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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
August 26, 2007
Why it matters
In recent columns I returned to an old bête noire of mine: Darwinism. It is one of three I wrestled with as a young man, before I became a Christian, and long before I became a Catholic. I was an atheist as an adolescent; or perhaps an agnostic, for I prided myself on an “open mind,” and often tried to understand what I was rejecting. But Christianity then struck me (more than thirty years ago) as a spent force, as something that had animated men in the past and no longer animated them.For this reason I was content, at first, to ignore Christian claims, and instead focus upon those of the powerful contemporary ideological forces. Marxism, Darwinism, and Freudianism were the substitutes for religion that actually commanded allegiance in a world I was already considering to be “post-modern.” Among my contemporaries, whether they realized it or not -- especially the ones who considered themselves to be intellectuals -- some hash of all three seemed ever to be in vogue. I read right through Marx, Darwin, and Freud. I found all three writers uncongenial, and for similar reasons. Each was a Victorian determinist, with a theory of everything -- respectively an economic determinist, a biological determinist, and a psychological determinist. Each was an atheist, trying to discover a “scientific” system that could definitively exclude the concept of God, and in reading them I had my first glimmerings of why God might be necessary after all. From a real love for both natural science, and philosophy, I was especially hard on Darwin, who in every chapter contaminates natural science with unwarranted philosophical assumptions. (On the other hand, I delighted in Darwin when he was closely observing nature, with the finely trained eye of an early 19th-century naturalist -- when, indeed, he was playing the scientist, instead of the prophet.) Yet all three -- Marx, Darwin, Freud -- gave accounts of reality that struck me as demonstrably false, because they excluded as irrelevant everything outside a visionary focus. Marx excluded the power of non-economic forces -- of ideals -- upon men’s minds (except as an “opium”). Darwin denied the sense of purpose and the life-wish that I could observe in all nature’s creatures -- the “soul” of each animal, or plant, in the Aristotelian sense. Freud denied the objective power of “religious,” in the sense of “regulatory” habits to control men’s behaviour, subconsciously as well as consciously. Indeed, each was making an astounding claim, to have grasped the very mechanism of reality. Yet each was finally self-referential. Beyond the writings were the movements: Marxism, Darwinism, Freudianism. None was a science, for each proved a malleable system, with zero predictive power, able to assimilate almost any contradiction in a blather of jargon. And while no founder can be blamed for the misdeeds of his followers, each movement was an image of its founder, writ large. I came finally to consider Marx, Darwin, and Freud to be the great charlatans of the modern age. Paradoxically, each helped lead me to Christianity, in search of the very oxygen that had been sucked out of his system; in search of reason, turned outward, instead of in upon itself. It was when I began to realize that atheism, in any form, can flourish only by the denial of objective realities, that my mind was opened to the possibility of Christ. Among all the letters I have received on my Darwin columns -- mostly blind support, or blind abuse -- one struck me as especially worth answering: “Wake up, man. Whether or not ‘Darwinism’ is good science, it is accepted as good science by most intelligent people, and if you persist in attacking it you will lose the respect of people who are prepared to listen to you on many other subjects. Why don’t you have the tactical sense to leave Darwinism alone?” The answer to this has been implicit in what I have written. Nevertheless, it is worth spelling out. It is because Darwinism has embedded itself so deeply into the assumptions of our age, that it must be attacked frontally. For Darwinian assumptions cloud our view of reality. They subvert our grasp of moral issues. They make it possible for people to be dismissive, not only of art, philosophy, and religion, but of the requirements and limitations of true scientific research. They eviscerate the human spirit, by insisting that, in the last analysis, everything is random and meaningless. Conversely, they justify true fascism (“survival of the fittest”), and all the horrors of eugenics, abortions and euthanasia. Moral relativism could not stand, except on a Darwinist base, and reason itself is rendered defenceless, by the notion that all nature was randomly contrived. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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