The View From 1776

-------------------
This posting is a reply to point number five of a recent message from Adam Leigland in which he contends that I made eight mistakes in my reply to his first email.  My responses to the other seven points will appear shortly in another posting.

Mr. Leigland, whose website is The Hammer of Judgement, is a supporter of one or another of the current warring versions of the hypothesis of biological evolution that was first popularized by Charles Darwin with his 1859 publication of “On the Origin of Species.”

I know nothing, however, of Mr. Leigland’s views on other topics.  It should therefore be understood that in the following reply I am not asserting that views I criticize are necessarily ones advocated by Mr. Leigland, though they are implicit within the doctrine of biological evolution.

Mr. Leigland writes:

5. You confuse the scientific theory of evolution with the many social and political theories that it created or enabled. Who cares what Huxley or Dewey said about evolution and relative morality? The deplorable practice of eugenics does not invalidate the theory of genetics. Hiroshima and Nagasaki do not render null the field of nuclear physics. We cannot call a scientific theory wrong simply because we dislike the outcomes or outgrowths of that theory.

My Reply: 

As a matter of fact, we very definitely should renounce a speculative scientific hypothesis that produces results destructive to the better aspects of human nature and human society. In no event should it be taught to young students, as is now the case, to convert them to the atheistic religion of socialism.

To say,"Who cares what Huxley or Dewey said about evolution and relative morality?” is rather like saying, “Who cares whether Osama Bin Ladin’s interpretation of Islam results in suicide bombings and ritual beheadings of thousands of innocent civilians?”

The 20th century was the most sanguinary epoch in history, because of the application of the atheistic and materialistic doctrine of evolution as a justification for atrocities by collectivized, socialistic governments.  Darwin’s role was to affix the imprimatur of one of the physical sciences to the so-called social “science” ideas of Henri de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, and Karl Marx.

Darwin’s acolytes, from Thomas Huxley to John Dewey, preached that there is no right or wrong, just the struggle for survival.  This meant that the end justifies the means.

Precisely this viewpoint was repeatedly and widely expressed here and in Europe from the mid-1850s until after World War II, when the atrocities of Hitler and Stalin began to merge into public awareness.

It must be remembered that the hypothesis of evolution is far more than the popular understanding, which is limited to the idea of natural selection, a sort of breeding or hybridization by the impartial, unstructured forces of nature. 

Evolution, in addition, denies the existence of God and postulates that life is no more than the chance result of random confluences of inorganic chemicals and environmental conditions.  This, by the way, is conjecture with no proof of any kind. Modern era biologists such as Julian Huxley and Richard Dawkins have taken delight in trumpeting that there is no inherent meaning or structure to nature or to human life beyond a process that is said blindly to create new species of life.

Progress, the conceptual faith that dominated the worlds of 19th and early 20th century intellectuals, academics, and politicians, is simply the application of Darwinian evolution to political societies. 

Auguste Comte, in the 1820s and 1830s, postulated Immutable Laws of History which controlled the evolution of political societies from primitive forms to the emerging Age of Science in the 19th century.  The new rulers of nations, and ultimately of the world, were to be intellectuals who understood these laws of history.

Eighteen years later Karl Marx published “The Communist Manifesto,” in which he theorized that the materialistic factors of the economy were creating an evolution of societies that foreordained the triumph of world socialism. English Marxists enthusiastically took up Darwin’s biological evolution as proof of what they called scientific socialism.

The evolutionary view of life means that events of history are not influenced by individual free will, either at the biological level and at the political level, because events are determined by the materialistic conditions within which people live. Only the all-powerful socialistic state can regulate those material conditions, and only the intellectuals know how to use the powers of the collectivized state.  This is the philosophical view that underlay Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet Russia in the 1920s and Franklin Roosevelt’s imitative New Deal in the 1930s.

In this world of evolutionary political and social Progress, John Dewey’s philosophy of pragmatism decrees that the rulers may do whatever they deem necessary for the benefit of humanity’s future.  If, as evolutionists assert, there is no higher law of religious morality, there can be no limit on action by the powerful. If there is no such thing as morality, no one has grounds for arguing that something is not fair.

In the same way that evolution of species is said to result entirely from material forces, justice is reduced to an impersonal, materialistic process. What liberal-Progressive evolutionists call social justice is merely the mechanical action of redistributing society’s physical wealth as equally as possible without regard to individual merit.

John Dewey’s evolutionary political and social concept of Progress, incidentally, is the platform for the theory that the Constitution is continually evolving to reflect changes in volatile public opinion.  Liberal-Progressives recognized as early as the French Revolution that public opinion must be manipulated by the mainstream liberal media, among other things, by presenting a one-sided picture to keep the public from knowing all the facts.  Such is the basis for judicial activism.

Feelings of individuals have no meaning in the bleak evolutionary world.  Indeed, individualism is equated with selfishness and greed.  The only meaningful unit is the species, or the social class. Evolutionists deal only in incalculably large numbers of genetic mutations over billions of years.  In a parallel way, liberal-Progressives think grandly of “humanity” and evolutionary Progress toward “world government,” concepts within which it is easy to rationalize the pain and suffering of dissident individuals caused by one-size-fits-all collective government regulation.

Evolutionary doctrine is literally the cornerstone of today’s secular education.  The ACLU and other liberal-Progressives rightly fear that their whole structure would collapse if students were made aware of the multitude of inconsistencies and impossibilities required by belief in evolutionary atheism.  If evolution were properly presented as no more than a speculative hypothesis, students might again be taught that ideas and ideals matter, that people don’t willingly die for their countries because they are impelled by impersonal, materialistic forces.

Were students made aware of the connection between evolutionary doctrine and imposition of the all-powerful socialistic state, the United States could return to the ethos upon which the Constitution was founded. The same may be said of secular education’s sneering at “teaching patriotism” and relegating religious faith and personal morality to the realm of ignorance.

Teaching atheistic, materialistic, amoral evolution as the only doctrine that qualifies as scientific has proved an effective way to destroy individual political liberties and political society itself.

In sharp contrast, under no construction is it possible to envision using Intelligent Design for such purposes.

Intelligent Design merely intuits that the laws of physics, chemistry, and mathematics must have pre-existed the creation of the universe. There is no evidence that these laws evolved by chance over billions of years.  The Big Bang theory requires a pre-existing God to supply the laws of science which controlled the expansion and conformation of the universe from the first nano-second of its existence.

Visit MoveOff Network Members