The Philosopher's Apprentice Read Free

to,” I said, cringing to hear such a dumb, folksy locution escape my lips, then launched into my well-rehearsed précis. The fact that humankind now finds itself in a post-Darwinian epistemological condition, I explained, need not trouble us from an ethical perspective. Indeed, by problematizing our tendency to view ourselves as creatures apart—God’s Chosen Species, discontinuous with the rest of nature—the evolutionary paradigm obliges us to address the assorted evils, from overpopulation to climate disruption to habitat destruction, that we have visited upon this, our only planet. Through a Darwinian deontology, we might at last come to know the true character of our sins, a catalog of transgressions not against heaven but against the earth and its life-forms.
    Throughout the auditorium there arose mutterings of approval mingled with bursts of applause, a smattering of jeers, and several sustained moans.
    â€œMr. Ambrose, are you saying that your naturalist ethics supplants the other moral systems surveyed in these pages?” Dr. Girard removed his glasses and rubbed his aquiline nose. “Are you telling us to forget about Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Thomism, Kantianism, and Utilitarianism?”
    Although I was prepared in principle for Girard’s question, a nugget of dread congealed in my stomach. I took a slow breath, swallowed a mouthful of now-tepid water, and assumed a swaggering smile that immediately degenerated into a grimace. For the next ten minutes, I spouted convoluted and uniformly incoherent sentences, many turning to vapor before their subjects could enjoy intimacy with their verbs. Phrase by awkward phrase, I endeavored to explain why the admitted materialism underlying my dissertation was perfectly in step with the parade of ethical discourse thathad tramped through human history from the ancient Greeks to the early Christians to the twentieth-century Rawlsians.
    The audience grew restless. They’d come for blood, not dialectic. Only in my concluding remarks did I manage to articulate a reasonably feisty thought.
    â€œRather than eclipsing Kantianism or Utilitarianism,” I said, “Darwinian deontology adds yet another pigment to the palette of moral philosophy.”
    At this juncture Felix Pielmeister slammed his copy of my Ethics on the table—violently, righteously, as if to crush a cockroach. From his throat came a sound suggesting a wild boar simultaneously enjoying a good joke and an important orgasm.
    â€œAs I’m sure you’re aware, Mr. Ambrose,” Pielmeister said, “postrationalist thought is not ipso facto at odds with the arguments of Charles Darwin. And yet I find that these fulminations of yours carry the reader far beyond the theory of natural selection, depositing him in a place devoid of all hope, meaning, and teleology. Is that in fact your position? Is transcendence an illusion? Is God dead?”
    Excited murmurings wafted through the hall. This was why our audience had gotten up at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning—to watch state-of-the-art Augustinian theology stomp Mason Ambrose into the dirt.
    â€œIt depends on what you mean by transcendence,” I said.
    â€œI believe you know what I mean by transcendence,” Pielmeister replied.
    â€œHonestly, sir, I can’t unpack your question.”
    â€œStop temporizing, Mason,” Dr. Schwendeman said.
    I fixed on the uneaten doughnuts. A solitary fly hovered above the pile, wondering what it had done to merit such sugary grace. My dilemma was elegant in its simplicity. I needed merely to assert that evolutionary biology, like the other physical sciences, had nothing to say about God, and I was home free. I had only to insist that I hadno fundamental quarrel with either Jesus Christ or Felix Pielmeister, and I could pick up my union card.
    With an impertinent flourish, I seized the carafe and filled my tumbler to the brim. I