Yes, Evolution IS a Religion!

I probably would get this type of remark from any evolutionist to whom I might suggest such a thing. Yes, evolution (or, at least, belief in it and Darwinist defense of it) is a religion and its believers are just as religious as their theistic counterparts. This fact can be a stumbling block to most atheists, but it is quite true.

I should begin this essay by explaining what it is that constitutes a religion. I have expounded on this point elsewhere and I will do so in greater detail in this essay. A religion is not something that necessarily involves a belief in a god. The Humanist Manifesto I claims humanism is a religion and humanism certainly doesn't revolve around a belief in a god, at least a personal one (although it might revolve around a deliberate disbelief in a god). Buddhism and certain New Age religions claim to believe in God but their god is a very impersonal, almost nonexistent, god. Marxism has been defined as a secular religion and clearly contains no belief in a god. I've given this quite a bit of thought and have come up with the following qualities a belief system must have to be a religion:

1. It must be a paradigm that views multiple portions of reality as part of a single process, story, or historical narrative. The parts of the narrative must concern obligations, origin of life or universe or both and their eventual destination or outcome, and salvation. This is similar to Neil Postman's methodology when he defines a god as a narrative or story, "one that tells of origins and envisions a future, a story that constructs ideals, prescribes rules of conduct, provides a source of authority, and, above all, gives a sense of continuity and purpose [and] has sufficient credibility, complexity, and symbolic power to enable one to organize one's life around it."(1) Rabbi Marc Gellman and Monsignor Thomas Hartman agree with me, at least partly, in defining religion as a belief in a divine and rituals and ethics that stem from that belief. "Beliefs give religion its mind, rituals give religion its shape, and ethics give religion its heart," they say. (2) However, humanism has been defined as a religion and so perhaps their definition should be amended to include the belief and deliberate non belief in a god. Since our views of reality are affected by what a divine is and does, their definition should also include a conception of how the divine interacts and fails to interact with the history of the world.

Christianity satisfies this criterion because it views all of history as a paradigm centering on the Christian God's interactions with humanity. The creation of humans, the birth of Christ, and eventual judging of all humans is part of this process.

The New Age movement is an example because the original splitting of life from its pantheistic god is a part of the same process, or narrative, by which we supposedly can regain our union with this god. We are to realize the godhood in each of us and this realization is a culmination of the original separation from the pantheistic god.

2. There is an aspect of the religion that causes its adherents to be biased toward that religion. This is because the religion speaks to needs such as the desire to know where humans and the universe came from, what their obligations are, and how they are to be saved. This bias comes about because the religion answers these questions and those answers are appealing to the believers. Religions "explain" reality and believers of religions find it difficult to leave their religions because of the emotional attachment to them. This is different, certainly, from the traditional view of the scientist who is undogmatic and not attached to any religious view of reality.

The salvation aspect of religions should be understood as either a way to escape the present malaise of sin on this Earth, reform each person to make them without sin, or to reform society to eliminate social ills. Becoming a "clear" is an example of this in Scientology and Nirvana is an example in Buddhism and Hinduism. Reincarnationist religions, especially the New Age movement, give their adherents a reason to believe in their religions because they give the followers a way to control their own salvation and eventual soulish destiny. As I've found, these religions do believe in a certain type of cyclical evolution of the universe.

3. Some, perhaps many, events in this religious process cannot be seen, inspected, or totally understood by any scientific method of inquiry that includes the possibility they might be falsified. The enlightenment of Buddha, the nature of God, the creation of humans, the future utopia of Communism, the angelic visitations to Joseph Smith (for instance) are not accessible to human view nor can they, in principle, ever be accessible to human exploration except for those who experience the religious occurrences. These events must be believed out of faith although these religious paradigms might find evidence for these unfalsifiable events that we can accumulate with our scientific methods.

This property is open to dispute so I'll clarify what I mean. The internal workings of the human body can be studied by numerous researchers, but the internal workings of God's "body" cannot be inspected by anyone. The enlightenment of Buddha cannot be studied by anyone because no person can experience the same experience he did. The creation of humans by God cannot be studied because it was a singular event not to happen again or be observed. Angelic visitations to Joseph Smith will undoubtedly never happen to any other Mormon in the same way they did to Smith and hence are not capable of being studied in any way that lends itself to possible refutation.

