Posted on 02/04/2010 2:42:12 PM PST by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus
In addition to original Darwinism, today there are two other versions of evolutionary theory: punctuated equilibrium and neo- Darwinism, a revamped version of the original Darwinism. No matter the variant though, evolution serves as the creation myth for the theological and philosophical worldview of Evolutionary Humanism (Naturalism).
Evolution is a religion, declared evolutionary Humanist Michael Ruse. This was true of evolution in the beginning and it is true still today One of the most popular books of the era was Religion Without Revelation, by Julian Huxley, grandson of Thomas Huxley...As always evolution was doing everything expected of religion and more. (National Post, Canadian Edition, 5/13/2000)
Humanism is a philosophical, religious, and moral point of view. (Paul Kurtz, Humanist Manifestos I & II, Introduction)
The primary denominations of Evolutionary Humanism are Cultural Marxism/Communism, Secular Humanism, Postmodernism, and Spiritual Communism. The offshoots of these are among others, New Age/green environmentalism/Gaia, socialism, progressivism, liberalism, multiculturalism, and atheism. Individually and collectively, these are modernized versions of pre-Biblical naturalism (paganism).
All worldviews begin with a religious declaration. The Biblical worldview begins with, In the beginning God... Cosmic Humanism begins, In the beginning Divine Matter. Communism, Postmodernism, and Secular Humanism begin with, In the beginning Matter. Matter is all there is, and it not only thinks, but is Divine:
...matter itself continually attains to higher perfection under its own power, thanks to indwelling dialectic. the dialectical materialist's attribution of dialectic to matter confers on it, not mental attributes only, but even divine ones. (Gustav A. Wetter, Dialectical Materialism, p. 58)
In explicitly religious language, the following religionists offer all praise, honor, and glory to their Creator:
We may regard the material and cosmic world as the supreme being, as the cause of all causes, as the creator of heaven and earth. (Vladimir Lenin quoted in Communism versus Creation, Francis Nigel Lee, p. 28)
The Cosmos is all that is or ever will be. (Carl Sagan, Cosmos, p. 4)
Evolutionary Humanism has demonstrated itself to be an extremely dangerous worldview. In just the first eighty-seven years of the twentieth century, the evolutionist project of radically transforming the world and mankind through the power of evolutionism has led to the extermination of between 100-170 million subhuman men, women, and children.
Deadly Problems
First, in order that materialist ethics be consistent with the idea that life evolved by chance and continues to evolve over time, ethics must be built on human social instincts that are in a continuous process of change over evolutionary time. This view demolishes both moral ethics and social taboos, thereby liberating man to do as he pleases. Over time this results in a lawless climate haunted by bullies, predators, despots, psychopaths, and other unsavory elements.
Perhaps Darwin could not envision the evil unleashed by his ideas. Nonetheless, he did have some inkling, for he wrote in his Autobiography that one who rejects God,
...can have for his rule of life...those impulses and instincts which are strongest or seem to him the best ones. (Tom DeRosa, Fatal Fruit, p.7)
Humanist Max Hocutt realizes that materialist ethics are hugely problematical, but offers no solution. An absolute moral code cannot exist without God, however God does not exist, says Hocutt. Therefore,
...if there were a morality written up in the sky somewhere but no God to enforce it, I see no reason why we should obey it. Human beings may, and do, make up their own rules. (David Noebel, Understanding the Times, pp. 138-139)
Jeffrey Dahmer, a psychopath who cannibalized his victims, acted on Darwins advice. In an interview he said,
If a person doesnt think there is a God to be accountable to, then what is the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? Thats how I thought I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. (Dahmer in an interview with Stone Phillips, Dateline NBC, 11/29/1994)
With clearly religious overtones, atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell summarizes the amoral materialist ethic:
Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way. (Why I am not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, p. 115)
Next, materialist epistemology and metaphysics dispossesses man of soul, free will, conscience, mind, and reason, thereby dehumanizing (animalizing) man and totally destroying not only the worth, dignity, and meaning of human life, but the possibility of freedom. The essence of this annihilation is captured in the following quotes:
Man is but fish made over... declared biologist William Etkin (Greg L. Bahnsen, Pushing the Antithesis, p. 224). And his life is but a partial, continuous, progressive, multiform and continually interactive, self-realization of the potentialities of atomic electron states, explained J.D. Bernal (1901-1971), past Professor of Physics at the University of London (The Origin of Life, p. xv). Furthermore, The universe cares nothing for us, trumpets William Provine, Cornell University Professor of Biology, and we have no ultimate meaning in life. (Scientists, Face It! Science and Religion Are Incompatible, The Scientist, Sept. 1988)
Man... must be degraded from a spiritual being to an animalistic pattern. He must think of himself as an animal, capable of only animalistic reactions. He must no longer think of himself as capable of spiritual endurance, or nobility. By animalizing man his state of mind can be ordered and enslaved. (Degradation and Shock, Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics, Chapter viii)
