Darwin's nihilistic idea: evolution and the meaninglessness of life

It has often been thought, and has recently been argued, that one of the most profound impacts of Darwin's theory of evolution is the threat that it poses to the very possibility of living a meaningful, and therefore worthwhile, life. Three attempts to ground the possibility of a meaningful life are considered. The first two are compatible with an exclusively Darwinian worldview. One is based on the belief that Darwinian evolution is, in some sense, progressive; the other is based on the belief that the natural world is a thing of value and hence, that our lives are lived in the presence of value. The third is based on a belief in providence, and holds that we must transcend the exclusively Darwinian worldview if we are to find meaning. All three are, for different reasons, rejected. The conclusion reached is that, contrary to what has often been thought and recently argued, the impact of Darwin's theory is precisely to liberate us to lead the most meaningful of lives.

1992

Artificial Life is, by its nature, an interdisciplinary research programme; it will involve biologists, of course, but also philosophers, mathematicians, chemists, computer scientists-and perhaps even (as in my case) engineers. Success in our endeavours will require some of us, at least, to venture into foreign territory. This essay is a log of my personal expedition into evolutionary biology. I attempt to provide a comprehensive review of Darwinism in the biological world, and to do so as an outsider-a non-professional in the field. My purpose is twofold. Firstly, I hope that real biologists may take this opportunity to correct at least the worst of my errors. Secondly, I offer this to other non-specialists as a sort of map-a record of my particular exploration. I hope it might at least provide some insight into the kinds of questions which need to be asked, even if the particular answers suggested here are less than satisfactory. Above all, I want to convince any who may be in doubt that Darwinism encompasses a complex and subtle system of interrelated theories, whose substantive transplantation to any artificial medium will be very far from easy. This essay draws on abstract concepts introduced in a previous essay (McMullin 1992); the two essays are therefore best read in conjunction.

The Review of Politics, 1988

This chapter is written in response to Anthony O'Hear's "Darwinian Tensions." However, it goes beyond a mere response in attempting to present some of the main aspects of a robust naturalism which fi nds its basis in evolutionary theory. Central to it is a naturalist account of cognition based upon an investigation of the deep analogies between cognition and evolution.

Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society , 2016

Contemporary philosophers wonder about the implications of the theory of evolution for our ability to know the ‘truth’. In other words, are we as a species evolved specifically for survival, or are we evolved for what is often termed in the literature as ‘true belief’, or is it some combination of both elements? In recent times, thinkers such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Alister McGrath, Thomas Nagel, Alvin Plantinga, to name but a few, have been to the fore when it comes to writing on the theory of evolution pertaining to the question of truth, purpose, and the question of meaning. In this paper, we wish to examine the dilemma posed by Darwin’s theory of evolution. Some thinkers argue for the possibility of ‘evolutionary reliabilism’, others for mitigated skepticism, but either case appears to require that there is intelligibility in place in order to exposit their own positions. If there is intelligibility and a porosity for meaning, then additional questions arise as to where that meaning would originate from—is it simply an inherent accident of nature or pointing to something beyond?

Philosophical Studies, 2008

Alvin Plantinga has famously argued that metaphysical naturalism is self-defeating, and cannot be rationally accepted. I distinguish between two different ways of understanding this argument, which I call the "probabilistic inference conception", and the "process characteristic conception". I argue that the former is what critics of the argument usually presuppose, whereas most critical responses fail when one assumes the latter conception. To illustrate this, I examine three standard objections to Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism: the Perspiration Objection, the Tu Quoque Objection, and the "Why Can't the Naturalist Just Add a Little Something?" Objection. I show that Plantinga's own responses to these objections fail, and propose counterexamples to his first two principles of defeat. I then go on to construct more adequate responses to these objections, using the distinctions I develop in the first part of the paper.

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection revolutionized biology and our understanding of the origin and diversity of life. In Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Thought You Knew, Steve Stewart-Williams unleashes the theory and addresses its implications for theology, ethics, philosophy, and the purpose and place of humans among animals and the cosmos at large.

Environmental Values, 2011

While finding no fault with Darwinism as a scientific theory, this paper argues that there are serious problems for the scientistic construal of Darwinism that interprets the universe as nothing but a purely random and contingent flow of events. Life in a godless impersonal universe is beset by contingency, alienation, despair, failure and fragility. Notwithstanding Alan Holland's claim that we can evade these problems though self-affirmation, I argue that human beings can achieve meaningful lives only by acknowledging our dependency and accepting the authority of values we did not create.

Philosophy in review, 2019

This excellent collection focuses on three major approaches in current academic philosophy to the question of the relationship between ethics and human evolution. Perhaps a bit more than is usual in edited volumes of this type, it is constructed around the particular interests and philosophical proclivities of editors Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards. This is a strength in that Ruse and Richards can afford the space to provide an historical perspective of how the debate in which both are avid participants came to take shape, and to present different arguments by multiple philosophers defending a limited set of competing positions. It is a weakness in that the contributors too often refer to each other, and thus allow themselves to neglect too many important contemporary philosophical perspectives on this topic, as well as the insights and discoveries of many scientists and scholars outside of philosophy departments which could (and should) inform their arguments. Part I traces how the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species (in 1859) and The Descent of Man (in 1871) affected academic moral philosophy. With the exception of Naomi Beck's discussion of Friedrich von Hayek (Chapter 4), this section directly addresses the interests of the editors and thus works effectively as a springboard to what comes after. Lillihammer (Chapter 1) shows that Anglophone philosophers through much of the twentieth century 'explicitly responded to' evolutionary approaches to ethics and, for the most part, 'turned away from them on the basis of what they thought of as decisive arguments' (15). Several of these arguments are revived and updated in Part III. In the meantime Jeffrey O'Connell (Chapter 2) explores Friedrich Nietzsche's loathing of evolutionary theory, while Trevor Pearce (Chapter 3) wades through the more ambivalent reception Darwin's ideas found among American pragmatic philosophers. Pearce and Abraham Gibson (Chapter 5) pay special attention to the competition between Darwin's and Herbert Spencer's very different conceptions of evolution. Unlike Darwinism, which is decidedly non-teleological, the Spencerian view highlights the 'correspondence between organism and environment' and envisions an ever-improving natural world in which '[m]ore evolved species … are able to meet a wider and more complicated set of environmental challenges' (45). Spencer was, as Gibson points out, 'the most widely read philosopher in the United States through the second half of the nineteenth century' (74). Yet, 'mastery of the atom' and the discovery of DNA 'accelerated the biological sciences' wholesale shift towards reductionism' (80) and with it Darwinism's rise to hegemonic supremacy. As Ruse points out in his contribution (Chapter 6), which opens Part II of the book, Spencer's ideas remain influential among ecologists such as Rachel Carson and James Lovelock (89), as well as many philosophers, writers, and artists. He even taunts his coeditor Richards for being a Spencerian (90), a charge that Richards good-humoredly rejects as 'the product of a long day in the sun' (5). Yet the question is of paramount importance to metaethical debates about moral justification and indeed about the nature of morality itself. 'The world after Darwin,' declares Ruse, all too rightly, 'is very different from the world before Darwin' (89). If one accepts Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection as fact-and how can one not, given the heaps of extant evidence in support of it, not least of which is the entire field of genetics?-then one must confront its implications: evolution is purposeless and directionless, a product of uncountable random mutations and fortuitous, transient conjunctions between species and environments.