Evolutionary Humanism: the Antithesis

The worldview of Evolutionary Humanism (or scientific naturalism) has two central components. The first is metaphysical; the second epistemological. Metaphysically, Evolutionary Humanism infers that the natural or material realm either self-created or has existed eternally. This doctrine is known as scientism. In addition, this worldview teaches us to believe that everything---including life and intelligence---came about through unseen (immaterial) processes of motion called evolution. Epistemologically, it demands that sensory knowledge (empiricism) be the only authoritative source of knowledge.

In the words of the Humanist Manifesto II: “Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis…science is the best method for determining this knowledge…” This principle is a universal limitation on knowledge requiring that knowledge be restricted to only that which can be empirically determined (sensed). In short, if it can’t be touched, seen under a microscope, measured, counted, weighed, or otherwise sensed, then it doesn’t exist, meaning that the immaterial or metaphysical realm does not exist.

This worldview’s two-part metaphysical creation story revolves around the atomic theory of matter and evolutionary theory. According to the former, all chemical change is the result of the rearrangement of unseen (immaterial) tiny parts---protons, neutrons, and electrons. By authority of the latter (evolutionary theory), we are expected to believe that random mutations or incremental changes (rearrangement of tiny unseen parts) over time are mostly responsible for causing macro-changes. In other words, this unseen process of change miraculously caused bacteria to change into fish which in turn changed into lizards which then changed into proto-apes which then changed into man. Through this same process, dinosaurs changed into hummingbirds, chickadees, flamingos, and such. Because all life forms emerged out of the same primordial bacterial stew, bacteria are the common ancestors of all life forms. By extension, all life forms share the same genetic material; therefore the idea of species distinctions is a fiction. This makes man a Heinz 57 mutt whose material brain possesses genetic material from bacteria, lizards, fish, and apes. In the words of John Darnton in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005:

“We are all of us, dogs and barnacles, pigeons and crabgrass…equally remarkable and equally dispensable.” (Quote from, “Human Beings Deserve the Right to Life Because They Are Human,” Wesley J. Smith, Life News, 8/27/07)

With profound faith in the humanist worldview, evolutionists and fellow travelers view themselves as thoroughly ‘modern’ ‘progressive’ and ‘intellectually enlightened.’ From their lofty perches they look down their noses in utter contempt and disdain upon the unwashed masses (defenders of God and America’s founding Judao-Christian worldview) for continuing to believe the unenlightened view that man is created in God’s image rather than accepting the ‘enlightened’ superstition that mans’ common ancestor is mindless bacteria. Believing they have arisen to spectacular intellectual heights, in reality the so-called ‘enlightened ones’ have fallen into the abyss of the most absurdly stupid and dangerously delusional belief system the world has yet witnessed. How can this be? Briefly, the entirety of their worldview (including its evolutionary creation story) is not itself scientifically testable. By failing to meet its own empirical requirements, it refutes itself. Yes, here we come to now understand why the emperor has no clothes.

This embarrassingly insurmountable intellectual problem occurs precisely because of humanism’s anti-God and metaphysical bias. Rejecting God and metaphysics is destructive of reason and science. In short, it’s not just anti-intellectual it’s also an insanity inducing deception.

The word metaphysics is based on the compound of two Greek words meta (after, beyond) and physika (physics, nature). It literally means beyond the physical or knowledge that exists beyond the physical world of sensory perception. Metaphysics is the study of the ultimate nature of reality, that is to say, it encompasses both natural and supernatural realms in its investigation of the origin, structure, and nature of what is real.

Greg L. Bahnsen tells us that worldviews are networks of metaphysical presuppositions and principles “regarding reality (metaphysics), knowing (epistemology), and conduct (ethics) in terms of which every element of human experience is related and interpreted.”(Pushing the Antithesis, p. 280)

Presuppositions provide both foundation and framework for worldviews. Crucial to the process of reason, presuppositions provide starting points and standards of authority by which truth and error are evaluated, the real and unreal can be identified, and the possible and impossible are determined. For instance, “In the beginning, Nothing---then a spark--- then Matter…” (spontaneous generation or something from nothing) is the foundational metaphysical presupposition by which evolutionary humanists determined through a peculiar reasoning process that only the sensory realm exists.

