Matt 24 watch, 70: the spiritual factor behind evolutionary materialism and the de-christianisation of Western Civilisation

It is now time to reflect on some underlying spiritual factors in the rise of evolutionary materialism, for the ongoing agenda to de-christianise our civilisation is not happening in a spiritual vacuum.

Nor, on the evidence over the past several weeks, is it without serious and damaging consequences.

Indeed, it can be seriously argued and supported with all too abundant factual details, that evolutionary materialism-rooted secular humanism is in effect a quasi-religious establishment that is increasingly tyrannically and damagingly imposed on science, science education, law, public policy, and our civilisation at large by state power. So, when such advocates of a de facto establishment speak -- sometimes (as we saw last week), even from the pulpit -- in terms of defending our civilisation from the "threat" of Bible-quoting, "fundamentalist," potentially violent "theocrats," I find that their case unfortunately too often rings distinctly hollow.

So much so, that I often want to shout from down in the saw-pit below the log being wsawed into planks, as sawdust cascades uncontrollably into my eyes:

"Hey mon, stop! Stop!

That plank in your eyes is blinding you to what you are doing!

Please, please, take it out; then, you can see to help me . . ."

(Again, apologies in advance for those who will find this post painful or even possibly offensive. Please, consider carefully whether whatever may be clumsily put is sufficiently important that it must be considered carefully despite poor wording; even if it is painful to address what one sharply disagrees with. For, not all that is at least potentially right or helpful is agreeably pleasant or easy to deal with. And, if we are finite, fallible, fallen and sometimes ill-disposed to "endure sound doctrine," that may improperly bias how we respond to what is put before us.)

A good place to begin is with a striking Bible passage David C Cooke [sp?] drew my attention to when I read his The Great Brain Robbery back in the 1970's. For, in making his closing remarks in his farewell epistle, the aged and about to be martyred Apostle Peter observed:

2PE 3:3 First of all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. 4 They will say, "Where is this `coming' he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation." 5 But they deliberately forget that long ago by God's word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water. 6 By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. 7 By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.

2PE 3:8 But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. 9 The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

2PE 3:10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.

2PE 3:11 Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives 12 as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. 13 But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.

Here, Peter predicts that in the last days, scoffers will come, who will mock those who expect a Second Coming of the Messiah and associated eternal judgement before our Creator and Lord, based on their rejection of the concept that God intervenes into the order of the world in powerful, supernatural ways -- in creation, in redemption, in liberation and at length in judgement.

Peter's response (in the face of his upcoming, long since predicted judicial murder) is to note that God's patience should not ever be confused with his absence or lack of interest in us or indifference to injustice.

In that context, it is very interesting indeed to see that at the time of the foundation of modern science, founding scientists sought to read God's book of nature, and to think his thoughts after him; offering their findings in service to man and in worship to God. A glance at Newton's now too often overlooked words in the General Scholium to that greatest of all scientific books, Principia, amply suffices to illustrate this:

. . . This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. And if the fixed stars are the centres of other like systems, these, being formed by the like wise counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One; especially since the light of the fixed stars is of the same nature with the light of the sun, and from every system light passes into all the other systems: and lest the systems of the fixed stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other mutually, he hath placed those systems at immense distances one from another.

This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God pantokrator , or Universal Ruler . . . And from his true dominion it follows that the true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being; and, from his other perfections, that he is supreme, or most perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done . . .

Science as the very vestibule of worship!

However, Newton's very triumph of identifying apparent universal laws of nature that accurately summed up and predicted the mechanical behaviour of bodies on earth and in the heavens, soon enoutgh led other men of a different temperament to infer that this uniformity extends, lockstep, from origins to the remotest future.

In effect, the view that once there was an initial condition and associated motions, all the future in principle was contained in the inexorable, inescapable laws of nature was soon enough used to try to explain the world without reference to its Creator. In that context, Darwinian evolution appeared to provide a way to account for life and its forms up to and including man, without reference to an intelligent designer: natural selective filtering or culling processes acting on matter ordered by chance and changing under the necessity of mechanical laws seemed "good enough" to many.

