intelligent re-design

or

the <scientific> truth shall set you free

" ...one implication of neo-Darwinian ideas is that even when people believe they are acting autonomously, they may really only be obeying the distant tugs of genes." [believe it] 

"It would be as if human beings invented God, rather than the other way around." [gee, no kidding?] 

western religious philosophy is infantile. it tries to segregate good and evil. it can't handle the truth. eastern philosophy can be a little more mature: Confucius said "He who has no enemies has no friends" knowing friends would be practically useless without enemies. all the traits we admire and the ones we don't are honed through millennia of natural selection. a good book on the evolutionary underpinnings of human behavior is "The Moral Animal" by Robert Wright, in which he actually uses the life history of Darwin in alternating chapters to illustrate Darwin's own ideas.

Bobby Darrin knew enough about the nature of man to sing convincingly, "oh the passions that thrill us/ and lead us into glory/ are the passions that kill us/ and lead us down to hell!" (from "Softly"). we're a mixed bag, morally, and we're not very different from other animals. for example, dogs are loyal only because they hunt and kill in packs. loyalty has the same origins in people, who lived and hunted in tribes. dogs are good companions to man because they adhere to pack hierarchy, and every man likes to be the boss. it's in our genes.

we cherish children because they are the vessels of our genes, so we either take excellent care of them or we cease to be represented on earth. there's a reason for everything, it's just that the reason isn't flattering enough to suit some.

instead of constantly crediting ourselves with higher motives for our actions, which are in fact driven by evolutionary program, we should just savor the rewards of our existence. but it's too humbling for some people to think we're just over-achieving chimpanzees; ego forces them to weave fables about why we are who we are and how we got here. ironically, this predisposition toward self-aggrandizement is itself genetically coded. self-marketing enhances the individual's survival!

just because our motives are not fallen from heaven, that doesn't make everything we do worthless. yesterday in the grocery store, for instance, a little girl in her mother's shopping cart locked onto me with her eyes and started laughing and yelling. i laughed too, in pure joy. i don't need moral justification or sanctification for why little kids are a delight, i'm just glad for the glorious evolutionary programming!

nor are we absolute slaves to our biology. (at least i hope not.) our genes were honed by the survival process, but there is the possibility of of going beyond "nature red in tooth and claw". honor, compassion, and empathy might rule our lives if we could understand and check the innate impulses that keep us chained to the millstone of survival-oriented thinking.  this would be contrary to much of our nature, but we have conquered so much of our physical world, it seems that if we tried we might be able to stop competing furiously with one another and move on to an age of Aquarius. 

advance can only come through a fuller understanding of ourselves, not through clinging to unsupportable dogma. the latter leaves us prey to every passing sociopath. the manipulator will demand we adhere to a strict moral code, while he indulges his desire for control -and often other of his baser instincts- with abandon. 

isn't the inseparable mixture of the good and bad in our nature consistent with Catholicism's tenet of "original sin"? (someone in the monastery had their thinking cap on!) the goal of science is to discover the truth. won't science, itself agnostic of religious and moral goals, reveal the path to peace and harmony if allowed to unravel our complicated and contradictory nature? it's probably our only hope, but will we give it a chance?