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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   1861 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 1, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Is there a general term for the sort of broad political position of 'secular/atheist individual who believes in Darwinian evolution so deeply that he is led to reject liberalism, high modernist utopianism, and much of the "Enlightenment" project'?

What does it mean to "believe" in Darwinian evolution?

I mean, there are plenty of people who don't, disproportionately on the right.

I think "believe in" is the proper breakdown, as from Pratchett:

It’s hard to believe in the gods, he thought, when certain people are never struck by lightning. Why doesn’t it happen? If the gods wanted people to believe in them, they’d show themselves occasionally. That’s the whole point.

After all, you never needed faith in the postman. You just knew the postman would come, rain or shine, and deliver the mail. You didn’t have to believe in him. He was just there.

It was the same with the gods. They were just there, too, and you didn’t have to believe in them any more than you had to believe in the sky. You just knew they were there.

And if you didn’t believe in something, then it couldn’t help you.

By that standard, most biologists don't "believe in" evolution, it's simply there. My guess would be that someone who "believes in" Darwinian evolution uses it as a guiding principle and might do things like driving increased competition or having a lot of children. Or maybe a completely different set of beliefs. It's not like social movements stick close to their namesakes.

You just knew the postman would come, rain or shine, and deliver the mail. You didn’t have to believe in him. He was just there.

Yeah, until the Postal Service goes on strike. There are a lot of things we believe in without critically analyzing them, just because our beliefs are never challenged. But that doesn't mean they can't be.

And if you didn’t believe in something, then it couldn’t help you.

I love Pratchett, but he is making an exact opposite of the correct point here (which is fine because guess what, he's writing fantasy). The sky works the same whether you believe in it or not. You can believe the sky is totally fake, but it won't change any practical result - you can still fly an airplane, enjoy sunbathing and get wetted by the rain. However, I am not sure the concept of "evolution" is the same way. If you're a biologist and you accept it, would your actions and results be different than if you did not? The sky is the territory. The evolution is a map. It may be argued it is a great map - so be it, but it's still a map. You can choose to reject a certain map and use another one - with better results or worse, but you can. You can't "reject" a territory - you can ignore it, but that'd be still just a change of a map (to a much worse one).

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