One could further criticize my definition by asking whether I consider scientific postulates about the "big bang" religious tenets since the big bang is not repeatable. True, it is not repeatable, but the big bang is not part of a religious paradigm unless you assume it part of secular humanism. The previously mentioned religious "events" are unique in that they are part of a larger religious paradigm and give credence to others parts of that paradigm.

Evolution has properties like religion in all of the previously mentioned ways. I'll go in the exact order of the previous list.

Evolution is a paradigm that explains not only the origin of the universe but the origin of humans and human culture. Everything else in our life is also explained through the Darwinian lense of explanation such as biological reasons for human behavior, not to mention ethics. I'll explain what I mean by this after I first quote Julian Huxley.

Charles Darwin has rightly been described as the "Newton of biology": He did more than any single individual before or since to change man's attitude to the phenomena of life and to provide a coherent scientific framework of ideas for biology, in place of an approach in large part compounded of hearsay, myth, and superstition. He rendered evolution inescapable as a fact, comprehensible as a process, all-embracing as a concept. (3)

We now believe with confidence that the whole of reality is one gigantic process of evolution. This produces increased novelty and variety, and ever higher types of organization; in a few spots it has produced life; and, in a few of those spots of life, it has produced mind and consciousness. This universal process is divisible into three phases or sectors, each with its own method of working, its own rate of change, and its own kind of results. Over most of the universe it is in the lifeless or inorganic phase. On earth . . . it is in the organic or biological phase. This works by natural selection and has produced a huge variety of animals and plants, some astonishingly high organizations . . . and the emergence of mind. (4)

This is not some minor evolutionist speaking about Darwin in a secluded back-room intellectual discussion. This is Julian Huxley, grandson of Thomas Huxley, a man who has earned fame defending evolution from critics. His thoughts have been echoed by countless other atheists.

Evolution, to most evolutionists, is not an event that occurs in limited periods of the universal timescale, like water freezing or fossils decaying. Evolution, to Huxley, applies to not just biological life but nonbiological entities (probably stellar bodies). Religion and ethics also evolved by chance and were not divinely created, a point Huxley also makes. Scientists also create machines that "evolve" and psychologists construct ways of helping people that suppose people evolved from primitive life.

Clearly evolutionists, at least atheistic evolutionists, are biased toward evolution as their religion. Richard Dawkins let the cat out of the bag when he admitted that Darwin made it possible to be an "intellectually fulfilled atheist."(5) Humanist manifestos I and II both indicate that humanists are biased. Humanist Manifesto I begins by defining as its first affirmation the supposition that humans are a part of nature and have emerged from a continuing natural process, and that modern science makes any supernatural view of the universe unacceptable. It also says the "traditional dualism of mind and body must be rejected."

That the evolutionist religion speaks to ultimates as the origin of life and the origin of morals and our moral obligations has been recognized by such diverse philosophers as Peter Kreeft, Frank Zindler, Edward Wilson, Daniel Dennett, and others. What atheistic evolutionists envision is a world where there are no dogmatic absolutes and every moral judgement is tested against the needs of society - no matter how nebulous the concept of "society" is. This means that our social codes are very malleable and never unchangeable.

Given this, it's no surprise that Humanist Manifesto II argues for permissibility of sexual experiences, birth control, divorce, and abortion. This manifesto says that "intolerant attitudes" cultivated by "puritanical cultures" repress sexual conduct. Humanists are obviously knowledgeable about Christianity and its codes of conduct and evolution, of course, removes a god as judge of mankind's actions. It's no wonder that the manifestos that encourage sexual freedom and abortion to fix mistakes of sexual misconduct begin by advocating evolution as the bedrock of their faith. One might not be mistaken for supposing the evolutionist philosophy is adopted to make proper the political choices these manifestos advocate.

The evolutionist philosophy also gives its adherent a method of secular salvation. Humanist Manifesto II declares that we need to extend the scientific method and fuse compassion and reason to build constructive social and moral values. A Secular Humanist Declaration published later than the first two manifestos declares:

The modern secular humanist outlook has led to the application of science and technology to the improvement of the human condition. This has had a positive effect on reducing poverty, suffering, and disease in various parts of the world, in extending longevity, on improving transportation and communications, and in making the good life possible for more and more people. It has led to the emancipation of hundreds of millions of people from the exercise of blind faith and fears of superstition and has contributed to their education and the enrichment of their lives. (6)

Certainly there have been theists who have practiced science and medicine, but this blurb is not really denying that. What it is denying is the possibility of being helped at all by religion and miracles.

