Chasby, 

It wigs you out a little when I key on a phrase which is sometimes tangential to the main point of an article you send.  If I am not careful you will think this is such a case.

Let me assure you I understand what Dinesh is saying.  He says if you believe in a secular world there is no absolute morality, so it is proper to think that man is just the same as other animals, there is nothing wrong with killing the infirm or the unborn…etc etc etc.  Dinesh sees these conclusions to be anathema and so he goes to reject the premise:  that God does not exist.   He challenges liberals in general to admit they hail this guy and stand behind him, because if they do then in this framework they must endorse immoral acts.

I will neither endorse nor denounce Singer since I know so little him.  His story and thinking is, no doubt, more complex then Dinesh suggests, just like the Wright story is more complex than what you get from Hannity. 

Now on to my “tangential phrase”….

Dinesh associates atheism with what he calls “free market homicide”, but he does slip in this zinger.  Singer's Darwinian atheism.   How is Darwin even relevant here?  Darwin’s theory has something to do with how life evolved on the planet.  There is no statement in evolution regarding infanticide or euthanasia.  You know that, I know that.  Dinesh is convoluting separate and distinct ideas to defame a scientific theory.  The theory is not his main target of course.  Damaging a scientific theory is collateral damage in his war against liberals.  Ben Stein does much the same thing in his movie convoluting “darwinism” and the nazis.  

I love the word “Darwinism”.  I think we should have other words: “Newtonism” , “Einsteinism” “Heisenbergism”.  This is not entirely facetious.  Every time a new scientific paradigm is created it gets bastardized in the culture in so many ways.  F=MA leads to some deistic idea that God created a big magnificent clock and sits back to watch its intricate mechanisms.  Einstein comes along and suddenly morality is “relative”.  Every thing depends on the observer and his frame of “moral reference”.  After Heisenberg everything is “unknowable”.  If you describe the evolution of life then you must be atheistic.  It doesn’t follow.  NONE OF IT DOES.

It is all crazy.  The simple fact is the purpose of a scientific theory is to predict the results of experiments.  It is the first lecture that you hear in a quantum mechanics course.  I know.  I took three of them.  All of this business, this extension of the descriptions of electrons and fields, to society or religion or morality is all so much BS.  Science is science.

Dinesh at his heart is saying if you believe in evolution then you have to accept “Darwinian atheism” and THEN you have to accept euthanasia and free market homocide.  Is it true that…. If you accept “newtonism” you have to be a Deist.  If you accept relativity then you have to accept moral relativism.  Of course not, but it’s a lot easier than talking about tensors, genetics and particles moving backwards in time.

Feynman gave a talk to laymen about quantum electrodynamics in Australia.  He began by telling his audience that they were not going to understand what he was about to say.  He said that he was sure of this because HE didn’t understand what he was about to say.  NOBODY understands QED, your humble servant included. Nobody understands the theory.  The theory is ONLY useful because it allows us to predict the results of experiments.  Nobody understands, except Dinesh.  Without reading a single text on evolution he can show the hidden links between Darwinism and so many evil practices.    For Dinesh the ability to predict the results of experiments is nothing, genocide and infanticide is what it is REALLY all about.  So evolution must be wrong.  I guess moral relativism isn’t quite evil enough to prove “einsteinism” to be false.

Me?   I prefer to get my science from scientists and my politics from liberals.

Michael