Thus, we can now also see the cutting relevance of the Apostle Paul's observations in Romans 1:

20 . . . since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

RO 1:21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

RO 1:24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator . . . .

RO 1:28 Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

Here, we see:

1 --> From the world without and our own mannishness within, it is sufficiently evident that we form a creation, complete with a moral order.

2 --> So, we have no excuse to reject these inner and outer testimonies and substitute images made to look like various creatures for the Author of Creation. (In Paul's day, such images were commonly found in temples, and were associated with various pagan legends. In ours, we can find very similar images in museums, in the media and in textbooks, associated with the name Science.)

3 --> Furthermore, once we exclude God from the order of what we call knowledge, we find our minds endarkened and that ourt passion spin out of control in slavery to ever increasing evil and perversions.

4 --> At its grim apex, this evil loudly demands that we approve of evil as though it were good.

This all sounds ever so sadly familiar as we look around us, astounded at the claims, arguments and demands being made al around us by all sorts of radical movements and their public advocates.

Part of the response is obvious: we have to expose the now commonly met with imposition on the definition of science that is must seek out and explain only in terms of "natural causes" of what we observe about our world in the present an its origins. Causes that boil down to chance and mechanical necessity acting on matter and energy, so that intelligence can only be accepted as an explanatory factor if it is the product of such forces through a cascade of purposeless, undirected evolutions.

"Imposition"?

Yes.

For, unfortunately, so-called methodological naturalism takes science away from being an unfettered search for the truth about our world based on observation, experiment, hypothesis and empirical testing.

Indeed, it subtly forces scientists -- on pain of damage tot heir careers and reputations -- to try to explain what we see from hydrogen to in terms of evolutionary materialism, instead of their being open to the full range of possible causal factors that have -- or even simply could have -- been at work in our world across the ages and up to today: chance, lawlike mechanical necessity, agency. (In particular, it arbitrarily shuts the mouth of the many signs of intelligent design in the world, from the finely tuned life facilitating order of our universe's underlying physics, to the intricate functionally specified complexity in cell based life, to the huge increments in information required to generate body plan level diverity in life, to even how we may best account for the credibility of the minds we have to use to even practice science.)

Another part, is that we need to see that we are inescapably moral. Indeed, we quarrel when we believe our rights have been violated. As C S Lewis and others aptly note, in so quarrelling, we appeal to our dignity and the binding nature of moral obligation: my right to life, liberty, reputation etc means you have a duty to respect my life, liberty, reputation etc.

But, where does such a dignified status come from, that the humblest and weakest of us may rightfully expect even the most powerful to treat us properly, i.e. justly and even kindly?

The only enduring answer to that is that we are all made in God's image, and so are endowed by our common Creator with inalienable rights.

Indeed, as we have looked at over the past several weeks, the sad record of the century just past is that once our civilisation walked away from that insight, ruthless chaos was loosed and resulted in mass murders on an utterly unprecedented scale; often motivated by a contempt for perceived evolutionary inferiors. [Just as was foreseen by Darwin himself or even by H G Wells.]

So, we must now turn to the question of reforming our view of science, setting it back on a sounder foundation, and grounding the credibility of our minds and the civilising force of binding moral obligation.

So, so long until next time . . . END

Matt 24 Watch, 69: Implications of dechristianisation through the influence of evolutionary materialism in the name of "science"

Over the past several weeks, we have been looking at a very painful matter, one that is bound to hurt or even enrage many good people. (But, on pain of repeating some very dark chapters of recent history indeed, we must forge ahead, with all continued apologies in advance for hurt feelings. )

For, the pain that would stem from not learning from the mistakes we must never make again, would be far, far worse.

(Arguably, indeed, since the ongoing American Abortion holocaust -- a mere fraction of the global total -- is both (1) a result of the undermining of the value of human life due in decisive part to the influence of evolutionary materialist thought and (2) this ongoing horror now dwarfs Hitler's unspeakable horrors: nearly 50 millions versus a "mere" 12 - 14 millions or so -- indeed it begins to approach the Soviet Union's 60 million death toll -- we are already paying a terrible price for what we have forgotten or dismissed on the Creation-anchored value of human life . . .)

