How to Destroy Love with Darwinism
When we make sacrifices that benefit others, is it a real conscious choice? Or are we just unconsciously acting on an evolved genetic trait? On today’s ID the Future from the vault, host Andrew McDiarmid presents an Evolution News essay, “How to Destroy Love with Darwinism.”
Altruism, as defined by evolutionists, means “behavior by an animal that may be to its disadvantage but that benefits others of its kind.” It’s not an easy fit with Darwinism, since Darwinian evolution is all about passing your favored genes onto your offspring. How can a creature do that if she gives her life for another, particularly when it’s not even her own children, and before she has produced any offspring? Such individuals fail to pass on their own genes — a seeming conundrum for Darwinism. Evolutionists think they’ve made some progress explaining such things with theories of group selection or kin selection. But those explanations face some fresh challenges and don’t even begin to explain self-sacrificial acts done for non-kin, a behavior we see among humans. “Remember, to scientific materialists, humans are just populations of organisms, like ants,” McDiarmid reads. “That soldier on the grenade must have been invaded by the altruism allele lurking in his population.”
From a design perspective, though, such behaviors are not baffling, for they are not genetically determined acts, as if humans are only robots governed by genes. They are acts of true self-sacrificial love, done freely and made possible because reality is more than matter and energy, and humans are more than just DNA survival machines.
DIG DEEPER
Just last month, neurobiologist and behavioral scientist Robert Sapolsky launched the latest attack on free will in his book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. Listen to Dr. Eric Hedin respond to the arguments for determinism in these recent episodes of ID The Future:
LISTEN: Eric Hedin on Suffering in a Designed World
LISTEN: Eric Hedin on Free Will and Morality in a Designed World
READ: Casey Luskin critiques evolutionary psychology’s attempts to explain human behavior in evolutionary terms: Is Human Psychology Better Explained by Evolution or Design?