"If the sole reason why you must not kill your neighbour is because God has forbidden it...then, when you learn there is no God and that you need not fear his punishment, you will certainly kill your neighbour without hesitation..."

- Sigmund Freud

"Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny."

- Carl Sagan

"For good genetic reasons...it would be an unhealthy biological situation [to have unregulated childbearing]. Some group of people should decide that some people should have more some should have fewer..."

- Francis Crick

"We civilised men...build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment...Thus the weak members of civilised societies propogate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man."

- Charles Darwin
The Descent of Man

"...three generations of imbeciles are enough."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes
on his Supreme Court decision to force sterilization of the mentally handicapped.

 

 

Where did man come from?
2) the history of evolution

 

"I will not accept [creation] philosophically, because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible - spontaneous generation arising to evolution."

- George Wald
1971 Nobel prize for biology

"Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion."

- Gary Zukav

 

10.4 The prehistory of evolutionary theory.

Belief in creation has been around for a long time, but not because it was the only alternative. Some of the first writings that conceive of evolution actually pre-date Darwin by 2,300 years. These writings were offered by Greek philosophers such as Lucretius, Anaximander, Thales, and Empedocles. But it was not until the nineteenth-century that a literally godless explanation for the appearance of man became popular. Now atheism could finally say, "God doesn't exist because I don't need him to".

Since the time of Darwin's writings, advances in fields such as geology and microbiology, with the assistance of computer modeling, have led to new directions in evolutionary thinking. Darwin's original concept of evolution has since been superseded several times by ideas that better conform to evidence gathered since Darwin's time. Darwinism itself has been slightly changed and restated to account for what we call genes, and is now referred to as Neo-Darwinism.

One of the more recent evolutionary theories, Directed Panspermia, enjoys the prestige of having been formally introduced by one of the Nobel prize winning discovers of DNA, Francis Crick. Crick's theory truthfully has one foot in the evolution camp and the other in intelligent design. I don't credit it toward the latter, however, for reasons that will be clear later.

Crick's work has since been slightly modified by Sir Fred Hoyle, British scholar knighted for his exemplary work in astronomy and astrophysics, and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe, noted Sri Lankan mathematician and astrophysicist. Their work has begun to take the non-Christian explanation for origins down a whole new path.

As for why these new paths are becoming popular, and why non-Christians as well as other anti-creationists are shelving Neo-Darwinism for other theories, the answer begins with looking at the traditional theory of evolution. First in terms of its history, then its explanation, and lastly the evidence for and against it.

Evolution was, and still is, a philosophy as much as an attempt at explaining human origins. And it is precisely because it is a closed and tightly embraced social philosophy that it can never become fluid and keep pace with advancing scientific discovery.


10.5 Darwin's predecessors

In 1809, the evolutionary beliefs of Chevalier de Lamarck were published in Philosophie Zoologique.3 This French biologist believed that changes in, and adaptation to, environment shaped living creatures. These changes progressively accrued in their offspring until a descendant, many generations later, no longer bore any resemblance to its ancestors; even to the point of being a new species. (Note: while minor variations and adaptations within a species have always been accepted as fact (referred to as micro-evolution), the idea that the same process could effect changes on a macro-scale is what was the new departure.)

Lamarck's idea described nature as a continuous escalator of being. At the low end, lifeless matter was turning into living cells, and all along the way creatures were on their way up.

Lamarck's concept of evolution as an inheritance of acquired characteristics would eventually prove false when genetics became known many years later. Genes fixed at conception were being passed on, not the habits and skills of the parent generation. But at the time, the philosophy of evolution caught fire as it perfectly dovetailed with the ideology of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

Socially interpreted, evolution was the concept that the lowly had the capability or even destiny to become great. Lower forms either became dominant or they perished. This was seen by some as an ultimatum and gave a seemingly biological and even moral justification for rebellion and overthrow of authority. This was just one factor in the French Revolution, but not the last time evolution was to have such an effect.

In England at this time, Lamarck and his ideas were rejected for lack of proof as well as for fear of political instability. Still, evolution continued to be proselytized by such men as Robert Chambers and Herbert Spencer. It was Spencer who first coined the phrase "survival of the fittest". Spencer was a philosopher who applied the idea of evolution to social progress. He believed that,

Self-will and effort were the paths towards almost inevitable progress, and when applied to human society the survival of the fittest meant that advancement came from natural strength and the inherent capacity to adapt. Roughly speaking, the rich were rich because they had the prowess to become so; the poor were poor because they were lazy or incompetent, or both. 4

Such ideas reflected many of the societal changes being brought about by industrialism in Victorian England. These changes included such things as cottage industries which incrementally grew into large and complicated factories; a very visual example of how the human species was being said to have evolved from simpler forms of life.


