2.5 – A Creature Like No Other (18 min video)

Transcript

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– Well, welcome to our final lecture for this week. Actually, I’m gonna start out with a quote by Patricia Churchland, who’s actually a philosopher and most certainly an evolutionist. She says this about our brains and our nervous system. We’re starting here because we’re discussing today what makes man, man. She says this, she says, “Boiled down to the essentials, “a nervous system,” our brain and so forth, “enables the organism,” enables us, “to succeed in feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing. “The principal chore of a nervous system “is to get the body parts where they should be “and/or the organism should survive.” She goes on to say that truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost. In other words, if we’re to approach who we are from a strictly materialist or evolutionary perspective, we end up with this issue of why is man so distinct?

Or in other words, to use Francis Schaeffer’s term, why is man mannish? Why is he so different from all of the animals and all the creatures as we actually know them? Well, take a look at a few categories of this, starting out with morality. The philosopher, Mitch Stokes, from whose book I was just quoting, says that if naturalism is true, if evolution is true, if we were just created by biological forces, essentially, then we should have a moral nihilism, meaning that we really shouldn’t have a true morality. We really shouldn’t even really care about morality. The Russian writer, Dostoevsky, said, “If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.” Stokes says, “Naturalism does not tell us how we ought to live or how we ought to behave.” And in fact, if you read the Evolutionists about morality, you come up with very similar issues. Richard Dawkins argued that biology and our genes are really a terrible prescription for morality. So he argued that we should try to teach things like generosity or things like altruism Simply because we can so that we can outsmart our own genes, of course, it begs the question Why would we want to if we are just the product of biological and genetic forces?

Harvard professor Mark Houser another evolutionist argues that our morality somehow evolved by experiences with our people that we have simply kind of just figured out what works actually is a very common position Jerry Coyne another Atheist and evolutionist argues that evolution can’t tell us what to do. It can’t tell us how we should behave Or we get characters like Sam Harris, for example, who argues that yes science can actually tell you morality You basically just run things like a science experiment figure out whatever causes well-being and that’s what you want to pursue whatever causes harm, that’s what you don’t want to pursue. That of course is a very simplistic idea, way of looking at it. It also doesn’t explain why we do what we actually want to do. Probably a more honest philosopher is the atheist Peter Singer, who says, I need facts to make a sensible decision, but no amount of facts can make up my mind for me.

Hence, no amount of facts can compel me to accept any value or any conclusion what I ought to do. He says we do not find our ethical premises in our biological nature or under cabbages either, we simply choose them. In other words, this is kind of the natural result of evolution. We simply choose our own morality. This is where someone like C.S. Lewis and his work “Mere Christianity” is extremely helpful because it’s there that Lewis is able to help us see that that we all have a sense of right from wrong, even when we fight about something, even when we make excuses, when we feel guilty about something and so forth, it reveals that there is some kind of a standard.

Lewis talks about some of the objections he might have encountered at the time, there’s the fact that, well, maybe we try to do good things, try to help people out of a herd instinct, we’re just biologically programmed to help each other, kind of like some animals help their own kind. Or maybe we are just biologically programmed to protect ourselves and protect our own lives, which is why we often flee from danger. But of course, Lewis says that when you have a situation where someone is in danger and to go and help them requires you to put yourself at danger, you have to decide between those two instincts.

And it’s that third thing, what we would call the conscience, that seems to be an enormous hint by the fact that there actually is a morality and the fact that there is something absolute, there actually is a God.

I love what Lewis says in “Miracle Christianity.” I’ll quote it. He says that the whole universe has no meaning. We should never have found out that it has no meaning. We really shouldn’t care ’cause it has nothing to do with our biological survival of what was that, fighting and fleeing and so forth. He says, “Just as if there was no light in the universe “and therefore no creatures with eyes, “then we should never have known it was dark, dark would be without a meaning. And his conclusion is, he says, quote, “I find that I do not exist on my own, “and that I am under a law that somebody or something “wants me to behave in a certain way.” In other words, morality is a huge hint that man is manish. Second category we’ll look at, and we could look at a whole lot more, but the second category we’ll look at is the category of art. the fact that humans distinctly make art and they make art different from animals. I mean, it is true. We have creatures such as the bowerbird, which will make the sometimes elaborate nest using all kinds of colorful objects. It’s even true that other birds like the weaver bird that makes these elaborate nests and these nests can actually improve over time. One thing to note is that these behaviors are innate and they only are to that species and they’re only for pragmatic reasons, meaning they’re only for the purpose of actually attracting a mate and reproducing the species. So it’s not quite the same free will attribute of art that we have or we create because we have this compulsion to create. Well, there are animal examples. One of the most famous is the chimpanzee Congo, who was a London zoo in the 1950s. this chimpanzee Congo made these abstract paintings and whenever a painting was brought back to him, if he felt like painting more, he would do so.

