[BaseballMan]

Harvard’s renowned Professor Stephen Jay Gould1 is a vigorous anticreationist (and Marxist), and perhaps the most knowledgeable student of the history of evolutionary thought and all things Darwinian.

I’m glad he and I are on the same side about one thing at least — the real meaning of ‘Darwin’s revolution’. And we both agree that it’s a meaning that the vast majority of people in the world today, nearly a century and a half after Darwin, don’t really want to face up to. Gould argues that Darwin’s theory is inherently anti-plan, anti-purpose, anti-meaning (in other words, is pure philosophical materialism). Also, that Darwin himself knew this very well and meant it to be so.

By ‘materialism’ he does not mean the drive to possess more and more material things, but the philosophical belief that matter is the only reality. In this belief system, matter, left to itself, produced all things, including the human brain. This brain then invented the idea of the supernatural, of God, of eternal life, and so forth.

It seems obvious why Christians who wish to compromise with evolution, and especially those who encourage others to do this, would not want to face this as the true meaning of Darwinism. Such ‘theistic evolutionists’ believe they can accept the ‘baby’ of evolution (thus saving face with the world) while throwing out the ‘bathwater’ of materialism. I will not here go into the many reasons why the evolution/long geological ages idea is so corrosive to the biblical Gospel2 (even if evolution could be seen as the plan and purpose of some ‘god’).

My purpose is (like Gould’s, but with a different motive) to make people aware of this very common philosophical blind spot, this refusal to wake up to what Darwin was really on about. Why is it true, as Gould also points out, that even among non-Christians who believe in evolution the vast majority don’t wish to face the utter planlessness of Darwin’s theory? Because they would then no longer be able to console themselves with the feeling that there is some sort of plan or purpose to our existence.3

The usual thing vaguely believed in by this majority of people (at the same time as they accept evolution) is some sort of fuzzy, ethereal, oozing god-essence — more like the Star Wars ‘force be with you’ than the personal God of Scripture. They usually obtain some comfort from a vague belief in at least the possibility of some sort of afterlife, which helps explain the success of recent movies like Flatliners and Ghost.4

Gould appears to deplore these popular notions as unfortunate, illogical and unnecessary cultural hangups. He, of course, starts from the proposition that evolution is true. He knows the real message of Darwin to be that ‘there’s nothing else going on out there — just organisms struggling to pass their genes on to the next generation. That’s it.’ In which case it is time for people to abandon comforting fairytales and wake up to this materialistic implication of evolution.

I also regard such notions (of cosmic purpose in a Darwinian world, of life-after-death without belief in the existence of the holy God of the Bible) as tragic fables, for different reasons. They lead people away from the vital revealed truths of Scripture, the propositional facts communicated by the Creator of the universe. It is also tragic that professing Christians can be deluded into embracing a philosophy (evolution) which is so inherently opposed to the very core of Christianity, and has done so much damage to the church and society.

Climbing the ladder
As evidence for this widespread desire to see purpose and plan in the planlessness of evolution, Professor Gould points to the overwhelming tendency among evolution-believers of all levels of education to see the message of Darwin as progress. Evolution is usually illustrated (even on the cover of some foreign translations of Stephen Gould’s books, much to his chagrin) as a 'ladder of progress' or similar.

Why is this?

Think of this. If the evolutionary scenario is true, then man’s arrival on the scene has come only at the end of an unspeakably long chain of events. For example, it would have taken 99.999% of the history of the universe to get to man. After life appears, two-thirds of its history on earth doesn’t get past bacteria, and for half of the remainder it stays at the one-celled stage! In order to escape the obvious (which is that in such an evolutionary universe, man has no possible significance, and just happened to come along), our culture, he argues, has had to view these vast ages as some sort of preparation period for the eventual appearance of man. This works if the idea of progress is clung to. The universe, then organisms, just got ‘better and better’, till finally we came along.

Puncturing myths
However, there is no hint of this popular mythology of ‘evolution-as-progress’ in Darwin’s ‘grand idea’. Variations happen by chance. Those organisms which happen, by chance, to suit their local environment more effectively and thus have a better chance to pass their genes on to the next generation, are favoured by natural selection. That’s all. In the theory, the giraffe that develops a longer neck is not a better giraffe — just one with a longer neck. Given a certain change in the environment, that long neck can just as easily be a disadvantage.

There is therefore nothing 'inevitable' about the appearance of man, or intelligent self-aware beings, for that matter. I would add to Gould’s comments my opinion that it is this belief in evolution as having been an 'onwards and upwards' force leading to us, and then to greater intelligence as a historical inevitability, which makes many dedicated evolutionists so sure that there must be intelligent aliens out there somewhere.

Radical
But isn’t Gould going a bit far to suggest that Darwin knew how radically anti-God his philosophy was? After all, wasn’t he a kindly, doddery naturalist who just happened to be in the right place at the right time, who was persuaded by what he saw in the Galápagos?

Wrong on all counts. If what follows sounds too revisionist, remember that Gould (an undisputed intellectual giant who has made a very careful study) is not alone in his conclusions, and has had access to unpublished notebooks of Darwin from when Darwin was a young man. It appears that:

1.The myth of the ‘kindly slow-witted naturalist stumbling across evolution’ was fostered by an autobiography Darwin wrote as a deliberately self-effacing moral homily for his children, not intending it to be published. It was a common Victorian thing to do. His notebooks tell a different story, of an ambitious young man who knew he had one of the most radical ideas in the history of thought.

2.Darwin did not get his idea from Galápagos finches — Gould even says ‘he clearly did not know that they were finches’. About the Galápagos tortoises, he says Darwin ‘missed that story also and only reconstructed it later.’ Did he get it from observing the results of animal breeding? Peter Bowler, writing in Nature (vol. 353, October 24, 1991, p. 713) says that ‘many now accept that Darwin’s analogy between artificial and natural selection was a product of hindsight’. So where did the ideas come from?

Just prior to his famous ‘insight’, Darwin spent months studying the economic theories of Adam Smith. In Smith’s extreme free-market view, the struggle of individuals competing for personal gain in an unfettered marketplace (by eliminating inefficient participants, for instance) is supposed to give an ordered, efficient economy. Although nothing is guiding it, it is as if there is an 'invisible guiding hand'. The ‘benefits come as an incidental side-effect of this selfish struggle.’

Of course, it is not hard to see where Darwin applied this idea to nature. The apparent design and order in nature is an incidental side-effect of the selfish struggle to leave more offspring.

3. Why did Darwin wait 20 years before publishing? It was not because of his modesty (another common myth which Gould debunks), so it is clear that he was afraid to reveal something.

Was it his belief in evolution itself? No. Evolution was quite a common concept in Darwin’s day. It was because of the bombshell he knew lay behind his theory, namely its rank, radical materialism. He knew as a young man that he had ‘the key to one of the great reforming ideas of history and systematically [went] out to reformulate every discipline from psychology to history.’5 To explain apparent design without a designer — that was the key to Darwin’s theory, not the idea of 'evolution' (common descent) itself.

4. It is likely that this assault on design had a lot to do with a reaction against Captain Fitzroy6 on the Beagle. The captain’s views on almost all political subjects were diametrically opposite to Darwin’s. For instance, Darwin was an ardent abolitionist, whereas Fitzroy believed that slavery was benevolent. Apparently, the good captain would wax long and eloquent on Paley’s argument from design7, which was used to justify many of his ideas. Nothing could possibly have taken deadlier aim at Paley’s argument than Darwin’s persuasive concept that design is an incidental side-effect of otherwise random change.8



http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation...darwin.asp