10.6 Darwin's theory in Europe

The concept of evolution was quickly accepted as fact to non-theists and the politically ambitious, but to the rest of the world, and to those who were being subjugated in its name, evolution still lacked proof.

In 1859, a naturalist by the name of Charles Darwin established an intellectual basis for belief in evolution that was accepted by many as proof-enough. It was proof-enough for Karl Marx who felt that evolution validated his own views of society and materialistic philosophy. These he spelled out in Das Kapital.

If life was shaped by environment as evolution claimed, then so-called higher individuals had both the freedom and duty to shape society by political environment; this to their correspondingly higher likings. Marx was even moved to ask permission to mention Darwin on the dedication page of his book. However, Darwin's wife prevailed recommending against it.

In Germany, belief in evolution continued to spread quickly and with incredible zeal. Blackmore and Page note,

From the outset in Germany, Darwinism was adopted as an ideological tool which presaged a new future. As new animal species had risen from the graveyards of the old, so modern social reforms would eventually triumph over political conservatism. The thwarted revolutions of 1848 had created a pressure for liberal reform. 5

Zoologist Ernst Haeckel's belief in evolution added to that pressure:

Progress is a natural law that no human power, neither the weapons of tyrants nor the curses of priests, can ever succeed in suppressing... Standing still is in itself regression, and regression carries with it death." 6

Haeckel further stated in an unwitting prediction of Germany's then-near future,

The theory of selection teaches that in human life, as in all animal and plant life everywhere, and at all times, only a small and chosen minority can exist and flourish, while the enormous majority starve and perish miserably and more or less prematurely." 7

Others joined Haeckel in fueling resentment against authority; including the authority of the church as well as the state. Ludwig Buchner stressed the absence of God in his scientific writings Force and Matter. In his own writings, Friedrich Nietzsche declared, "God is dead! God remains dead!" 8

Near the turn of the century, and before his nation's central role in two world wars, Nietzsche predicted that 'the glorious demise of God' would sweep over Europe and that this would produce a new and wonderful Germany in the coming twentieth century. While all of this may or may not have been to Darwin's liking, Darwin nevertheless recorded,

The support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail. 9

Darwin had correctly judged the German peoples' acceptance of his ideas. Darwin's and Nietzsche's views prevailed in the mind of a then-unknown Bavarian house-painter named Adolf Hitler. Rightly deriving that morality stems from one's worldview, he would one day write, "Nature is cruel, therefore we have the right to be cruel".

To Hitler's (limited) defense, once the world began to embrace a purposeless, survival-of-the-fittest view of human origins, it was only a matter of time before someone conceived of a single master race of human species; one driven to dominate and out-survive all others. Unlike Darwin, however, Hitler would employ more than hope to see that those views prevailed.


10.7 Darwin's theory in America

In America, as in England, religious conservatism slowed the acceptance of evolution as a legitimate system of belief. However, evolution still managed to exert significant influence, notably in its legal system. For example,

Christopher Langdell, dean of the Harvard Law School, theorized that as man evolved, then his laws must also evolve. Deciding that judges should guide the evolution of the Constitution, in the late 1800s he introduced the case law study method under which students would study judges' decisions rather than the Constitution... Blackstone's [Commentaries on the Law] was deemed to present an outdated approach to law because it taught that certain things were always wrong and did not change - particularly those related to human morality and behavior. 10 [emphasis mine]

Incrementally, traditional interpretations of the Constitution were allowed to evolve just as humanity supposedly had evolved, in spite of the public's general rejection of Darwinism. Of the two most significant results, one was the movement of the legal system towards an amoral perspective. The foundation for judgments began to be moved away from the concept of right and wrong, and moved toward judges' personal interpretations and technical precedents. The role of judges reversed from one of being held in subject to the Constitution to one of controlling the Constitution:

Charles Evan Hughes, Chief Justice from 1930 to 1941 ...explained, 'The Constitution is what the judges say it is.' 11

The second major result was the beginning of a fragmentation of the judicial branch of government as set in motion by the legal system's adaptation of evolutionary principles. Although U.S. judges were originally conceived to collectively represent a single branch of government, the new emphasis on subjective and individual interpretation effectively released judges to become free agents; no longer having to act as if they played on the same team, no longer having to dispense the same so-called justice for all.