If he didn’t, he would refuse to paint and but would always paint on a new canvas. It’s probably the closest example we have to an animal just kind of wanting to create and so forth. But once again, the art was always fairly simplistic. It never really went anywhere. And keep in mind if the animals are essentially kind of like helpers to mankind and part of our dominion, it would make sense that they reflect some of our traits.

I also, of course, have the example of painting elephants, such as elephants in Thailand, for example, who have been witnessed as, or people have witnessed them painting flowers or painting other elephants and things like that.

I read an article by actually a friend of Richard Dawkins, Desmond Morris, in the Daily Mail, from 2009, where he actually went to Thailand and actually investigated this to see if they really do create art.

And what he discovered was they have trainers who have trained them to paint and who control the brushstrokes through various tugs on their ears.

So it’s not actual creation of art as we would describe it amongst humans. But of course, Cheshire 10 can address this best in his book, “The Everlasting Man.” Let me read to you the section about birds’ nests and how that relates to art and how it’s different than man’s art. Cheshun writes, he says, “The very fact that a bird can get as far as building a nest and cannot get any farther, in art that is, proves he is not a mind as a man has a mind.

It proves it more completely than if he built nothing at all. If he built nothing at all, he might possibly be a philosopher, indifferent to all but the mind within. But when he builds as he builds, and is satisfied and sings loud with satisfaction, then we know there really is an invisible veil like a pane of glass between him and us.

But let’s just suppose that some abstract onlooker saw one of the birds begin to build as men build. Suppose in an incredibly short space of time, there were seven different styles of architecture for one style of nest. Suppose the bird carefully selected forked twigs and pointed leaves to express the piercing piety of Gothic architecture, but turned to broad foliage and black mud when he sought, in a darker mood, to call up the heavy columns of bale and ashtoreth from antiquity.

Or suppose the bird made little clay statues of birds, of other birds who were celebrated in letters or politics, and stuck them up in the front of the nest.

Suppose that one bird out of a thousand birds began to do one of the thousand things that that man has already done even in the morning of the world.

In other words, suppose a bird actually did those things. It’s kind of ridiculous, that’s Tushnet’s whole point. He says, “That something, if it appeared, “would be the appearance of a mind “with a new dimension of depth. “It would be a mind like that of man.” In other words, the fact that we create art that we do, the fact that we create music like we do, the fact that we find things beautiful, And as Carl Sagan pointed out, they actually cause some kind of internal response to us.

All of those things are hints at our manishness. It’s also Chesterton, by the way, who pointed out that we are the only creature that laughs because something is funny. We can also take a look at how man is manish by the fact that we have a conscience, by the fact that we have consciousness and we have reason.

In fact, paleoanthropologists, those people that study those early fossils of humans, something we’ll talk about later, they’re often trying to figure out, “Okay, when did consciousness actually develop?” because they reject Genesis as kind of just an assumption right from the beginning. But we have this issue, the fact that we have reason that even contemplates its existence, especially evolution, but there’s no biological or evolutionary explanation for why we should care. Charles Darwin himself said that facts compel me to conclude that my brain was never formed for much thinking. In other words, he recognized that we should not be able to think like we do if it’s just a result of biology. There has to be something more to it. The British philosopher John Locke said, “It is impossible to conceive that ever pure, “incognitive matter,” matter that doesn’t think, “should produce a thinking, intelligent being, “as that nothing of itself could produce matter.” Meaning there has to be mind at the heart of all creation. Something the Greeks understood, and all philosophers understood very well until evolution changed the narrative. Darwin actually has more to say about this and it’s worth reading here. Darwin wrote in a letter to a friend, he said, “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, the ability to reason, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, according to evolution, are of any value or at all trustworthy.