Universals are truths of an immaterial or non-sensory nature and are crucial to the understanding, organizing, and interpreting of particular truths within the context of the material world. Universals are metaphysical constructs such as concepts (i.e., inalienable rights), standards, principles (i.e., our founding principles), moral values, laws, and categorical statements. The Laws of Logic, so vitally important to the practice of science, reason, and coherent communication, are universals.

Metaphysical presuppositions and universals can’t be seen under a microscope, held in the hand, measured, weighed, or otherwise detected by the five senses yet they do exist. They exist within the supernatural or immaterial realm and are absolutely essential to the process of reason and the practice of science.

Additionally, scientists constantly deal with the unseen or immaterial realm in the form of subatomic particles, gravity, numbers, natural laws, laws of thought, causation, and memory (vital to scientific experimentation).

The whole theory of evolution, which drives and authenticates modern materialist presuppositions and assumptions, is a non-sensory (metaphysical) theoretical projection back into time. Yet despite that no scientist was there to witness it nor has anyone ever observed the creation of other universes or witnessed one kind of life change into a different kind, the theory of evolution is nevertheless proclaimed by many to be an empirically determined fact.

In principle, evolutionary humanists cannot even count, weigh, or measure (all of which are essential to the practice of science) because these acts involve an immaterial concept of law (a universal). Additionally, the postulation of universal order, a view necessary to making counting, weighing, and measuring intelligible, contradicts the materialist (metaphysical) proposition that the universe is a random or chance material realm. Furthermore, counting, weighing, and measuring call for immaterial entities which are uniform, orderly, and predictable. This once again contradicts the materialist proposition of continuous and random change over time.

Within the anti-intellectual straitjacket of the sensory realm, reason and science are destroyed. Empirical learning, reason, and intellectual inquiry are impossible without metaphysical presuppositions, universals, and assumptions.

As it is, evolutionary humanists do in fact reason, theorize, propose, presuppose, assume, hypothesize, count, weigh, measure, and practice science. They simply cannot give a philosophically principled account of how they “know” to do these things. All of which highlights the glaring dialectical tensions (i.e., hypocrisy, revisionism, deceptions, self-delusions, outright lying, mysticism) which of necessity are endemic to the humanist worldview.

Yet despite its colossal intellectual and moral failings, Evolutionary Humanism is now the dominant worldview in our secularized schools, colleges, universities, and government at every level. Additionally, it has made inroads into Christian schools, seminaries, and churches.

Regarding education in America, its’ direction can be seen as a downward spiral from Jonathan Edwards (1750) and the Christian influence, down to Horace Mann (1842) and the Unitarian influence, and yet further down to John Dewey (1933) and the evolutionary humanist take-over of our education institutions.

In the words of Charles F. Potter, signatory of the first Humanist Manifesto, 1933,

“Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday school, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teachings?”

Today, our classrooms are but transmission belts for the weird moral fetishes of humanist indoctrination; a mind-befogging and immorality-inducing process that leads to the adoption of atheism, materialism, politically correct ‘new morality,’ inhumanity, evolutionism, Cultural Marxism, New World Orderism, multiculturalism, sexual egalitarianism (hedonism/androgyny), cruelty, and other destructive anti-traditional views. As a consequence, Americans (and Christians) are walking away from America’s founding worldview---as well as God and their inalienable rights---due to the teaching of Evolutionary Humanism. After being befuddled, filled with unreasoning hatred and paranoid fear of God, Christianity, Orthodox Judaism, and traditional-values America, Americans’ become their own worst enemies. For as they mindlessly destroy traditional-values America in pursuit of universal peace, tolerance, diversity, and inclusion, they are unknowingly setting the stage for their own eventual enslavement and perhaps even death, as Evolutionary Humanism has a proven track-record of mass murder (genocide).

A brief comparison of our founding worldview versus Evolutionary Humanism’s three major permutations---Secular Humanism, Leninism-Marxism, and Post Modernism, will show us why this is occurring.

