Sovereignty and Dominion
AN ECONOMIC COMMENTARY ON GENESIS
VOLUME 2 APPENDIXES
https://www.garynorth.com/SovereigntyAndDominion2.pdf
APPENDIX A—From Cosmic Purposelessness to Humanistic Sovereignty
APPENDIX B—The Evolutionists’ Defense of the Market
APPENDIX C—Cosmologies in Conflict: Creation vs. Evolution
APPENDIX D—Basic Implications of the Six-Day Creation
APPENDIX E—Witnesses and Judges
Appendix C
Gertrude Himmelfarb, in her superb study, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959), quoted an amusing and highly revealing section from Benjamin Disraeli’s 1847 novel, Tancred. Disraeli, who later became England’s Prime Minister, caught the new evolutionistic spirit of some of Britain’s upper classes—pre-Darwinian evolution, and a perspective universally condemned by scientists everywhere prior to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). A fashionable lady urges Tancred, the hero, to read a new book, Revelations of Chaos (actually, Robert Chambers’ anonymously printed and enormously popular Vestiges of Creation): “You know, all is development. The principle is perpetually going on. First, there was nothing, then there was something; then—I forget the next—I think there were shells, then fishes; then we came—let me see—did we come next? Never mind that; we came at last. And at the next change there will be something very superior to us—something with wings. Ah! that’s it: we were fishes, and I believe we shall be crows. But you must read it. [Tancred protests, mentioning that he had never been a fish. She goes on:] Oh! but it is all proved. . . . You understand, it is all science. Everything is proved—by geology, you know.”
It was people like this lady who bought 24,000 copies of Vestiges of Creation from its publication in 1844 until 1860—not the scientists, but good, upstanding Anglican Church members. When Darwin’s Origin was published, the entire edition of 1,250 copies was sold out to booksellers in one day. The doctrine of evolution, rejected by scientists in 1850, was the universal orthodoxy in 1875. The idea of natural selection over millions of years had become the catch-all of the sciences. The entire universe is a chance operation in this perspective. Chance brought all things into existence (if in fact all things were not always in existence), and chance presently sustains the system. The utterly improbable laws of probability provide creation with whatever piecemeal direction it possesses. This cosmology was a return to the cosmologies of ancient paganism, though of course it is all dressed up in its scientific smock and footnotes.
The reigning cosmologies of the non-Christian world have always had one feature in common: they do not distinguish between the being of God and the being of the universe. In all these cosmogonies—stories of the original creation—a finite god created the world out of a preexisting “stuff,” either spiritual or material. This god, only comparatively powerful, faced the contingent (chance) elements of the ultimately mysterious “stuff” in a way analogous to the way we now face a basically mysterious creation. Chance is therefore ultimate in most non-biblical systems. Some “primitive” cosmogonies affirm creation from an original cosmic egg (Polynesian, eighth-century Japan).1 A large number of the creation stories were creation out of water (Maori, certain California Indian tribes, the Central Bantu Tribe of the Lunda Cluster, Mayan Indians in Central America, Babylon).2 The Egyptian text, “The Book of Overthrowing Apophis,” provides an excellent example of a water cosmogony: “The Lord of All, after having come into being, says: I am he who came into being as Khepri (i.e., the Becoming One). When I came into being, the beings came into being, all the beings came into being after I became. Numerous are those who became, who came out of my mouth, before heaven ever existed, nor earth came into being, nor the worms, nor snakes, were created in this place. I being in weariness, was bound to them in the Watery Abyss. I found no place to stand.”3 After planning in his heart the various beings, he spat them out of his mouth. “It was my father the Watery Abyss who brought them up and my eye followed them (?) while they became far from me.” This god is not the sovereign God of the biblical creation story. The Bible’s God did not spring from a watery abyss, nor did He create the world from His own substance. He created it out of nothing.
Hesiod, who probably wrote his classic poems in the eighth century B.C., sketched a cosmogony that sought the source of creation in the infinite void (chaos), in much the same way as modern science searches for the origin of the universe. Chaos is the source of all that is.4 As was the case and is the case in most non-Christian cosmologies, he held to a theory of eternal cycles: the original Age of Gold is inevitably followed by a process of deterioration into new ages: Silver, Bronze, and finally Iron.5 (A similar outline is given by Daniel to King Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 2; Daniel’s exposition to the king’s vision is not cyclical, however, for a fifth kingdom—God’s eternal kingdom— finally replaces the fourth and final earthly kingdom.) Pagan cyclical theories held to a faith that the grim age of iron could be regenerated back into a new age of gold through the application of ritual acts of chaos. Our present age is characterized by law and order—the opposite of life—so that by violating established social and political laws, societies can be regenerated from below. Thus, the ancient pagan cultures had annual or seasonal chaos festivals. Metaphysical regeneration rather than ethical regeneration was basic to their cosmologies. Not a return to covenantal law, as in the Hebrew-Christian perspective, but an escape from law: here was the alternative to the biblical perspective.6 This dialectic between order and chaos was universal in the Near Eastern and classical civilizations. Ethics was therefore primarily political, for it was the state, as the supposed link between heaven and earth, that was the agency of social and personal salvation.7
In examining the history of the universe, Greek scientists were not noticeably superior to their predecessors, the poets, or the cosmologists of other ancient cultures. In an extremely important study, The Discovery ofTime (1965), the authors concluded: “For all the rationality of their concepts, they never put down firm intellectual roots into the temporal development of Nature, nor could they grasp the timescale of Creation with any more certainty than men had done before. In the History of Nature, therefore, the continuity between the ideas of the Greek philosophers and those of the preceding era is particularly striking: here, even more than elsewhere, one may justly speak of their theories as ‘radical myths.’”8
Hecateus of Miletos, an historian of the mid-sixth century, B.C., attempted to link human history with natural history. His conclusions were still being quoted by Diodorus of Sicily five centuries later, in the latter’s Historical Library. “When in the beginning, as their account runs, the universe was being formed, both heaven and earth were indistinguishable in appearance, since their elements were intermingled: then, when their bodies separated from one another, the universe took on in all its parts the ordered form in which it is now seen ”9 Life sprang from “the wet” by reason of the warmth from the sun; all the various forms were created at once. The creation of the elements was therefore impersonal. The creation of life was spontaneous, instantaneous, and fixed for all time. It was a purely autonomous development.
Plato was caught in the tension between order and chaos. Two of the pre-Socratic philosophers, Heraclitus and Parmenides, had set forth the case for each. Heraclitus had argued that all is flux, change, and process; Parmenides had argued that all is rational, static, and universal. This so-called dialectic between structure and change, order and chaos, was expressed in terms of the Form (Idea)-Matter dualism.10 Plato, in the Timaeus dialogue, began with a contrast between exact, eternal mathematical concepts and the temporal flux of history. As Toulmin and Goodfield commented: “The Creation of the cosmos was the process by which the eternal mathematical principles were given material embodiment, imposing an order on the formless raw materials of the world, and setting them working according to ideal specifications.”11 It is the vision of a Divine Craftsman. Plato was noncommittal about the timing of this creation or the order of the creation; it was, at the minimum, 9,000 years earlier. In response to Aristotle’s attack on this theory, Plato’s pupils argued that it was only an intellectual construct, not something to be taken literally.12 They were correct. Plato’s god, as his other dialogues indicate, was an impersonal Idea of the Good, itself a fragmented universal.13
Aristotle’s cosmology was different. His god was a totally impersonal, totally aloof being—thought contemplating itself—and therefore indifferent to the world. The affairs of the world are determined by autonomous processes. Both god and the world are eternal (Physics, VIII). His god was therefore “Unmoved Perfection,” totally independent. The creation was equally independent.14 God’s existence does not explain why other beings exist, or why they exist in a particular way. 15 There had never been a temporal beginning; time is unbounded. History operates in terms of cycles.16 Aristotle was intensely skeptical concerning questions about some hypothetical and unknowable original creation.
The later Greek philosophical schools known as the Stoics (deterministic) and Epicureans (skeptical, atheistic) also held to a cyclical view of history. Their curiosity about the universe’s origins went unsatisfied. When Paul confronted members of both schools of thought on Mars’ Hill in Athens, he was unable to convince them to believe in the Bible’s Creator God—the God in whom we live and have our being (Acts 17:24–28, 32). Paul’s concept of God was utterly foreign to their belief in an independent, autonomous universe. They preferred to believe that an impersonal world of pure chance (luck) battles eternally for supremacy over pure determinism (fate), equally impersonal.17
Christianity offered a solution to this eternal tension. The Creator of heaven and earth is a God of three Persons: eternal, omnipotent, exhaustive in self-revelation. The revelation of the Bible, not the logic of the self-proclaimed autonomous human mind, serves as the foundation of this belief.18 This belief overcame the dualism of classical thought by denying the impersonalism of the cosmos. It provided an alternative to the collapsing classical civilization, for it offered a wholly new cosmology. As Cochrane says, “The fall of Rome was the fall of an idea, or rather of a system of life based upon a complex of ideas which may be described broadly as those of Classicism; and the deficiencies of Classicism, already exposed in the third century, were destined sooner or later to involve the system in ruin.”19
The major philosophical religions of China and India are Buddhism and Hinduism. Both are ultimately monistic faiths. They hypothesize an ultimate oneness of being underlying all reality. This total oneness became plural at some point in the past, thus producing the creation out of itself; at some later point in history, it will overcome this dualism to become unified again. The change and multiplicity of life are therefore maya—illusions. Only unity can be said truly to exist. Somehow, the ultimate reality of one has included in itself the illusion of plurality. Swami Nikhilananda, a respected Hindu scholar whose article appears in a symposium of Darwinian evolutionists, tried to explain his system’s cosmology.
