The Old Paganism of New Atheism

 I love watching nature shows. Growing up in the Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom era, I will watch anything that has an animal or something about nature in it. The Planet Earth, Blue Planet, Blue Planet II, anything the Discovery Channel or David Attenborough puts out, etc. is a feast for the eyes. Not so much for the ears though. 

With all of these shows comes an indoctrination of naturalistic evolution that has always baffled me. Whenever there is a mystery in nature it is referred to as a mystery of evolution. Whenever an animal suddenly has knowledge that it should not have naturally it is assumed to have something to do with evolution even though no one knows how. I call it the "Evolution of the Gaps" argument. When you hear these shows talk about evolution, it becomes extremely obvious that they have merely taken the concept of God and replaced it with evolution. Now, evolution has a mind and purpose that directs these creatures and their development in the same way that some pantheistic force would do it in the ancient world. They are said not only to be guided by millions of years of evolution, that evolution has fine tuned their predation skills, evading skills, birthing places and techniques, but also that the information needed to evolve is somehow a naturalistic product of evolution itself. 

You see, anything that evolves must have three major pieces of information. It must be able to diagnose, repair, and reproduce that repair in further offspring. This is how adaptation works. We see it in every species. The problem is that naturalistic processes cannot produce knowledge and it's not as though the animals genes are watching a Youtube how-to video. This knowledge must come from mind and so it seems that the writers of these shows subconsciously realize this and are incapable of speaking about evolution in any other way than to assign it the place of deity, at least, in its role. This isn’t even to mention the phrase, “The miracle of evolution that gets thrown around. Now it’s doing miracles.

Beyond this, there are mysterious pieces of information that seem to guide animals that could not merely be gained from genes. The Monarch Butterfly makes a trip from Mexico to Canada and back again that takes six life times to make. A butterfly will stop a third of the way, lay eggs, and die, leaving no interaction between the butterfly and the offspring. Yet, the offspring will complete the trip. As said before, this happens six times. What is giving the information to the offspring? Likewise, certain birds will fly away from a particular island, or marine animals will move from one place of the ocean to another, without ever going back, have offspring somewhere else, and those offspring fly back, swim back, trek back to the original island or place of the ocean, etc. from which their parents came. Where is it getting this information? Well, evolution of course. How? Well, the genes just acquire this knowledge? How? Well, just cuz.

Everyone agrees it has this knowledge. The issue concerns how this knowledge was obtained. Hence, even though you have neo-atheism claim to not believe in any gods, it becomes increasingly clear that they do believe in some mysterious force/law/principle of being that they refer to generically as "Evolution."

This is nothing short of the same pantheism you find in pagan religions. In fact, in most religions evolution is also the answer. It springs from this universal principle or force referred to as a god that then develops into all other things that exist. 

Likewise, when I hear the theory of origins that aliens engineered the world, I think to myself how much new atheism has simply returned to old paganism. What would these aliens have to be in order to engineer the world? They'd have to be really skilled. Perhaps, different aliens had different skills. Maybe one originally engineered the plant life and another worked on developing the atmosphere that it depends upon. Maybe another worked on programming the information into the DNA of some particular animals and others into other plants and animals. Then one coded particular mammals to develop into higher mammals and even humans. Anyone familiar with pagan creation stories would immediately identify the similarities here. Different gods create different things. Many gods work together to create the world that we now experience. 

So from the one universal mind/principle/ground of being comes many more creative minds that develop the world. The One god (monistic pantheism) producing many gods (polytheism) that then produce the world is the ancient model of paganism. In essence, neo-atheism isn't as evolved as you might think it is.