A convenient specific reference is the recent media exchange between ABC TV News Anchor Charles Gibson and US Vice Presidential Candidate, Alaska Governor and evangelical Christian, Mrs Sarah Palin:

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, “Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.” Are we fighting a holy war?

PALIN: You know, I don’t know if that was my exact quote.

GIBSON: Exact words.

But -- without seeking to endorse any politician or programme -- it is evident that those words were plainly taken utterly out of their context and propagandistically twisted into the very oppositite of what they properly meant in context, as can be seen in the Powerline discussion here (again, pardon highlighting to help us see what we might miss otherwise):

[Gov. Palin, in church in Wasila, June 2008:] “Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God . . . . That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.”

Newt Gingrich -- former speaker of the US House of Representatives and a History Professor in his own right, has properly lashed Mr Gibson for his out of context distortion by making reference to precedents set by Presidents Clinton, Kennedy, F D Roosevelt and Lincoln, in a YouTube video clip here. (NB: Well worth the five minutes to watch it.)

Q: What lurks behind those words and the way they were twisted?

A: Again, two "favourite" excerpts from Rev Dr Rod Hewitt, a recent Moderator of the United Church of Jamaica and Grand Cayman, are revealing -- once we realise that Mrs Palin, as just noted above, is an evangelical Christian:

During the twentieth century in particular we have seen the rise of militant expression of [traditional] faiths by extreme conservatives who have sought to respond to what they identify as 'liberal' revisions that have weakened the fundamentals of their faith. The conservative apologists of these religions have sought to roll back the impact of the theories of evolution, rationalism and textual criticism that they claim seek to erode the divine authority and 'certainties' of their faiths. They opt for a belligerent, militant and separatist posture in their public discourse that can easily employ violence to achieve their goals . . . .

The worldview of the Fundamentalists is characterised by an overwhelming patriotism, a strong [US] military that must dominate the world and a deregulation of business in order that through globalisation, world trade may be effectively controlled by western multinational corporations.

During the cold war era fundamentalist religious ideology gave strong support to the anti-communism foreign policy of the USA. With the demise of communism, it has focused its energy in offering strong support for Israel thus preventing the USA government from becoming an honest broker in the Middle East. [Gleaner, Sept 26, 2001]

Here, we must of course first pause to reject the many blatant strawman distortions, improper immoral equivalencies across "religions," outright errors, and -- sadly -- bigotry-laced prejudices that lurk in these caricaturing words. [Cf my corrective discussion on the smear-word "fundamentalism" here. Also, cf. remarks on the highly complex situation in the Middle East with Israel here and here.]

But also, let us take strong note: we see the explicit, pride of place role played by -- surprise [NOT!] -- "the theory of evolution" in shaping the strident, often slanderous objections and "gotcha" journalism tactics directed to evangelicals who dare to tread into the public square.

In short, a key social purpose of evolutionary materialism and those influenced by it, is to drive the Judaeo-Christian worldview from the public square. In that cause, Mr Gibson stooped to slandering Mrs Palin as promoting Holy War, when she was doing just the opposite: seeking to pray that the USA, its military and its leadership would be on God's side, that of justice [cf. Rom 13:1 - 7 as discussed here.]

Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address -- to which Mrs Palin was alluding -- which is inscribed in stone at his monument in Washington DC, is also a sobering and instructive contrast to the misleading rhetorical point Mr Gibson was making:

. . . four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it . . . Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.' If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether'.

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

Oh, that the current -- equally deeply unpopular -- "long war" in the face of the declared Islamist attempt to subjugate all of humanity under their agenda for the Ummah and its restored Caliphate [cf copy of the map here and its original context here (NB: the wayback machine somehow failed to save the images)], would be similarly led in a spirit of deep, humble repentance, charity and reformation!

However, deeper concerns lurk, tied to the pride of place point given to the theory of evolution in the words of a theologian.

