Arc Tangent

The Right Rev­erend Pro­fes­sor Tom Frame responded to my email — and quite a nice response it was. He’s given me per­mis­sion to pub­lish it here. A big thank-​you to him for engaging!

Dear Andy (if I might be informal)

Thanks for tak­ing the trou­ble to write to me after a busy day.

It might help you to know that I didn’t pro­duce the “extract” that appeared in today’s SMH. It was put together by the pub­lish­ers (UNSW Press) and the edi­tor of the Op Ed page. In fact, I wasn’t aware that it was appear­ing this week until I began to receive email this morn­ing. As most of the email has been abu­sive and com­bat­ive, your care­fully con­sid­ered email was a pleas­ant change.

The sen­tences to which you refer do not appear in that order in the book, they are from two sep­a­rate chap­ters and were merged to give an impres­sion you won’t find in the book. I am pleased that you intend to acquire a copy (which is some 110,000 words in length) and exam­ine the argu­ments that I present in the depth and in the order that I present them. It is nei­ther anti-​Darwin nor anti-​evolutionary theory.

There is one mat­ter I want to touch on here. In a forth­com­ing book on unbe­lief in Aus­tralia (it will appear in Nov 09) I have iden­ti­fied and dif­fer­en­ti­ated the two com­mon strains of athe­ism in Aus­tralia: pos­i­tive
athe­ism and neg­a­tive athe­ism. Pos­i­tive athe­ism con­tends that God does not exist whereas a neg­a­tive athe­ist is some­one with­out a belief in God. You are plainly a neg­a­tive athe­ism whereas many of the peo­ple who have emailed me today are pos­i­tive athe­ists. It is dif­fi­cult to have a con­ver­sa­tion with a pos­i­tive athe­ist and, these days, I don’t even try.

I hope you find the book use­ful. It is, in essence, an account of the influ­ence of evo­lu­tion­ary the­ory on Aus­tralian think­ing and pop­u­lar cul­ture. What appeared in today’s news­pa­per was not an accu­rate reflec­tion of its objec­tive. I would be inter­ested in your thoughts after read­ing the narrative.

Tom

WARNING: This post talks about Athe­ism and reli­gion. I am an Athe­ist. If you feel you might be offended, or are unable to tol­er­ate the idea of any­one ques­tion­ing your par­tic­u­lar reli­gion, I would encour­age you to skip this arti­cle.

For the first time in a long time, I felt moved to write a let­ter in response to an arti­cle I saw on the Syd­ney Morn­ing Herald’s web­site. I’m not nor­mally the type to engage, espe­cially on this par­tic­u­lar sub­ject, but I felt that there were some seri­ous mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the stan­dard Athe­ist posi­tion in the arti­cle (which I would encour­age you to read first, if you plan to read this blog post).

Dear Right Rev­erend Professor,

I read with inter­est your arti­cle in the online ver­sion of the Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald, an extract from your book ‘Evo­lu­tion in the Antipodes’ (http://​www​.smh​.com​.au/​n​e​w​s​/​o​p​i​n​i​o​n​/​q​u​e​s​t​i​o​n​s​-​d​a​r​w​i​n​i​s​m​-​c​a​n​n​o​t​-​a​n​s​w​e​r​/​2​0​0​9​/​0​2​/​0​8​/​1​2​3​4​0​2​7​8​4​7​2​8​1​.​h​tml, accessed 9÷02÷2008). Whilst I have not read your book (yet!), I find your stance on the sub­ject of evo­lu­tion refreshing.

How­ever, I fear I must make an objec­tion to some of the views you expressed in the arti­cle. Specif­i­cally (and I quote):

“A ded­i­cated Dar­win­ian would wel­come impe­ri­al­ism, geno­cide, mass depor­ta­tion, eth­nic cleans­ing, eugen­ics, euthana­sia, forced ster­il­i­sa­tions and infan­ti­cide. Pub­licly, he advo­cates none of them.”

