"Darwinism" is a fantasy word, whatever radical opponents of evolution say it is, much like my son’s made up superhero "Traigler". At least he’s not misrepresenting other superheros when he invents his. But he’s just 4 and not so insecure and bitter.
Try to find strength in your own ideology rather than misrepresenting those of others Irish.
Objectivism is nothing more than naturalism dressed up as something it isn’t. The bottom line for Ayn Rand is this: her ideas taken to their logical conclusion find her (and her followers) caused and determined by impersonal forces of Nature. Logically, her ‘thougts’ were caused by something other than herself. In short, her thought processes weren’t her thought processes after all.
Aristotle had a good mind but when all is said and done, he swam in the muddied waters of naturalism with no way out.
Typically, many who seek to misrepresent the Objectivist position on this issue, by trying to charge that Objectivism stands for ontological materialism, make the mistake of assuming the false alternatives involved in monism — and indeed are often just hawking their particular religious views, which they hold on faith and not by reason, but which they seek to smuggle into the discussion of philosophical issues. By trying to associate the natural exclusively with the material, such religionists hope to pave the way for their version of reductive spiritualism and supernaturalism. Since Objectivism rejects monism and the false alternatives of materialism and idealism/mysticism from the start, this dishonest tactic does not succeed. It must only be pointed out.If seems to me it is not the "religionists" who are hoping to reduce the natural to the material, so to "pave the way for their version of reductive spiritualism and supernaturalism." [Reductive???] They are just the ones who notice that it is the atheists who specialize in this sort of thing. Ayn Rand, the founder of Objectivism, was an atheist. As such, she had all the fashionable atheist presuppositions, the most famous being that faith and reason are absolutely mutually exclusive entities. She ever purported to be "Aristotelian" in her methods, while excoriating Plato, Aristotle's own teacher, for his "idealism," not to mention his putative fascist tendencies. She evidently did not see that both men saw just the same thing, albeit from different perspectives: That is, at bottom, the world is as it is because it is the creature of a divine will and intelligence that emanates from outside the natural world system. Both recognized that "creature" manifests "form." Plato put creature-specifying Form outside of or "beyond" nature; Aristotle, within the creature itself. In either case, "Form" for both of them remains a metaphysical entity that specifies all the particular living systems in the (immanent) natural world.
I just think the woman was terribly confused....
In any case, you mention that you couldn't tell whether the belief in naturalism or idealism came first. The question strikes me as anhistorical to begin with. For if we want to know the answer to that question, we have to go back to the original sources of the ancient world. And if we do that, we have to interpret them in light of the meaning and intent of their authors — who will not have been applying such modern categories as "naturalism" and "materialism" or "idealism" to their efforts, nor had they ever heard of "the scientific method."
To clarify this, C. S. Lewis drew the distinction between the "use" of a text, and the "reception" of a text.
In An Experiment in Criticism Lewis draws an important distinction between “using” and “receiving” the text. If we are to understand an ancient text, or any text for that matter, we must get out of the way. We must toss all our culturally and historically conditioned biases aside and “receive” the text in the manner in which the author intended. When we approach ... [a] text, we must read it in the light of its own cultural, historical and literary context. Since modern scientific and historical precision were foreign to the ancient writers, we must not hold them to such standards.Of course, this is the very opposite of what the literary deconstructionists recommend.... But it seems to me that Ayn Rand has taken a page from their book. She must, for it seems she uses Aristotle as some kind of ventriloquists's dummy, through which to speak her own thoroughly disordered and distorted ideas.
Anyhoot, I'm not an Objectivist (as you can see). I'm also not a Libertarian, through I am so often sympathetic to their views. As long as they keep taking "pot shots" at religious believers in general, and Christians in particular, I can find no home among them. FWIW