Come on guys. Evolution doesn't need shit from god. If Lacan thinks so, he is out of his tree. Or in a more academic tone, could you please explain how god is required as a prerequisite to evolution?
Chuck Grimes
In the evolutionary porcess God goes unnamed throughout, he (always he) is literally omnipresent. An evolution that insists on deducing from continuous process the ascending movement which reaches the summit of consciousness and thought necessarily implies that consciousness and that thought were there at the beginning. It is only from the view of an absolute beginning, which marks the origin of the signifying chain as a distinct order and which isolates in their own specific dimension the memorable and the remembered, that we do not find Being always implied in being, the implication that is at the core of evolutionist thought (Lacan talked about this in the 50's - I suspect that some evolutionists have shifted from a teleological model) (like Gould's contingency plan). Creation ex nihilo is the only place one finds production as an original domain. Consciousness pulls itself out of the swamp by pulling on its bootstraps. It wasn't the scientists who "disproved" the existence of God, it was the theologians. The most profound materialist understanding of God, which brings about the death of God (not the invisibility of God) is to be found in Schelling's Ages of the World. In the beginning... which was not *the* beginning, but a beginning that must be presupposes because there is a gap separating ground from existence. Ground is always a retroactive process. In effect, Geist must have been outside of itself in order to start the entire process of creation.
The origin here lie in the creation of something from nothing. And this is precisely what subjectivity is. A numerical matrix so complex that it literally becomes self-aware (self created out of an abyss).
Rob, as for Chomsky on Lacan, well, what can I say. If you ditch the Freudian unconsciousness you have hell of a lot of explaining to do. Chomsky, a good Kantian, argues that language is hardwired. Well, that may be so. But it doesn't mean anything until set in motion within a contingent context. It could equally be argued that the word, the internalization of the speech of the other which "fits" this hardwired grammar, kills / replaces the existing program by replacing it with another. And even if this isn't the case, there really isn't much of a contradiction here between hardwired and contingent. I'm tempted to say that hardwiring stretched to the limit leads to determinism...
Painfully abstract, ken