This is the seventh article I have written as part of an ongoing debate with Mr. Adrian Thysse on the reasonableness of Christian faith. This is also the first of the 3rd generation of articles. The second generation of articles were written as responses to Mr. Thysse’s comments on, The Faith of Reason. This article is in response to a comment he made on one of those second generation articles. To make it easier to follow, I have cut his comment into sections and placed them in block quotes.
It has been about a month since my last article and I know I promised to get back sooner. I do apologize but, this is not the kind of blog that you read to hear about what I’ve been up to so I will not burden you with that. I do intend to respond to all of Mr. Thysse’s points and for that matter I am also still planning to write an article on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I may write another article tomorrow, no promises though.
I shall be responding to the last part of Mr. Thysse’s comment on Evil in Society. It appears below.
Evolution neatly accounts for why we are universally horrified by the harming of infants. -Mr. Thysse
This is not the case according to Harvard evolutionary psychologist, Steven Pinker. On November 2, 1997, Dr. Pinker published a now infamous article in the New York Times. The title of the article was, Why They Kill Their Newborns. In the article, Dr. Pinker lays out in no uncertain terms and quite convincingly, how the theory of evolution not only explains why, but predicts that women will occasionally kill their own newborn children.
“the emotional circuitry of mothers has evolved to cope with this uncertain process, so the baby killers turn out to be not moral monsters but nice, normal (and sometimes religious) young women.”
This is in direct contradiction to Mr. Thyss’s statement. One thing, (in this case, evolution) cannot be the explanation for opposites. In a similar way opposites cannot both be used as evidence in the same argument. An attorney would have to be insane to defend his client based on the premises that his client was both at the post office and at the pharmacy at the time of the crime.
Mr. Thysse’s point that, evolution explains an abhorrence of harming infants and, Dr. Pinker’s point that evolution explains why young women kill their infants are obviously in direct opposition to one another. Whether they are inferred from the theory of evolution, or used as support for the theory of evolution, a contradiction exists.
My point in saying all of this is not to slam either Dr. Pinker or Mr. Thysse. I am sure both of them could produce multiple sources and citations in support of their respective positions. Dr. Pinker made the list of the 100 most influential intellectuals in the world, he’s a fairly authoritative source in his own right (and if you have been following this article series, you know that Mr. Thysse is better at finding citations and source material than I am.) This does nothing however, for either of their cases. Rather, the more source material they could both produce, the greater the depth of logical inconsistency in the Secular Humanist worldview.
This debate originally centered on how reasonable the Christian worldview is and I admit that I have gotten a little off track with this article. We will get back to Christianity, soon enough, but I felt that Mr. Thysse’s comment provided an opportunity to examine the reasonableness of Secular Humanism, one of Christianity’s chief rivals. I expect comments on this one, so fire away!