If you find that astonishing, it would be helpful to read Edwin Yamauchi's summary on the roots of modernist, "Liberal" theology, in his classic work, The Stones and the Scriptures, pp. 27 - 30:

“Higher” or literary criticism is the study which attempts to determine the questions of authorship, of the date, and of the composition of any literary texts on the basis of vocabulary, style, and consistency . . . . In biblical studies higher criticism received its classic exposition in 1878 in the work of Julius Wellhausen [through the Documentary/JEDP Hypothesis, which dated the key elements of the Pentateuch from the 9th to the 6th centuries before Christ] . . . on the basis of Wellhausen’s concept of the evolution of Israel’s religion. According to this viewpoint, which was influenced by Darwin and Hegel, the religion of the Hebrews evolved at first into a national henotheism . . . and only much later in the time of the literary prophets and the Exile into an ethical monotheism . . . . Wellhausen, who was a great Arabic and Hebrew scholar, reconstructed Israelite life on the basis of Arabic poetry. He refused to believe that either Egyptian or Akkadian had been deciphered [which had of course long been the case by that time!] . . . .

In New Testament criticism the scholar who corresponds . . . to Julius Wellhausen . . . is F. C. Baur of Tubingen (1792 – 1860). . . . Baur having established an evolutionary scheme of development believed he could date the New Testament documents according to their place in this pattern. On this basis he accepted only four of the epistles as genuinely Pauline . . . John’s Gospel was dated as late as the second half of the second century. The Acts of the Apostles was also assigned this late date . . . Baur’s views were quite dominant throughout the nineteenth century and have left a lasting legacy for the twentieth century , though many of his assumptions have been disproved . . . . . Johannes Munck . . . argues that the Tubingen concept of a struggle between Jewish-Christian nomism and Gentile-Christian antinomism has now been compressed by scholars into the thirty years between the death of Jesus and the death of Paul.

Indeed, it is worth pausing to note that "rationalism," too, which comes in second place in Dr Hewitt's words, is not at all a scientific theory, it is instead at root the philosophical
position that, as OED summarises, "opinions and actions should be based on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response . . ."

In its philosophical root, such rationalism is "the theory that reason rather than experience is the foundation of certainty in knowledge."

Carrying over into Theology, it is "the practice of treating reason as the ultimate authority in religion. "

(Now, recall, that we are finite, fallible, on abundant evidence morally fallen, and that we are too often ill-willed. On such a basis, the quality of our reasoning is always open to dispute, and points to open-minded, critically aware humility rather than prideful certitude.)

In short, we see again and again that there is a deep, sharply polarised rift in our civilisation, driven by the rise of the philosophy of evolutionary materialism -- often in the misleading guise: "science" -- and its many influences across the whole culture over the past 150 years,
including perhaps even through words from the pulpit.

And, as we discussed last week, that philosophy is inescapably self-refuting and deeply undermining of basic morality and the key value of the right to life:

a --> Evolutionary materialism argues that the cosmos is the product of chance interactions of matter and energy, within the constraint of the laws of nature -- from hydrogen to humans by chance plus mechanical necessity.

b --> Therefore, all phenomena in the universe, without residue, are determined by the working of purposeless laws acting on material objects, under the direct or indirect control of chance.

c --> But human thought and decisions, which clearly are observed/experienced phenomena in the universe, must now fit into this picture.

d --> Thus, what we subjectively experience as "thoughts" and "decisions" can only be understood materialistically as unintended by-products of the natural forces which cause and control the electro-chemical events going on in neural networks in our brains. (These forces are viewed as ultimately physical, but are taken to be partly mediated through a complex pattern of genetic inheritance and psycho-social conditioning, within the framework of human culture.)

e --> Therefore, if materialism is true, the "thoughts" we have, the "conclusions" we reach, the "decisions" we make and actions we thereafter undertake -- without residue -- are produced and controlled by forces that are irrelevant to purpose, truth, logic or right vs wrong.

f --> As a further consequence, materialism can have no basis, other than arbitrary or whimsical choice and balances of power in the community, for determining what is to be accepted as True or False, Good or Evil. So, Morality, Truth, Meaning, and, at length, Man, are dead.