What these humanists do suppose is that science is the key to making the world better and this science is seen through a Darwinist framework. Whether it be genetic engineering or robotics, not to mention psychology, everything is being molded into a framework where evolution supposedly explains the quirks in that scientific realm. The key to making things better is to understand how things come about and came about through evolution.

This is the humanist secular salvation. It isn't heaven, of course, but it is the means to make things better - if not now, then later. Salvation certainly doesn't have to happen immediately; reincarnationist religions certainly don't advocate the culmination of salvation immediately. The humanist salvation represents a continuing process with neverending possibilities drawing inspiration from Darwin. It is also assumed, among some humanists, that religion will die out as well (or at least lose much of its usefulness). Then humanism will also take over the role that religion had in people's lives. The continuing hold on mankind's hearts that religion has must be quite a disappointment to humanists. This secular hope is also seen in Ralph Burhoe, founder of a journal of religion and science, who is described by theistic evolutionist Ian Barbour.

Burhoe advocates an evolutionary naturalism as the religious philosophy best suited to a scientific culture. For him, nature is the functional equivalent of the traditional God, and it should be the object of our worship and obedience. We are totally dependent on the evolutionary process for our existence, our sustenance, and our destiny. nature is omnipotent and sovereign, the power on which we are dependent; it is our creator and judge. We must adapt to the requirements of "the all-determining reality system .. Man's salvation comes in recognizing this fact and adapting to it or bowing down before the majesty and glory of the magnificent program of evolving life in which we live and move and have our being." (7)

Humanists generally assume things will get better. Paul Kurtz, in the introduction to Humanist Manifesto II that I own, says that events after the signing of the first manifesto, like Naziism, have shown the first manifesto was too optimistic. Kurtz seems surprised by this although a Christian might not be surprised. To a Christian, mankind is depraved by sin and certainly controls must be used to repress mankind's desires. To Kurtz - to borrow a useful euphemism - "the skies the limit" to what changes the humanist can create using scientific methods. Perhaps science can even elimiminate the harmful effects of sexual activity so that we can enjoy, without the dangers, all the freedoms the manifestos promise. That, I think, is the hope and dream of the signers.

This is why, I think, the humanists of these documents embraced socialism. Mankind is fragmented and therefore fights amongst itself. The need for a cooperative order is never greater than now and humanists feel a united effort will solve our problems, using science, of course. Critics, however, reply that absolute power corrupts absolutely and we should not have transnational governments.

When things go awry, socialists often express regret, as Norman Thomas (8) did when finding it a surprise that science led to the exploding of the atom bomb when science was supposed to save us and fill the void left in the hearts of socialists that have forsaken Christianity.

This brings me to the last contention I have, the one most difficult to prove. Evolution has happenings that cannot in principle ever be seen or examined by scientific principles and practices. This is because biological evolution happened long before man appeared. So did stellar evolution and the evolution of religion. The macroevolutionary changes demanded by evolution cannot be observed, nor can evolution from ape to man.

The lack of transitionals was brought to everyone's attention in a recent edition of Time magazine.

The more scientists struggle to explain the Cambrian explosion, the more singular it seems. And just as the peculiar behavior of light forced physicists to conclude that Newton's laws were incomplete, so the Cambrian explosion has caused experts to wonder if the twin Darwinian imperatives of genetic variation and natural selection provide an adequate framework for understanding evolution. "What Darwin described in the Origin of Species," observes Queen's University paleontologist Narbonne, "was the steady background kind of evolution. But there also seems to be a non-Darwinian kind of evolution that functions over extremely short time periods and that's where all the action is."(9)

This article is not the only one to bring attention to some of the inadequacies of evolutionist theory. Francis Hitching has tested current evolutionary theory and found it not compelling. He finds creationism also lacking, although he finds that everything found in nature fits creationist theories perfectly. Hitching wishes to put in its place a science of new discovery.

