that is devoid of illusions: So, the Devils Chaplain might conclude, Stand tall, Bipedal Ape. The shark may outswim you, the cheetah outrun you, the swift outfly you, the capuchin outclimb you, the elephant outpower you, the redwood outlast you. But you have the biggest gifts of all: the gift of understanding the ruthlessly cruel process that gave us all existence; the gift of revulsion against its implications; the gift of foresight - something utterly foreign to the blundering short-term ways of natural selection and the gift of internalizing the very cosmos. We are blessed with brains which, if educated and allowed free rein, are capable of modelling the universe, with its physical laws in which the Darwinian algorithm is embedded. As Darwin himself put it, in the famous closing lines of the Origin of Species: Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. There is more than just grandeur in this view of life, bleak and cold though it can seem from under the security blanket of ignorance. There is deep refreshment to be had from standing up full-face into the keen wind of understanding: Yeatss Winds that blow through the starry ways. In another essay, I quote the words of an inspiring teacher, F. W. Sanderson, who urged his pupils to live dangerously ... ... full of the burning fire of enthusiasm, anarchic, revolutionary, energetic, daemonic, Dionysian, filled to overflowing with the terrific urge to create - such is the life of the man who risks safety and happiness for the sake of growth and happiness. Safety and happiness would mean being satisfied with easy answers and cheap comforts, living a warm comfortable lie. The daemonic alternative urged by my matured Devils Chaplain is risky. You stand to lose comforting delusions: you can no longer suck at the pacifier of faith in immortality. To set against that risk, you stand to gain growth and happiness; the joy of knowing that you have grown up, faced up to what existence means; to the fact that it is temporary and all the more precious for it. -- Richard Dawkins, A Devils Chaplain What he proposes is acceptance of the truth of evolution by natural selection, but a rejection of the fatalism and immoral practices it might engender a la Hitler or Stalin. He challenges us to embrace the powers our brains provide with the aim of constructing a world where The Selfish Gene does not rule us but WE rule IT! That, rather than the irrational practices of worshiping the bloodthirsty god of the bible, is what makes us truly human, truly noble, truly worthy of the mantle of human as rational animal.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 19:24:21 +0000
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