So, on materialist premises, even materialist thoughts themselves are produced and controlled by forces that are utterly irrelevant to purpose, truth, logic or right vs wrong. For instance:

. . . Marxists commonly deride opponents for their “bourgeois class conditioning” — but what of the effect of their own class origins? Freudians frequently dismiss qualms about their loosening of moral restraints by alluding to the impact of strict potty training on their “up-tight” critics — but doesn’t this cut both ways? And, should we not simply ask a Behaviourist whether s/he is simply another operantly conditioned rat trapped in the cosmic maze?

Such a fundamental logical incoherence should give us serious pause. Especially, before we are dangerously misled by distortions and dismissals of what those who don't adhere to evolutionary materialism and/or rationalism have to say, e.g. the much derided "Christian fundamentalists."

For, over a hundred million ghosts from the century just past rise up to warn us on where that might lead. END

Matt 24 watch, 68: Is there a causal link between the rise of Darwinism, materialism in the name of science and the undermining of morality?

Today's topic is even more painful and controversial than what we have been looking at over the past few weeks, here, here, and here.

But, as any surgeon can tell us: sometimes, we must wound to heal -- on pain of allowing even worse things to happen. So, given what we have seen, we must proceed; with all due caution, respect and apologies in advance for hurt feelings.

Of course, we must immediately pause to anticipate a likely -- and very understandable -- "how dare you" objection: we are not at all claiming that evolutionary materialism or its fellow travellers are the root of all evils in modern Western society, nor are we seeking to distract attention from the real (or even the imagined) sins of the Christendom and/or the church and/or "religion." Far from that, we know all too well from introspection, observation and scripture that "[t]he heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked" [Jer 17:9, KJV].

We are finite, fallible, morally fallen and too often ill-willed -- all of us.

The issue, then, is to mutually face the truth, then diagnose, repent from and remedy where possible, or at least to restrain. And, the key concern is that we are addressing a prestigious and widely trusted power centre in our civilisation that, on objective evidence [as we have seen over the past several weeks here, here, and here], may well have been dangerously undermining moral restraints over the past 150 years.

A good place to begin our painful reflections is to return to the same opening passage of the book by a Biology-trained author who studied under Huxley himself that we cited last week. So, let us zoom in a little bit on H G Wells' opening remarks in his epochal science fiction novel, War of the Worlds. Pardon the highlighting, which will help us see what we might otherwise miss:

. . . across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us . . . . looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.
And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars . . . .

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

Here -- in what is probably in part a veiled warning on the dangerous nature of the matches the elites of Europe were playing with at the turn of the C20 -- we see that an evolutionary materialistic, socially Darwinist view raises serious implications once we allow our morality to be shaped by the view that the survival of the fittest logically and scientifically entails extinction of the inferior, and thence, lends support to a genocidal policy. This view (as we already saw here, here, and here) is of course just what Darwin projected in the 1870's and is what Hitler advocated in the 1920's then -- horrendously -- carried out in the 1940's. And. lest we congratulate ourselves on progress in recent decades, we should realise that similar materialist thinking plainly influenced the Gulags and killing fields of the Communists right up to at least the 1980's.

Worse yet, too much of the abortion-promoting rhetoric and policy in our own day uncomfortably reflects the same will-to-power, might-makes-right, ends-justify-means thinking that undergirds Wells' subtle satire. How else can one explain that, biologically, from conception, an unborn child is plainly a separate human life (however dependent on his or her mother), but as a culture we too often refuse to afford it -- voiceless and powerless as it is -- adequate protection of said life? And, if there is doubt on the value of life in the womb, are we not therefore morally bound to err on the side of protection, through the "do no harm" principle that lies deeply embedded in the Golden Rule?

A deeper issue lurks, as "science" is etymologically and popularly "knowledge."

That is, "Science" is perceived by many as the effectively ultimate authority on what is credibly true, well-warranted belief -- i.e. knowledge. So, in many circles, to say that something is "unscientific" is tantamount to saying it is false, dangerous nonsense. In short, science is among other things, an instrument -- and so also an institution -- of power.