According to the Upanishads, which form the conclusion and the essence of the Vedas and are also the basis of the Vedanta philosophy, Atman, or the unchanging spirit in the individual, and Brahman, or the unchanging spirit in the universe, are identical. This spirit of consciousness—eternal, homogeneous, attributeless, and self-existent is the ultimate cause of all things Vedanta Philosophy speaks of attributeless reality as beyond time, space, and causality. It is not said to be the cause of the Saguna Brahman [first individual] in the same way as the potter is the cause of the pot (dualism), or milk of curds (pantheism). The creation of Saguna Brahman is explained as an illusory superimposition such as one notices when the desert appears as a mirage, or a rope in semi-darkness as a snake. This superimposition does not change the nature of reality, as the apparent water of the mirage does not soak a single grain of sand in the desert. A name and a form are thus superimposed upon Brahman by maya, a power inherent in Brahman and inseparable from it, as the power to burn is inseparable from fire According to Vedanta, maya is the material basis of creation; it is something positive. It is called positive because it is capable of evolving the tangible material universe.20
The one of Atman-Brahman produces something different, maya, which really is not different in reality from the one, and maya in turn evolves the material universe, although it is not itself material. It is an illusion. The universe is therefore an illusion. The process is cyclical:
Evolution or manifestation is periodical or cyclic; manifestation and non-manifestation alternate; there is not continuous progress in one direction only. The universe oscillates in both directions like a pendulum of a clock. The evolution of the universe is called the beginning of a cycle, and the involution, the termination of the cycle. The whole process is spontaneous, like a person’s breathing out and breathing in. At the end of a cycle all the physical bodies resolve into maya, which is the undifferentiated substratum of matter, and all individualized energy into prana, which is the cosmic energy; and both energy and matter remain in an indistinguishable form. At the beginning of the new cycle, the physical bodies separate out again, and the prana animates them. Evolution and involution are postulated on the basis of the indestructibility of matter and the conservation of energy. [The swami seems to be throwing a sop to the evolutionists here, since matter really cannot exist, for all is one—spirit.—G.N.] From the relative standpoint, the creation is without beginning or end. A cycle is initiated by the power or intelligence of God. According to Hindu thinkers, the present cycle commenced about three billion years ago. It appears from some of the Upanishads that all beings —superhuman, human, and subhuman—appear simultaneously at the beginning of a cycle.21
There can be no true separation or distinction between the Creator and the creation. All is ultimately one substance: spirit. If matter is eternal, this means that illusion is eternal. Yet the attainment of Nirvana implies an escape from the process of time and change, so it would appear that not everything is matter eternally, i.e., illusion. Something—one’s soul—escapes from this eternal illusion to return to the oneness. Thus, both Hindus and Buddhists developed systems of ascetic practices by which the souls of men, or at least the surviving deeds of men (Buddhism), could escape from creation. In this sense, the asceticism of the East was similar to the monistic (not necessarily monastic) asceticism of the West’s gnostic sects, desert mystics, or other neoplatonic groups.22
During the first half of the twentieth century, English language readers had to rely almost exclusively on the voluminous researches of Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki for their knowledge of Zen Buddhism. His studies of the more orthodox and scholarly Mahayana Buddhism were also influential. Both systems are ultimately monistic, as is Hinduism, from which Buddhism developed. Paralleling the almost scholastic Mahayana form of Buddhism is Hinayana, or ascetic-magical Buddhism, but Western readers are far less concerned with this less speculative offshoot, however important it may have been in practice. As might be expected, Suzuki tried to come to grips with the ultimate oneness—Absolute Suchness—but his explanation was by definition hopeless. “Absolute Suchness from its very nature thus defies all definitions.”23 The ground of all existence is therefore nonrational, incommunicative, mysterious. As with Hinduism, diversity is viewed as a result of finite consciousness.24 There can be no answer of the eternal one-many distinction; we can never know how the one became many.25
Certain conclusions utterly foreign to Western, Christian thought result from this monism. For example, there can be no personal responsibility in such a system. Suzuki explained that “Buddhism does not condemn this life and universe for their wickedness as was done by some religious teachers and philosophers. The so-called wickedness is not radical in nature and life. It is merely superficial.”26 All things are at bottom one; thus, there can be no murder. “It is true that Mahayanism perfectly agrees with Vedantism when the latter declares: ‘If the killer thinks that he kills, if the killed thinks that he is killed, they do not understand; for this one does not kill, nor is that one killed.’ (The Kato-panishad, II, 19.)”27 Furthermore, according to Suzuki, there is no personal immortal soul in Mahayana Buddhism.28 There is no personal God.29 There is no grace; all merit is earned.30 One’s deeds—not the person—are carried into eternity through karma, or reincarnation, ascending or descending along the scale of being.31 The deeds survive, not an individual soul.32 Yet somehow it is possible to distinguish good deeds from bad deeds, in spite of the fact that at bottom all things are one, and all distinctions are illusions.33 There is no Creator, no Fall, and no hell.34 In the final analysis, there is no knowledge:
Human consciousness is so made that at the beginning there was utter not knowing. Then there was the eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge—the knowledge that consists in making the knower different from what he knows. That is the origin of this world. The fruit separated us from not-knowing in the sense of not knowing subject and object. This awakening of knowledge resulted in our ejection from the Garden of Eden. But we have a persistent desire to return to the state of innocence prior, epistemologically speaking, to creation, to the state where there is no division, no knowledge—prior to the subject-object division, to the time when there was only God as He was before He created the world. The separation of God from the world is the source of all our troubles. We have an innate desire to be united with God.35
He deliberately uses Western and Christian terms to describe a completely non-Western concept of God—impersonal, without attributes. But the thrust of Buddhist monism should be clear: the goal is universal, eternal unity. The Creator must be unified with the creature. We are to unite with God metaphysically, as equals, not ethically, as subordinates. We are to share God’s attribute of divinity and oneness, rather than be united ethically to Christ in His perfect humanity.
The idea of creation out of nothing, and hence the Creator-creature distinction, is repugnant to Eastern thought. While the following quotation from Suzuki is chaotic, it is no worse than an extract from Hegel, Tillich, or Bonhoeffer, whose book, Creation and Fall, must rank as one of the truly perverse, contorted efforts in modernist biblical exegesis.
When God created the world outside Himself, He made a great mistake. He could not solve the problem of the world as long as He kept it outside of Himself. In Christian theological terminology, God, to say “I am,” has to negate Himself. For God to know Himself He must negate Himself, and His negation comes in the form of the creation of the world of particulars. To be God is not to be God. We must negate ourselves to affirm ourselves. Our affirmation is negation, but as long as we remain in negation we shall have no rest; we must return to affirmation. We must go out into negation of ourselves and come back. We go out but that negation must come back into affirmation. Going out is coming back. But to realize that going out is coming back we have to go through all kinds of suffering and hardship, of trials and disciplines.36
The use of intense mystical contemplation of total absurdities, sometimes followed by acts of asceticism, or physical beatings, is the Zen Buddhist means of achieving satori, the heart of Zen.37 Nothing has meaning or purpose: this is the gateway to satori, or pure religious freedom. Total chaos rules supreme, and in chaos there is perfect peace.38 All aspects of life must be accepted.39 True existence is timeless.40 By abandoning one’s own individuality, man links himself to the infinite—infinite possibilities, infinite responsibilities, unlimited freedom.41 Total annihilation means total perfection.
Given such a philosophy, it is not surprising that the East should have produced a stagnant culture in which men seek escape in earthly routine and the timelessness of satori: “The only thing that makes Buddhists look rather idle or backward in so-called ‘social service’ work is the fact that Eastern people, among whom Buddhism flourished, are not very good at organization; they are just as charitably disposed as any religious people and ready to put their teachings into practice. But they are not accustomed to carry on their philanthropic undertakings in a systematic way ”42 This stands in contrast to Puritans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who built charitable institutions that still exist today, and which transformed the character of English life.43 Eastern people can organize successfully, as the Communists have shown, but only under the influence of a Western philosophy of progress and triumph. Monism is a religion of stagnation and retreat.
God is not part of the creation, according to Christianity. He is the Creator. He existed before time began. The Bible offers a unique concept of time. There was a beginning; there is linear development; there will be a final judgment. The first philosopher to develop this concept of linear history was Augustine.
The concluding chapter of Charles Norris Cochrane’s superb study, Christianity and Classical Culture (1944), deals with the philosophy of St. Augustine and his concept of history.44 Augustine marks the transition between the shattered world of classical civilization and the new Christian society. Augustine reshaped the historical vision of Western Civilization, a monumental intellectual feat. Augustine’s twin vision of predestination and linear line—both explicitly Pauline concepts—gave Western culture the idea of history. All human history is directional. It began with the creation, and it shall end with the final judgment. Earthly kingdoms rise and fall, but God’s kingdom (which Augustine saw, unfortunately, as exclusively spiritual and ecclesiastical in impact) is permanent. The doctrine of historical cycles is therefore false.45 Furthermore, creation was not a process extending back into the mists of time; it was a fiat creation within the time span of human records:
In vain, then do some babble with most empty presumption, saying that Egypt has understood the reckoning of the stars for more than a hundred thousand years. For in what books have they collected that number who learned letters from Isis their mistress, not much more than two thousand years ago? . . . For as it is not yet six thousand years since the first man, who is called Adam, are not those to be ridiculed rather than refuted who try to persuade us of anything regarding a space of time so different from, and contrary to, the ascertained truth?46
Sadly for the condition of the besieged Church in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Christian scholars must spend whole lifetimes in refuting that which is, in Augustine’s term, ridiculous—worthy of ridicule rather than refutation.
