Thursday, April 01, 2010

Dr. John West: Darwinian Materialism and Its Effects on Culture and the Church



This is a report from the recent Science & Faith: Friend or Foes? Conference held at Westminster Theological Seminary and sponsored by the Discovery Institute.

Ideas have consequences. Darwin posited that man is nothing more than the result of a universal common ancestor and the blind, impersonal, material process of natural selection acting on random variations.

Natural selection is a Designer Substitute -- mimics the actions of intelligence in design. Darwinism thus makes materialism plausible, gives it scientific cover.

Darwin's Descent of Man - moral rules are determined by reproductive success; any practice can be justified; any time conditions for survival change, so can/do moral rules. Courage/cowardice, maternal care/infanticide, kindness/cruelty; monogomy/rape -- all can be viewed as morally good or evil depending on the [amoral] criteria of reproductive success. Darwinism leads to Relativism -- when conditions change, moral rules change.

Honest thinking atheists/materialists admit this! Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson say morals are "merely an adaptation" -- morality is an illusion fobbed off on us by evolution.

Nothing sacrosanct about monogamous marriage. Alfred Kinsey - trained as a darwinian evolutionary zoologist at Harvard - sexual ethics reduced to "normal mammalian behavior"

Darwinism undermines human uniqueness and value - "no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental facilities".

At the same time, Darwin posited significant differences between races; with natural selection, we should expect races to be unequal. Ernst Haeckel (of bogus embryo drawings fame) also drew evolutionary diagrams of human races.

This view of racial inequality, which flows naturally from darwinism, extends all the way to 2007 when James Watson (of DNA fame) asserted that blacks are biologically inferior to whites, which he attributed to human evolution.

Darwin, himself a compassionate man, went on to note that the weak and inferior among humans are a drag on society and should be eliminated -- "savages" eliminate the weak, the "civilized" do not. He speculated this must be highly injurious to the race of man: "if he is to advance still higher he must remain subject to severe struggle".

Which brings us to Mein Kamf and eugenics.

"Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution" -- Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, N.A.S. -- this was the "consensus view" of science -- one might say, the "science was settled" [in which case Al Gore, if he had lived in this day, might have been trading in Eugenics credits].

Who challenged "the science"? Mainly Roman Catholics, and some American evangelicals.

The fake Ernst Haeckel embryo diagrams were in most science textbooks through 2003-2004. Stressing embryonic recapitulation, they had "scientific" implications for abortion -- you are "killing a fish". Miscarriage evolved to show only the fit survive. This acidic view is still with us today. Alexander Sanger - Beyond Choice - abortion is a moral good. Peter Sanger, Princeton - a newborn baby has a value less than a pig, dog, or chimpanzee.

In Darwin's time, many Christians opted for guided, theistic evolution, e.g., Presbyterian Asa Gray. But, how do you get a guided process from a random, undirected process? If it's guided, it is no longer darwinian.

Dr. West gives us ample reasons why a rational person would hope that darwinism is false and Christian theism true.

Dr. John West is author of Darwin Day in America.

1 comment:

P@J said...

“Darwinism leads to Relativism -- when conditions change, moral rules change.”
So you are suggesting moral rules didn’t change before Darwinism? Slavery went from a moral activity to an immoral one (in many parts of the world) before Descent of Man was published. The Morals expressed in the Old testament seem to vary significantly from those of the New Testament…

“Nothing sacrosanct about monogamous marriage.”
Monogamy in humans is no different than monogamy in Canada Geese, except that Canada Geese tend to be better at it.

“This view of racial inequality, which flows naturally from darwinism, extends all the way to 2007 when James Watson (of DNA fame) asserted that blacks are biologically inferior to whites, which he attributed to human evolution.”
If Watson had merely stated that blacks are biologically different that whites, would he be correct? His mistake was to view those measureable, confirmable, DNA-related differences through a lens distorted by his culture and place dubious “value” on the differences: Long legs are better/worse, blue eyes are better/worse, etc.
He also made the logical error of suggesting that, since people spread out from Africa, the people prior to that spread were more like Africans than Europeans or Asians, as if human evolution stopped in Africa when the Europeans moved out. Silly.

“Which brings us to Mein Kamf and eugenics.”
Ha ha ha! Dropping the reductio ad Hitlerum pretty early, no? Wasn’t Hitler Catholic? Let’s see: Mein Kampf: ““I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.” (p. 507), ““The anti-Semitism of the new movement was based on religious ideas instead of racial knowledge.” (P 119). Hmmm…

“Dr. West gives us ample reasons why a rational person would hope that darwinism is false and Christian theism true”
Well, if hopes were sandwiches, we would all have great picnics. What you refer to as “darwinism” (the observation of evolution and interpretation of natural selection as a driving mechanism) isn’t something any *rational* person can “wish” out of existence any more than you can “wish” Gravitism (the observation that things fall and the interpretation that it is the result of general gravitation) out of existence. I would posit that just wishing that fundamental physics, chemistry, math and biology is all untrue is a warning sign that a person is not being “rational”. Or how would you define “rational”?

"... nothing intellectually compelling or challenging.. bald assertions coupled to superstition... woefully pathetic"