Let’s recap:
1. Neither David Berlinski nor Thomas Nagel have great pony hair; Michio Kaku briefly had something going on but then (disappointingly) dialed it back.
2. The chance of life resulting from an accidental collision of amino acids in some primordial soup is demonstrably zero (or something so close to zero that only MATLAB software developers care about the difference).
3. If you were raised in the North American or European public education systems, you might be reflexively warming up your verbal brickbats to thump me, probably because teachers left you unarmed with any substantial defense for the dogmas you were force fed. I’m going to address that, which is why you should keep reading.
Audie is obsessed with machines, especially engines, which is why he loves TV programs and expensive merchandise featuring a fictional blue steam engine whose name I will not mention (although it rhymes with “Thomas the Tank Engine”). The show/books/movies feature and contrast many different kinds of engines: electric vs. combustion, internal combustion vs. external combustion, gasoline vs. diesel, etc. My son is only three years old, but he already knows about spark plugs, pistons, and collision insurance fuel injectors. And he asks great questions that require a thoughtful answer. Recently, he wanted to know what would happen if you put gasoline into a diesel engine (or the opposite, putting diesel into a gasoline engine). So we experimented with Mommy’s car researched it on the Internet, and here’s what we found:
The nozzle for a diesel fuel pump is much larger than the typical aperture to a gasoline-vehicle fuel tank, so almost nobody accidentally fills a gasoline tank with diesel at the pump. This usually only happens when someone fills a gas can with diesel and then pours the diesel fuel into a gasoline tank somewhere else (like at a boat yard). Diesel fuel ignites by pressure alone (diesel engines don’t need or use spark plugs), but a gasoline engine’s pistons don’t provide optimum pressure for diesel fuel’s relatively higher flash point. The vehicle will continue to run mostly on residual gasoline intermixed with the diesel, but its performance will gradually degrade, the engine will eventually go out of sync, and you’ll wind up with damaged pistons and cylinder heads. The danger of putting gasoline into a diesel engine is more immediate: gasoline’s relatively lower flash point will cause the engine to misfire, likely resulting in serious engine damage. Gasoline is also less oily than diesel and will interfere with the fuel pump and fuel line.
Gas in your diesel tank? Better have it towed to a professional mechanic.
The big lesson here for my son is that it’s not the vehicle owner who gets to decide what fuel a vehicle’s engine will use; it’s the designer of the engine who makes that decision. It’s just as a software company gets to decide, as early as the design phase of the development cycle, what constitutes proper use of its software and what use will ultimately be consistent with the product-support contract. The fact that something has been designed strongly implies a designer, and that designer’s purpose and intentions constitute the basis by which we can judge proper use and misuse. Though you may own a motor vehicle or a software product, you are still in a very concrete legal way accountable to the designer of that product. You may be free to put diesel into your Honda’s gas tank, but you can’t reasonably expect to sue Honda Motors when your engine eventually dies. The law is essentially a moral instrument insofar as it declares what is right and what is wrong, and so the concept of design is therefore inseparable from the concept of morality.
And that, I believe, is why people totally FLIP. OUT. when you dare question the pronouncements of a 19th-century naturalist who died over 70 years before the discovery of DNA. If life is not the result of an accident, it is the result of a design and is therefore accountable to its Designer. This means that the postmodern idea that all truth is confined to a specific social and historical context (i.e., an individual’s own subjective and personalized moral code) is false—apart from its inherent philosophical contradictions. If we make up our own rules, or even claim that there are no rules, we still remain accountable to the Designer regardless of how congruent our “rules” are with that design.
If you’re like me, it’s disquieting to recollect how much of what you learned in school was wrong—for example, some of my secondary school science texts actually had renderings of Ernst Haeckel’s embryo drawings and couldn’t explain why airplanes can fly upside down—and so I understand wanting to believe you’ve been taught the truth, even if it consequently implies that life has no objective meaning or purpose or value, that your best and worst behaviors can never be oriented to any absolute moral compass, that there can never be any real justice for atrocities like the Holocaust, or that you have no business using meaningless terms like “good” and “evil” in any case. That’s why after terrorist attacks, some people like to gather around a piano and sing John Lennon’s “Imagine” while the bodies are still warm. They shut out reality, and imagine a world that never has been and never can be. I get that, but it’s all just a wish being father to the thought. As a former coworker of mine put it in his crass-but-concise Brooklyn patois, “Wish in one hand, s**t in the other, and see which hand fills up first.”
The late philosopher Jerry Fodor (whom you can safely count among the agnostic critics of neo-Darwinism) assessed that these ideas (i.e., “… nature is without conscious design, species evolve over time, the emergence of Homo sapiens was without meaning or telos …”) constituted a loyalty oath of modernity, and one can see how apt Fodor’s assessment was in how neatly these beliefs remove any moral obstacle to following the prevailing trajectories of modernity: If you believe the lie that you’re accountable to no one but yourself, it’s a simple matter to abandon your family, cheat on your spouse, smoke weed and play video games all day/night, or even take your own life. It’s also a simple matter to discard rational thought because Fodor’s loyalty oath of modernity completely undercuts the philosophical basis for reason itself … which might explain why doctrinaire evolutionary biologists rarely bother to criticize postmodern lunacy and even try to reconcile with it at times.
Let’s be honest: If you hold to the loyalty oath of modernity, you’re not motivated by science but rather by a philosophy … and not a very good one.