My line of thought was:
---Undoubtedly, judging by what they wrote, human beings up to about 150 years ago--and many still today--**did** regard humanity as a finished product, created by God's hand. The product included all its petty variations, of course; but nobody thought that humans developed by gradations from other creatures, still less did anyone think that humans might develop, by gradations, **into** other creatures. This finished-product view of humanity stood at the center of all religions.
---Once it became clear that these things were so, religious people split into two camps. One camp just refused, and still refuses, to look, saying that these things cannot possibly be so, because they contradict the ordinary religious thinking of 1,850 years. Which, in my opinion, as stated in my original piece, they do. The people in this camp--I use "Creationists" as a convenient label, though it always starts arguments--believe that the modern picture of man as a mere line segment on Nature's continuum cannot be squared with the truths of religion, or at any rate of the Christian religion. (Though lots of people in the other Abrahamic religions agree with them, and I think some Hindus, too.)
---The other camp, whose strongest cohort, so far as I know, is in the Roman Catholic Church, summoned up its intellectuals to get to work to rationalize the new understanding, so that it could be accepted. They wanted it fitted in to RC doctrine, so that they could then say: "Well, OK, but see--it doesn't contradict anything that we've always believed." RC intellectuals are, in my opinion, superb--probably the best religious intellectuals in the world, ever. They'll give you an elegantly-constructed argument for absolutely anything. They also feel they got badly burned by the Galileo business (as a PR matter, I mean, whether justly or not) and are determined not to let **that** happen again.
---But the fact that religious intellectuals, when new truths of this sort are uncovered, have to be set to work to incorporate them into the body of doctrine, weakens the force of that doctrine. Religion is supposed to contain eternal truths. Each time you say: "Well, yes, that's what our grandfathers believed, but now we know they were wrong, and what we SHOULD be believing is this..."--each time you say that, you sap away a little at religion's claim to eternal truth.
---The cumulative effect of all those saps, eventually, is to undermine religious faith.
That's all I was saying.
[As a footnote there, reading through what I just wrote, it sounds as if, for all my diatribes against "Intelligent Design," I am actually more sympathetic to the ID-ers than I am to the Catholic church's rationalization of Darwinism. I just noticed that, and I want to think about it a bit more, but yes, comparing the ID-ers' flat rejection of truths that are inconsistent with scripture, to the Catholic church's subtle, brilliant finessing of the issue, there is at least a sort of bull-headed damn-the-torpedoes honor in the first approach that is absent from the second.]
Can Wesley Smith come up with a 500-word argument for human exceptionalism? I would never have doubted for a moment that he could. He is an extremely smart guy. Are his beliefs about the universe and humanity congruent at every point with his grandfather's? No, they aren't. Then where are these eternal truths? (And please don't tell me "in the Creed." That's metaphysics. Very few religions--I think Hinayana Buddhism may be an exception--have been content to restrict their teachings to metaphysics. Certainly the RC church has not. And once you venture outside the metaphysical sphere, you expose yourself to contradiction, or at least vitiation, by scientific inquiry.)
I was arguing that in the light of modern biology, man looks much more like just another branch of the tree of life than he did to our grandfathers, or even to the younger John Derbyshire, and that this weakens faith--has weakened mine. That "looks like" may of course be an illusion; but science does the best it can, and its track record with the physical world, as against any revealed religion's, is pretty darn good. In any case, my argument, as just stated, seems to me unassailable.
To Wesley's last paragraph: It is a tired point, but Wesley invites it, that the "evils that have plagued human history" have not been noticeably less observable in religious ages (e.g. 17th-century Europe) than in irreligious ones ( e.g. the late Roman republic); nor in deeply observant Christian places (e.g. 1970s Northern Ireland) than in unobservant ones (e.g. 1970s Norway); nor indeed have they been notably less observable in religious institutions (the College of Cardinals) than in secular ones (the Royal Society). As an argument for the proposition that we need a faith-based conviction of our own specialness to keep us from cutting each other's throats, this really doesn't get us anywhere... Unless, as must always be added, your faith prejudices you in favor of the argument.