Augustine’s world was a universe of cosmic personalism. God’s providence brings all things to pass. This was his answer to the cosmic impersonalism of the classical world. “By thus discarding characteristic prejudices of classical mentality, Augustine opens the way for a philosophy of history in terms of the logos of Christ; i.e. in terms of the Trinity, recognized as the creative and moving principle.”47 In short, wrote Cochrane, “For Augustine, therefore, the order of human life is not the order of ‘matter,’ blindly and aimlessly working out the ‘logic’ of its own process, nor yet is it any mere reproduction of a pattern or idea which may be apprehended a priori by the human mind.”48 Process is not the source of structure or meaning. “The logos of Christ thus serves to introduce a new principle of unity and division into human life and human history.”49
The world has a fixed order. The Greeks believed this with respect to the creation of the various species, as do the Hindus. They were not so rigorous in applying a theology of process to the world. They hesitated to follow the implications of their view of cycles. They refused to question fully the firmness of a fixed order of creation that is not the product of a sovereign Creator. But Christians do have a foundation for their trust in natural laws. From the time of Augustine in the early fifth century through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Christian West stood in confidence before a nature which is under the control of God.50
The medieval view of the earth was still basic to Western men’s understanding of the universe as late as 1600. Because of the centrality of the earth in the order of God’s creation, and because of the drama of the Fall of man and the Incarnation of the Son of God in Jesus Christ, their view of the universe was understandably geocentric. But they took the Ptolomaic construction of the universe as physically geocentric as a valid representation of the covenantal geocentricity of earth in the creation. The earth was understood as round. (The incredible portolano maps of the Middle Ages rival the accuracy of modern maps; they were probably pre-Phoenician in origin.) 51 But it was supposedly placed at the center of a huge system of translucent spheres, to which the sun, planets, and stars were attached, all rotating in perfect spherical harmony around the earth. While the existence of comets should have warned them against the translucent spheres, it did not. Galileo’s telescopes, not comets, smashed these spheres.
Some commentators, such as J. B. Bury, have argued that this geocentricity gave men a sense of importance and power in the universe. This was supposedly destroyed by the advent of modern astronomical theories.52 Others, such as Arthur O. Lovejoy, have argued just the opposite: the earth, was seen as the garbage dump of the universe, with hell at its center. “It is sufficiently evident from such passages that the geocentric cosmography served rather for man’s humiliation than for his exaltation, and that Copernicanism was opposed partly on the ground that it assigned too dignified and lofty a position to his dwelling-place.”53 The fact seems to be that man’s escape from the geocentric universe could be viewed either as a contraction of man’s physical (and therefore historical) place in creation, or as an elevation, ethically, because of one’s escape from the wrath of the God of the formerly confined creation. On the other hand, men might view the universe as majestically huge, and therefore the God who created it must be infinite. This is metaphysically humbling, but for the regenerate it can be the promise of triumph. The key is not the size or shape of the universe, but the reliability of the revelation of the God of creation. The problem is not size, but ethics, not geographical position, but ethical position. The great danger, soon witnessed, of the expanded size of God’s universe was the next step, wholly illegitimate: infinite time.54
Modern historians have often been remiss, lazy, or deliberately misleading in their unwillingness to comment on another aspect of the conflict between medieval Roman Catholic orthodox science and the Renaissance discoveries. Renaissance speculation was not the product of a group of armchair college professors. It was deeply involved in magic, demonism, and the occult arts. C. S. Lewis was correct when he observed that it was not the Middle Ages that encouraged grotesque superstitions; it was the “rational” Renaissance. These men were searching for power, like Faustus, not truth for its own sake.55 For example, it is generally today accepted that the first late-medieval or early modern figure to advance the old Greek concept of an infinite universe was Giordano Bruno.56 Yet it was Bruno’s reputation, welldeserved, as a magician, a Kabbalist, and an astrologer that brought him to his disastrous end.57 It was not simply that Copernicus, in the name of mathematical precision, placed the sun at the center of the universe. Ptolemy’s system was as accurate in its predictions as Copernicus’ system (for Copernicus erroneously favored circular planet orbits instead of ellipses).58 Copernicus was involved in a neoplatonic, Pythagorean revival against the Aristotelian universe of the late-medieval period. Mathematics governs everything, this tradition teaches, contrary to Aristotle’s teachings.59 It was also a deeply mystical and magical tradition. Kepler, the mathematical genius who discovered that planetoid motion is elliptical, was a sun-worshipper and an astrologer.60 The leaders of the institutional church understandably were disturbed by these theologically and cosmologically heretical individuals.
89. The attempt of modern science to fuse rational scientific technique and magical power is the theme of Lewis’ magnificent novel, That Hideous Strength (1945).
The debate over whether or not the universe is infinite is still with us today. Einstein’s curved (in relation to what?) and finite universe is obviously not in harmony with the absolute space of Newton’s cosmology. Prior to the sixteenth century, however, European scholars had not raised the question. Aristotle’s rejection of the idea was considered final. The problem is exceedingly intricate, as anyone understands who has attempted to struggle through Alexander Koyré’s book, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957). Copernicus and Kepler rejected the idea, although their speculations vastly expanded men’s vision of the creation. Galileo, whose telescopes shattered the transluscent spheres as comets never had, was content to affirm an indeterminate universe. Descartes, who above all other men of his era believed in a totally mathematical universe, and whose vision in this regard was crucial for the development of modern science, said that space is indefinite. He was always cautious on theological or semi-theological topics. The limit, he thought, may well be in our minds; we should therefore avoid such disputes. In fact, Descartes’ refusal to postulate limits (due to men’s inability to conceive such limits) really served as an assertion of an infinite space.61 Descartes’ god was simply pure mind, having nothing in common with the material world.62
Henry More (not Sir Thomas More), in the latter part of the seventeenth century, was converted to a belief in an infinite void space, identifying this with God’s omnipresence. The limited material universe is therefore contained in this infinite void. Space is eternal, uncreated, and the necessary presupposition of our thinking. He identified the spatiality of God and the divinity of space.63 Space is an attribute of God in this perspective—a dangerous linking of Creator and creature. (This position, by the way, was also held by Jonathan Edwards in his youth.64) More is not that crucial a figure in the history of Europe, but his opinion on the infinity of space was shared by Isaac Newton.65 Newton’s affirmation of Absolute Space and Absolute Time as postulates of all physics was to open the door to a conclusion which he personally opposed: an autonomous universe.
Leibniz identified Newton’s Absolute Space with the material universe, a step Newton did not take, but one which few others seemed able to resist after 1700. It was the crucial step in severing God from His universe. Thus, concluded Koyré,
At the end of the [seventeenth] century Newton’s victory was complete. The Newtonian God reigned supreme in the infinite void of absolute space in which the force of universal attraction linked together the atomically structured bodies of the immense universe and made them move around in accordance with strict mathematical laws. Yet it can be argued that this victory was a Pyrrhic one, and that the price paid for it was disastrously high Moreover, an infinite universe existing only for a limited duration seems illogical. Thus the created world became infinite both in Space and in Time. But an infinite and eternal world, as [Dr. Samuel] Clarke had so strongly objected to in Leibniz, can hardly admit creation. It does not need it; it exists by virtue of this very infinity.66
From a closed world to an infinite universe means, therefore, a universe closed to God. There is nothing to which men can appeal beyond the creation itself. But without God there can be no meaning. Max Weber was correct: modern science removes meaning from the world.67 Koyré ended his book with this statement: “The infinite Universe of the New Cosmology, infinite in Duration as well as Extension, in which eternal matter in accordance with eternal and necessary laws moves endlessly and aimlessly in eternal space, inherited all the ontological [being] attributes of Divinity. Yet only those—all the others the departed God took away with Him.”68 This is cosmic impersonalism. We are back to the ancient pagan cosmology, only now there is no doubt about the randomness of the universe; it is aimless.
This did not mean that those holding the new cosmology abandoned the idea of linear time. Now that God was officially removed, the linearity of time was secularized and thereby ostensibly humanized. The universe would now be cosmically personal in terms of man. The secular idea of progress was born in the seventeenth century, paralleling the advent of a resurgence of orthodox Protestant (especially Calvinistic and Puritan) optimism. Nothing has characterized this secularization of Christian providence any better than Nisbet’s comment: “By the late 17th century, Western philosophers, noting that the earth’s frame had still not been consumed by Augustinian holocaust, took a kind of politician’s courage in the fact, and declared bravely that the world was never going to end (Descartes, it seems, had proved this) and that mankind was going to become ever more knowledgeable and, who knows, progressively happy. Now, of a sudden, the year 2000 became the object of philosophical speculation.”69 They had not yet become fully consistent with their own philosophy of randomness.
