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COMMENTARY
November 1, 2006
All Saints
Here is another public service column. The over-celebration of Halloween is part of the re-paganization of our culture. I won’t moan about it, only note it. All Hallows’ Eve was formerly the shadow of an important event in the Christian year: the Feast of All Saints. And that was not a celebration of ghosts, witches, and goblins. If my reader can be reminded that today is All Saints, my purpose in writing is already fulfilled.My best Texas buddy, a diehard evolutionist, forwarded to me yesterday an item from the New York Times science pages, reviewing a new book by the Harvard biologist, Marc D. Hauser, entitled Moral Minds (HarperCollins). The hypothesis is that human beings were endowed by the random evolutionary process -- like the apes and other higher mammals -- with a kind of “moral grammar”, akin to the universal linguistic “grammar” that Noam Chomsky hypothesized in the books he wrote within his area of expertise. (Mr Chomsky is also the author of a number of political tracts in which he indulges his partiality for revolutionary paranoid twaddle.) “Both atheists and people belonging to a wide range of faiths make the same moral judgments, Dr. Hauser writes, implying ‘that the system that unconsciously generates moral judgments is immune to religious doctrine’.” On the one hand, I think, this is old hat, the Darwinoids have been trying this on for as long as I remember, and this basic hypothesis -- that morality is itself an artefact of evolution -- is always presented as “groundbreaking”, “earthshaking”, “brilliantly original”, with "far-reaching consequences", etc., etc. So I must fight the temptation to say, "Oh, give me a break." On the other, it is good to see secular scientism earnestly trying to catch up with what the Church has been teaching to the Gentiles these last 2000 years, and had been teaching the Hebrews for a few thousand longer. God created man -- having first “evolved” the universe and our planet -- endowing us with what we would need to survive, including a moral conscience. He allowed us to "fall", to become profoundly twisted, yet to this day we retain our instinctive sense of good and evil, as well as the freedom to wilfully confuse them. Verily, ye Church has been teaching that God created an entire universe that has moral, rational, and spiritual dimensions, as well as the purely physical -- all written into Nature as into Man himself, such that Man interacts in his nature with this Nature. We are each, even in the most practical and pedestrian way, not merely an ape, but an astonishingly clever and twisted ape. We are capable of turning morality on its ear, of subverting and inverting it for our selfish purposes. Religion we desperately need, to discipline these impulses -- though of course religion itself can be subverted and inverted. The sad effect of these evolutionary hypotheses is that they explain away the hard facts of our human condition. They de-moralize morality. They tell the general audience, that our moral sense is merely an accident of evolution, a by-product, when it is the whole point of the exercise. The Darwinoids thus subtly encourage us to behave like animals, while thinking ourselves above it all. By leaving God out of the account, we subvert the authority of the moral law. From a religious view, the Darwinoids re-enact that Fall, when Adam and Eve decided they could eat of the apple and thereby seize control of their "divine programming", making themselves their own judges of what is right and wrong. It was the beginning of our exile from God, and from Nature. Biblical literalists play into their hands by reading Genesis as if it were factual science. It does not pretend to be that; it was recorded thousands of years ago. The account of the fall of man is mythic, which is to say, deeper than the factual.* Genesis is instead the beginning of an extraordinary revelation from the God who will never give up on us, or leave us alone. Who made us, He said, "in his own image", and to purposes we could never guess, were it not for the same Revelation. What we can know, from science, is that something very weird happened about 40,000 years ago. This twisted ape started doing paintings on the walls of caves such as Lascaux; and about the same time, all over the planet. Since then, nothing in this world has been quite the same. And man himself is no longer an ape, but has become sui generis, the star in an extraordinary drama in which good and evil are writ large. “All Saints” is what this leads to. In commemorating the great procession of human saints, through history, we are brought into view of that mysterious divine purpose. God did not create just another ape; he created a species in which fully-conscious saints would be possible. FOOTNOTE * "The account of the fall of man is mythic, which is to say, deeper than the factual." -- Please note, when I write this, I do NOT mean, "it is a fairy tale, like Cinderella". I mean instead what I said, that it is not science, but not therefore shallow. Such that, the person who takes the "creation myths" from Genesis as literal fact, gets closer to the truth than the person who takes them as some kind of oriental fantasia. There are truths that go deeper than fact, which expound mysteries that science can never hope to explain. Such as, in this case, the very existence in man of a moral conscience, and the sense of sin. Something DID happen, in the antiquity of man, corresponding precisely to Adam's fall. And we carry the echo of that fall, that tragedy, even in our own lives today. The account in Genesis makes it comprehensible to us. We do not actually need to know more, though neither is there anything to stop us looking for more. ... But here, let me also mention a limitation of science that is seldom acknowledged: that without reverence, we will never discover anything of value. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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