As any fully sentient human must be, Fred is an evolution skeptic:
Evolutionists espouse the mechanistic and deterministic view, though more as metaphysics than science. Selective pressures, plausible though not measurable, defined, or confirmed, push evolution in certain directions. Much of it is wonderfully questionable, but we will pass over this. The evolutionist, again meaning the sort for whom evolution must explain all human behavior, falls into difficulties when he considers humanity.
Consider morality. For the evolutionist, everything must be explained in terms of maximizing the production of offspring so that, for example, honesty serves to promote cohesion in hunting bands, making them more efficient and therefore having more children. Right and wrong do not exist, nor Good and Evil, as these have no meaning within evolutionism unless they can be tied to fecundity.
Which leads the evolutionist into logical swamps. I have asked such people why I should not make a hobby of torturing to death the genetically feeble-minded. In evolutionary terms, killing them is a good idea, as it reduces the diversion of resources in maintaining them and raises the average intelligence of the group.
How they are killed has no evolutionary importance, and in any event executing them with a blowtorch would consist merely in substituting certain chemical reactions for others: Pain has no existence in physics.
Of course if I actually did such a thing, the evangelists of scientism would be horrified. They are not immoral. They just can’t explain why they are not.
I now await with no little pleasure the predictable attempts to redirect the discussion from the obvious problems with evolution to religion, creationism, and intelligent design in lieu of actually attempting to defend their “theorum”. Note to the insufficiently read: “theorum” is the word for a a statement that has been not proven on the basis of previously established statements, but one that credentialed midwits would like you to accept at face value.