Bernard de Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) became the great popular work announcing the new infinity of creation, as well as its new-found autonomy. In 1755, Immanuel Kant took these speculations and became the first systematic evolutionist. Process theology came into its own. Wrote Toulmin and Goodfield: “The fame of Immanuel Kant’s three Critiques has obscured his striking contributions to cosmology. In fact, his earlier work on the General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens (1755) was the first systematic attempt to give an evolutionary account of cosmic history. In it, he spoke of the whole Order of Nature, not as something completed at the time of the original Creation, but as something still coming into existence. The transition from Chaos to Order had not taken place all at once.”70 Creation, argued Kant, had taken millions of centuries. Time may somehow be linear and infinite, but the process of creation is cyclical. The world will run down, only to be reformed once again out of the climactic conflagration at the end. As he put it, “Worlds and systems perish and are swallowed up in the abyss of Eternity; but at the same time Creation is always busy constructing new formations in the Heavens, and advantageously making up for the loss.” So, what we have here, in his words, is a “Phoenix of Nature, which burns itself only in order to revive again in restored youth from its ashes, through all infinity of times and spaces. . . .”71 Kant, on whose speculations modern philosophy is built, also set forth the presuppositions in terms of which supposedly neutral “eternal oscillation” astronomers have constructed their footnoted cosmologies. Religious presuppositions govern modern astronomical science and modern geological science.
61.
Men have abandoned the revelation of God. In the name of science, they inform us that the belief in a creation by God a few thousand years ago is preposterous—reversing St. Augustine’s dictum. In place of this creation account, physicist George Gamow asked us to believe that the universe began its existence as a condensed droplet of matter at an extremely high density and temperature. This primordial egg—the “ylem”—generated fantastic internal pressures and exploded. As it expanded its temperature dropped. As Robert Jastrow summarized Gamow’s theory: “In the first few minutes of its existence the temperature was many millions of degrees, and all the matter within the droplet consisted of the basic particles—electrons, neutrons and protons. . . . According to the big-bang theory, all 92 elements were formed in this way in the first half-hour of the existence of the universe.”72 Jastrow offered this as a serious possibility. He was the Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the lectures were originally viewed over CBS television in 1964 as a Summer Semester. The public is expected to believe this, but not expected to take seriously the biblical account of creation.
We are told that the laws of probability probably govern the universe. The universe evolved in terms of these laws. Prof. Charles-Eugene Guye once estimated the probability of evolving an imaginary (but given) random assortment of atoms into an equally imaginary protein molecule containing a minimum of four atoms: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. He did not assume the coming of all 92 elements or even life itself—just the components of a single protein molecule. The volume of original random atomic substance necessary to produce—randomly—the single protein molecule would be a sphere with a radius so large that light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, would take 1082 years to cover the distance (10, followed by 81 zeros). The outermost limits of the known universe today, however, is about ten billion light-years, or 109 light-years. The probability that this imaginary molecule might be formed on a globe the size of the earth, assuming vibrations of the random electrons and protons on the magnitude of light frequencies, is next to nil. It would take—get this!— 10243 years. The universe is supposedly a minimum of 10 billion years old, or 109 years.73 Obviously, modern scientists dismiss Guye’s estimates as impossible, but if he is even remotely correct (within 50 or 60 zeroes), the laws of probability simply do not account for the existence of the universe. Yet scientists regard the creation story of the Bible as utterly fantastic, the cultic tale of a primitive Semitic tribe. Of course, what they fail to point out is that the theory that the universe sprang from the random impact of atoms in motion was first developed by Epicurus and Democritus; the theoretical presuppositions of the “new cosmology” are very ancient indeed. In the area of speculation concerning ultimate origins, the scientists of today have contributed very little improvement over Greek speculation twenty-three centuries ago. The fact that Kant propounded it in 1755 does not make it automatically modern.74
Renaissance science broadened the conception of the universe that had been inherited from Aristotelian science. The physical boundaries of the universe seemed immeasurably gigantic, inconceivably large, and finally infinite. Enlightenment thinkers, most notably Kant, then hypothesized the infinity of time to match the hypothetical infinity of the spatial universe. From the Christian point of view, this constituted the “evolutionary wedge” by which the creation account of the Bible was steadily shoved into the realm of myth and fable. Mechanical laws replaced personal providence, thus seemingly negating the necessity of believing in “creation as sustaining.” Next, the expansion of men’s temporal horizon seemingly negated the necessity of believing in “creation as origin.” Cosmological evolution provided the hypothetical framework for geological evolution; geological evolution was to make possible the hypothesis of biological evolution. But all three required vast quantities of time to make them plausible. Loren Eiseley, perhaps the most successful popularizer of biological evolutionary concepts within America’s intellectual circles, made this point repeatedly: “No theory of evolution can exist without an allotment of time in generous quantities. Yet it is just this factor which was denied to the questioning scientist by the then current Christian cosmology. A change as vast as that existing between the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems of the heavens had to be effected in Western thinking upon the subject of time before one could even contemplate the possibility of extensive organic change; the one idea is an absolute prerequisite to the other.”75
In the year 1750, there were still very few scientists, let alone average citizens, who believed that the earth was much older than 6,000 years. By 1850, a majority of scientists were convinced that the earth was far older. The Origin of Species, which sold out in one day (1,250 copies) in 1859, would probably not have been published, and certainly would not have been popular, apart from a revolution in men’s conception of the earth’s chronology. How had this revolution come about?
If any man deserves the distinction of having set forth the outlines of geological evolution in a scientific framework, it is probably the French scholar and literary figure, the Comte de Buffon. Named as a member of the Royal Academy at age 26 (1733), appointed keeper of the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in 1739, Buffon published the first volume of his Natural History in 1749. He published 35 more volumes before his death in 1788, one year before the outbreak of the French Revolution. His cosmological presupposition was straightforward: “Time is the great workman of Nature.”76 In the next sentences, he outlined the doctrine of uniformitarianism: “He [time] moves with regular and uniform steps. He performs no operation suddenly; but, by degrees, or successive impressions, nothing can resist his power ”
Buffon personalized the impersonal. His universe was the same as an American popular song’s: “We run our race in an hourglass of space; but we’re only the toys in time’s great game: time gives and time takes away.”77 Only the French censors kept his language even remotely orthodox.
Buffon also abandoned one of the fundamental beliefs of orthodox Christianity and non-Christian Aristotelian speculation (fused temporarily in one of Thomas Aquinas’ proofs of God): the doctrine of final causes. The universe, Buffon believed, is not headed anywhere in particular. This is one of the crucial tenets of all modern science: teleology cannot be assumed by or proved by modern science. In fact, it was only by Charles Darwin’s rejection of teleology—final cause, ultimate direction, etc.—that modern biological evolutionism became possible. As we shall see, the earlier systems of biological evolutionism assumed to some degree a teleological framework. Buffon set the standard over a century before the publication of Darwin’s Origin.78
Furthermore, Buffon rejected the idea that the present order of existence was set immutably by God in the original creation. As John C. Greene summarized Buffon’s position, “it tried to conceive organic phenomena as the outcome of temporal process rather than a static expression of a pattern of creation.”79 Providence disappears, and with it, the idea that each kind reproduces after its own kind indefinitely (Gen. 1:24). He did not take this next step, Greene said, but he could not dismiss the idea of the mutability of species from his mind.
Thus, by removing God from the realm of science, Buffon thought he had transferred sovereignty to man. “There is no boundary to the human intellect. It extends in proportion as the universe is displayed. Hence man can and ought to attempt everything: He wants nothing but time to enable him to obtain universal knowledge.”80 Greene’s comments are significant: “Buffon had come a long way from the Christian concept of the earth as a stage for the drama of man’s redemption by divine grace. Burning with the thirst for knowledge and intoxicated with the sense of man’s potential control over nature, he proclaimed man’s power to be master of his own fate. Hitherto, he declared, man had pursued evil more energetically than good, amusement more diligently than knowledge, but there was reason to hope that he would at last discover peace to be his true happiness and science his true glory.”81
Buffon offered a “scientific” conclusion that it had taken about 72,000 years for the globe to cool enough to allow the appearance of life.82 We have about 70,000 years ahead of us before the planet chills to lifelessness. This is neither far enough back in time to please modern geologists nor far enough ahead to please evolutionary humanists, but the break between 6,000 years and 72,000 was all that was necessary; ten billion more years was easy enough, once the 6,000-year barrier was breached.
He did not believe in organic evolution; instead, he offered a theory of repeated spontaneous, though naturalistic, appearances of new life-forms. He allowed God to be present only at the very beginning, far back in the mists of time, and far ahead in the final, unspecified, end.83 By his prestige, Buffon offered man the apostate gift of Godless time. Time was the needed dwelling place of uniformitarian change, and the zone of safety from a personal God. Providence was removed from space by autonomous laws of nature and pushed back into antiquity by the newly discovered time machine.
Geology, as a specialized profession, came into being with mining and metallurgy. As men burrowed into the earth, a few of them began to notice the fact that the earth’s crust often appears to be layered, like a multi-tiered cake without frosting. Prior to the uniformitarian geology, the two generally accepted explanations were: (1) Neptunism, that is, deposition by water (either at the flood of Noah or in some great sea of creation); (2) Vulcanism, that is, the deposits of volcanic action. An influential pioneering work was Johann G. Lehmann’s Investigation into the History of Stratified Mountains (1756). The author believed that Noah’s Deluge was the crucial event in the past that re-shaped the earth’s crust. Another German, Abraham Werner, was an influential teacher of stratigraphy. He was a Neptunist, but his focus was a great primeval sea, and he did not explicitly profess faith in a six-day creation. It was against Werner’s theories that James Hutton reacted.84
In all of these theories—Neptunism, Vulcanism, and even Buffon’s—there were elements of catastrophism. James Hutton set out to refute this presupposition. He accepted the earth at face value; all changes on earth have always occurred at the leisurely pace observable today. He first offered the results of his investigations in 1785; his two-volume Theory of the Earth appeared in 1795. He held defiantly to a totally mechanistic view of geological processes; all forces and changes produce counter-forces and compensating changes. In his famous sentence, Hutton announced to the world: “The result, therefore, of this physical inquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end.”85
Eiseley stated categorically: “He discovered, in other words, time— time boundless and without end, the time of the ancient Easterners ”86 Indeed he did; as Eiseley also had to admit, Hutton’s time bears traces of cyclicalism. There is no linear development in Hutton’s self-compensating world machine. “Hutton was thus a total uniformitarian.”87 There have never been any catastrophic changes, Hutton believed, because there have never been any significant change at all. But there has been time—countless eons of time; the checkbook might even be large enough for biological evolutionists to draw the needed time reserves for their cosmologies. The cosmic judgment of God was pushed forward into the endless recesses of time’s comforting womb.
