Darwinian Bootstrap

Darwinian evolution is the answer.

In the end, the religionists will either win or lose. If they win, they will have proved themselves the fittest and the human race will take one direction. If they lose, they won't be the fittest, and the human race will take another direction. The Darwinian expression, "survival of fittest," aptly describes the situation. There are lots of right-wingers who will be happy to read my concession, that this is a Darwinian struggle; it fits their Social Darwinian consciousness. But, the religious right (fundamentalists) won't be happy about this at all, as they believe the outcome is ordained by their god (not the workings of nature).

I hasten to point out a religionist loss does not guarantee a scientific win. This is not a zero sum game with just two possible outcomes. There are many possible outcomes, of which a win by religionists is only one. I assert there are many possible outcomes, not as matter of deduction from first principles, but by induction from prior experience. Examination of previous historical conflicts shows that the eventual outcome can be very different from what was expected at the time. Conflicts that involve "sides" often do not result in a victory of the "sides," but in something else altogther. So, Woodrow Wilson's "War to End All Wars" became World War II, and the eventual "winners" of the Franco-Prussian struggles were the Americans and Russians.
 

Nature does not operate according to simple syllogisms: premise, assertion, conclusion. Our human syllogisms are abstractions that suit the patterning process that evolved within our brains. They are a simplification of nature, allowing the imposition of cause and effect on what we perceive. Out there, beyond human civilization, that was a useful ability that improved survivability. That same ability eventually allowed the domestication of plants and animals, the development of lanaguage and the start of civilization. That ability is at the root of both religion and science, which are different "modes" of explaining the world in which we live.
 

Now, my view of religion is pretty negative because I am a modern man living in, and committed to, a technologically advanced civilization. Were I a peasant in ancient Sumeria, I might have different attitudes. I view religious beliefs as an outmoded form of adaptation, nothing more or less. They worked for our ancient and primitive ancestors, who had no better working hypotheses about the natural world. Religion may have helped our ancestors survive, or maybe it didn't prevent them from surviving; we cannot know which. What we do know is that religion was not a lethal adaptation, or we would not be here today. What we also know is that the "scientific adaptation" has not killed us off, yet, although it threatened to do so as recently as the Cold War.
 

Most of us, including me, judge the scientific version of our lives - the technological society - as "superior" to what went before as recently as a century ago. Most of us like living longer lives in cleaner circumstances. We like sleeping between clean sheets on our fine beds. We like drinking clear, cool water and eating fresh, healthy food. Most of us don't want to draw the plow as a draft animal, slogging through the mud in our bare feet. We don't want to lose our eyesight or limbs, or get malaria, cholera or dystentery. We don't want to die from, or be maimed by, a thousand other diseases that used to curse mankind. In America, our Founding Fathers were an exceptionally lucky bunch, and, by today's standards, rather young to be making such profound changes and decisions. McCullough notes in 1776 they already had many injuries and disabilities. Yet, in their time, they had already lived to ripe old ages when they wrote the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution.
 

There are consequences to whatever the outcome of this American struggle over religion may be, because systems of beliefs support social relations. I propose this connection, as it nearly certain that one cannot invent the Hydrogen Bomb unless one knows how to manipulate some rather fancy physics and machine tools, and build complex factories. I think Schroedinger and Copernicus precede the Bomb, even if someone can think of some far-out way it might have been otherwise. By analogy, I don't think modern agriculture is supportable without modern science and technology. Very little or none of what we have is possible without science and technology. The Founding Fathers knew that over 200 years ago.
 

So, if the religionists win, it will mean the end of technological civilization in America. That is a consequence of their beliefs. It won't be the first time a backward culture triumphed over a more advanced one. (Sorry, I'm a bigot. I definitely believe what we have now is more "advanced" than what was. I prefer what we have now to what we didn't before.) If that happens, it will just mean there was some deficiency in our adaptation, an Achilles heel or two. The Greeks advanced very far, right to the edge of our modernity, and then fell back. Their conquerers, my ancient, direct ancestors, the Romans, were comparatively barbarians. The Romans did have the good sense to import Greek teachers and learning, but, unfortunately, also had the good sense not to import so much Greek thinking as to overthrow the Empire. Later on, they needed that last bit of Greek knowledge to ward off the mystery religions, such as Christianity, but they did not have it, so they succumbed. In the Roman case, the end began when they thwarted developments implied by Greek thinking.
 

It is an important fact that we can only see these things in retrospect. Historical analysis and Darwinian thinking do not guarantee any particular future. Study of the past may suggest patterns of change, cause and effect, but those patterns are only suggestions. We cannot know with certainty that past is prologue. We are not prohibited, however, from making "educated guesses" ("guestimates") and even calculating probabilities. If history works as I think, in a chaotic fashion, we may be justified in claiming causes and effects when events are constrained by an attractor - a "central principle." But that constraint only has effect for a time, and then events move to another path. By analogy or mystic intuition, we may even have a heuristic that takes us from one stable space-time to another, but "heuristic" is all we have. The farther we look in either direction (backward or forward) from whatever are present conditions, the less clear and certain are our speculations about those faraway events.

Assuming, as sadly I must, that we have not taken charge of our own destiny, Darwinian processes are taking place. We can know how some of those processes developed in the historical record. We can use that knowledge to speculate about the outcomes of current processes. We can be fairly sure that several outcomes are possible. We can be fairly sure that certain outcomes are dependent on the establishment of other, previous or concurrent outcomes. But, in the final analysis, we cannot know what will be the actual outcome. We can only do a post-mortem when it is all over.
 

While I cannot be assured of the result, I can hope the religionists will be defeated and set aside. My hope is not based on any religion or science, but only on my fear and rejection of religionists. For a long time, there was a schismatic sect of the Russian Church called "Old Believers." They lived in atrocious conditions in Siberia. Their religion allowed them to survive such poverty and deprivation, but it didn't allow them to get beyond it. Their numbers were small, because their children regularly abandoned that culture for the Big City and a "better life." Today, in America, we have a large number of Christian fundamentalists who are Old Believers. They differ from their Russian exemplars in managing to hold onto their children, using extensive and intensive "programming" (brainwashing, education).

The question is what beliefs will be inculcated in American children. This is the critical question of the "intelligent design" war. The answer decides what abilities those children, someday adults, will have in dealing with their "real" world.