Another excellent post by Steve Kellmeyer showing the concequence of an argument about global warming.
It' ain't natural
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"It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it." GKC
4 comments
I don’t buy the argument that global warming is ‘unnatural.’ It is nature’s ‘natural’ response to abuse of the environment by man.
Well for one thing, global warming is a myth. The evidence is very weak and misinterpreted. But, I do like to make this case to secular friends. If we’re just animals, then so what if we cut down trees, slash and burn, drill for oil, drive big honkin’ SUVs. Screw the baby seals. Survival of the fittest, baby.
Also, if we’re just animals, then what’s wrong with violent crime? Do you arrest a lion who kills another lion intruding on his territory? Of course not, he’s just an animal. Then they’ll tell me, well you can do whatever you want as long as you don’t hurt anybody else. Says who? Where does that rule come from?
Any sort of vague ideas about kindness or justice or human intellectual superiority inevitably point to a divine Creator.
Although the believer views morality and
laws as deriving from the Creator, the humanist
or darwinist only sees them as measures/traditions which
improve the chances of the survival of the
species as a whole by fostering societal stability.
Neglecting all moral implications, global warming, whatever its root causes, could have consequences that are unpleasant for humans, not just for the baby seals. – We control other natural processes when tehy become too inconvenient (e.g. forest fires).
It’s all very amusing, but hardly convincing evidence for the special status of humans.
ann(-e)
I’ve never heard an effective rebuttal to the argument that natural selection can’t be the major force driving species’ success or failure, or human beings would have died out before we really got started. The brain size of humans is such that human infants have to be born oecious – early and relatively undeveloped – as opposed to being born precocious, such as animals that can walk (or cling, or swim) very soon after birth. The natural-selection disadvantage to having a large helpless infant (and human newborns can weigh as much as a tenth of the mother’s weight) who has to carried everywhere, and can’t even hold on to the mother by itself, would have made it next to impossible for humans to reproduce successfully. Mothers who were recently delivered or in the last stages of pregnancy would have been far too easy prey for the large, fast predators that have existed everywhere that early evidence of man has been found. Humans beings’ much-vaunted ability to avoid or outwit predators would not have preserved early man as a species if the females and young were so desperately vulnerable, if natural selection were the main pressure behind speciation. They wouldn’t have survived to the point of developing language and planning skills to enable them to protect the next generation. It isn’t as though they could put the young in the middle and make a ring around them with their great big antlers pointing outwards, like elk, or have relied on speed and frequent reproduction to outdistance predation, like rabbits. Defensively speaking, all humans have is intelligence, and that by itself wouldn’t cut it against a saber cat.