The new biology is looking afresh at living things -- at their shapes, their patterns, their dynamics and their relationships. If, after more than a century, natural selection has been tested and found wanting, and if we are left once again with a sense of ignorance about origins, Darwin would not have minded. Science is a voyage of discovery, and beyond each horizon there is another.(10)

Sometimes evolutionists make frank admissions that evolution is extrapolation from micro to macro changes, as Hitching has done. Apparently what we do not understand with our science is how macroevolutionary changes occurred and we do not have the ability to understand them. They are beyond our science and hence the supposition the changes happened via natural processes is as much an article of faith as anything Christianity can offer.

The lack of evidence for evolution is most apparent in the change from apes to mankind - especially concerning the adoption of language. John Klotz lists several experiments done with apes, experiments meant to demonstrate that they could learn and master language.(11) In the 1960s there were attempts to teach chimpanzees. One chimpanzee learned to make and recognize 125 signs. A chimp named Koko is reported to have learned more than 400 signs. Many psychologists and anthropologists recognize that these apes may have learned these signs as a mechanism for getting rewards from the humans training them. If the ape does what the human tries to teach it, the ape will get rewarded. Thus, the actions by the apes are ones of stimulus-response without comprehending the language.

Robin Dunbar, evolutionist, after listing experiments with teaching apes to speak, comes to roughly the same conclusions as Klotz.

However, despite all the effort devoted over the past three decades to training apes to use language, none of them has progressed convincingly beyond the simple two and three-word sentences typical of two-year-old human children. (12)

Here is a clear example of the possibility of proving or disproving evolution. If Christianity would have to subject itself to evidence this scant, atheists would pronounce it false on that basis. They don't do this to evolution, of course, because evolution is much more than science. It is religion in the disguise of science.

Clearly evolution is unfalsifiable because there are so many events that make up the concept of evolution that one can always select what might "prove" evolution and discard what might damage faith in this belief. This is not the end of it, though. Evolution sports as evidence, micro changes such as the resistance of bacteria to antibiotics. But when evidence of changes are lacking, it supposes the changes were large as in the suppositions of punctured equilibrium. The evidence is lacking because evolution often leaves no evidence, so the argument goes. Sometime we find that evolution is so crafty and wise that it can create the most intricate organs, such as the eye. This is why Dawkins has dubbed evolution "the blind watchmaker," an admission that evolution can create biological organs as intricate as a watch. When we find, however, that terrible chaotic things happen, as in a bus that crashes and kills children, Richard Dawkins argues that this, too, is an example of evolution. (13) Evolution is capable of creating and doing anything, but such capabilities mark the dividing line between science and pseudoscience.

This sort of unfalsifiability in evolution disturbs those who look at it with philosophical and skeptical eyes, but it does not disturb the true believers. That is because evolution, to them, is not something to be proven or disproven. It's idea of common ancestry and descent with modification, not to mention higher organizing capabilities, is so appealing that it cannot be false. Evolution, like Christianity, looks for proof of it to give evidence for a faith in events that can never be proven or perceived. Gaps in evolution can always be explained away as gaps in our scientific knowledge so that evolution can never be disproven. It, instead, takes on a religion with the need for faith in what we cannot see.

To summarize, evolution satisfies my criteria for the definition of religion. It adopts a paradigm, or narrative, to explain life's origins, its obligations, the origin of religion, and our eventual destiny and salvation. The events that make up evolutionist theory are so numerous that it cannot in principle in any way be falsified using our scientific knowledge. Evolution is believed for emotional and philosophical reasons, by faith. True believers can always pick and choose what events confirm belief in evolution and what events do not count as confirmation. The emotional crutch evolution creates causes its adherents to be very biased against other views of reality.

Evidently, you didn’t read far enough

Evolution has happenings that cannot in principle ever be seen or examined by scientific principles and practices. This is because biological evolution happened long before man appeared. So did stellar evolution and the evolution of religion. The macroevolutionary changes demanded by evolution cannot be observed, nor can evolution from ape to man.

The lack of transitionals was brought to everyone’s attention in a recent edition of Time magazine.

