Reply to Holland … the Meaning of Life and Darwinism

Abstract

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.

A phenomenological challenge to ‘enlightened secularism’

“…One strategy for identifying them is to consider people's very different responses to certain broad philosophical doctrines, such as naturalism. John Cottingham regards the naturalistic picture of the world – of brute contingencies, of our fragile existence in a random universe – as an impossibly ‘bleak’ picture, within which a ‘fulfilled and worthwhile life’ becomes impossible (Cottingham (2011b), 299). Yet that same naturalistic doctrine, replete with contingencies and randomness, elicits no such despair from Richard Dawkins, who by contrast regards its picture of the world with a ‘feeling of awed wonder’ and a ‘deep aesthetic passion’, which, as Dawkins puts it, ‘makes life worth living’ (Dawkins (2000), x).…”

“…The second is that Miller presumes that all persons – religious or otherwise – can and will find naturalistic ethics a ‘rewarding moral framework for human interaction’. That, too, is unpersuasive because many religious persons report their disenchantment with the ethical and existential potential of naturalism – for instance, its ‘bleakness’ (see Cottingham (2011a) and Haught (2006)). The third and most disturbing point is that Miller does not actually recommend engaging religious persons in the sustained rational and evidential debates which – one hopes – would be central to secularism in all its forms.…”

Is Naturalism Bleak? A Reply to Holland and Cottingham

“…2. See Cottingham 2011 andHolland 2009. Environmental Values 22.6 ness' charge: that Darwinian naturalism describes a world marked by brute contingency, alienation, and randomness in a way that jeopardises the possibility of one's living a genuinely meaningful life within it. Although their concerns about the 'bleakness' of Darwinian naturalism are well-taken, I argue that certain modifications need to be made to Cottingham's and Holland's accounts of it.…”

Editorial: Building on the Past, Creating a Future

“…Ted Benton also returned to Darwin's own writing to show how it presents nothing of the reductionist picture with which it is so often represented (Benton 2009). Holland's paper drew comments from both Robin Attfield and John Cottingham: on the question of meaningful life (Cottingham 2011) and the role of value (Attfield 2011).…”