France goes the way of America

It was in America 50-odd years ago that I first followed the heated debates between ‘evolutionists’ and ‘creationists’.

In those days, I hadn’t yet pondered those issues as assiduously as I have since. But even in that larval stage of my intellectual development, I was appalled at the paucity of the arguments put forth by both sides.

The warring parties didn’t even realise they were at cross purposes. The confusion began by both insisting that Genesis and Darwin are mutually exclusive, whereas no contradiction between them exists: being omnipotent, God is capable of creating things gradually as well as instantly .

In fact, when Darwin published his Origin in 1859, some English theologians, such as Charles Kingsley, praised the book for providing another peephole allowing us to catch a glimpse of God’s design.

But Kingsley, sorely misguided as he was in most other areas, was immeasurably cleverer and better-versed in philosophy than those American jousters of my youth. They just screamed themselves hoarse, making spectators believe that one could be either for science or religion, but never both.

With all my respect for Americans, and this isn’t just a phrase, philosophical training doesn’t rate close to the top of their list of priorities. France, on the other hand, is different. There, philosophy, from atomism to Thomism and onwards, is taught at school. French youngsters can be overheard arguing about the relative merits of Foucault and Derrida, for example. (Both are considered philosophers in France.)

One would expect such education to elevate the discussion of life’s origin to a higher level than I encountered in America, c. 1975. Alas, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Talking to some French youngsters, intelligent ones who have gone to all the right schools, I was surprised to find out that they haven’t advanced the argument one bit. It’s still creationists versus evolutionists, and devil take the hindmost, as long as it’s the former.

The intellectual level is just as poor, and the emotions just as febrile. In fact, those French youngsters wouldn’t even discuss such self-evident things, refusing to stoop to the level of someone as insanely reactionary as me.

This adds another piece of evidence to my observation that, evolutionally speaking, the Enlightenment has gradually created an intellectual catastrophe affecting the world at large, not just any specific country. Most people aren’t just unable to think properly – they don’t even know what constitutes proper thought.

If they did, they’d know that it’s not theologians but scientists (many of whom, such as Hoyle, Watson, Creek et al., were themselves atheists) who identify problems with Darwin’s theory. In that spirit, try to guess which insane reactionary was the author of these two statements:

“Not one change of species into another is on record… we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.”

And, “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

No, it wasn’t a charismatic fundamentalist preacher in America’s Bible Belt. It was Darwin himself, pointing out two of the gaping holes in his theory.

In the intervening 175 years, science has never proved a single one of his conclusions of a more sweeping nature, those concerning macroevolution, one species becoming another. (Microevolution, a species developing to adapt to its environment, isn’t disputed by anyone — and hasn’t been since Plutarch and Lucretius.)

Unlike Darwin himself, today’s politicised Darwinists don’t even try to see how his assertions tally with the most elementary scientific data, such as the dearth of intermediate forms of living creatures in the fossil records. In fact, empirical evidence supports not the appearance and development of new species but the degradation and disappearance of the old ones.

Scientists now agree that about 99 percent of the species that have ever inhabited the earth are no longer with us. Really, that book ought to have been called The Disappearance of Species.

In fact, Darwinism, as a universalist, materialist explanation of the world, has been refuted not only by logic but also by every natural science we may wish to consider, from microbiology to physics, palaeontology, cosmology, biochemistry and geology.

Darwinism is taught as fact at schools in America, France and elsewhere not because it’s scientifically irrefutable but because it’s politically indispensable. Not only does it attack traditions of Christendom more effectively than Marxism does, but it also rivals Marxism for far-reaching social and economic implications.

One no longer has to leave the realm of seemingly objective biological science to explain both socialism, with its class struggle, and capitalism, with its dog-eat-dog struggle for economic survival. Even more fundamental is Darwinism’s demotic insistence on the purely animal nature of man.

In Christendom, man was regarded as unique among all living beings because his life was believed to have a higher transcendent purpose. As long as that view was more or less universally shared, no consumer society in our modern sense could arise.

There were in-built limits to man’s consumption because it was recognised that there were no in-built limits to man’s being. Obviously, man has always consumed, but that activity couldn’t have been paramount for someone who believed he was created in the image and likeness of God and would therefore live eternally.

For consumption to be elevated to the defining feature of society, the very concept of man had to change. For consumption to reign supreme, the whole society had to become consumptive.

That is precisely the service Darwin provided, though not single-handedly. If we are nothing but highly developed apes, then we aren’t qualitatively different from animals.

We differ only in the range of our activities that all reach their resolution and apotheosis in consumption. Thanks to our evolved minds, we don’t have to stick to bananas. We can consume cars, computers, jet travel – and we can feel good about ourselves while devoting our lives to the pursuit of animal-like happiness.

Modern people are ever prepared to shrug their shoulders with indifference whenever yet another length of flimsy yarn is spun at them. They open their arms to such primitive fallacies as Marxism and Darwinism not because they are persuaded by their rational arguments but because at heart they don’t really care one way or the other.

They hear vague materialist noises in those doctrines, and that’s all they want to hear. Having created our modern, virtual world, materialism needs virtual science to vindicate itself. 

As long as money remains tangible and plentiful, people feel no need for any other reality. The assumption is that Chimaera’s fire may singe everything else, including supposedly objective science, while sparing the only reality that really matters. Alas, this reality is no less inflammable than any other, and more so than some.

History will obligingly provide empirical proof of this observation but, until it does, people will continue to cling to their uncritical faith in Darwinism. It’s no less fideistic than Genesis but, unlike the latter, has the advantage of easy appeal to immature minds happy to boil the whole complexity of life down to primitive binary choices.

Such as the one between ‘creationism’ and ‘evolutionism’ – yes or no, black or white, no other hues anywhere in evidence, no nuances entertained. Oh well, as long as those people are happy, for as long as they are happy.