Toulmin and Goodfield, in an otherwise excellent study, could not seem to grasp the threat to Christianity which Hutton’s system represented. They said that “his fundamental aims were conservative and devout.” He was just an honest observer of facts, letting them carry him to some cosmically neutral conclusion. They asked: Why did his contemporaries attack him? For one thing, it was not simply theology that motivated his opponents; his position was undermining Vulcanism’s catastrophism, while simultaneously undermining Neptunism, since
Hutton laid great emphasis on the power of slowly acting subterranean heat.88 He was stepping on everyone’s methodological toes. But some of the opposition was theological. Naively, Toulmin and Goodfield remarked: “Yet there was, in fact, nothing in Hutton’s system—apart from the unbounded chronology—that could legitimately give offense.”89 That, however, was precisely the point, as Eiseley understood so well:
The uniformitarians were, on the whole, disinclined to countenance the intrusion of strange or unknown forces into the universe. They eschewed final causes and all aspects of world creation, feeling like their master Hutton that such problems were confusing and beyond human reach. The uniformitarian school, in other words, is essentially a revolt against the Christian conception of time as limited and containing historic direction, with supernatural intervention constantly immanent [immanent—“inherent, operating within”—not imminent—“about to happen”–G.N.]. Rather, this philosophy involves the idea of the Newtonian machine, self-sustaining and forever operating on the same principles.90
There should be no confusion on this point: the great theological debate centered around the question of time. All good men—Frenchmen excepted, naturally—believed in a personal God in the period 1750–1850. This God was allowed to be a creator in some sense or other. But, by pushing the time or order of God’s creative acts back into a misty past, men were relegating this God into a mere intellectual construction—a kind of useful myth, rather like Plato’s creator god. One’s concept of time is fundamental in defining one’s concept of God.
Prior to Lyell’s hesitating conversion to Darwinism, his view of time was almost static. Some geological forces tend to raise portions of the earth’s crust; there are forces elsewhere which tend to allow land to sink. If elevation is happening in one region, leveling or erosion is taking place somewhere else. It has been this way indefinitely. The forces are evenly balanced. “If we ask what of significance has happened in this expanse of time, the answer is, ‘Nothing.’ There have been no unique events. There have been no stages of growth. We have a system of indifference, of more or less meaningless fluctuations around an eternal mean.”91 As Walter Cannon pointed out, this is not developing time—the time of the modern historian. It is simply unlimited, meaningless time. We might say that his impersonal time is like an infinitely long geometrical line, composed of an indefinite number of identical points. Uniformitarian time does not, in or of itself, give us a theory of evolution, for evolution implies growth, and the eighteenth-century world machine could not grow. It was a gyroscope, not a seed. But it was an exceedingly old gyroscope, and that was to prove crucial.
There is a distinctly religious impulse undergirding uniformitarianism. Eiseley was correct when he said that Hutton was proposing an anti-Christian concept of time. Charles C. Gillispie concluded that “The essence of Huttonianism lay not in specific details of weathering, denudation, or uplift, but in its attitude towards natural history.”92 Consider what Hutton was saying. On the basis of his own limited wanderings and observations around Edinburgh, Hutton announced a new theory of change to the world. In doing so, modern commentators have concluded, he created the first truly historical natural science, geology. Hutton challenged the biblical account of Noah’s Flood, the researches and conclusions of the Neptunists and the more cataclysmic Vulcanists, and concluded that what he had seen—slow, even imperceptible geological change—is all men now know. Furthermore, we can assume that such imperceptible change is all any man can know—past, present, and future. Because he had never seen the universal Flood, obviously no one has ever seen one. His operational presupposition was about as sophisticated as the opinion of the Soviet Union’s cosmonaut who announced, after returning from a few revolutions above the earth’s atmosphere, that he had not seen God up there! What Hutton imposed, all in the name of rational historical insight, was the most arrogant and blatant form of what historians call “the tyranny of the present.” What was true in Edinburgh in 1780 was true for the whole world throughout endless eons of time. If any other historical data refute such a claim—the Bible, the almost universal pagan myths concerning a universal Flood, the astoundingly precise calendars of the Babylonians and other ancient cultures, the equally astounding Babylonian astronomical records—then they must be disregarded as insufficiently historical. History is what we can observe here and now, not what primitive people used to think they were observing. Or, as Van Til summarized it, “what my net won’t catch aren’t fish.” Yet what Hutton and his endless troops of defenders have claimed is that he alone was truly empirical, truly concerned with the “facts.” But no fact is allowed which seems to come into direct conflict with Hutton’s deeply religious presupposition that rates of change today have always existed, or at the very least, that we have no evidence that indicates that the rates of change have ever been different.
The prolix, unreadable writing of James Hutton did not convince men to believe in the uniformitarian religion. It was not the testimony of the rocks near Edinburgh that converted the world to a theory of an ancient earth. It was rather the built-in desire of men to escape the revelation of a God who judges men and societies, in time and on earth, as well as on the final day of judgment. They prefer to believe in the tyranny of the present because the past indicates the existence of a God who brings immense, unstoppable judgments upon sinners. Men prefer the tyranny of the present to the sovereignty of God. Nothing less than a deeply religious impulse could lead men to accept a presupposition as narrow, parochial, and preposterous as the theory of uniformitarian change. Hutton announced, “today Edinburgh; tomorrow the world—past, present, and future,” and men rushed to join the new anti-millennial religion. Like the Soviet cosmonaut, Hutton just could not see any sign of God in the Edinburgh rocks, and those were the rocks men soon wanted.
James Hutton is long forgotten, except by specialists in the history of geology. But his most famous follower, Sir Charles Lyell, cannot be ignored, for it is Lyell’s book, Principles of Geology (1830–33), which gave Charles Darwin his operating presuppositions. The son of a botanist, Lyell was by profession a lawyer. He studied geology on the weekends. He was in his early thirties when his multi-volume work was published, and it became an instant classic—indeed, the definitive book. He had been a catastrophist until 1827; three years later, he was the premier uniformitarian in the English-speaking world.
It is not easy to summarize Lyell’s work. He opposed the theory of biological evolution until the late 1860s, yet it was sometime around 1860 that the evangelical Christianity of his youth returned to him.93
His commitment to uniformitarian principles of interpretation led him to view geological processes as if they were part of a huge mechanism. He was familiar with the young science of paleontology; he was aware of the fact that lower strata (“older”) often contained species that did not appear in the higher (“younger”) strata. This seemed to point to both extinct species and completely new (“recent”) species, indicating biological development, given the “fact” of eons of time in between the geological strata. Yet Lyell resisted this conclusion until 1867—nine years after Darwin and Wallace had published their first essays on natural selection and biological evolution. Lyell’s opposition to evolution had long vexed Darwin; he could not understand why Lyell resisted the obvious conclusion of the uniformitarian position. As recently as 1958, scholars were still as confused over this as Darwin had been. Lyell’s correspondence indicates that he was committed to the idea of final causation—teleology—like most other scientists of his day. He spoke of a “Presiding Mind” in an 1836 letter to Sir John Hersche1.94 This divine intelligence directed any extinctions or new appearances of species that might have taken place in the past. He called these “intermediate causes,” and let it go at that. But such interventions by God, direct or indirect, violated the principle of uniformitarian change, since no such intervention is visible today. Thus, concludes the meticulous scholar, A. O. Lovejoy, “once uniformitarianism was accepted, evolutionism became the most natural and most probable hypothesis concerning the origin of the species.”95 But Lyell insisted (in the 1830s through 1863) on the recent origin of man and the validity, respecting mankind, of the Mosaic record. “He simply did not see,” wrote Lovejoy, “that a uniformitarian could not consistently accept special-creationism, and must therefore accept some form of evolutionism.”96 In the tenth edition of Principles (1867), Lyell finally capitulated, becoming a full Darwinian.
Lyell’s ultimate faith was in uniformitarianism: unlimited geological time and slow, continuous geological change. This was to override his commitment to special creation (or some unnamed nonevolutionary natural process of species transformation). It was an inescapable either/or situation. Nineteenth-century geological and biological scientists could not forever cling to a God who intervened to rewrite the book on living species, eon after eon, letting the “geological clock” tick for ages in between interventions. If creationism was not a one-time fiat act of God, it was ludicrous. The ridiculousness of such a God could not forever be avoided. Here was a God who created creatures, then let them perish; intervening, He created new creatures, and some of them perished. In order to keep the balance of nature going, He intervened over and over through countless ages, adding ever more complex creatures to the earth. Some of these became extinct, but cockroaches and ants survived. He behaved, in Lovejoy’s words, like a very lazy and befuddled architect, intervening with endless ad hoc plans to reconstruct the jerry-built structure. As Lovejoy wryly commented, “no man outside of a madhouse ever behaved in such a manner as that in which, by this hypothesis, the Creator of the universe was supposed to have behaved.”97 Yet such a view was orthodox, both theologically and geologically, from 1820–30. Enlightenment rationalism had eroded the Christian foundation of knowledge; Christians had built on a foundation of sand. Darwinism destroyed the structure, but only because the “creationists” had long before gone bankrupt, leasing the grounds temporarily to Lyell until Darwin foreclosed, bringing in the demolition equipment.
