No one has conceived an adequate name. We are basically stuck with naturalism. One can try philosophical naturalism or ontological naturalism. But they aren’t much of an improvement. We just have to deal with a clunky name for it. Sadly.

As to the short manifesto idea, I have ideas about doing that in future. But I have too many projects already in the queue first.

You need a pretty convincing and solid argument (more than anecdotal evidence) that the cognitive tools which drive cultural evolution trump the natural laws and forces that drive biological evolution.

If science and democracy and industrial technology were biological, we would have had them a hundred thousand years ago. So, clearly, they are not. If you think our biology wholly trumps science and democracy and industrial technology, you are a very poor student of history.

humans are just animals – not all that unique.

When a monkey cures polio, then you can make this point.

But that hasn’t happened, so you can’t.

Extinction is hardly uninformed paranoid unscientific fantasy.

Yes, it is. Read the article I wrote about it.

Even a full scale nuclear war, detonating every nuke that exists on the planet, would not extinguish the human race. It would just set us back a few centuries.

Anyone who thinks otherwise, doesn’t know how the inverse square law affects blast radius, and hasn’t noticed that life has thrived without cessation at Chernobyl, and that there are people who were in Hiroshima when it was bombed who not only survived, but are still alive today.

Ditto any other manmade scenario you can conceive. And that’s with current tech. Every decade our resilience increases as the technical means to survive harm increases.

It’s really weird that you think this makes us identical to dinosaurs…who didn’t even have nukes, much less the tech to survive a nuclear winter (which is the only reason they didn’t). If dinosaurs had space stations, geothermal power plants, electric lamps, and hydroponics, they would not have gone extinct. So using them as an analogy to us is precisely that bad science I was talking about.

You also aren’t very good at math concepts, either. A 4% difference in where a bullet hits you makes the difference between living or dying. Which are radically, fundamentally different states to be in. So 4% doesn’t mean anything out of context. By the same reasoning, you cannot argue from the mere fact that we are 4% different in DNA coding from other primates that we are only 4% phenotypally different from them. A small genetic variation can entail a huge phenotypal one. That difference is measured in space stations, power plants, electric lamps, and agriculture. Which is way the hell more than a 4% difference from chimpanzees and their termite sticks.

You need to be a better thinker than this.

You need a pretty convincing and solid argument (more than anecdotal evidence) that the cognitive tools which drive cultural evolution trump the natural laws and forces that drive biological evolution – if that is indeed the case you are trying to make. Intelligent design has a lot less experience than the millions of years of natural selection out of which a complex brain emerged. The thought that wise, intelligent and conscious acceleration of adaptability has made the human animal immune to contingency and fate smacks more of metaphysical trans-naturalism than naturalism. Your suggestion that the arc of history bends toward wisdom and well-being is a faith based statement, not a scientific one. Maybe in our enlightened instead of benighted day and age, the human animal IS trans-natural. :-0

Repressing the fear of death and the yielding to the denial of death are both very real. You don’t deny the denial of death do you? The threat of extinction is hardly based on scientific illiteracy. Minimizing the threat, ignoring it, denying it, being distracted is habitual. Check out “What SHOULD We Be Worried About: Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night” by John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org before you bandy about the term “scientific illiteracy.” For shame.

After reading Pinker’s “Better Angels” I thought Herman and Peterson’s critique ” Reality Denial: Steven Pinker’s Apologetics For Western-Imperial Violence” more based in empiricism. For humans to think that cultural evolution will forestall our own extinction as we carry on business as usual with our current political/economic/social habits is denying reality too. It’s to synthesize an ancient myth with a modern illusion that humans are – because of our big brains, the ability to accumulate knowledge through writing, and our adaptive cognitive tools – Historic animals with a rationality (transcendent Logos out of the gospel of John) that increases over time. Faith based myth making.

