Posted on 04/22/2008 7:15:39 AM PDT by Ethan Clive Osgoode
One can ask this question also in different terms. For instance, which books have had the greatest impact on current thinking? Inevitably, the Bible would have to be mentioned in the first place. Up to 1989, when the bankruptcy of Marxism was declared, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital would clearly have been in second place, and it is still the dominating influence in many parts of the world. However, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) must surely be mentioned in the next place. I hope to be able to show that this position is justified not only because Darwin more than anyone else was responsible for the acceptance of a secular explanation of the world, but also because he revolutionized our thinking about the nature of this world in surprisingly many other ways.
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The most widely used method in the physical sciences is the experiment. However, in his evolutionary studies Darwin had to cope with a factor that is irrelevant in most of the physical sciences except in geology and cosmology, the time factor. One cannot experiment with biological happenings in the past. Phenomena like the extinction of the dinosaurs and all other evolutionary events are inaccessible to the experimental method and require an entirely different methodology, that of the so-called “historical narratives.” In this method one develops an imaginary scenario of past happenings on the basis of their consequences.
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In my title I referred to the philosophical foundations of Darwin’s thought, and elsewhere in my writing I have referred to Darwin as one of the great philosophers. This is not a widely adopted point of view. Actually, he was one of the great philosophers of all time, but his philosophy of biology differs so fundamentally from the philosophies based on logic, mathematics, and the physical sciences that its philosophical nature was traditionally overlooked.
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A literal acceptance of every word in the Bible was the standard view of every orthodox Christian. Everything in this world, as we see it, was created by God. Natural theology added the conviction that at the time of creation God had also instituted a set of laws that would continue to maintain the perfect adaptation of a well-designed world. Darwin challenged all three major components of this belief. He claimed, first, that the world is evolving rather than remaining constant; second, that new species are not specially created but derived from common ancestors; and third, that the adaptation of each species is continuously regulated by the process of natural selection. In Darwin’s theories, there is no need for divine interference or the action of supernatural forces in the whole process of the evolution of the living world. Darwin’s revolutionary proposal was, thus, to replace the divinely-controlled world by a strictly secular world, run according to the natural laws.
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However, the theory of common descent also led to one conclusion that was quite unpalatable to most of his Victorian contemporaries. It postulated that man’s ancestors had been apes. If the humans had descended from apes, then they were not outside the rest of the living world but actually part of it. This was the end of any strictly anthropomorphic philosophy. Darwin did not question the unique characteristics of Homo sapiens and neither do the modern evolutionists. Zoologically, nevertheless, man is nothing but a specially evolved ape.
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Let me now try to summarize Darwin’s contributions to the thinking of modern men. He was responsible for the replacement of a world view based on Christian dogma by a strictly secular world view... Almost every component in modern man’s belief system is somehow affected by one or another of Darwin’s conceptual contributions. His opus as a whole is the foundation of a rapidly developing new philosophy of biology. There can be no doubt that the thinking of every modern Western man has been profoundly affected by Darwin’s philosophical thought.
Read the whole thing (pdf format, 8 pages) here.
I accept evolution as the Lord working in mysterious ways.
There, that covers it all.
The philosophical foundation of Darwinism is naturalism; the belief that ‘the cosmos is all there is, was or ever will be’ as Carl Sagan put it.
Unfortunately for Darwinism, naturalism is not teleological and natural selection is teleological.
A fact that is always ignored.
To paraphrase CS Lewis: Science teaches us How God created the world, the Bible teaches us Why.
My Catholic and Catholic School upbringing combined Religion with the natural sciences.
I was taught Evolution/Darwinism and about Jesus by the same Marist Brother biology teacher in the 10th grade. There was no conflict, as we were taught that, that was the way God set the universe up.
Mayr does have something to say about that:
"It was Darwin’s great achievement to be able to explain by natural selection, all the phenomena for which Kant had thought he needed to invoke teleology. The great American philosopher Van Quine, in a conversation I had with him about a year before his death, told me that he considered Darwin’s greatest philosophical achievement to consist in having refuted Aristotle’s final cause. The purely automatic process of natural selection, producing abundant variation in every generation and always removing the inferior individuals, can explain all processes and phenomena that, prior to 1859, could be explained only by teleology.Nonsensical as this may be, it is nevertheless important to see what darwinians really think and really say.
Unfortunately for Darwinism, naturalism is not teleological and natural selection is teleological.Nope. You don't understand natural selection.A fact that is always ignored.
Think of it this way, when water flows downhill does it have a purpose? Love it or hate it, Darwinian natural selection believes in the roughly the same principle.
Nonsensical as this may be, it is nevertheless important to see what darwinians really think and really say.It's not nonsensical at all. If you actually *understood* what he was talking about it would make perfect sense.
Not going to read the rest of this. The excerpt is plenty enough butchery of the language.
Darwin was a great admirer of Adam Smith and his The Wealth of Nations. The article doesn’t mention Smith as someone who undoubtedly shaped Darwin’s idea of natural selection.
Out of the three biblical worldly attributes -
1) Lust of the eyes
2) Lust of the flesh
3) The Pride of Life
File Darwinism under #3.
Newton refused to explain holes in his gravitational theory by saying God did it because it was outside of observable (secular) science.
Come now, your missing out on a lot of good stuff. Didn't you like the bit about "anthropomorphic philosophy" and Victorians living "outside the rest living world"?
I don't think Mayr really understands Judeo-Christian belief. The way I read the Bible, God is slowly working through history to “evolve” humanity to that perfect society that will occur sometime in the future. In other words, I think Marx (without realizing it) was simply borrowing from his Jewish heritage and stripping it of its religious content.No. Marx got his evolutionary viewpoint from Hegel.
Major disconnect here, a hypothetical as a certainty. Also, usage of 'historical' and 'narrative' as if dealing with politics or sociology while saying natural science. This is correct since the application of evolution is in politics and social science, but an error since he has not placed biology in the social sciences.
“Up to 1989, when the bankruptcy of Marxism was declared ...”
I almost stopped reading there (and should have done so). Ironically, George Bernard Shaw - then a nascent Socialist - demonstrated the logical fallacies of Marxist theory in 1884.
“A literal acceptance of every word in the Bible was the standard view of every orthodox Christian. “
This is an urban legend scientists often tell each other. As such it provides a false premise for anything else he has to say. I’ve only glanced at the article and am writing this to bump for later read.
Darwinism and its underlying premise of naturalism would have you believe that:
nothing produces everything
non-life produces life
randomness produces fine-tuning
chaos produces information
nonconsciousness produces consciousness
non-reason produces reason
You seem to mistake “understanding” with agreement. That I disagree does not mean I do do so because I do not understand. I understand perfectly well Darwinian philosophy...and that understanding is the basis upon which I reject it as an explanation for macroevolution.
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