America’s Founding Judao-Christian Worldview 1. Theology: biblical theism 2. Philosophy: God/supernaturalism/metaphysics 3. Ethics: moral absolutes/Ten Commandments/sanctity of life 4. Biology: Creation 5. Psychology: mind/body dualism 6. Sociology: traditional family, church, state 7. Law: Divine/Natural Law 8. Politics: inalienable rights, individual freedom, justice, order 9. Economics: stewardship of property (private property), free markets

Secular Humanism, Marxism-Leninism, Post Modernism 1. Theology: atheism, atheism, atheism 2. Philosophy: naturalism, dialectical materialism, anti-realism 3. Ethics: moral relativism, proletariat morality, moral and cultural relativism 4. Biology: neo-Darwinism, punctuated evolution, punctuated evolution 5. Psychology: monism (self-actualization), monism (behaviorism), monism (socially constructed selves) 6. Sociology: alternative lifestyles and State control of children, classless society and State control of children, sexual egalitarianism and State control of children 7. Law: positive law, proletariat law, critical legal studies 8. Politics: secular world government, communist world government, secular world government 9. Economics: state control of resources, scientific socialism, state control of resources

As can be seen by this brief comparison, Evolutionary Humanism is not just the antithesis of our founding worldview it is completely destructive of it as well.

Observes William F. Buckley on the disintegration of traditional-values America,

“The most influential educators of our time---John Dewey, William Kilpatrick, George Counts, Harold Rugg, and the lot---are out to build a New Social Order. There is not enough room…for…religion (Christianity). It clearly won’t do…to foster within some schools a respect for an absolute, intractable God, a divine intelligence who is utterly unconcerned with other people’s versions of truth…It won’t do to tolerate a competitor for the allegiance of man. The State prefers a secure monopoly for itself…Religion (Christianity), then, must go…The fight is being won. Academic freedom is entrenched. Religion (Christianity) is outlawed in public schools. The New Social Order is larruping along.” (“Let Us Talk of Many Things,” p. 9-10)

Linda is the author of numerous published articles and essays on culture, politics, and worldview. Her writings are published both nationally and internationally. Linda is a member of MoveOff.net/

Sources: Pushing the Antithesis, Greg L. Bahnsen Understanding the Times, David Noebel What is Scientific Naturalism? J.P. Moreland

By my understanding, Lamarke's [sic] science was intended as an "improvement" on Darwin's theory, not a replacement for it in all details.

If that was the case, then Lamarck had a time machine. Lamarck was born in 1744 and died in 1829. His evolutionary ideas were probably best stated in his book Philosophie Zoologique, which was published in 1809, the year that Darwin was born. Briefly, Lamarck posited that characteristics acquired by an organism were heritable, or in other words, that organisms evolved through the acquisition of traits that they needed and used.

To get back to Darwin . . .

Why of course, since that is your agenda.

As I said, I don't think Lenin got any of his ideas from Plato or Thomas More. Or Lamarck, who eventually fell out of favor with Soviet science (who came along after Lenin's rise to power anyway, if memory serves).

I have no idea what you think you are "remembering" (although it sounds almost identical to the rendered hogwash tossed around by creationists like Henry Morris.)

Marx and Engels were Lamarckians. They believed that acquired characteristics could be inherited (and they were also inordinately fond of the rather loopy strand of Lamarckian thinking that the type of soil and landscape in a nation influenced national character).

Indeed, Marx viewed Darwin's ideas as inapplicable to human history and development. In Das Kapital, he references Darwin in only two footnotes. These are Marx's only published references to Darwin, and both are critical of Darwin's theory.

Marx went so far as to castigate both Büchner and Lange for trying to draw connections between his ideas and Darwin's, describing Büchner's work in particular as "superficial nonsense."

As Terence Ball noted in his article Marx and Darwin: A Reconsideration -- "[For Marx], Darwin's theory of natural selection applies, at best, only to prehuman, preconscious natural history; it does not apply to the epoch of human history in which men consciously transform nature and therefore themselves." The latter, of course, having distinctly Lamarckian roots.

In short, Darwinian theories of speciation and natural selection were diametrically opposed to Marx's idea that man was largely a product of his own will.

And Lamarckian concepts did not, in your words, "fall out of favor with Soviet science." On the contrary, Lamarck's theories flourished during Stalin's tenure.