What is both baffling and appalling is that so many Christians still cling to Lyell’s temporary and hopeless compromise—a compromise he had to abandon in 1867. Geologists who profess orthodoxy still argue that we must accept the results of uniformitarian geology, yet assure us that we do not have to accept organic evolution. In a scholarly journal of a modern Calvinistic seminary we read:
We believe that Scripture does not permit the interpretation of the theistic evolutionist. We do believe that the data of Scripture permit, although they do not require, the view that the days of Genesis one were periods of time of indefinite length. Hence we believe that the products of creation of the various days one through six were not necessarily instantaneously produced in a mature state but were formed over a long period of time. This view does have the advantage of permitting the Christian geologist to interpret intelligibly the actual data of geology.98
This has the advantage of allowing a geologist who is a Christian to interpret the Bible in terms of the geology and theology of 1840, when some men could still believe in numerous special creations. The geology of 1859 or later, devoid of final causes, purpose, interventions by God, or the need of reconciliation with the Bible, has no space for God’s activity in between the autonomous strata of the earth.
Galileo had begun the steady removal by autonomous men of God from His universe. By the 1840s, God’s last place of refuge among scientists was in the realm of biology. Uniformitarianism after 1830 had finally removed Him from the rocks. He was allowed His various “special creations” from time to time among living beings. Lovejoy commented: “And while all these miraculous interpositions were taking place in order to keep the organic kingdom in a going condition, the Creator was not for a moment allowed, by most of these geologists (including, as we shall see, Lyell and his followers) to interfere in a similar manner in their own particular province of the inorganic processes. . . . So, in the opinion of most naturalists the only officially licensed area in which miracles might be performed by the Creator was the domain of organic phenomena.”99 Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species repealed the license even here. Thus, it is a sign of the demoralization and naïveté of modern uniformitarian geologists who claim to be Christian in their scholarship, that they expect the methodology of uniformitarianism to be easily restrained. It is supposedly fine for geologists to assume as valid this uniformitarian methodology (as it was in 1840), but biologists nevertheless have to be anti-evolutionists, denying therefore Darwin’s overwhelmingly successful-pragmatically speaking-fusion of uniformitarianism and biology. But Darwinianism is not to be denied by compromising Christian biologists today, any more than he could be denied by uniformitarian scholarship in the 1870s. Uniformitarian concepts of time are far too potent for half-measures.
The important humanist study, Forerunners of Darwin (1959), published on the centenary of the publication of Origin of Species, opens with a crucial quotation from the uniformitarian geologist, George Scrope, who in 1858 wrote these memorable words: “The leading idea which is present in all our researches, and which accompanies every fresh observation, the sound which to the ear of the student of Nature seems continually echoed from every part of her works, is— Time! Time! Time!”100
The seventeenth century had seen the reappearance of postmillennial eschatology—out of favor ever since the fifth century—which offered Christians new hope. The preaching of the gospel and the establishment of Christian institutions would eventually transform the world ethically, and this ethical transformation would eventually be accompanied by external personal and cultural blessings. This had been the vision of many English Puritans and most of the American colonial Puritans until the pessimism of the 1660s, symbolized by the poetry of Michael Wigglesworth, set in. This vision was to have a revival, unfortunately in more antinomian, “spiritual” forms, through the influence of Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century.101
Paralleling this biblical optimism was the secular idea of progress of Enlightenment thinkers, especially Frenchmen. By the 1750s, this perspective was becoming a part of the European climate of opinion. 102 The idea of stages of historical development fascinated the writers of the day. The cosmological evolutionary schemes of Kant and Laplace were discussed as serious contributions, and Maupertuis and Diderot, the French secularists, offered theories of biological development —“transformism.”103 Three important features were present in these new theories; without these theoretical axioms, there would have been no reason to assume the evolutionary perspective. First, change (not stability) is “natural”—one of the key words of the Enlightenment.104 Second, the natural order is regular; nature makes no leaps. This is the doctrine of continuity (uniformitarianism). Finally, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the method of investigation selected by the progressivists was the comparative method. Classification preceded the demonstration of evolutionary change.105
Classification: this was all-important. Because of the influence of the Greek concept of the chain of being, men had long regarded all life as a harmonious interdependence of every species, from God at the top of the chain (or ladder) to the lowest creature. (This presented problems in theory: Are Satan and his angels therefore metaphysically necessary for the operation of the cosmos? Is Satan at the bottom of the scale because of his ethical depravity, or just under God Himself because of his metaphysical power? In fact, if he is totally evil, can he be said to have true existence at all? Questions like these destroyed the jerry-built “medieval synthesis” of Greek philosophy—itself self-contradictory—and biblical revelation. Even in the eighteenth century, much of the original potency of the concept of the “great chain of being” remained.) But this chain of being was made up of fixed species. There was progress possible within one’s species, but not between the fixed categories. Part of the magical impulse of alchemy was the desire to change lead into gold, not primarily for the sake of wealth, but for the power involved. The magical “philosopher’s stone” would enable the magician-scientist to transcend the limits of creation. Thus, the search for the magical talisman; thus, the quest for magical salvation: metaphysical manipulation rather than ethical repentance and regeneration was the magician’s means of grace.106 To break the limits of creaturehood!
Enlightenment progressivists now offered a new theory: there had been progress of species through time. There had been development, and to Enlightenment thinkers, it was easy to assume that biological modification implied ethical improvement. There had been progress! And there would continue to be progress, not just politically and economically, but in the very nature of mankind. The religious impulse was clear enough: there are no longer any fixed barriers in the creation, given sufficient time to transcend them. The great chain of being could now be temporalized. Heaven was no longer above men; it was in front of mankind chronologically. Genetics would serve as a substitute for the alchemical talisman.
Not many thinkers were convinced by the biological evidence in 1750, or even in 1850. But the comparative method which had always been implied in the concept of the great chain of being was now emphasized by a newly developed discipline, natural history. The crucial figure in this field in the eighteenth century was the Swedish naturalist, Linnaeus. He possessed an unparalleled reputation in 1750; indeed, after the publication of the first edition of his Sustema Natura in 1735, he became world-famous, “a phenomenon rather than a man,” as Eiseley put it.107 He had a mania for naming things, and he created the system of dual names which still exists today, generic and species (which H. L. Mencken used in classifying the boobus Americanus). He was not an evolutionist in any sense, but by popularizing comparative anatomy as the means of classification—a method to be applied to every living organism—he added the crucial third axiom of the developmental hypothesis.108
Buffon’s researches also added prestige to the taxonomic research of the mid-eighteenth-century naturalists. But the next major step was half a century away. An obscure mining engineer, William Smith, had created a system of classifying strata in terms of the placement of organic fossils in each layer. “Strata” Smith’s system would be popularized by Rev. William Townsend after 1800. (Ministers would have an important role in natural science for well over a century. Rev. John Ray was the first popular classifier, four decades before Linneaus published. Rev. John Playfair would be the popularizer of James Hutton’s uniformitarianism after 1800. Even Charles Darwin himself had once studied to be a minister.) Smith avoided any theoretical explanation of his system. He hated both speculating and publication. He was a convinced catastrophist. Nevertheless, he had provided the uniformitarians with their necessary yardstick. By fusing Hutton’s time scale and Smith’s progressive fossil beds (“older” fossils in the lower layers), uniformitarians could now argue that they could measure the slow, steady history of the earth.
By 1820, there was hardly a single reputable scientist in the British Isles who was committed to a six-day creation. Both the Neptunists (flooders) and Vulcanists (heaters) believed in long ages preceding man’s appearance on the earth. The Hutton time scale was common property among all the groups. All geologists therefore faced a disturbing problem: the fossil record demonstrated clearly that animals and plants appearing in one layer of the earth often did not appear in lower or higher layers—dinosaurs, for example. This implied extinction. It also implied a series of special creations over eons of time. The “creationism” of the 1820s, by clinging to Hutton’s time scale, was involved in a whole series of difficult, self-imposed dilemmas. We have already discussed them in the previous section: God the lazy architect; uniformitarianism with too many supernatural interventions; catastrophism with too much time to explain and too little emphasis on the great Noahic Flood. (Not that it was ignored, but it was regarded as only one of many important crises; after 1830, the Flood had become a local disaster in Palestine, or the Near East, at most.)
The doctrine of organic evolution was advocated by two thinkers at the turn of the century, Jean Baptiste Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin. Their speculations never proved popular among scientists or laymen. Each came to the conclusion that members of the various species adapted themselves to changes in their environments. This process of adaptation was supposedly hereditary; thus, the doctrine of acquired characteristics was born. It was never to be taken seriously officially; unofficially, it became an escape hatch in the later editions of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. But their major premise, namely, the unlimited possibility of species variation, did become the touchstone of Darwinian evolution. It was this premise that broke the spell of the great fixed chain of being.