The matter of "how we perceive ourselves" seems to me, on historical and personal evidence, to be orthogonal to religious faith. In my view, we are indeed a part of nature; an animal; but a social animal, inclined by nature to live amongst others of our kind, and equipped by nature to do so in reasonable harmony. Possibly this was all arranged by a beneficent deity, but I see no necessary reason to think so. As I am sure Wesley Smith knows, those cold-hearted Darwinian materialists have come up with excellent (though, unfortunately, hard to test--not that that should be troublesome to a theologian!) explanations for things like altruism, fraternal affection, and other benign common features of human societies, even of irreligious ones.
I am not sure either, though it is not my zone of expertise, that Wesley isn't putting words into Thomas Jefferson's mouth. I understood Jefferson's meaning to be that no man comes into the world with a moral right to be another man's master. Jefferson was, in other words, denying the aristocratic principle that, in his time, still dominated Europe. That principle (call it A), and its denial (call it null-A... fans of classic science fiction are chuckling quietly here), are possible organizing rules of human societies. Jefferson was stating his preference for null-A over A as an organizing principle of his new Republic. That either A or null-A depends on the METAPHYSICAL principle that humanity differs from the rest of nature by supernatural ordinance, is not obvious to me. Nor do I know whether Jefferson believed that they did, though from a sketchy knowledge of the man, I think it more likely he thought they didn't. As I said, this is not my area, though, and I will humbly take correction on the subject of Jefferson's thinking.
"[B]eyond the esoteric, there are practical reasons to reject Derbyshire's perspective." What does THAT mean? Either we are, or else we are not, exceptional in the way that Wesley claims. If we can determine the truth of the matter, we should acknowledge that truth, and live with it as best we can, and to hell with "practicality." Should we "reject Derbyshire's perspective" even if it seems much more likely to be true than Wesley's? I am sure Wesley does not think so. Truth is truth, notwithstanding that it is most often of a probabilistic nature. If we can find the truth, we should acknowledge it, however "impractical" it might be to do so. Magna est veritas et praevalebit ("The truth is great and shall prevail... a bit.")
And then Wesley says: "[U]nderstanding that there is such a thing as evil action proves we are special in the known universe. Thankfully, one need not have faith to understand that."
That is very well said. A lesser brain would have left out the word "action," opening up the proposition to several lines of fire. As an intellectual combatant, Wesley is no slouch.
Is the first of those two sentences true, though? It seems to me that it **is** true, but only tautologically so. Yes,humans are the only created things that we know to employ the concept "evil action." We are, in fact, the only created things that employ ANY abstract concepts--"beauty," "wisdom," "quadrilateral,"... We are indeed special in that sense. The fact of our being special in this way is indeed proved by... our being special in this way.
Whether it follows that we are special in the way Wesley has been arguing--by virtue of being supernaturally favored and gifted--does **not** follow. Nor is it inconceivable (well, not to me) that next Tuesday some mad scientist might come up with a computer that can employ abstract concepts; or that we might get a message filled with abstract concepts from beings in the M31 spiral galaxy; nor even that my mongrel mutt has some dim inkling of abstract concepts (though I think a chimp is a much better candidate for that). The specialness being displayed here, in other words, while real, may be no more special than the elephant's trunk--a highly, but NATURALLY, developed feature. That there is anything supernatural going on does not follow.
And the suspicion that nothing supernatural, nothing eternal and immutable, is present behind our specialness, is reinforced by the obvious fact that the commonly-understood meaning of "evil action" has varied greatly across time and space, even within the confines of a single faith. Razib Khan over at the Gene Expression website recently blogged that when he was a child, growing up among orthodox Muslims in Bangladesh, the taking of photographs was severely proscribed as violating the scriptural rulings on idolatry. It was an evil action! Nowadays Osama bin Laden--a very devout Muslim, as I understand--broadcasts his messages by video. Similarly, when I was a young child, the Roman Catholic church was railing furiously against contraception as an "evil action." They have since gone very quiet about the wickedness of contraception, yielding to the fact that some huge majority of female worshippers preferred to ignore church teaching on this point. Yessir: if what you seek is a situational, circumstantial code of ethics, adjusting itself constantly to the twists and turns of the Zeitgeist, retooling the understanding of "evil action" every decade or to to keep up, the Inerrant Word of God is just the ticket!