By 1927, Denisovich Lysenko had firmly established control over almost all of Soviet science, and Lysenko's scientific agenda was founded on Lamarckian concepts of evolution by acquired characteristics. As Stalin's lackey, Lysenko pressed his Lamrackian notions into policy so completely that they nearly destroyed Soviet agriculture, and by 1948, Stalin had even outlawed the study of genetics and shipped the Soviet Union's Darwinian geneticists to the Gulag.

As Lenin observed, "ideas have consequences."

Indeed they do.

If that was the case, then Lamarck had a time machine. Lamarck was born in 1744 and died in 1829. His evolutionary ideas were probably best stated in his book Philosophie Zoologique, which was published in 1809, the year that Darwin was born. Briefly, Lamarck posited that characteristics acquired by an organism were heritable, or in other words, that organisms evolved through the acquisition of traits that they needed and used.

Thanks for the corrections! I had a "senior moment" and confused Lamarck with Lysenko (and not for the first time). I do know that Lamarck (and later Lysenko) advocated the theory that acquired (i.e., not inherited) traits could become heritable, which of course is at odds with Darwin's theory.

Some thoughts on this topic, and on the "problematic" affinity of Marxian and Darwinian thought on certain questions, from Loren Eisley (at the time of this writing, chairman, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania):

"This is the history of man"...that [he] has sought successfully to transcend himself, his appetites and his desires.... [This is] the most remarkable story of all, the rise of a value-creating animal and the way in which his intangible dreams had been modified and transformed to bring him to the world he faces today.
The educated public has come to accept the verdict of science that man...is the product of endless evolutionary divergence and change. In accepting this verdict of science, however, men have frequently failed to inquire in what way human evolution may differ from that of other animals, or by what extra dangers and responsibilities the human brain may be haunted. In the revolt from the fanatical religiosity of past centuries we have too often welcomed with open arms a dogmatic scientific naturalism which, like the devil with Faust, seemed to offer unlimited material power over nature while, at the same time, assuring us that our moral responsibilities were limited and excusable since we were, after all, only the natural evolutionary culmination of a line of apes that chanced to descend upon the ground.
Darwin and his compatriots, struggling to establish for their day a new and quite amazing interpretation of human history, placed great emphasis upon man's relationship to the animal world about him. Indeed, at times they overemphasized man's kinship with the existing apes, partly because of their anxiety to prove the reality of man's descent from lower forms of life, partly because in their lifetime the course of human evolution was very imperfectly known from fossils. The result was that Darwin's own interpretation of the early stages of human evolution wavered between a theory involving an early and Edenlike seclusion on some oceanic island, to a later more ferocious and competitive existence on one of the major continents.
These extremes of interpretation need not concern us now except to illustrate the hesitancy with which Darwin attempted to account for some of the peculiar qualities of man.... Each year the public grows more accustomed to this history, feels more at home in the natural world which is casually assumed to be dominated by struggle, by a dog-eat-dog interpretation of existence which descends to us from the Darwinian period.
Some time ago I had a letter from a professional friend of mine commenting upon the education his daughter was receiving at a polite finishing school. “She has been taught…that there are two kinds of people, the tough- and the tender-minded. Her professor, whose science I will not name, informed her that the tough-minded would survive.”
This archaic remark shook me…. Man has not really survived by toughness in a major sense – even the great evolutionists Darwin and Wallace had had trouble with that aspect of man – instead, he had survived through tenderness….
Man, in the achievement of a unique gift – a thinking brain capable of weighing stars or atoms – cannot grow that brain in the nine months before birth. It is, moreover, a peculiarly plastic brain, intended to receive impressions from the social world around it. Instinct…is here reduced to a minimum. The brain must grow and learn, be able to profit from experience. In man much of that growth and learning comes after birth. The result is that the human infant enters the world in a peculiarly helpless and undeveloped condition. His childhood is lengthy because his developing brain must receive a large store of information and ways of behavior from the social group into which it is born. It must acquire the complicated tool of speech.
The demands of learning thus placed upon the human offspring are greater than in any other animal. They have made necessary the existence of a continued family, rather than the casual sex life of many of the lower animals….

