On Darwin and the eternal lie of evolution atheism, Part 1

Original title of Darwin’s book on evolution showing his invidious racist intent (subtitle removed in 6th edition of 1872)

It [evolution theory] is a mere rag of an hypothesis with as many flaw[s] & holes as sound parts.

~ Darwin (letter to friend Asa Gray, June 1859)

Biography of Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin, (1809–1882) was an English geologist and naturalist, famously recognized for his influences and in formulating not the first, but the most lasting scientific consensus on evolutionary theory. He understood that all species of life originated over time from mutual ancestors, and in a joint writing with fellow English naturalist, biologist, Alfred Russel Wallace, introduced his scientific theory that this separating form of evolution caused a progression which he called “natural selection,” where the struggle for life has a related effect to the artificial selection regarding selective breeding.

On November 24, 1859, Darwin published On the Origin of Species explaining his theory of evolution with sophistic evidence in that his book tried to reconcile evolution based on spontaneous regeneration of the species with the numerous number of scientific denunciations of earlier conceptions of transmutation of species. By the 1870s Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and his second treatise on evolution, The Descent of Man (1871) many prominent members of the scientific community like Thomas Huxley, humanist intellectuals and much of the general public had accepted evolution as fact. On a macro-political level, Darwin’s book on evolution was viewed as the triumph of science over Christianity. Now Marxists, Socialists, Atheists and Progressives had a “scientific” foundation it could use to deconstruct America’s Judeo-Christian traditions in society and replace them with a Darwinian evolution atheist worldview which as the 1900s ensured, they would undertake to do with the zeal of an irredeemable fanatic.

Conversely, during Darwin’s time many scientists were partial to opposing theories of the origins of life and were not convinced Darwin’s evolutionary view had all the answers, therefore it took the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a wide-ranging consensus emerged wherein natural selection was understood and accepted as the general mechanism of evolution. Modern science considers Darwin’s scientific discovery as the unifying theory of the life sciences and the primary explanation of the endless variety of life.

Darwin and Aristotle

Regarding Darwin’s precursors the problem of Social Darwinism and eugenics racism, natural selection and missing links, for example, the basis of analysis appears in his discoveries, his conceptions, and his theory and yet based on my decades of study of Darwin and to many other academics associated with the Intelligent Design movement, Creationism or origins of life ideas independent of Darwinism, his evolution atheist ideas seem inexorably connected to and inseparable from their personal, partisan political, philosophical, and religious expectations, thus having nothing substantive in common with legitimate scientific investigations. In other words, Darwin’s evolution atheism appears to be the fulfillment of the political Left’s overt Romantic longings dating back to the Enlightenment Age (1600-1800). Said another way, Darwinism wasn’t so much a new theory as it was a grand scientific rationalization for the origins of life based on atheism. (Remember, Aristotle, Lucretius and others beat Darwin by 2-3,000 years). Nevertheless, scientific justification or necessity which is the political Left’s reflexive and enduring hatred of Western Civilization’s 4,000+ year reliance on Judeo-Christian suppositions on the origins of life, was the principal reason the scientific establishment of the Victorian age so unthinkingly accepted Darwin’s evolution theory as religious fact. Apparently susceptible to similar interpretation are Aristotle’s statements that “nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life”; that “there is observed in plants a continuous scale of ascent toward the animal”; and that “throughout the entire animal scale there is a graduated differentiation in amount of vitality and in capacity for motion.”

Kant, Darwin and intermediate species

On the Origin of Species was the defining work that gave Darwin demigod status in the scientific community and in the highest circles of Victorian society, nevertheless the original title specifies it is not evolution as a comprehensive field theory of biological, or cosmic, history, but the origin of species with which Darwin appears to be primarily concerned. He is concerned with proving the fact that new species do evolve over the course of time, counter to those (including Christianity) who presuppose the species of living things to be fixed in number and unchangeable in kind from antiquity to the present age. Darwin is concerned with identifying the conditions by which new species ascend and other forms cease to exist as a separate species or altogether become extinct.

Darwin’s understanding of the term “species” as “arbitrarily given,” and for that purpose does not offer any definitive meaning of the term. He employs the term like his precursors in systematic biological classification, to indicate “a set of individuals closely resembling each other” – a class of plants or animals having positive shared characteristics. Spontaneous generation, obviously exists as a probability. In Darwin’s scientific fairytale world gaps in the fossil record can be covered up because a new species of organism may exist without descending from other living organisms. However separate from the question of ultimate concern – i.e., whether spontaneous generation ever does occur, deriving the biological origin of all physical forms of life appears to be outside the process of natural causes and like the burgeoning scientific movement called Intelligent Design, suggests the conscious involvement of an infinitely eternal and immeasurable metaphysical power mankind has through the ages referred to as “God.”

The likelihood of spontaneous generation was first conceived in antiquity, particularly in the writings of Aristotle (384-322 BC) and later Lucretius (99-55 BC), and the Middle Ages, and was even assumed to be understood by observation and experimentation, for example Gregor Mendel (1822-94), the father of modern genetics, and his famous experiments with maggots developing from decaying matter. However modern science is inclined to affirm the biogenetic law that living organisms are generated only by living organisms. To German philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the idea that “life could have sprung up from the nature of what is void of life,” seems not only opposite to fact, but irrational and arbitrary. Yet, if Darwin’s evolutionary theory is anything it is arbitrary and formulated on inexplicable and unproven ideas assuming controlled chaos while asserting the principle that like produces like by maintaining that “the generation of something organic from something else that is also organic.” On this major point Kant does not follow Darwin’s principle of spontaneous generation to his extreme degree, since to Kant (and most Enlightenment philosophers) spontaneous generation of a new species is in nature quite impossible. Kant could only come close to Darwin, but not further – “Within the class of organic beings,” Kant writes, it is conceivable for one organism to generate another “differing specifically from it.”

