Posted on 09/23/2003 1:23:37 PM PDT by Vindiciae Contra TyrannoSCOTUS
Ask someone who the first Darwinist was, and they’re likely to think it’s a trick question, like "Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?" But as a recent book tells us, it’s not Darwin—at least not in regard to the way a materialistic worldview shapes our morals.
That book is Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists by Benjamin Wiker. Wiker of Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, calls the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who lived in the third century before Christ, the "first Darwinist." Actually, as Wiker says, it would be more accurate to say that Darwin was an Epicurean—probably the most influential one ever.
What he means is that Darwin represented the culmination of what Wiker calls "Epicurean Materialism." While Epicureanism is commonly associated with hedonism, the fact is that Epicurus "offered the first thorough-going materialist view of the universe where the mere chance interaction of brute matter swirling about created all things."
So, human beings are "just one more soul-less product of evolution," and "there is ultimately no good and evil." This account of the universe was the "foundation" of Darwin’s system and his materialistic explanation for the world.
Wiker writes that Epicurean materialism is "fundamentally antagonistic" to Christianity. For two thousand years, these worldviews have contradicted one another with regard to God, nature, human nature, and morality.
The last part is especially important. Just as Epicurean materialism provided the foundation for Darwinism, Darwinism is the foundation for "one of the two sides in the culture war": the side "that champions sexual freedom, abortion, [and] euthanasia."
A materialistic worldview undermines the very basis for morality by denying that we are distinct from the other animals and created in the image of God. Instead, we are considered the product of chance and impersonal forces. If that’s so, why prohibit murder? Nobody talks about "murdering" a dog or a fly. The very idea of "murder" assumes that there’s something unique about being human.
What’s true about murder goes double for human sexuality and familial relationships. If there is no God, soul, or afterlife, all that’s left, as Wiker’s subtitle tells us, is hedonism. In a world that is amoral, how we should live becomes a matter of "continually balancing bodily pleasures and pains." Morality and the distinction between good and evil are purely human creations with no intrinsic authority.
This link between materialism and amorality, along with materialism’s account of the origins of the universe, makes attempts to "reconcile" Darwinism with Christianity—which some Christians try to do—wrong-headed. If there is one lesson to be learned from "moral Darwinism," it is that Darwinism and materialism are not "morally neutral."
Materialism is very strong in American culture today. And we ought to be prepared to highlight for neighbors and friends the moral and cultural dead end to which materialism leads. A world in which good and evil are the product of the "random jostling of brute atoms" is not a place where most people want to live. But it’s the world that Darwinism and materialism gives us.
For further reading and information:
Benjamin Wiker, Moral Darwinism (InterVarsity, 2002).
Benjamin Wiker, " Playing Games with Good & Evil: The Failure of Darwinism to Explain Morality ," Crisis, May 2002.
Benjamin Wiker, " Darwin and the Descent of Morality ," First Things, November 2001, 10-13.
"Darwin as Epicurean: An Interview with Benjamin Wiker ," Touchstone, October 2002.
Richard Weikart, " Epicurus’—and Darwin’s—Dangerous Idea ," Books & Culture, 18 November 2002 .
[…]
Yet textbooks continue to ignore the growing scientific skepticism. Some textbooks even perpetuate long-discredited proofs for Darwin's theory, such as embryo drawings from the 19th century that purport to show that many animals - from fish to people - look virtually identical in the earliest stages of embryonic development. Although it has been known in scientific literature for years that the drawings are wildly inaccurate, three textbooks proposed for Texas still include them. How should schools teach evolution? Don't forget weaknesses in theory
The American nation had been founded by intellectuals who had accepted a world view the that was based upon Biblical authority as well as Newtonian science. They had assumed that God created the earth and all life upon it at the time of creation and had continued without change thereafter. Adam and Eve were God's final creations, and all of mankind had descended from them. Did America's Founders Believe in a Creator God?
In fact, all the signers of the Declaration and the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, as well as the delegates to the various sessions of the Continental Congress-at least so far as known-were men who believed in God and the special creation of the world and mankind. Nearly all were members of Christian churches and believed the Bible to be the inspired Word of God. Did America's Founding Fathers Believe in Creationism?
For three decades, Holmes brought his distinctively Darwinian bias to the Court. He spoke candidly: "I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand." Do Laws and Standards Evolve?
Consequently, during Warren’s sixteen year tenure, the Court became a powerful societal force, striking down numerous long-standing historical practices while acknowledging that it was doing so without any previous precedent. [222] In short, the Court thus publicly affirmed that it had finally arrived at its fully evolutionary aspiration, no longer bound by history or precedent.