One of the most important books of the early nineteenth century was Rev. William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802). Paley’s work synthesized many of the then-prominent arguments for God’s providence on earth. He argued that Newton’s clock-like universe offers us testimony to God’s sustaining providence. We can see it if only we look at nature’s intricate design; the harmonious interdependence of the infinite number of parts assures us that only an omnipotent Creator could have designed, created, and sustained it for all these years. The language of design had become universal by Paley’s day, and his book only reinforced an established dogma. Darwin himself had been greatly influenced by Paley’s providentialism in his college days, as he admitted much later: “I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley’s ‘Natural Theology.’ I could almost formerly have said it by heart.”109 At the heart of all these schemes of God’s mechanistic providence was the doctrine of final causation: the whole universe was designed to serve the needs of man. All things were planned in advance to further man’s affairs; in every being created in the mists of time there were the materials available to deal with the survival of the species. (This posed a serious theoretical problem: how to explain extinct fossils.) The evolutionary form of this doctrine is obviously Lamarckianism: species have the power of adaptation, individual by individual, organ by organ. Unconscious adaptation is the mechanism of organic evolution. When Darwin finally broke with Rev. Paley, he therefore also had to break with Lamarckianism, a position which he had never held anyway. Only later, under criticism, did he return to partial Lamarckianism.
Providence implies control by God; control implies purpose. The doctrine of final causation had provided Western man with philosophical purpose since the days of Aristotle.110 For as long as scientists were able to cling to the concept of purpose, science would never become fully autonomous. It is safe to say that the struggle over Darwinian evolution was, above all, a struggle over the concept of purpose.
Darwin is regarded as the Newton of biological science. Why? Most of his arguments and data had been offered by others much earlier; the crucial arguments had been provided in the much maligned Vestiges of Creation (1844).111 The answer would appear to be in the purposeless quality of the doctrine of natural selection; it is based on the philosophy of random variations. Biological processes, in theory, can now be subjected to the rigors of mathematical logic, just as Newton subjected all astronomical changes to mathematical law—or thought he had. It was no longer necessary, Darwin and his followers believed, to hypothesize the existence of creation, providence, or final causes. Therefore, God was seen as no longer a part of the operating hypothesis of biological science. From the observation that final causes are not necessary for the operations of modern science, it was easy—almost automatic—to conclude that there can be no final causes. “Whatever my net doesn’t catch aren’t fish,” and the net of modern science excludes final causes, both impersonal and personal, but especially personal. Final causation points to God; so does design; hence, let us abolish final causation from the domain of logic and science. If God is to confront us, He must do so only through the non-logical communication of mysticism, ecstasy, encounter, the tongues movement, or some other way which does not confront us in our external, intellectual apostasy. God, being unnecessary to science, was shaved away by the logic of Occam’s razor: needless propositions in any logical statement may be safely ignored.
Lamarck was a representative of the French Enlightenment. In England, after 1789 had brought the French Revolution, it was not popular to be identified with French revolutionaries. After the advent of Napoleon in 1799, it was not popular to be identified with the French, unless it was the “orthodox” comparative anatomist, Cuvier. Lamarck’s arguments were not compelling to conservative Christians or even vague Anglican scholars. He had broken with theological and biological orthodoxy by offering the theory of organic evolution (as had Erasmus Darwin), thus alienating conservatives. Yet he held to the idea of purpose, however remote, in arguing for the unconscious adaptation of species to the environment. He had not gone far enough to propose a true “scientific revolution.” Too heretical for the conservatives, too providential for any potential atheists and “total autonomy” investigators, the doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics died for want of takers. It survived after 1859 only because Charles Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection had washed all traces of purpose from its exterior, and after 1900, the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics finally buried it.
There were other possibilities for an earlier conversion to biological evolution, but none took hold. Hegel’s thought was one of these, but the discontinuous “leaps” of nature that he proposed alienated uniformitarians.112 In Germany, the close association of romanticism and evolutionary thought alienated the professional biologists, most of whom were increasingly mechanistic in outlook.113 Darwin’s theory was truly a scientific revolution.
The defeat of orthodox creationism was not an overnight event. One of the most interesting features of this steady retreat between 1750 and 1859 was the rallying cry of each successive capitulation: the “higher” view of God involved, or the “deeper” understanding of His providence. Six days just did not do justice to God; He must have showered His providence on His creation for millions of extra years. If only we accept the action of God’s primeval sea, the Neptunists said, plus a less comprehensive impact of the flood. If only we accept God’s activity in unleashing volcanoes and internal heat, said the Vulcanists. If only we will admit the effects of the flood and earthquakes, said the catastrophists of the 1820s. If only we allow God the right to create new species from eon to eon, the uniformitarians said. If only we do these things, then the introduction of vast geologic time will not harm us. At each step, the name of God was invoked. Men were not to be limited by the confines of God’s six-day creation; God is unlimited.
The “unlimited” God of geologic time steadily retreated from the scene. The “unlimited” God was steadily replaced by unlimited time. Time was not seen as personal; time was not seen as calling men to repentance. Time seemed holy and magnifying, but most of all, it seemed safe. This centrality of time is understood by today’s evolutionists; “respectable” Christian geologists—geologists who may be regenerate— have never grasped the fact. Wrote Gillispie:
From both the empirical and the interpretative points of view, the progress of geological science in the first half of the nineteenth century was an essential prelude to the formulation of a successful theory of biological evolution. There had, of course, been a number of more or less fanciful evolutionary schemes suggested ever since the middle of the eighteenth century. In [Thomas H.] Huxley’s opinion, however, these speculative proposals had little influence on scientific thinking, and it was rather Lyell’s work which was primarily responsible for smoothing the road for Darwin, so that from this standpoint it is James Hutton and not Lamarck who ought to be considered Darwin’s intellectual ancestor But uniformitarianism as an attitude toward the course of nature could not be carried to its logical conclusion in a theory of organic evolution until a formulation sufficiently scientific to be compelling could attack the idea of a governing Providence in its last refuge, the creation of new species, and drive it right out of the whole field of natural history.114
Men abandoned creationism step by step, not overnight.
Gillispie went on to argue that it was the commitment to providentialism that kept the idea of immutable species in the canons of biological orthodoxy: design implied fixed species. Step by step, uniformitarianism removed God from the earth’s history. “And after each successive retreat, providential empiricists took up positions on new ground, which their own researches were simultaneously cutting out from under them.”115 Not starting with God as the presupposition of their empirical researches, not starting with God’s self-justifying revelation in the Bible, the supposedly neutral scientists—operating as they were in terms of non-Christian methodologies—found that their own logic drove them into the waiting arms of infinite time and random change. Not starting with God, they could not logically wind up with God—not the God of the Bible, at least.
No document can be found that better demonstrates this “higher view of God” than Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of Creation. More than any other scientific work, though produced by an amateur scientist, this one prepared the public’s mind for Darwin. Not even Herbert Spencer’s evolutionism was more important. How did Chambers defend his researches? First, he defended the Mosaic record as being most in conformity with his views. Then he said that it was God’s expressions of will, not His direct activities, that brought forth the creation. (He ignored, of course, the orthodox doctrine of the verbal creation, that is, the response out of nothing to the command of God.) God created all life; Chambers stated that he took this for granted. “In what way was the creation of animated beings effected? The ordinary notion [that is, the debased doctrine of successive creations over endless ages–G.N.] may, I think, be described as this,—that the Almighty Author produced the progenitors of all existing species by some sort of personal or immediate exertion.” So, he allowed God to create life. But he then proceeded to ridicule the “orthodox” creationism of his day, that disastrous fusion of geologic time, uniformitarian change with successive creations:
How can we suppose an immediate exertion of this creative power at one time to produce zoophytes, another time to add a few marine mollusks, another to bring in one or two crustacea, again to produce crustaceous fishes, again perfect fishes, and so on to the end? This would surely be to take a very mean view of the Creative Power. . . . And yet this would be unavoidable; for that the organic creation was thus progressive through a long space of time, rests on evidence which nothing can overturn or gainsay. Some other idea must then be come to with regard to the mode in which the Divine Author proceeded in the organic creation.116
It should be obvious that the progression described by Chambers is correct: given the idea of vast geological time, fossils distributed in layers, and uniformitarian change—and it was, by 1840, a single idea— God’s creative interventions do look foolish. So, he offered new mode of creation: organic evolution. In two sentences, Chambers took his readers from Newton’s cosmic impersonalism for the heavens (not that Newton intended such a conclusion) into a hypothetically impersonal world of biological law: “We have seen powerful evidence, that the construction of this globe and its associates, and inferentially that of all the other globes of space, was the result, not of any immediate or personal exertion on the part of the Deity, but of natural laws which are expressions of his will. What is to hinder our supposing that the organic creation is also a result of natural laws, which are in like manner an expression of his will?117 Only one thing was to inhibit such a supposition: there was too much of God’s will in the picture. When Darwin substituted natural selection through random variation, there would no longer be any hindrance to the supposition in the minds of “liberated” scientists—liberated from the doctrine of final causation or design. Chambers prepared the way for Darwin among the public even as John the Baptist prepared the way for Jesus. And, like John the Baptist, he did it in the name of God, he thought.
116.[Robert Chambers], Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 4th ed. (Soho, London: John Churchill, 1845), pp. 157–58. It sold 24,000 copies, 1844–60: Eiseley, Darwin’s Century, p. 133.
To a reasonable mind the Divine attributes must appear, not diminished or reduced in any way, by supposing a creation by law, but infinitely exalted. It is the narrowest of all views of the Deity, and characteristic of a humble class of intellects, to suppose him constantly acting in particular ways for particular occasions. It, for one thing, greatly detracts from his foresight, the most undeniable of all the attributes of Omnipotence. It lowers him towards the level of our own humble intellects Those who would object to the hypothesis of a creation by the intervention of law, do not perhaps consider how powerful an argument in favour of the existence of God is lost by rejecting this doctrine.118
Men adopted heresy in the name of a “higher orthodoxy.”