That potential for abuse tempts ruthless ideologues, who are too often only restrained by prudence in light of perceived balances of power. So, if such think they can get away with it, they will have no compunction about capturing science, diverting it from being an empirically anchored, open minded and open-ended search for the truth about our world, to serve their ideologies and associated agendas. Also, since power is itself a temptation, it can easily corrupt those who are of a better temperament, blinding them to what they are doing. Then, many others will find themselves pressured to go along with the politically correct party-line of the day, out of the "needs" to survive, to find approval by their intellectual peers, and to thrive in their chosen careers as scientists or educators or the like.

Arguably, that is precisely what has happened over the past several generations with Science. Namely, science has been captivated to serve the ideology, agendas and ends of materialistic philosophies.

For instance, through the concept of "methodological naturalism," we can see that "science" in our day has often been explicitly re-defined as a search for "natural explanations," or "natural causes" of what we observe and/or experience. What that subtle wording means, in practice, is that science is no longer viewed by such scientific institutions and their spokesmen as an unfettered search for the truth about or world in light of empirical testing, but instead as in effect the best evolutionary materialist account of how chance and mechanical necessity could have given rise to the world, from hydrogen to humans.

(Finessing words that one may read about being "agnostic" on whether philosophical naturalism is true simply disguise the implications of this commitment, often by making a tendentious contrast: natural/supernatural; when all along there is a very relevant alternative that is being suppressed: nature/art. That is, as Plato pointed out long ago in The Laws, Book X, some things happen by nature [in which we today include both chance and necessity], and others by art [i.e by intelligent, intentional action]. Moreover, the point is that once the triumphant announcement is made that evolutionary materialistic forces adequately account for reality -- they don't, and never have, by the way [cf. more details here] -- then it is asserted or assumed that unless one is "ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked," we need look no further to understand our place in the world. And, dismissive contempt for those who dissent, historically, is the first step to oppression.)

Already, this is replete with moral implications: the diversion of a key institution that historically sought intellectual freedom in the name of the unfettered pursuit of truth, to serve an ideology that instead suppresses truth or potential avenues to truth is already a grave corruption. Then, when to suppress dissent, what dissenters -- such as the intelligent design thinkers -- have to say is slanderously distorted by those who know or should know better, that makes the matter even worse. Career-busting and the like (there are now many notorious cases) simply take it to the level of petty tyranny and bully-boyism; with serious implications for what would happen if such were to gain unchecked power in the community at large.

A grim warning.

But it gets worse. For, evolutionary materialism inherently and inescapably undermines the foundations of morality.

Of course, this seems an outrageous statement, and atheists and their supporters will quickly roll out the refuting argument: atheists can be just as moral as the rest of us -- or even more moral, as we can see from the following litany of the sins of Christendom, etc.

This objection fails, for at least two key reasons:

First problem: the issue is not [p] whether atheists can be moral, but instead [q] that they are here adhering to an ideology in the name of science that tends to undermine the foundations of moral responsibility and restraint -- both historically (i.e as a matter of on the ground fact) and logically (i.e. as the outworking of the principles and assumptions in the worldview). In short, we see a strawman argument that misunderstands and/or misrepresents what it objects to.

Second problem: The argument betrays a fatal naiveté and want of serious reflection about the human moral dilemma. For, sober reflection will reveal that -- at our best -- we struggle to do the right, and too often fail. Worse, our consciences testify that a lot of the time, we are not even struggling to try to do the right. Yet worse, sometimes we are blind and/or deceive ourselves, imagining that we do the right when we should realise that we are in fact doing the wrong. In short, as Solzhenitsyn aptly said, there is an all too powerfully explanatory reason for the long history of the sins of cultures, institutions and individuals: the line between good and evil passes, not between nations and classes, but right through the individual human heart.

