So Put That In Your Pipe And Smoke It

Another John C. Wright tour de force. There is more before this section:

Can they not invent some new slander, at least?
...

The Abrahamic god, the “God of our fathers” (Goof), is a species attractor that I believe shows Dawkins’ genocentric view of Darwinian evolution to be essentially correct. Once you see that, you cannot naively believe in Goof. You can accept its power, just as you can accept the power of hunger as a behavioral driver, but understanding drives out superstition.

That is the whole of the entry for that day: perhaps further explanation or support exist on other entries, or unwritten in his mind, but at this point, my faith in Mr. Ross's reasoning powers, or his ability to express himself clearly, is undermined.

I mean, this is a guy who rejects superstition, but believes in the genocentric view of Darwinian evolution, that little bits of twisted matter in my cells make me believe in God, but SOMETHING ELSE, allows him to have "understanding" that drives out that belief.

I suppose his world view would be shattered if he discovered that disbelief in God were based on a defective gene, or an atrophy of the part of the brain that senses such things.

Imagine the blind man who discovered these little round wet balls in the faces of everyone but himself. He would, as a faithful and unquestioning materialist, conclude that these balls of matter were influencing the brains of the sighted people; there is even a nerve cord running from the matter ball to the brain! "No wonder you believe in Light, that most naïve of superstitions! Those little balls on the front of your face are sending signals into your brains. My face is not defective like yours; my powers of understanding allow me to overcome this absurd belief in "Light", or, as I like to calling it, the Luminous Spaghetti Monster."

Unfortunately for the genocentric theory, genes interact in complex ways to produce phenotypes, and the relation between phenotype and behavior is unexplained, to say the least (even identical twins do not have the same personalities or values). If genes act in concert to produce outcomes, then the outcomes cannot be reduced to single or selfish gene levels. Using genes as the basis or ultimate explanation of human behavior is about as simplistic an idea as astrology, which used the positions of planets in the zodiac to explain human behavior.

Of course, in astrology theory, it was postulated that influences from the stars showered down from heaven and changed the souls and destinies of men born on earth, one spiritual substance impressing another spiritual substance. Astrologers had an explanation, albeit a false once, how the astral powers of the stars could effect the soul of man. But in the genocentric view, there is no explanation, no influence, no mechanism even postulated to explain how the neuro chemical make-up of the human organism leads, or can possibly lead, to magical influences over a man's nature and destiny.

I was once an atheist and now I am a Christian. Did my genes change? Was there a hidden chemical in my brain that waited until I was 42 before it released its mystical philosophy-changing power? Which gene, precisely, makes me worship Jehovah but not Jove?

And what makes you atheists think your genes are not the defective ones, that you are missing something the rest of us have? Since atheists range from Objectivists to Marxists to Nihilists, the absence of the God-gene seems not to have given your tribe any particular insight or skepticism in any other area: you are a remarkably gullible lot, if you consider all the branches of the atheist race. Think of how many of your fellow atheists believed everything Stalin said.

(I call you a race and a tribe, because, logically, if you are missing the God-gene then you must be related by blood to a common ancestor, the first mutant born with the God-Gene missing, possibly Epicurus. I mean, we all know all Black people are Baptists and all Jews are Devoutly Jewish, right? So clearly denomination is an inherited characteristic like eye color!)

You had better hope your theory is wrong, O ye materialists, because if it is true, all that will result is that the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (or whoever is put in charge of gene-programming for the Brave New World) will inject you with the Christianity gene, the "doctrine of nonresistance" strain, and you will then believe that obedience to civil authority is an absolute and unmitigated duty.

You see, if the religion gene is something that natural selection has overwhelmingly made dominant in the human genome, what grounds do we have for assuming that the natural processes behind political and cultural evolution will not likewise favor that same gene? What use is it to throw off the superstition gene, O Darwinist, if the net result is that your fertility rates drop below the fertility rates of your more superstitious and more numerous neighbors?

Come, let us reason together: if the content of the human brain is determined by the composition of his genes, what cause have we to believe that this belief (or any other) deserves our loyalty if it does not survive the brutal test of survival of the fittest?

If the Creationists are more fit to survive, if they prove to be the tougher breed, and if you nonetheless think their beliefs do not deserve our assent, then you tacitly admit that something other then the gene-determined content of the thought is worthy of assent.

This admission, tacit or not, is fatal to the materialist argument: because once you say a person should believe what is true due and only due to the "truth value" of the belief, you admit, nay, you make it a moral imperative, that something other than gene-content determines belief.

In other words, saying that religion is caused by genetics is a slur, nothing else. It is an ad Hominem attack, and a clumsy one at that. "Your beliefs are not rational, because all beliefs are caused by behavioral determinants in the genes. My beliefs are rational, however, because I believe what is true for the sake of truth." Well, a ghost (who has no genes) debating with a robot (who only believes what he is programmed) might be able to make that statement, for these creatures occupy two different metaphysical and ontological conditions. For we humans, occupying the human condition, the statement cannot be made.

A guy who believes in astrology is a paragon of reason compared to this nonsense. The astrology nut at least has a theory open to some sort of proof and disproof: merely have a baby born on another planet in the solar system, where the planets are not aligned in the zodiac as on Earth, and see the results in the baby's personality and behavior.

The gene nut has no theory open to disproof: he merely postulates that human thinking is the epiphenomenon of genetic code, and he postulates no mechanism, no medium, by which the matter-bits in his genes are translated to the personality types in human nature. It is not open to disproof because it is not a theory, merely an assertion.