Excellent thoughts Nicolaou,
I leave for Houston in a few minutes to ....you guessed it deliver some large bird cages to a Veternarian. So, I must be brief..... here's my take:
Working with exotic birds and babies everyday as well as taking lots of customer service calls allows me to compare different species on our planet. We can know this:
1. The ability to appreciate and know beauty is unique to our species. In this regard, (and countless others) we don't fit in with the lower animal kingdom.
2. The posession of morality and the chronic violation of our own standards both makes us accountable to ultimate Justice and prevents us from membership in God's kingdom.... or a oneness with our morality. A real pickle for a species to be in.
We neither fit in the animal kingdom, nor God's kingdom.
You champion logic as a great place to be. Your logic condemns you. Here's how. I'm sure that you have come to the conclusion, that lying is wrong, that stealing is wrong, that adultery is wrong, (or at least unhealthy or unproductive behaviors).
Do you do them? If so, why? ....Especially since your logic tells you that it's wrong or unproductive (if you get caught)? Don't you think it is rather curious that on the one hand you can logically determine what sort of man you ought to be and on the other hand violate your own will?
Animals don't have this problem. They live in a sorta "persistent state of identification stasis". A kinda "joy" because the reality of their existence matches up nicely with their worldview... however small. Humans live in a persistent state of desperation created by the disparity between the reality of their existence and their worldview ... however large. As a result, humans live in consecutive and overlapping states of illusion and denials as coping mechanisms.
The evolutionary process that led to Homo Sapiens resulted in us not having wings or tails, but it has given us creativity and appreciation of beauty.
Here's my take on your reference to Darwinism:
Darwinism is so shapeless that it can be enlisted in support of any cause whatsoever. Over the years, it's been championed by eugenicists, social Darwinists, racialists, free-market economists, liberals galore, Wilsonian progressives, and National Socialists, to give only a partial list. Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer, Communists and libertarians, and almost anyone in between, have at times found Darwinism to their liking. Spencer himself first used the phrase "survival of the fittest, "and Darwin thought it an "admirable" summation of his thesis.
Both selfishness and (with a little mathematical ingenuity) altruism can be given a Darwinian twist. Any existing psychological trait, from aggression to pacifism, can be deemed adaptive by inventing a just-so story explaining how genes "for" that trait might have arisen. The genes themselves do not have to be identified, nor does the imagined historical scenario have to leave any trace behind.
The underlying problem is that a key Darwinian term is not defined....."fitness". Darwinism supposedly explains how organisms become more "fit," or better adapted to their environment. But fitness is not and cannot be defined except in terms of existence. In other words, if an animal exists, it is "fit" (otherwise it wouldn't exist). It is not possible to specify all the useful parts of that animal in order to give an exhaustive causal account of fitness.
So in Darwinian "logic", if an organism possesses features that appear on the surface to be inconvenient, such as the peacock's tail or the top-heavy antlers of a moose, the existence of moose and peacocks proves that these animals are in fact fit!
The circular reasoning in all this does not go unnoticed by many, many people.
So the Darwinian theory is not falsifiable by any observation. It "explains" everything, and therefore nothing.
It barely qualifies as a scientific theory for that reason. The impact of Darwinism on any and all groups of people can be argued any way you want and it's not very illuminating for that reason.