On the main point:

a --> Evolutionary materialism argues that the cosmos is the product of chance interactions of matter and energy, within the constraint of the laws of nature -- from hydrogen to humans by chance plus mechanical necessity.

b --> Therefore, all phenomena in the universe, without residue, are determined by the working of purposeless laws acting on material objects, under the direct or indirect control of chance.

c --> But human thought and decisions, which clearly are observed/experienced phenomena in the universe, must now fit into this picture.

d --> Thus, what we subjectively experience as "thoughts" and "decisions" can only be understood materialistically as unintended by-products of the natural forces which cause and control the electro-chemical events going on in neural networks in our brains. (These forces are viewed as ultimately physical, but are taken to be partly mediated through a complex pattern of genetic inheritance and psycho-social conditioning, within the framework of human culture.)

e --> Therefore, if materialism is true, the "thoughts" we have, the "conclusions" we reach, the "decisions" we make and actions we thereafter undertake -- without residue -- are produced and controlled by forces that are irrelevant to purpose, truth, logic or right vs wrong.

f --> As a further consequence, materialism can have no basis, other than arbitrary or whimsical choice and balances of power in the community, for determining what is to be accepted as True or False, Good or Evil. So, Morality, Truth, Meaning, and, at length, Man, are dead.

g --> It is consequently no surprise to detect the consistent theme that all of reality is ultimately meaningless in modern and post-modern Literature, in contemporary Philosophy, and in the Arts generally.

h --> Equally unsurprisingly, when materialistic evolutionary frameworks are applied to academic/professional disciplines such as Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, Linguistics, Economics, Law, Management, or Media and Communication -- not to mention to politics [or, should that be "follytricks"] -- it is the implications of such materialism that invariably are the root of a now characteristic, amoral, will-to-power, might-makes-right, cynically manipulative or nakedly tyrannical Machiavellian approach.

i --> The same bitter seed has shot up a general, vague relativistic assumption that "Right" and "Wrong" are simply arbitrary social conventions and the result of accidents of social evolution. This has often led to the adoption of hypocritical, inconsistent, futile and self- and/or socially- destructive public policies.

j --> Next, "truth is dead," so Education has become a power struggle; the victors have the right to propagandise the next generation as they please.

k --> Media power games simply extend this cynical manipulation from the school and the campus to the street, the office, the factory, the church and the home.

l --> Further, since family structures and rules of sexual morality are "simply accidents of history," one is free to force society to redefine family values and principles of sexual morality to suit one's preferences.

m --> Finally, human life itself becomes meaningless and valueless, so the weak, sick, defenceless and undesirable — for whatever reason — can simply be slaughtered, whether in the womb, in the hospital, or in the death camp.

But, what if the evolutionary materialist view of origins is actually correct; isn't it, after all, "science"?

Actually, first, it is philosophy, not science.

But, by imposing methodological naturalism on scientific investigations of origins, scientific explanation of origins has been forced to censor the facts from speaking before they can open their mouths. And, once the materialistic imposition is removed, at once it becomes pretty obvious that cell-based life that uses highly sophisticated informational macromolecules to implement the information technology at the heart of life "reeks" of design. For, functionally specified, complex information in our observation has but one source: intelligence. We might not be able to scientifically identify who the designers of observed cell-based life are, but that life is designed is both intuitively evident and scientifically sound.

Once science is no longer being censored, that is.

Then, once we turn to the fact that our observed universe evidently had a beginning, one that was exquisitely finely tuned for cell-based life, that leads us to see that the best explanation for that is an extrea-cosmic, highly intelligent and purposeful creator. (The alternative, that we are seeing just one of a quasi-infinite number of "bubbles" in a wider eternal cosmos, is not only an after the fact resort, but immediately leads to the question of what is responsible for the "bubble"-making factory.)

In short, evolutionary materialism has no right to claim to be scientific fact or the only credible scientific alternative. Indeed, there are excellent reasons to reject it as our worldview framework for doing science -- not least, as we just saw, it destroys the foundation for not only morality but for the minds we must trust and use to think even materialist thoughts.

That is, it is a self-undermining, self-contradictory and necessarily false philosophy.

One that arguably undermines not only science but rationality and morality. One we would be well advised to subject to far more searching scrutiny than too many are wont to apply. END
___________

UPDATE: overnight cleanup, additional links.

