More thoughts on evolution

Many years ago I had plans on doing a post about the ideology of "evolutionism" and the problems of interpreting the fact of evolution (if referring to evolution as a fact in the fossil record and natural selection and common descent the theory explaining it) and how, even with complete information of all of history, the problem of interpretation could never, of course, say anything at all about the existence and activity of God or even, and this was the salient bit for the conversations with "meat puppets"[1], any positive statement about ethics or morality based solely on those data. I never got around to it, otherwise I would not have written the above summary. I still stand by that most adamantly: science says nothing at all about morality or theology. I don't quite hold to "non-overlapping magisteria" or whatever those people say, this is more of a Wittgenstein-ian thing (late Wittgenstein). Science can inform moral decisions when those moral decisions rely in some way on facts (eg, if somebody wrongly thinks that the morality of abortion depends on whether or not the heart is beating or the fetus could survive outside the womb, Science will tell you directly when those two events occur). Pretending, or, worse, actually believing, science implies moral conclusions can lead to some very dangerous conclusions.

If you are coming to moral conclusions informed by science and by ancient theological thought, this becomes more important, since it requires knowing several things: old scientific thought, current scientific thought, old theological thinkers, and the relation of the theologian to the schools of old scientific thought. A common pitfall here is again in the unfortunate case of abortion. People who don't read very well sometimes come across the notion that some Christian thinkers allowed abortion until a certain point of the pregnancy, and therefore modern opposition is ahistorical. A familiarity with Aristotle's Biology and what was meant by anima (sorry, we're discussing the Latin) in that context would immediately make clear the concern of the theologians involved and the application of modern knowledge of the processes of life would have two results: horrifying the theologians at how wrong their previous conclusion was (how many murders occurred because of their opinion?) and having them revise their opinion toward not allowing it after significantly earlier point - I would think to the sperm meeting the egg, but I cannot speak for them, as the parties involved have generally been dead for many, many centuries.

[1] "Meat puppets" referring to those who believe they are basically puppets made of meat.