Bruna Frascolla
If Darwinism does not explain human morality, it does explain the morality of humans who believe in Darwinism.
A question that occurred to me when writing the last article is: Is it possible, within the framework of Western culture, to defend freedom while denying Christianity? After all, in our culture we have, as opposing interpretative keys, the religious principle of creation and the scientific principle of natural selection.
On the Christian side, we have that God created man endowed with free will: man does such and such a thing with a moral content because he is free. On the Darwinist side, man is the viable result of an atrocious process of natural selection. Thus, it will be necessary to explain human action based on this process. This is not impossible, because, as we have seen, morality is necessary even in a society of thieves. However, if morality is nothing but the result of a process of natural selection, it is very difficult to say that a man is free. When a bird builds its nest, this is an act resulting from natural selection - and it is not a free act, since the bird is not rational and could not act otherwise.
It does not follow that we need to oppose evolution to creationism. Just like flat-earthers, creationism is a pseudoscience created by biblical literalists. But if not every Christian is a creationist, every militant defender of evolution is a militant defender of atheism. Now, the evolutionary mechanism discovered by Darwin evidently does not prove the non-existence of God, since one can say that God created the world with creatures that evolve. In general, the most intelligent atheists agree that it is not possible to prove the non-existence of God, which is why they prefer to discuss the burden of proof. After all, it is possible to say that God created the world with creatures that evolve; and it is possible to say that there is a teapot orbiting the sun between the Earth and Mars. Proving it is another story.
In the end of the day, Darwinism consists of an explanation of life through laws that are intrinsic to matter. This explanation goes back to Epicureanism, for which all that exists are atoms and movement. From the incessant movement of matter, ordered bodies emerge; and, once the order is disturbed, the body perishes and the atoms continue to move. Thus, it is not appropriate to ask why an animal is well-made, because, if it were not "well-made", it would perish. Darwin gathered material and showed that this Epicurean process, which implies the destruction of the unviable, is capable of explaining life, contrary to the idea of a static Creation. But Darwin was a son of the England of his time.
Modernity rediscovered many Greco-Roman philosophical currents that the Church had thrown into the proverbial dustbin of History. One current was Epicureanism; another, Pythagorean thought, for which Number is the principle of everything. Galileo appropriated this principle and translated it into the idea that God wrote the book of nature in mathematical language. Later, the person who appropriated this translation from Galileo was Newton, a kind of Protestant mystic dedicated to (among other things) the literal exegesis of the Bible. He was followed by a whole school of thought, articulated in the Boyle Lectures, which would pave the way for creationism. Thus, if we believe that Galileo, Newton and Darwin are right, then we believe that the Creator is versed in mathematics and that there is no Creator!
If in the times of Galileo and Newton (16th to 18th centuries) mathematical laws were seen as proof of a Creator versed in mathematics, but in the times of Darwin and the Darwinists (19th centuries to the present), evolutionary laws serve to prove that there is no creation, then it is reasonable to conclude that what changed was the mentality of the time. In modernity, scientists believed in God; in postmodernity, scientists believed in atheism. That is why they gave different treatments to ancient principles rediscovered in different eras.
It seems, then, that it is convenient for a physicist to reason like a biblical literalist, and it is convenient for a biologist to reason like an atheist. Darwin did not nullify Galilean or Newtonian physics, and the widespread acceptance of Father Lemaître's cosmological assumption did not dethrone Darwin from biology. Science advances based on the most disparate assumptions. And these are all assumptions with a moral nature, and the black sheep among them is Darwinism. (Some say, however, that determinism is a secular Calvinism, because of predestination, which also brings philosophical complications to the notion of freedom. Even if this seems absolutely correct to me, there is still a huge difference between a Puritan morality and a morality inspired by Darwinism.)
At least since Lucretius, Epicureanism has had a forceful moral message. In short, all life is chaotic, the gods do not care about mortals, religion is born from ignorance of causes and is the source of unreasonable fears, such as the fear of death. Anyone who wants to learn more about Epicureanism and the history of its rediscovery can read The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011), by Professor Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard. The book won the National Book Award and even the Pulitzer. And the book is a tremendous piece of propaganda that, while telling the story of Poggio Bracciolini, sings the eternal virtues of Epicureanism and repeats Protestant clichés against the "Dark Ages" (although the author is Jewish). The fact that this book has had such a successful institutional reception is an indication that the elites of the English-speaking world are so committed to Darwinism that they actively defend its very roots, that are Epicureanism.
Let us finally return to the initial point. If Darwinism does not explain human morality, it does explain the morality of humans who believe in Darwinism. Since man is not expected to act like an animal different from the rest, then it is accepted, for example, that males copulate with as many females as they can, and that females copulate with any male who has resources. There is even a science of "evolutionary psychology" that is very effective in explaining cads and sluts, but of dubious success in explaining decent men and women. A billionaire believes that the right thing to do is to impregnate as many women as possible, preferably through in vitro fertilization with selected embryos, in order to gift humanity with his wonderful DNA.
Since human life is a material phenomenon, all of his agonies become pathologies. The man, a clump of cells, then goes to the psychiatrist to resolve them, and the psychiatrist will prescribe medications that supposedly correct the chemical imbalances that caused the agony. And since health is nothing more than the norm, it is no wonder that people want to build identities on top of illnesses (autism, ADHD...). Because illness, the deviation from the norm, is the possible difference and the possible freedom.