Finally, Evolutionary Humanism posits the notion that despite the fact that man is but fish made over there are in fact, some exceptions to this rule. For it happens - by chance of course - that some lucky species and races of the human animal are more highly evolved (superior) and therefore enlightened than the others, who are - unluckily for them - less evolved and as a consequence, subhuman. Paired to this view is the idea that if a species or race does not continue to evolve (progress up the evolutionary ladder), it will become extinct. Together, these ideas lead logically to the deadly conclusion that in order to preserve the fittest of the species - or the spiritually evolved, as is the case with Spiritual Communism - it is morally incumbent upon the superior to replace (via the science of eugenics and population control) and/or liquidate the subhumans. In his book, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Charles Darwin foresaw this eventuality:
At some future period...the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world...the anthropomorphous apes...will no doubt be exterminated. (Descent, 2nd ed., p. 183)
In practice, the materialist worldview is a hellish recipe for catastrophe, as was amply demonstrated by the 20th centurys two most blood-soaked political movements - pagan Nazism and atheist Communism. Both rejected God, and both were animated by Darwinism.
Nazi Germany
Hitlers murderous philosophy was built on Darwinian evolution and preservation of favored species. In his book Evolution and Ethics, British evolutionist Sir Arthur Keith notes,
The leader of Germany is an evolutionist not only in theory, but, as millions know to their cost, in the rigor of its practice. (p.230)
It was Darwinism that inspired Hitler to try to create - by way of eugenics - a superior race, the Aryan Man. In pursuit of his ambition, Hitler eliminated what he considered were inferior human animals, among which were for example, Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and Christians.
Evolutionism in Nazi Germany resulted in gas chambers, ovens, and the liquidation of eleven million useless eaters and other undesirables. Evolutionist Niles Eldridge, author of Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life, reluctantly concurs. Darwins theory, he acknowledges,
...has given us the eugenics movement and some of its darker outgrowths, such as the genocidal practices of the Nazis. (p. 13)
The Soviet Union
Even though Karl Marx wrote his Communist Manifesto before Darwin published his On the Species, the roots of Communism are nonetheless found in Darwinism. Karl Marx wrote Fredrich Engels that Darwins Origin,
...is the book which contains the basis in natural science for our view. (Conway Zirkle, Marxian Biology and the Social Scene)
Stephane Courtois, one of the authors of The Black Book of Communism, relates that,
In Communism there exists a sociopolitical eugenics, a form of Social Darwinism. (p. 752)
Vladimir Lenin exulted that,
Darwin put an end to the belief that the animal and vegetable species bear no relation to one another (and) that they were created by God, and hence immutable. (Tom DeRosa, Fatal Fruit, p. 9)
Lenin exercised godlike power over life and death. He saw himself as, the master of the knowledge of the evolution of social species. It was Lenin who decided who should disappear by virtue of having been condemned to the dustbin of history. From the moment Lenin made the scientific decision that the bourgeoisie represented a stage of humanity that evolution had surpassed, its liquidation as a class and the liquidation of the individuals who actually or supposedly belonged to it could be justified. (The Black Book of Communism, p. 752)
Alain Brossat draws the following conclusions about the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and the ties that bind them:
The liquidation of the Muscovite executioners, a close relative of the treatment carried out by Nazi assassins, is a linguistic microcosm of an irreparable mental and cultural catastrophe that was in full view on the Soviet Stage. The value of human life collapsed, and thinking in categories replaced ethical thought In the discourse and practice of the Nazi exterminators, the animalization of Other was closely linked to the ideology of race. It was conceived in the implacably hierarchical racial terms of subhumans and supermen but in Moscow in 1937, what mattered was the total animalization of the Other, so that a policy under which absolutely anything was possible could come into practice. (ibid., p. 751)
21st Century America
Ronald Reagan loved God and America. America he said is, the moral force that defeated communism and all those who would put the human soul into bondage. (Republican National Convention, Houston, Texas, 8/17/1992)
Even though he was optimistic about Americas future he nevertheless cautioned that America must maintain her reliance on God and her commitment to righteousness and morality. He liked quoting Alexis de Tocquevilles insightful analysis of the source of Americas greatness:
Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret and genius of her power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great. (Michael Reagan, In the Words of Ronald Reagan)
As America moves into the 21st century, we have yet to admit a shameful, dark secret. Evolutionism the creation myth, that empowered Nazism and Communism, is being taught to Americas youth in our governmentcontrolled schools. The animalization of Americans is well advanced and coupled to a corresponding slow collapse of human worth. Already we hear of human life spoken of in dehumanizing categories such as vegetable, non-persons, and uterine content.