Under this current theory, judges are solely responsible for the evolution of the Constitution, and it is living and organic according to their decree. As Justice Cardozo acknowledged, "I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life." [223] And Chief-Justice Charles Evans Hughes (1862-1948) similarly declared, "We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is." [224]
Harvard Professor Steven Wise summarizes this radical revolution in legal theory occasioned by the adoption of Darwin’s principles:
"To understand the strong normative appeal of evolutionary models, one must first appreciate that American law, like biology at the time of Darwin, faces the problem of providing a theory of creation which does not invoke a Supreme Being." E Donald Elliott, "The Evolutionary Tradition in Jurisprudence," 85 Columbia Law Review 38, 91 (1985). Elliott, who believes that the manner in which law is affected by the ideas that it routinely borrows from other disciplines has been largely unexplored, sets sail by chronicling how the Darwinian idea of evolution has affected the jurisprudential work of such legal scholars as Holmes, Wigmore and Corbin. Id. See also Jan Vetter, The Evolution of Holmes, Holmes and Evolution, 72 Cal. L. Rev. 343, 362 (1984) ("Holmes’ The Common Law is first of all an account of legal change, and its object in this respect is to exhibit the workings of Darwinian evolution in law"). Evolutionary jurisprudence was often shunned during the middle half of the twentieth century due to that period’s association of evolution with Spencer’s racist and reactionary Social Darwinism. Elliott, at 59, 76. It is shunned no longer. Id. See Roger D. Masters, Evolutionary Biology, Political Theory and the State, in Law, Biology & Culture—The Evolution of Law 171 (Margaret Gruter & Paul Bohannon eds., 1983). [225] Evolution and the Law:
Pearcey analyzes "the crucial role played by the Darwinian view of origins" in the development of American legal philosophy. "Darwinism is not only a biological theory," she emphasizes; "it is also the basis for a comprehensive world view -- implying a new philosophy of mind, knowledge, morality, and law." Pearcey sees a direct connection between Darwinism and the postmodern view that "the only objective and absolute truth is that there are no objective and absolute truths." She argues that a "thorough-going critique" of judicial activism "must begin with Darwinism as a scientific theory." Pearcey advocates taking "the intellectual battle into science itself. The controversy over Darwin versus design is not a peripheral issue," she insists, "but lies at the heart of the cultural crisis of our day." Darwinian Roots of Judicial Activism
"I've been predicting this for 20 years - that ultimately this theory of the living Constitution will destroy us, it will destroy the federal courts," Scalia said. WorldNetDaily: Scalia: Supreme Court jester
This [theistic evolution] has often been called derisively a 'stop-gap' theory. It is really a child of embarrassment, which calls God in at periodic intervals to help nature over the chasms that yawn at her feet. It is neither the Biblical doctrine of creation, nor a consistent theory of evolution, for evolution is defined as 'a series of gradual progressive changes effected by means of resident forces' (Le Conte). In fact, theistic evolution is a contradiction in terms. It is just as destructive of faith in the Biblical doctrine of creation as naturalistic evolution is; and by calling in the creative activity of God time and again it also nullifies the evolutionary hypothesis.[122] Darwinism and the Law
Our founders also recognized that only a virtuous people would deserve the continued blessings of liberty that had been bestowed upon them. Moreover, virtually all of our nation's founders believed that a virtuous people was a necessary pre-condition for self-government, and that virtue could not be had or sustained without religion. President Washington, for example, noted in his Farewell Address that "reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." Benjamin Rush was even more blunt: "Where there is no religion, there will be no morals." Morality Without God?
1785, If men are so wicked with religion,what would they be if without it? Franklin's Advice to Thomas Paine Regarding the Age of Reason
I don't claim that Darwin and his theory of evolution brought on the holocaust; but I cannot deny that the theory of evolution, and the atheism it engendered, led to the moral climate that made a holocaust possible" Jewish scholar Edward Simon D arwin at Nuremberg I
Those attacking Christianity sometimes point to the many religious wars and atrocities perpetrated in the name of Christ and the Church. They forget that not everyone self-labelled 'Christian' truly follows Christ. Also, that many times more people have been killed this century, most by their own governments, than in all religious conflicts, ever.1 And this slaughter happened because of philosophies openly hostile to biblical Christianity, and flowing directly from evolutionary belief. About 130 million (not including the hundreds of millions killed by abortion) were slaughtered this century in the name of atheism, whereas all those killed in 'the name of Christ' in all of recorded history was at most around 17 million. See James Kennedy and Jerry Newcombe, What if Jesus had never been born? Thomas Nelson, Nashville, 1994. The blood-stained 'century of evolution'
My basic case is that religion doesn't promote this kind of thing; it's the exception to the rule. The rule actually is that when we remove God from the equation, when we act and live as if we have no one to answer to but ourselves, and if there is no God, then the rule of law is social Darwinism-- the strong rule the weak. We'll find that, quite to the contrary, it is not Christianity and the belief in the God of the Bible that results in carnage and genocide. But it's when people reject the God of the Bible that we are most vulnerable to those kinds of things that we see in history that are the radical and gross destruction of human lives. Stand to Reason Commentary - The Real Murderers: Atheism or ...