F/N: KF Blog sub-Series on the Holocaust and its history of ideas roots, Mt 24 W 65, 66 [note the significance of the 3 million non-Jewish Polish victims],  67, 68; cf also video lecture here. 

Matt 24 Watch, 67: From H G Wells' War of the Worlds to Hitler's World War

Nowadays, especially in "New Atheist" circles, it is very fashionable to dismiss (often quite angrily) concerns that Darwinian-based thinking, its transformation of how many people view human origins and the resulting impacts on western culture contributed materially to the mindset of a Hitler or a Stalin, thence, sadly, to the associated horrors of the last Century.

However, hard as it may be for many to accept, the lines of influence -- as say History Professor Richard Weikart documented in details (e.g. in his From Darwin to Hitler) -- are real, and remain of concern to this day.


U/D, Jan 10, 2012: Given various attempts to deny or dismiss, let me embed Weikart's Lecture on "From Darwin to Hitler" as a key point of reference:



For, to refuse to learn from history is to set up the conditions to repeat its worst chapters.

So, it is wise for us to now pause and observe that in 1898, famed science fiction novellist H G Wells opened the narrative of his famous War of the Worlds, thusly:

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water . . . No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us . . . . looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.
And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon them.
And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

In short, the survival of the fittest, ruthless struggle to survive thesis, analysis and predictions in Descent of Man -- and whatever precursors were there in earlier decades, it is indisputably Darwin whose work effected the scientific and cultural revolution -- had by the turn of C20 so pervaded western culture that a very popular science fiction work by a celebrated author could begin from the Darwinian thesis. At least, we see here a sense of moral concern, and hints of a warning of what could easily come about in the century to follow.

Would, that we had heeded this warning!

Now, of course, it is almost too chilling to draw the comparison we almost instinctively want to shy away from, yet again. [Cf the last two posts here and here.] But, Darwin's coolly "scientific" predictive analysis [delivered without one note of compunction or caution] is there, in black and white, in Ch 6 of his 1871 Descent of Man:

Man is liable to numerous, slight, and diversified variations, which are induced by the same general causes, are governed and transmitted in accordance with the same general laws, as in the lower animals. Man has multiplied so rapidly, that he has necessarily been exposed to struggle for existence, and consequently to natural selection. He has given rise to many races, some of which differ so much from each other, that they have often been ranked by naturalists as distinct species . . . .

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

And, with fear and trembling, we must also project forward, not to imaginary races on Mars looking 35 million miles sunward, but to Hitler in the mid-1920's, in Bk I, Ch XI of the infamous Mein Kampf. For, here, we can see him as he looked towards Germany's future conquests at the expense of its "untermensch" neighbours -- especially the Poles:

Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents . . . Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life . . . The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable.


The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc., and the difference can lie at most in the varying measure of force, strength, intelligence, dexterity, endurance, etc., of the individual specimens. But you will never find a fox who in his inner attitude might, for example, show humanitarian tendencies toward geese, as similarly there is no cat with a friendly inclination toward mice . . . .


In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. [That is, Darwinian sexual selection.] And struggle is always a means for improving a species’ health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development.


If the process were different, all further and higher development would cease and the opposite would occur. For, since the inferior always predominates numerically over the best [NB: this is a theme in Darwin's discussion of the Irish, the Scots and the English in Descent], if both had the same possibility of preserving life and propagating, the inferior would multiply so much more rapidly that in the end the best would inevitably be driven into the background, unless a correction of this state of affairs were undertaken. Nature does just this by subjecting the weaker part to such severe living conditions that by them alone the number is limited, and by not permitting the remainder to increase promiscuously, but making a new and ruthless choice according to strength and health . . .

By now, we doubtless feel sick, heartsick and disgusted with this demonic madman. But, we must learn one final lesson, one pointed out by Lord Keynes in the conclusion of his epochal General Theory, as he reflected on the long term impacts of economic theories:

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

Not just in economics, Lord Keynes. Not just in economics. END

__________

F/N: KF Blog sub-Series on the Holocaust and its history of ideas roots, Mt 24 W 65, 66 [note the significance of the 3 million non-Jewish Polish victims],  67, 68; cf also video lecture here.