Ominously, Evolutionary Humanism has also outstripped Judeo-Christian precepts in our universities, judiciary, federal bureaucracy, corporations, medicine, law, psychology, sociology, entertainment, news media and halls of Congress. As Biocentrism, it fuels the nonhuman animal rights project, the gay rights movement, radical feminism, and the increasingly powerful and influential green environmentalist program, which demands that America submit to the draconian mandates of the Kyoto Treaty.
America, the moral force that defeated communism is on the verge of completely rejecting God, the natural order, and moral absolutes and instead, embracing the godless religion of evolution, amorality, and the unnatural.
Evolutionary Humanism is the most dangerous delusion thus far in history. It begins with the animalization of Other, in tandem with the elevation of the superior, for whom this serves as a license to make up their own rules, abuse power, and force their will onto the citizens. This is accompanied by a downward spiraling process that pathologizes the natural order, moral ethics, virtue, and social taboos while simultaneously elevating narcissism, tyranny, cruelty, nihilism, confusion, perversion, sadism, theft, and lying to positions of politically correct new morality, which is then enforced through sensitivity training, speech codes, hate crime laws, and other intimidation tactics. If not stopped, as history warns us, this rapidly escalating downward process leads inevitably to totalitarianism, enslavement, and eventually mass murder.
In a portent of things to come,
evolutionist B.F. Skinner said: A scientific analysis of behavior dispossesses autonomous man and turns the control he has been said to exert over to the environment. The individual...is henceforth to be controlled...in large part by other men. (David Noebel, Understanding the Times, p. 232)
I object to the meaning of a premise being changed. For example consider this deduction:
Premise A) Banks are safe places to keep your money.
Premise B) The place by the side of the creek is a bank.
Conclusion: It is safe to keep your money by the creek.
Obviously this argument is fallacious. The problem is that we use the term "bank" to mean more than one thing. But if we were more objective we may have said:
Premise A-prime) Everything that could be called a bank, whether a financial institution or side of a creek is a safe place to keep your money.
Now in this case, premise A-prime is the one actually used to make the syllogism's conclusion valid. However we would not be able to get many people to accept this premise. Thus if we are devious, we could propose A and than imply A-prime to form our syllogism.
You have made this mistake a couple of times that I have pointed out, and I have spelled out the specifics already. I'm sorry that being wrong about what you are selling is hard to accept. Nobody likes it, including when it happens to me. Which is why I understand that you are resistant to accept this correction.
Wasn't Darwin the cause of 'original sin'?
Which is such an obviously false premis that it doesn't even merit a discussion.
The equivocation was certainly more subtle and harder to see than the bank example. It didn't boil down to two parts of the same word like your former error with "portray". I will try one more time to point it out to you, although I doubt you are in any mood to recognize it:
The law of cause and effect is the most rigorously confirmed induction we have ever been able to make as a species. The confidence is so great that we even have invented a label for those instances when it appears the law might have been violated. We call them "miracles."
This is a premise. You used this premise further down in post 131 in another form:
If we hold the premise that all effects have causes, it cannot lead you to an effect that has no cause. It can only lead you to an eternal chain of causes and effects.