On May 2, 2002, Mark Warner of Virginia became the first governor to publicly apologize to the many thousands of people who were sterilized against their will during the eugenics movement in the United States. Through 1979, about 8,000 people in Virginia were prevented from being able to have children because they were considered to be ‘unfit.’
A Yale University study has shed light on the dark side of evolution in the form of social Darwinism. Social Darwinism is the application of evolutionary principles to humans, most notably in the form of eugenics. As a result of the eugenics movement in the United States nearly 100,000 people were sterilized, many against their will. These sterilizations were legal in many states even as recently as 1974. The Dark Side of Evolution
My greatest mistake as a pro-life person was in thinking Roe v. Wade arrived by itself. I didn't want to link abortion to other controversial subjects, which scared or confused me, detracting from the obvious atrocity of butchering a living, unborn child. Because of my narrow focus, I ignored the horrific world-view and the socio-political-financial machinery fueling abortion.
I realized that evolution by natural selection has been the fundamental pro-life issue since Darwin himself. His argument that biologically inferior people threaten to deprive intellectually superior people of food and resources established a scientific-sounding rationale for genocide, which is used today by the abortion-based population control and family planning establishments, as well as others bent to this day on improving the race by laboratory methods.
Darwin argued that charitable acts by civilized men lead to evolutionary degeneration:
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we 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 civilized societies propagate 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. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.3
Darwin himself evidenced how evolution made bigotry an academic exercise…when he applauded the extermination of "savage races" and "anthropomorphous apes:"
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes . . . 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 civilized 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.7
In his book, Behe shows how, at the one-cell level, life is a self-contained system of indispensable moving, chemical parts, so mutually dependent on each other that absent even one part, the system would not exist. Behe named this observation "irreducible complexity." By physical necessity, all of the molecules of even a one-celled life must have burst forth together as an integrated operating system. Rebecca Messall -- The Evolution of Genocide
Quite aside from Darwinism as science, which it is not, Darwinism itself leads directly and inevitably to Social Darwinism, an extremely destructive philosophy with suitably destructive social impacts -- impacts that have become increasingly apparent in our culture in recent decades with the rising dominance of Darwinism in our public schools.
It is a costly pity that we as a culture have not achieved the clarity of thought and found th courage to say to Darwinism, simply, "Show me", and if it cannot, "Get out of the classroom!" It hasn't (shown us), it won't and it cannot, Folks. When do we give this scientific quackery a decent burial? 1 posted on 11/28/2001 10:21 PM CST by Phaedrus Darwin and the Descent of Morality
Idiotic nonsense, of course. There's no connection between Darwinism and any of these three. I believe in Darwinian evolution, am against abortion and euthanasia, and my stance of 'sexual freedom' is about what you'd expect from a father of two teenage daughters.
A materialistic worldview undermines the very basis for morality by denying that we are distinct from the other animals and created in the image of God. Instead, we are considered the product of chance and impersonal forces. If that’s so, why prohibit murder? Nobody talks about "murdering" a dog or a fly. The very idea of "murder" assumes that there’s something unique about being human.
Au contraire. A naturalistic worldview forces us to think seriously about morality, because it does not provide instant answers in terms of an archaic set of rules handed down to a primitive tribe, a high proportion of which rules are simply ignored by those who proclaim their superiority.
Since the LA Times recently revealed that Charles Colson does not actually write the columns that go out under his by-line, I must say I don't take his moral lectures awfully seriously. This supposedly amoral Darwinian doesn't put his name on other people's work. This supposedly amoral Darwinian has never hired Teamsters to beat up demonstrators, or considered fire-bombing the Brookings Institution, or obstructed justice.
Since the LA Times recently revealed
LOL - That's paragon of credibility.
A naturalistic worldview forces us to think seriously about morality, because it does not provide instant answers in terms of an archaic set of rules handed down to a primitive tribe, a high proportion of which rules are simply ignored by those who proclaim their superiority.
Till you have understood and refuted those sets of rules, your novel ideas concerning same have less credibility that the L.A.T.
Do you avoid wearing clothes of mixed cloth, or touching menstruating women?
Good thing you got here first. For me, anyway.
Au contraire. A naturalistic worldview forces us to think seriously about morality, because it does not provide instant answers in terms of an archaic set of rules handed down to a primitive tribe, a high proportion of which rules are simply ignored by those who proclaim their superiority.
Exactly.
However, we all know some people who are incapable of rational thought to begin with or prefer to have someone else do their thinking for them. There may even be a few examples here on this thread.
On the contrary; atheistic systems of ethics have been around since before Christ. Aristotelian ethics, Kantian ethics, utilitarianism - all of these are based on clearly stated principles, not on someone's variable 'thoughts and feelings'. On the other hand, the various religions are forever changing their supposedly unchangeable moral codes. Do you and a Quaker agree on the morality of war? Do you and a Catholic agree on the morality of divorce?
Are there moral absolutes? If so, what are they and how were they discovered?
And I'll bet that not believing in Santa Claus makes Christmas Xmas that much more special to you too! Seriously!!!
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