Only a mad­man could truly agree with any of these poli­cies! As a staunch athe­ist (despite a ded­i­cated Catholic upbring­ing) and what you might call a ‘Dar­win­ist’ (though I might object to that title myself) I can only object to the ‘log­i­cal con­clu­sions’ you think Dar­win­ism should take us to.

Evo­lu­tion goes a long way to explain­ing the way the world around us is now, but it does not take into effect future soci­etal fac­tors — our devel­op­ment of sym­bolic rea­son­ing, which in turn has given us tech­nol­ogy (of all sorts), has freed us as a species from the nor­mal effect of evo­lu­tion. The laws of evo­lu­tion apply only loosely to human beings now — med­ical sci­ence gives us the abil­ity to sur­vive all man­ner of ill­nesses which would once have proven fatal (and this is surely for the best).

We are no longer pri­mates swing­ing from the trees; as a species, we plant, har­vest and cul­ti­vate the trees. Of course, our tech­nol­ogy does raise cer­tain prob­lems — to express the sit­u­a­tion harshly, there are indi­vid­u­als pass­ing on their genetic infor­ma­tion who would not have had a chance to do so, two thou­sand years ago. Some ill­nesses which would once have been fatal to a given expres­sion of genes (ie. a val­ued indi­vid­ual of our species) no longer have an evo­lu­tion­ary effect, and are becom­ing more prevalent.

One could draw the con­clu­sion that these peo­ple should not be saved, if one was to take a ‘harsh’ Dar­win­ist stance. How­ever, I would argue that the same tech­nolo­gies that save these indi­vid­u­als gives us the oppor­tu­nity to erad­i­cate these dis­eases; given that we have the means to make life bet­ter for our­selves as a species, and as indi­vid­u­als, there is no need for geno­cide, eugen­ics, eth­nic cleans­ing or the like (all of which are rep­re­hen­si­ble acts, Dar­win­ism or no).

Of course, whether or not we should use those tech­nolo­gies raises still fur­ther debates — which I shall not enter into here!

Fur­ther, you state the fol­low­ing:
“Crudely nat­u­ral­is­tic sci­ence leaves no room for poetic truth, refuses to hon­our any spir­i­tual ele­ment in phys­i­cal things and can­not accept the exis­tence of a human soul.”

Again I must object — Athe­ism does not pre­clude God; rather, an athe­ist usu­ally takes the posi­tion that there is (as yet) insuf­fi­cient evi­dence for God’s exis­tence. Sci­ence can­not prove a thing’s non-​existence and God may very well exist, but athe­ists choose to live their lives on a dif­fer­ent basis than assum­ing he does. This does not make us cruel or ter­ri­ble peo­ple — every life is still unique and valu­able to the whole, whether or not it was divinely crafted or not. Nor, I feel, does athe­ism reduce in any way the beauty or aes­thetic value of a sun­rise seen from Mt Buf­fallo, or triv­i­alise the feel of sand between ones’ toes on the beaches of Queens­land. Whether these expe­ri­ences are divinely crafted or not, they are expe­ri­ences unique in all the Uni­verse; each moment is valu­able and pre­cious whether or not God planned it to be so.

Finally, I would argue that sci­ence may indeed be inca­pable of ask­ing if life has any intrin­sic mean­ing, but this frees us to ask if we want to give it any par­tic­u­lar mean­ing as a species. Navel-​gazing about our divine ori­gins boots us noth­ing; what mat­ters is how we treat the peo­ple around us, and whether we choose to make life bet­ter for the denizens of our planet. A sense of divine enti­tle­ment can only be detri­men­tal to our atti­tudes towards the unique world we find our­selves inhab­it­ing — we should, as ever, approach the world with a sense of humil­ity, and ask not whether God has given it to us (or not), but ask what we can give back to the world to make it a bet­ter place.

I fear this is prob­a­bly sound­ing very “sec­u­larly human­ist”, and if so, it’s an accu­sa­tion I’ll hap­pily take on the chin. Nev­er­the­less, I thank you for your writ­ing, which I found edi­fy­ing and engag­ing, and look for­ward to read­ing your book.

Thank you for your time!

–Andy White