Well both these snippets appear to make sense. However, when did we ever hold this premise as stated in the second snippet? It kinda sounds like the previous one, only stated with more brevity. But it isn't really the same. I hold the first premise, but in a different way than you do that does not support your restatement: that everything in nature has to have a cause, and that exceptions are properly called miracles because they are thus an effect of some super nature.
If you like, you can assert that the non-existence of super nature was an implied additional premise, but that's hardly useful in considering the veracity of naturalism. And it would make the rest of your argument have little utility other than obscuring that you have really just assumed your conclusion.
I was summarizing what I thought to be the author's conclusion rather than a premise. I used vague terms for brevity, being that my purpose was to distinguish the authors conclusion from a conclusion that it gave rise to all evil which seemed how Ender was interpreting it.
For myself, I think judging Darwin's theory to have moral culpability for Nazism is quite a stretch. But I don't think it as big a stretch as Ender's subsequent contention that it was the gospel of John that was the "proximate and ultimate" cause of the Holocaust. Subsequently, I have been debating Ender for quite some time now.
How long is eternity?
Well I never signed on to the idea that every effect has a cause. It was not a premise we agreed to, it was one you were arguing for. You stated the premise twice. The first time it sounded in line with both our world views. The second it was only in line with yours. You equivocated to get to that "premise".
But I am more interested in knowing how you think an eternal universe can have nothing infinite in it. Are you thinking of time as a part of the universe, or of something that transcends the universe and need not be considered part of it?
I never went that way but the biggest holocaust was the great flood.
This sounds odd, and I don't know what you mean.
Is this an assertion only for the sake of that argument, or is this your view, or do you merely mean time is not the same kind of thing as matter and energy, and is only the background on which matter and energy operate?
It is a widely held position among cosmologists, especially those working on models of what existed prior to the Big Bang.
Time is a convention that we use to make sense of change in the universe. But it doesn’t really exist. Matter exists. Energy exists.
Time does not.
Hmmm, well change seems to imply a ratio whose denominator is in terms of time. Perhaps they are using a number of event states as such a denominator and think of it more discreetly?
Perhaps all things if we would like could be abstracted in one way or another and thought of to not really exist, for some special meaning of existence that is useful to some model or another. For example, I believe some world views hold that matter and energy don't really exist.
"Existence" as a technical word causes more confusion than it helps I think. Its usefulness was eroded by too many philosophers putting too many meanings to it. So I favor using it in the most general non-technical way.
To the fictional characters of a book, the author does not exist (unless the author chose to represent his own person in the story). However the author is more real than the characters in the book.
But under the model you seemed to be describing, the author himself is not real. What is real is the state of the matter in the author at the thinnest possible slice of "time" (whatever that is), and the state of the particles close to the author, that might not be considered the author exactly...and perhaps the rest of the universe at that moment I suppose.
In the mind of the author would be a thought of the characters, so perhaps they are real in that way...but thoughts require a much longer chain of tiny causal steps then the thin tiny slice of now that is the only state that currently exists. Since the future and past don't really exist, well I can't see how thoughts exist. Or the mind of the author for that matter. Certainly the particular arrangement of some particles of matter and some energy that do not constitute a single thought do not constitute a mind.
Seems this view implies that minds only exist in our minds...which don't exist anyway...so we should just stop it!
It is an ambiguous term in reality. You seemed to be simply creating your own definition of the world with an implied model and asserting it as some immutable truth. Did you have a revelation I should know about?
You are equivocating again.
I was proceeding only from the model you presented and was trying to see if there were problems with it. Forgive me for suggesting that there might be more to a mind than just the brain. I should immediately reject that since you say so.
That author exists only within now. There are not an infinite number of authors occupying different "slices" of time like pages in a flip book. There is no author in "the past." There is no author in "the future." The author will change as each subsequent instance of now replaces the prior. But the author that exists now is the only author that exists... period.
Very well, this seemed a little different then the impression I had of your model, so now I think I understand it better.
But I see a problem with this new understanding of your model: Is not the entire universe and everything in it an entity? If so, certainly it is an infinite one--having an infinitely long web of causes and effects in it. Thus this entity is necessarily infinite provided that the universe really is eternal.
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.