Time for a time-out: Marxism = class struggle; it promotes sexual promiscuity; it is anti-family in the sense that it is the State, not the parents, who are ultimately responsible for childrearing and education; it argues that “our moral responsibilities were limited and excusable since we were, after all, only the natural evolutionary culmination of a line of apes that chanced to descend upon the ground.” I am sure that Darwin personally promoted NONE of these ideas. But the way so many modern neo-Darwinists speak and act, one supposes that they do. And when so many of them are avowed or closeted Marxists (e.g., Lewontin in the first case, Dawkins and Pinker in the second), one sees a link between Darwin’s theory and the way modern-day “progressive” (read: atheist) biologists see the world. Of them, Eisley speaks here:

…Man’s first normal experience of life involves maternal and paternal care and affection…. Thus the creature who strives at times to deny the love within himself, to reject the responsibilities to which he owes his own existence, who grows vocal about “tough-mindedness” and “the struggle for existence,” is striving to reject his own human heritage….
Even now in the enthusiasm for new discoveries, reported public interviews with scientists tend to run increasingly toward a future replete with more inventions, stores of energy, babies in bottles, deadlier weapons. Relatively few have spoken of values, ethics, art, religion – all those intangible aspects of life which set the tone of a civilization and determine, in the end, whether it will be cruel or humane; whether, in other words, the modern world, so far as its interior spiritual life is concerned, will be stainless steel like its exterior, or display the rich fabric of genuine human experience. The very indifference of many scientists to such matters reveals how far man has already gone toward the world of the “outside,” of no memory, of contempt toward all that makes up the human tradition.

Another time-out: Marx certainly had contempt for such things. His program was to “end history,” and start all over again towards the purpose of erecting a technically-based, materialist, dehumanized Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

…Dr. W. M. Krogman … remarked that “The mind of man, the learning potential of an evolved cerebral cortex, enable him to focus upon the quality of things rather than mere quantity.” Man has become, in other words, a value-creating animal. He sets his own goals and more and more exerts his own will upon recalcitrant matter and the natural forces of the universe….
It is here that we come upon what I choose to call the “unnatural” aspect of man; unnatural, that is, in the sense that there is nothing else like it on the planet. Even Darwin confessed that his principle of limited perfection – that is, the conception that life would evolve only sufficiently to maintain itself in competition with other life or to adjust to changes in its environment – had been upset in the case of man…. With man…Darwin professed to observe no foreseeable limit to the development of the mental faculties….
A society has an image of itself, its way of life. This image is a wavering, composite picture reflected from millions of minds. If the image is largely compounded of the events of the present; if tradition is weak, the past forgotten, that image can alter by subtle degrees…. The humane tradition – arts, letters, philosophy, the social sciences – threatens to be ignored as unrealistic in what has become a technological race for survival….
The important fact in such a material age is that we do not abandon or forget that man has always sought to transcend himself spiritually, and that this is part of his strange heritage. It is a heritage which must be preserved in our schools and churches, for in a society without deep historical memory, the future ceases to exist and the present becomes a meaningless cacophony….

End of Eisley’s “sermon” (in: “An Evolutionist Looks at Modern Man,” Adventures of the Mind, R. Thruelsen and J. Kobler, eds., 1960).

The immediately preceding blockquote contains not a single idea that Marx – or what passes today for the “typical” Darwinist – would have much sympathy for. Both seem to want to erase history, forget the past, sneer at human traditions, and at the entire idea of a spiritual dimension to life, including God.

atlaw, you and js1138 and many others here go bananas when it is suggested that there is a good deal of convergence between Darwin’s theory -- at least as it is popularly imagined today and Marxism – a/k/a “social Darwinism.” The above excerpts from Eisley point to the strong parallels – and also support my own thesis that Darwin has no theory of man (which is why I argue that Darwin’s theory is incomplete).

Also, to the extent that humans can transform their environment, they transcend the environmental context that controls Darwinian evolution theory. In a certain way, there is a resemblance here to Lamarck’s theory of heritable acquired traits – taken to the cosmic level. The acquisition of a radically changed environment is actually “inherited by” our descendants.

But evidently, this wasn’t what Darwin had in mind.

Thank you so much for writing, atlaw!

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