Metaphysical naturalism and neo-Darwinism have demonstrated conclusively that humans are just animals – not all that unique. From an anti-humanist author “Human uniqueness is a myth inherited from religion, which humanists have recycled into science.” Show me the science that any animal is proof against contingency and fate! Because human cultural evolution is progressive, does that progress make the human animal immune to the laws and forces of nature which govern the universe? You can conjecture and hypothesize about myths all you want, but don’t confuse that with scientific theory. Darwin, Dawkins (“The Selfish Gene”), Dennett, et al show that a species is only a collection of genes interacting within its genotype/phenotype and against a changing environment. People who think that higher concentrations of greenhouse gases, disrupted natural cycles, collapsing ecosystems, and rising baseline dry bulb temps are not selective pressures on a species at the top of the food chain are the ones living in a fantasy. These disruptions pose a real threat (not imaginary, not mythical) to the human animal and constitute a changing environment. To think otherwise is to deny reality.

Extinction is hardly uninformed paranoid unscientific fantasy. To speak about extinction is hardly fear mongering. E.O. Wilson coined the word Eremozoic for the next geological era. Was he being unscientific? Are you a scientist of higher repute than Wilson? Death is as natural as sex as the driver of evolution. Natural history and modern evolutionary synthesis show quite matter-of-factly that extinction is the rule. Human survival of climate disruption is hardly a foregone conclusion. I might read “Are We Doomed?” but the answer is clearly yes. The human species will go extinct, sooner or later. Those who think that it is hundreds of millions of years into the future could very well have bought into a secularized heroic cosmic immortality identity project.

I realize that you are a philosopher and an historian, not an evolutionary biologist and not a climate scientist and not an investigative journalist. I realize also that you are rooted and grounded in the humanist faith. I am extremely skeptical of that faith. From Wikipedia: Humanism is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers critical thinking and evidence (rationalism, empiricism) over established doctrine or faith (fideism)… [ETA: three of the articles of faith in humanism seems to be that (1) humans are unique (inherently different) from animals, (2) that those inherent differences ought to be maximized in terms of propaganda and (3) the philosophical and ethical stance affirms meliorism. Cont quote] Generally, however, humanism refers to a perspective that affirms some notion of a “human nature” (sometimes contrasted with anti-humanism – also from Wikipedia – In social theory and philosophy, anti-humanism is a theory that is critical of traditional humanism and traditional ideas about humanity and the human condition. Central to anti-humanism is the view that concepts of “human nature”, “man”, or “humanity”, should be rejected as historically relative or metaphysical.” Between humanism and anti-humanism I wonder which one is more in harmony with naturalism. Hmmm.

I am reminded of a conversation I had with a psychologist about the denial of death and repressed fears about the annihilation of the mental ego. When I brought up the five previous mass extinctions in geological history, that we are in the sixth (with the rate of extinction higher than the previous five and accelerating) she replied, “Oh, I don’t believe in those things.” Denial of science comes in many shapes and sizes. The fact that it is human behavior that is driving a geological mass extinction event makes the philosophy of humanism all the more repugnant.

I would agree that there are some fundamental differences between our species and our closest primate relatives. That 4% DNA difference packs quite a wallop. The cognitive tools make it a grand slam. But the anecdotal evidence of what we can do with our tools compared to other animals does not take away from the anthropocentrism inherent in the anti-naturalist humanist faith.

That’s up to you. If you have a lot of questions you’d like to ask, then the course is for you (and you have a leg up for having done most of the class reading already). If you don’t have any questions about the text, then it won’t likely gain enough for you to be worth registering. There may be some other readings outside SGG, but not that many.

Cultural evolution is obviously progressive. Because unlike genomics, it’s a product of intelligent design. Read Better Angels of Our Nature. I was pointing these facts out myself nearly a decade ago, and with broader examples (Sense and Goodness without God V.1.2, pp. 302-11).

Fears of our extermination are massively unrealistic and are generally based on science illiteracy. I already covered this in Are We Doomed? Naturalism is based on science as it actually is, not uninformed paranoid fantasies. Nor would our future extinction have any bearing whatever on the truth of naturalism, or its utility for our present lives. So that is a giant red herring. Even if humans won’t exist a thousand years from now, we still have to sort our lives out here and now.

And it’s silly to say self-consciousness is not a fundamental difference from other animals. It put men on the moon and now tracks asteroid threats to the earth. Monkeys can’t do either.

[Note to my readers: I didn’t delete the above comment because it is another example of the kind of ignorant idiocy we are dealing with. His behavior and attitude is only making our point for us.]

That’s very nice. But it has nothing to do with this blog post.

Looking forward to the course.