The more scientists struggle to explain the Cambrian explosion, the more singular it seems. And just as the peculiar behavior of light forced physicists to conclude that Newton’s laws were incomplete, so the Cambrian explosion has caused experts to wonder if the twin Darwinian imperatives of genetic variation and natural selection provide an adequate framework for understanding evolution. “What Darwin described in the Origin of Species,” observes Queen’s University paleontologist Narbonne, “was the steady background kind of evolution. But there also seems to be a non-Darwinian kind of evolution that functions over extremely short time periods and that’s where all the action is.”(9)

The new biology is looking afresh at living things — at their shapes, their patterns, their dynamics and their relationships. If, after more than a century, natural selection has been tested and found wanting, and if we are left once again with a sense of ignorance about origins, Darwin would not have minded. Science is a voyage of discovery, and beyond each horizon there is another.(10)

Robin Dunbar, evolutionist, after listing experiments with teaching apes to speak, comes to roughly the same conclusions as Klotz.

Here is a clear example of the possibility of proving or disproving evolution. If Christianity would have to subject itself to evidence this scant, atheists would pronounce it false on that basis. They don’t do this to evolution, of course, because evolution is much more than science. It is religion in the disguise of science.

Clearly evolution is unfalsifiable because there are so many events that make up the concept of evolution that one can always select what might “prove” evolution and discard what might damage faith in this belief. This is not the end of it, though. Evolution sports as evidence, micro changes such as the resistance of bacteria to antibiotics. But when evidence of changes are lacking, it supposes the changes were large as in the suppositions of punctured equilibrium. The evidence is lacking because evolution often leaves no evidence, so the argument goes. Sometime we find that evolution is so crafty and wise that it can create the most intricate organs, such as the eye. This is why Dawkins has dubbed evolution “the blind watchmaker,” an admission that evolution can create biological organs as intricate as a watch. When we find, however, that terrible chaotic things happen, as in a bus that crashes and kills children, Richard Dawkins argues that this, too, is an example of evolution. (13) Evolution is capable of creating and doing anything, but such capabilities mark the dividing line between science and pseudoscience.

This sort of unfalsifiability in evolution disturbs those who look at it with philosophical and skeptical eyes, but it does not disturb the true believers. That is because evolution, to them, is not something to be proven or disproven. It’s idea of common ancestry and descent with modification, not to mention higher organizing capabilities, is so appealing that it cannot be false. Evolution, like Christianity, looks for proof of it to give evidence for a faith in events that can never be proven or perceived. Gaps in evolution can always be explained away as gaps in our scientific knowledge so that evolution can never be disproven. It, instead, takes on a religion with the need for faith in what we cannot see.

To summarize, evolution satisfies my criteria for the definition of religion. It adopts a paradigm, or narrative, to explain life’s origins, its obligations, the origin of religion, and our eventual destiny and salvation. The events that make up evolutionist theory are so numerous that it cannot in principle in any way be falsified using our scientific knowledge. Evolution is believed for emotional and philosophical reasons, by faith. True believers can always pick and choose what events confirm belief in evolution and what events do not count as confirmation. The emotional crutch evolution creates causes its adherents to be very biased against other views of reality.

Charles Darwin has rightly been described as the “Newton of biology”:

Yes, that certainly sounds like Julian Huxley.

What makes Newton so influential is not the fact that he has a logically coherent model of the universe. What makes him influenial and relevant is the fact that we can PREDICT events with a fairly high degree of accuracy.

By including relativity and quantum mechanics with Newtonian insights — even if mutually exclusive in some areas — we can both PREdict and RETROdict physical events to 12 decimal places or more.

There is nothing even remotely approaching this in Darwinian evolution: Darwinists cannot predict things with accuracy; nor can they say with any sort of confidence what definitely did occur in the past. What they do is GUESS. The many gaps in the narrative they tell are neatly filled in by pre-fabricated elements in Darwinist theory (”struggle to survive”; “natural selection”; “survival of the fittest”; etc.).

Darwinian evolution may or may not be likened to a religion; it is, however, exactly similar to a Creation Myth, in which the historically indispensible notion of an intelligent creator is replaced with “Chance” plus “Lots of Time” plus “Pseudo-Explanatory-Laws like Natural Selection.”

Until he recanted, Karl Popper — who had always believed in evolution, and was an atheist — claimed that Darwinian evolution was a “metaphysical research programme”, and NOT a true science. His recanting did nothing to convince anyone that he had suddenly proven to himself that evolution lived up to his own requirements of “science.”

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.