Darwin’s Origin of Species thus appears to be indistinguishable with the extinction of intermediate varieties, together with the survival of one or more of the “extreme” varieties. These ‘lucky’ varieties appear to be basically two different approaches to examining the same problem. A further examination of this problem can be attained by presupposing, contrary to fact, the survival of all the varieties ever formed by the breeding of organisms. “If my theory be true,” Darwin writes, “numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed; but the very process of natural selection constantly tends, as has been so often remarked, to exterminate the parent-forms and the intermediate links.” As Darwin presupposed the concurrent co-existence of all intermediate varieties existing today, the groups now called “species” would not, therefore, be divided into distinct species, as they presently exist since in addition to between monkey and mankind, they are innumerable missing links between every species discovered by science which begs the unanswerable question of the ages … Why are there so many missing links amongst the species? Although Darwinism can’t explain it, Intelligent Design can, or at least proffers some compelling scientific evidence. See my review of Dr. Granville Sewell’s outstanding new book on Intelligent Design.

Darwin’s evolution atheism in modern times

I always was of the historical view that since the Age of Enlightenment (1600-1800) mankind was in search of a philosophy that would replace what humanists now considered the outdated superstitions of Christianity and religion. Darwin’s theory of evolution provided that pretext to them by achieving what up to that time has been impossible – the separation of science and religion. And like the ubiquitous Faustian bargain with the devil, in exchange they lauded Darwin with universal celebrity and cult-like admiration. Almost immediately atheists, Marxists, Progressives and humanists used Darwin’s name and evolution theory and connected it with ideas and movements which in many cases bore only an indirect relation to his writings. For example, Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), a pastor who created a theory call “Malthusianism” had contended that population development outside the earth’s sustainable resources was intended by God to provoke humans to work efficiently and observe self-restraint in not having as many children as possible. Malthusianism was propagated in the 1830s to defend sweat shops, child labor, and a radical interpretation of laissez-faire economics divorced from morality. Evolution was also understood by Leftist academics and Marxist intellectuals as possessing social effects. For example, Herbert Spencer’s humanist classic book Social Statics (1851) was established on ideas of human autonomy and individual freedoms based on a Lamarckian evolutionary theory.

Despite the fact Darwin as late five months before publishing his treatise on evolution in a June 1859 letter to friend Asa Gray openly admitted that “It [evolution theory] is a mere rag of an hypothesis with as many flaw[s] & holes as sound parts,” nevertheless he ignored scientific evidence disproving evolution and went on ahead with the publication of this pseudo-scientific book full of lies irrationally accepted to this day by virtually every college and university department of science in the world. As soon as Origin was published on Nov. 24, 1859, critics all over the world immediately condemned his explanations of a struggle for existence as Malthusian reasoning which historically coincided with the rise of English industrial age.

Darwin’s evolutionary atheism had an apparent and proximate cause and connection to the evolutionary philosophies of others, including Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” as free-market progress, and Ernst Haeckel’s racist concepts and writings on human development and intelligence. Marxist, Socialist and progressive scientists, intellectuals and academics also immediately glommed onto natural selection to promote different, often contradictory philosophies such as laissez-faire dog-eat dog capitalism, obscene racism speculations, warfare, colonialism and imperialism. Nevertheless, Darwin’s comprehensive view of nature involved “dependence of one being on another”; consequently pacifists, socialists, liberal social reformers and anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin pushed the importance of collaboration over struggle within a species.

Darwin’s evolution racism and the Supreme Court

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who served on the Court from 1902-32, was a leading figure of the Progressive Revolution, beloved by atheists and liberals as well as a stalwart champion of racialist eugenic philosophy. In the Supreme Court case, Buck v. Bell (1927), the Court ruled that a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, “for the protection and health of the state” did not violate the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Holmes infamously said in that case, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The decision was largely seen as an endorsement of negative eugenics – the attempt to improve the human race by eliminating “defectives” from the gene pool. An ironic tragedy is that it was later discovered that the plaintiff, Carrie Buck’s pregnancy was not caused by any “immorality” on her own fault, but in the summer of 1923, while her adoptive mother (Priddy) was away her adoptive mother’s nephew raped Carrie, and Carrie’s later commitment has been seen as an attempt by the family to save their reputation.

Justice Holmes and the Court judged this case wrong because they based their judicial opinion not on Originalism, Natural Law and Natural Rights which are the original ideas of the constitutional Framers, but on Progressive politics, the racist pseudo-science of evolution racism and racialist eugenics. Tragically we have learned nothing from history and just like today Progressive presidents like Barack Obama, judges, politicians, academics, intellectuals, and activists use Darwin’s evolution atheism and Galton’s eugenics ideas to create out of whole cloth the constitutional right of abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973). Indeed, this is why I call this zeitgeist the eternal lie of Darwin’s evolution atheism.

*N.B.: This essay is based in part on ideas from Encyclopedia Britannica Great Books of the Western World, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Editor-in-Chief (University of Chicago, 1952), Vol. 2, Chap. 24 – Evolution; Vol. 2, Chap. 29 – God; Vol. 3, Chap. 1 – Man; Vol. 3, Chap. 71 – Progress; Vol. 49 – Darwin. An important scholarly paper related to this subject I was commissioned by the Rutgers Journal of Law & Religion to write on recently declassified Nazi documents from the World War II era can be found here.