Because these effects of evolutionary theory are still in full force today, it is no surprise that judicial appointments have become hotbeds of controversy as we all wonder what new direction the law will take with each one.

A third result of evolutionary philosophy, not only in America but worldwide, was a so-called scientific basis for moral relativism. Speaking broadly of evolution's philosophical base, John G. West explains:

Scientific materialism was dubious science and even shakier philosophy, but it had far-reaching consequences for Western society. By claiming that all human thoughts and actions are dictated by either biology or environment, scientific materialists undermined traditional theories of human freedom and responsibility. By asserting that our moral beliefs were merely the products of heredity or environment, scientific materialists laid the groundwork for moral relativism. 72

If that is not sufficiently clear, Ludwig Buchner provides an application:

Man is no more 'responsible' for becoming willful and committing a crime than the flower for becoming red and fragrant. In both instances the end products are predetermined by the nature of protoplasm and the chance of circumstances. 73

Once again, if life is a purposeless accident, then both purpose and the adherence to or deviation from that purpose (right and wrong) are illusory, or are subjective social constructs at best.


10.8 Darwin's theory in religion

Finally, no review of evolutionary beliefs and evolution-based relativism would be complete without mentioning the philosophical contributions of Julian Huxley. More than avid on Darwinian evolution, Huxley created what he himself called a religion around the belief in evolution. That religion is called humanism. In Huxley's own words,

This new idea-system, whose birth we of the mid-twentieth century are witnessing, I shall simply call 'humanism'. It must be focused on man... It must be organized round the facts and ideas of evolution...It will have nothing to do with Absolutes, including absolute truth, absolute morality, absolute perfection and absolute authority. 12

Huxley had rightly observed that evolution discards the concept of moral rights and wrongs in its description of humanity to be an accidental by-product of biological mistakes rather than a purposed creation by an absolute authority. Yet one must seriously question whether right and wrong were not discarded first and it was evolution that was the resulting effect as Huxley explains:

I suppose that the reason that we all leapt at the Origin [of Species] was that the idea of God interfered with our sexual mores. 13 [emphasis mine]

Aldous Huxley, Julian's brother and author of Brave New World, said nearly the same thing:

We objected to the morality [of creationism] because it interfered with our sexual freedom. 14

Aldous further stated that evolutionary philosophy was essentially just a tool for liberation from moral rights and wrongs.15

The admissions by Julian and Aldous Huxley that belief in evolution is more the result of a justification for sexual promiscuity than it is the result of evidence are alluded to by many modern day anti-creationists. Fred Hoyle, though one of Darwinian evolution's harshest critics, blatantly states that belief in evolution is "psychological rather than scientific"16 and reveals that, "the biggest thing going for Darwinism was that it finally broke the tyranny in which Christianity had held the minds of men for so many centuries."17

Hoyle's writings themselves disdain biblical morality, as do certain science-oriented works by Francis Crick, Carl Sagan, and other secular evolutionists. These jabs seem out of place in science books until one remembers that a prejudice against biblical morality or other forms of absolute authority are sometimes the premise of evolutionary conclusions, and are thus a very necessary part of the complete evolutionary argument.

Of the three formal arguments for evolution, the first theory we will review is Neo-Darwinian evolution, the form of evolution most widely known. It is the foundation upon which all subsequent evolutionary variations have been built.

The second evolutionary argument, punctuated equilibria, proposes a timeline radically accelerated beyond what Darwin visualized for the development of life.

The third argument, directed panspermia, accepts the accelerated timeline, but proposes a radically unusual location and process for the origin of life.

Then we will introduce intelligent design theory, and then, lastly, creation science.

 

 


(top of page)

NEXT: PART 3) Darwin's theory

See also:

Where did the earth come from?

Where did the universe come from?

Printing Tips, Contact, Search,
Links & Bibles,
The Gospel
Objections
Introduction
Integrity
Veracity
Divinity
Authority
History

 

 

 

 

 

WHY THIS CHAPTER?

Western culture's belief in creation comes largely from the Bible; the origin of which was covered under Integrity.

For fair comparison, this section looks at the origin and history of Darwinism, the most popular of several evolution theories, and the effects of its philosophy.


1. Prehistory of the theory
2. Darwin's predecessors
3. Darwinism in Europe
4. Darwinism in America
5. Darwinism in religion