ATHEISM SAYS IT'S NEVER YOUR FAULT

C DeSalvo

 

Evolutionists teach that humans are the products of a long series of natural accidents that first created life and then improved life over and over again until it produced us, the human race.  We are told that this fantastically creative evolutionary process evidences: "no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."  And evolution has accidentally endowed each of us with a variety of both good and bad instincts, and good and bad intellects. 

 

So we are lectured that evolution has produced us by accident, and therefore we are living robots that owe all our physical and mental capabilities to this mindless process called evolution.  This means that every mistake, insult, crime and other bad or foolish thing that we humans do are not our fault - it's all caused by the accidental "wiring" of our brains by evolutionary accidents.  We should not be angry at others for their "bad" actions against us, after all, they too are only evolutionary accidents.  Other people, society and governments have no right to punish us for the "bad" things we do because evolution's accidents have made us into living robots preprogrammed by "nature" to do various things that aren't inherently good or bad.  "Good" and "bad" are simply labels defined by delusional moralists.  Are your swallowing this “science?”  Let me continue with more atheistic idiocy.

 

Saddam Hussein, Stalin and Hitler were not evil.  They were the unlucky recipients of brains that were accidentally created to prefer doing things that others call evil.  There is even evidence that the Nazis thought they were helping evolution by slaughtering "inferior" humans such as the Jews. 

 

Evolutionists continue pontificating by claiming that what each of us likes, dislikes and does is the end-result of eons of the blind, mindless evolutionary process.  Yes, evolution has endowed us with intelligence that sometimes can override accidental built-in emotions and preferences.  But often that accidental intelligence is too weak or too twisted to overcome our accidental instincts.  Sometimes our intelligence even is predisposed to support the pleasures and satisfaction that results from our "bad" natural inclinations to hate, insult, rob, lie, dominate, torture, rape, seek revenge and murder. 

 

How can we continue to punish unfortunate individuals who are naively following their natural instincts when they commit social crimes and moral evil?  Aren't the actions of such persons the fault of their accidental construction?  Infidelity is not your fault.  Evolution forces you to want it.  It is simply one way evolution spreads the best genes more quickly throughout the human race. 

 

How long will it be before an adulterer explains to an evolutionist spouse that it was evolution that made him/her be unfaithful?  How long after that will it be until a crafty lawyer defends his accused rapist client before a jury of evolutionists with the argument that his client is only a victim of bad genes; he had no control over his actions -- it's all evolution's fault; evolution made him do it! 

 

If evolutionists truly believe that humans are evolutionary organisms that are not responsible for their actions, that free will does not exist, that humans should never be blamed nor punished by anyone or any government for their actions, no matter how reprehensible, then doesn't that situation logically require that when an evolutionist is personally assaulted, robbed or otherwise harmed, he will not seek prosecution of the perpetrator?  When will such evolutionists begin practicing what they preach? 

 

If you think the above sarcastic essay is a false representation of modern evolutionary theory, read the below note written by the world’s most famous atheist.

 

Professor Richard Dawkins carries evolutionary theory to its logical conclusion in the below article.  He argues that humans are evolutionary robots, and are not responsible for their actions.  Somewhat like a malfunctioning auto is not at fault for its failures. 

 

Below text from:  http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_9.html

RICHARD DAWKINS  wrote the following text:

 

Richard Dawkins, Evolutionary Biologist, Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science, Oxford University; Author, The Ancestor's Tale 

 

Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution.  There may be passing mention of deterrence or rehabilitation, but the surrounding rhetoric gives the game away.  People want to kill a criminal as payback for the horrible things he did.  Or they want to give "satisfaction" to the victims of the crime or their relatives.  An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as "atonement" for sin. 

 

Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour.  As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics.  When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it.  We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software. 

 

Basil Fawlty, British television's hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn't start.  He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted.  "Right! I warned you.  You've had this coming to you!"  He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life.  Of course we laugh at his irrationality.  Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded?  Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas?  Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist?  Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty?  Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships?  Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component?  Or a defective upbringing?  Defective education?  Defective genes? 

 

Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned.  When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents?  Or his school?  Negligent social workers?  In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity.  Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn't surprise me). 

 

But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not?  Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment.  Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car? 

 

Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions?  Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing?  Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution.  Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live.  My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car.  But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.