Would “Would anyone trust the convictions of a monkey’s mind “if there are any convictions in such a mind?” In other words, it goes back to what Lewis was talking about that if our minds did indeed evolve from some kind of biological process from the primates, then why do we even care about how that actually happened?

We never should have actually developed this kind of consciousness. But the final thing we’ll talk about we’ll talk about the unique nature of man to use language. For this I’ll actually start out by quoting Douglas Kelly, whose book Creation and Change is a marvelous read on these topics we’ve been covering and much, much more. But he has this to say about language and man. He says, “Linguistic studies demonstrate,” these studies of language, as the scientists Oler and Amdel have stated that “apparently human beings, and only humans, are specially designed to acquire just the range of language systems that we see manifested in the world’s 5,000+ languages.” In the great Jewish linguist Noam Chomsky has shown that the ability to learn language is given in being human. “The rate of vocabulary acquisition is so high at certain stages of life, and the precision and delicacy of the concepts acquired are so remarkable that it seems necessary to conclude that in some manner the conceptual system with which lexical items are connected is already substantially in place.

” In other words, we have this natural ability to acquire language. We have this natural ability to use language which we cannot find in animals. Melissa Hagenboom, writing for the BBC in 2015, said, “We have our advanced language skills to thank for that, “for the fact that we’re different, “for the fact that we have developed “so much more than the animals are.” She says, “We may see evidence of basic “language abilities in chimpanzees, “but we’re the only ones writing things down. “We tell stories, we dream, “we imagine things about ourselves and others, “and we spend a great deal of time “thinking about the future and analyzing the past, something that animals do not do. There’s a great book by Tom Wolfe called The Kingdom of Speech in which he tries to deal with these issues. He talks about how evolutionists throughout time have tried to figure out where did language come from. It’s one of the trickiest situations for them. Darwin thought that maybe we were imitating birdsong and that’s where it came from. Noam Chomsky, who’s a great evolutionary linguist, assumes that we have some kind of organ in the brain that helps us create and understand language, something that no one has ever been able to figure out or discover.

Other evolutionists have assumed that when we started walking on two legs, we had more time to communicate with our hands, which is kind of what I do sometimes, and that’s how it began. In other words, we really have no idea where it came from from an evolutionary perspective, and this is very evident, or was very evident, in a 2014 report in the Frontiers of Psychology, which was called The Mysteries of Language Evolution.

It was written by Noam Chomsky and others. It was in that report that they said that despite 40 years of studying this problem, they were no closer to actually figuring out how language evolved.

They actually said there was a poverty of evidence in actually trying to figure it out. The same paper said that when it comes to animals, that they don’t really learn or even use language like we do. That is true, that dogs can understand sometimes up to a thousand words, for example, but that takes thousands of hours of training, and children don’t require that kind of time. Well, they talk, for example, the famous chimpanzee called Nim Chimpsky, name it for the philosopher or the linguist we just talked about, was that he was very advanced in his ability of understanding certain words, but he was not any more advanced than a two-year-old child.

He didn’t create words, he didn’t interpret words, he didn’t use words in new ways, he didn’t use syntax, he didn’t really pay attention to word order. All of these things that we actually do. The same paper recognized that we already have fully developed language abilities very early on, whereas animals develop them very early on as well, but they’re kind of complete. They don’t continue to develop them as we actually do. The paper also recognized that we have not found any precursors to the earliest form of writing, which is cuneiform, which is a highly complex system.

Their conclusion was that surely we must be able to find an evolution of language. The only way to do it is hopefully we’ll find some early precursor to cuneiform, something more than just, say, the cylinder seals. We’ll talk about that later, too. Or perhaps we’ll be able to develop technology to actually read animals’ thoughts and kind see how that works. In other words, they have no idea. Or we could put it this way. And what all these things are showing us is that man being man-ish, being imago dei, made in God’s image, has certain traits that separate us from the animals and allow us to build the culture and the civilization that we see today that is built upon the culture and civilization of the past which we’ll be studying this year.