Did Darwin Kill God Page #6

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out of universal Darwinism.

It applies to anything where information

is copied with variation and selection.

Memes are competing to use

our brains to get themselves copied.

Invert the normal way

you think about the world.

We, as humans,

feel we are doing the selecting,

but from the meme's point of view,

they're getting us to copy them.

So do you mean

we are colonised by our memes?

Yeah, that's exactly the right word.

They colonise us.

I mean, you could say that they're

parasites and parasitizing us,

but in a way that gives the wrong impression

- there's a whole range of memes,

from the valuable and wonderful memes that

make up our culture, our science and arts,

to the other end where

you have all the viral memes -

internet viruses, chain letters and religions,

things that exploit our brains and aren't true.

The memes that have colonised us through our life

have given rise to this great story that I'm in here,

I'm in control of my life, and

I would say the me that I think I am

is to that extent an illusion.

If true,

the theory of memes is devastating.

Ultra-Darwinists

say that everything is an illusion -

and this includes our sense of self,

and all our beliefs.

If our entire mental world is a product

of a lifetime of meme colonisation,

that means I believe in God because I have

been colonised by the Christianity meme.

In other words, I'm deluded,

and therefore God is not real.

But I can't see how

the theory of memes can be true.

There's a fundamental flaw

at the heart of the theory.

Consider this -

I also believe in evolution.

Doesn't that mean that I have also been

colonised by the theory of evolution meme?

How can I trust this meme to be

any more true than any other meme?

This may sound like clever wordplay,

but this is a philosophical problem that confronts

anyone who believes in the theory of memes.

You see, science requires truth

to be objective.

It requires benchmarks

to decide between what is true,

and what is not true.

But with ultra-Darwinism,

there can be no benchmark,

because all that matters

is which memes survive.

And their survival

has nothing to do with their truth.

As one atheist philosopher put it,

"Evolution does not care

"whether most

of our beliefs are true.

"Like Rhett Butler in the movie,

it just doesn't give a damn. "

In undermining

the objectivity of truth,

ultra-Darwinism

not only threatens the truth of God,

it inadvertently also destroys the

truth of the theory of evolution itself.

Although the theory of memes

has been around for some time,

ultra-Darwinists have been unable to

answer this philosophical problem.

The irony being that having

fatally undermined itself,

ultra-Darwinism

cannot destroy our sense of self,

threaten ethics,

and it cannot kill the idea of God.

Let's be clear, I remain an ardent supporter

of Darwin and his theory of evolution.

My issue is only against ultra-Darwinism, the

attempt to use the theory to explain everything.

And you don't have to believe in God to

see the dangers of such an enterprise.

The latest research into evolution

is a reminder that all science,

even the theory of evolution,

is provisional.

Darwin's theory

may not be the whole story.

And, indeed, being but a chapter,

it cannot expect to explain away God.

'I'm in London Zoo to meet

one of the world's most respected

'evolutionary paleobiologists,

Simon Conway Morris.

'His research explores how

life forms with wholly independent

'evolutionary paths can produce

such remarkably similar results. '

We humans are cultural,

and we have music, but it so turns

out that many animals have music.

Not only that -

the sort of music they have is

similar, in many respects, to ours.

Some birds even do drumming,

for example.

But more specifically, they have

harmony and melody, they have invention,

they even have cultures

in music where,

for example,

in the oceans, whales can swap songs.

Now, supposing that there

is a universal music out there,

then think of evolution

as more like a search engine,

and the reason why

the music sounds the same

is because it is actually discovering

something which, arguably,

is even pre-existing,

and that suggests, yes, evolution,

the algorithm is Darwinian,

but there are other realities,

and the fact that music

is discovered in this way

suggests that

there is more to play for,

that we've hardly begun to understand

who we are and why we're here.

do you think that

evolution is still true?

Evolution is true,

the question is not that, it's, "Is

evolution, as a theory, complete?"

Now, if you think of other sciences, go back

to the time of physics and the time of Newton,

they thought

they'd solved everything.

But, of course, in physics

along came general relativity,

along came quantum mechanics, and I strongly suspect

that, yes, evolution is true, so far as it goes,

but we are very much dealing with unfinished business,

and that means that it's like any other science.

If science is inherently

open-ended and provisional,

how can a scientific theory

like evolution possibly kill God?

The mainstream Christian view of God

was never at odds with Darwin.

The conflict was contrived by

an unorthodox strand of my faith -

creationism.

It was aggravated by

an unorthodox strand of Darwinism -

ultra-Darwinism.

So, for me, there is no conflict

between Darwin's theory

and belief in God.

Indeed, the theory of evolution even helps to stop

my understanding of God from becoming too domestic,

too cosy, too small.

Darwin hated religious controversy,

and he would have been dismayed at the

events that have transpired in his name.

His contribution to science

remains one of the greatest ever.

Let's just accept it, and stop

using it to attack religion.

It's time to let

Darwin rest in peace.

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