The View From 1776

The essence of Darwinian evolutionary doctrine is that humans are nothing special, that there is no intelligent or intelligible design unifying events relating to animal and plant life, that every living organism is the product of random chance, exercised over billions of years.  Only the process of natural selection, survival of the fittest, can be discerned, and neither humans, nor any other living organism can control the process.

The contradictory essence of the man-made global warming hypothesis is that there is a design, discernible to intellectuals, which removes the elements of random chance and enables those intellectuals to foresee the result of human actions affecting the entire world.  And that knowledge enables intellectuals to control the future of weather and its effects over the entire earth.

Darwinian doctrine was conceived as an hypothesis to discredit Christianity, in effect to kill God.  Both the Bible (Old Testament and New Testament) and classical Greek philosophy viewed human beings as the top of the line of living organisms, uniquely endowed with intelligence.  Moreover that unique intelligence was perceived to be a gift of God, or, as the Bible puts it, man was created in the image of God.  Darwinians are at pains to ridicule that conception, to reduce the status of humans to equality with all other living organisms.  That is why, in The Descent of Man, Darwin was pleased to describe humans as no more than cousins of the apes.

In contrast, the unprovable hypothesis of man-made global warming empowers humans (intellectuals, at least) to take the place of God.  Intellectuals uniquely perceive the master design of the whole world and uniquely foresee the world’s future.  Moreover, in sharp contrast to the random chance of Darwinian evolution theoretically playing out over billions of years, intellectuals’ world-plan is to be played out over as short a span, according to Al Gore, as the next eight years.

From geological evidence, we can theorize that forces re-shaping the oceans and the continents, as well as all the world’s landscapes, needed billions of years to do their work.  Only man-made global warming is projected to reshape the entire world in less than a decade.

Note that both Darwinian evolution and man-made global warming, along with socialism (particularly the Marxian communist version of socialism), have a common basis: secular materialism as the displacer of spiritual religion that acknowledges God as the Creator of the universe.  All three are what Karl Popper called scientism, that is, misplaced faith that the methods of the physical sciences can be applied to the political and social spheres to develop laws of political and social action comparable to Newton’s equations and quantum theory.

That is why Darwinian evolution, socialism, and the hypothesis of man-made and man-controlled global warming are no more than doctrines of the secular religion of materialism.  That is why imposition of man-made global warming doctrine through legislative action contravenes the Constitution’s First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...”