Odd, is it not? With every so-called strengthening of the idea of God, He became less and less important to the affairs of men. With each “elevated concept” of God’s sovereign power, He became less and less relevant for the activities of empirical scientists. This “exalted” conception of God was to collapse into oblivion a decade and a half later, when Charles Darwin finally made biology autonomous.
Early in the year 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace lay on his bed on the island of Ternate in the Dutch East Indies, suffering from what he later described as “a sharp attack of intermittent fever.” Because of hot and cold fits, he had to lie down, “during which time I had nothing to do but think over any subjects then particularly interesting to me.” So, in the midst of some tropical fever, with nothing else to while away his time, Wallace discovered the principle of organic development through natural selection, the theory which shook the world. Somewhere in between 98.7 degrees Fahrenheit and delirium, modern secularism’s most important theory of human autonomy was born. It was an auspicious beginning.119
Wallace had been thinking about the problem for almost a decade. He had wondered why some men live and some men die. “And the answer was clearly, that on the whole the best fitted live.” He might have said simply, those who survive do, in fact, survive. But that would never have satisfied a scientist like Wallace. “From the effects of disease the most healthy escaped”—you can’t fault his logic here, certainly —“from enemies, the strongest, the swiftest, or the most cunning; from famine, the best hunters or those with the best digestion; and so on.” A skeptic might not be very impressed so far, but you have to remember that the man was suffering from a fever. “Then it suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed and the superior would remain-that is, the fittest would survive.”120 This is the Darwinian theory of evolution, without its footnotes, intricate arguments, flank-covering, and graphs.
There are two answers to this perspective. First, the absolute sovereignty of God: “So then it is not of him that willeth nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy” (Rom. 9:16). The other is that of the philosophy of pure contingency, described so wonderfully in Ecclesiastes: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them” (Eccl. 9:11–12).121
Pure contingency or God’s sovereignty: neither satisfied Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin, and the myriad of their monograph-writing followers. Somewhere in the randomness that overtakes the individual, the evolutionists believe, there has to be some stability: impersonal, laws-of-probability-obeying stability. Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s unofficial hatchet-man and progenitor of that remarkable family of professional skeptics—skeptics except where evolution was concerned—stated his faith quite eloquently: chance is really quite orderly, all things considered, and totally sovereign in any case. Here is the testament of modern evolutionary thought.
It is said that he [Darwin] supposes variation to come about “by chance,” and that the fittest survive the “chances” of the struggle for existence, and thus “chance” is substituted for providential design.
It is not a little wonderful that such an accusation as this should be brought against a writer who has, over and over again, warned his readers that when he uses the word “spontaneous,” he merely means that he is ignorant of the cause of that which is so termed; and whose whole theory crumbles to pieces if the uniformity and regularity of natural causation of illimitable past ages is denied. But probably the best answer to those who talk of Darwinism meaning the reign of “chance” is to ask them what they themselves understand by “chance”? Do they believe that anything in this universe happens without reason or without a cause? Do they really conceive that any event has no cause, and could not have been predicted by anyone who had a sufficient insight into the order of Nature? If they do, it is they who are the inheritors of antique superstition and ignorance, and whose minds have never been illuminated by a ray of scientific thought. The one act of faith in the convert to science, is the confession of the universality of order and of the absolute validity in all times and under all circumstances, of the law of causation. This confession is an act of faith, because, by the nature of the case, the truth of such propositions is not susceptible of proof. But such faith is not blind, but reasonable; because it is invariably confirmed by experience, and constitutes the sole trustworthy foundation for all action.122
At least he called this view what it was: faith.
This is one of the endearing qualities about science, especially nineteenth-century, pre-Heisenberg science: its candid lack of modesty.123 We know where Huxley stood—at the vanguard of irrefutable truth—because he told us so.
Wallace was so confident in the truth of what he had discovered that he could hardly contain himself. “I waited anxiously for the termination of my fit so that I might at once make notes for a paper on the subject.” His fit-induced paper was completed post-haste and sent to his acquaintance, Charles Darwin, who was working on the same problem that had occupied Wallace’s mind for so long.
When Darwin read the paper, he was crestfallen. He wrote despondently to Charles Lyell:
Your words have come true with a vengeance—that I should be forestalled. You said this, when I explained to you here very briefly my views of “Natural Selection” depending on the struggle for existence. I never saw a more striking coincidence; if Wallace had my MS. [manuscript] sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters. . . . So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed 124
Actually, Darwin should not have worried about Wallace’s paper and its possible effects on Darwin’s claim of originality. The theory had already been offered back in 1813 by William Wells, in a paper delivered before the Royal Society of London, and it immediately sank into oblivion. Furthermore, another obscure writer, Patrick Matthew, had outlined a very similar theory in an appendix to an 1831 book on timber.125 But in 1858, few scientists remembered these papers.
He offered to have Wallace’s paper added to a summary of his own—carefully selected from a pre-1858 pile of notes, just to make certain that nobody would forget who had the idea first—and they were published in the Journal of the Linnean Society, Zoology, Vol. III (1858).126
The fate of these path-breaking, revolutionary papers was identical to those published by Wells and Matthew: they sank beneath the surface without a trace. No angry rebuttals, no outraged theologians, nothing. So much for the impact of scholarly journals on nineteenth-century society (and perhaps today).
The matter might have ended there, an obscure footnote in some obscure Ph.D. dissertation (which is the fate of most scholarly articles published in obscure academic journals), had it not been for Darwin’s willingness to bring his Origin of Species to a conclusion. It was published on November 24, 1859, and it sold out the entire edition of 1,250 copies in one day.127 This must have surprised the publisher, John Murray, who had begged Darwin to write a book on pigeons instead.128 The reading public, which had purchased 24,000 copies of Vestiges of Creation, in marked contrast to the subscribers to the Journal of the Linnean Society, obviously was in tune to the times. (Or, in Darwinian terminology, was better adapted to the intellectual environment.)
There can be no question about the book’s impact. It launched an intellectual revolution. Many historians and scientists have tried to grasp this instant success, and few can. It was an unpredictable fluke, by human standards. Thomas Huxley remarked years later that the principle of natural selection was so clear, so obvious, that he could not understand why he had not thought of it before. This was the reaction of most of the academic community. For about a year, the reviews in professional magazines were hostile. One exception—“by chance”— was the review in the Times, which had been assigned to a staff reviewer, and had in turn been referred to Huxley when he had decided that it was too technical for him to review. Thus, the December 26, 1859 review was very favorable.129 Yet at first it had not appeared that Darwin’s victory would prove so easy. Huxley wrote much later: “On the whole, then, the supporters of Mr. Darwin’s views in 1860 were numerically extremely insignificant. There is not the slightest doubt that, if a general council of the Church scientific had been held at that time, we should have been condemned by an overwhelming majority.”130 By 1869, the Church scientific (except in France) was in Darwin’s camp.131 Darwin knew in 1859 just what is needed to pull off an academic revolution: younger scientists and the support of laymen. He went after both, and he won. As he wrote to one correspondent within two weeks of the publication of the Origin, “we are now a good and compact body of really good men, and mostly not old men. In the long run we shall conquer.”132 He was like a troop commander, sending copies with accompanying personal letters to most of the eminent scientific figures in Europe and America.133 Laymen may not have converted the scientists, as Himmelfarb noted, but they helped to create the climate of opinion in which both laymen and professionals worked.134
Good tactics will seldom win a world war. Why did Darwin and his book succeed so completely? Because the various geological theories had already undermined the traditional faith of Christians in the historical accuracy of the Bible. Huxley may have been correct in his complaint that nine-tenths of the civilized world was Christian in 1860; he was not correct when he also complained that the Bible was accepted “as the authoritative standard of fact and the criterion of the justice of scientific conclusions, in all that relates to the origin of things, and, among them, of species.”135 If it had been true, then Huxley’s 1871 pronouncement would not have been very likely: “. . . this much is certain, that, in a dozen years, the ‘Origin of Species’ has worked as complete a revolution in biological science as the ‘Principia’ [of Isaac Newton] did in astronomy ”136 Himmelfarb’s assessment is closer to the mark:
“Thus the 1850s, which have been apotheosized as the most tranquil, prosperous, and assured of all decades in English history, were, in fact, a period of intense spiritual anxiety and intellectual restlessness.”137 The geology question had disturbed many thinking Christians. As a specialist in the history of Victorian England, her words have to be taken seriously: “What the Origin did was to focus and stimulate the religious and nihilist passions of men. Dramatically and urgently, it confronted them with a situation that could no longer be evaded, a situation brought about not by anyone scientific discovery, nor even by science as a whole, but by an antecedent condition of religious and philosophical turmoil. The Origin was not so much the cause as the occasion of the upsurge of these passions.”138 With this kind of religious and spiritual assessment of Darwin’s impact, it is not surprising to find, as late as 1969, a deservedly obscure evolutionary scientist warning his readers to “beware” of books like Himmelfarb’s.139 She points to the religious roots of Darwin’s success.
Charles Darwin had not been a bright child; he had not been ambitious, either. His father had despaired of him for years. He had studied to be a physician, like his father, but had given it up. He had studied to be a minister, but had given that up, too. At the end of his university career, he had developed a fondness for natural science under the direction of Prof. J. S. Henslow, the Cambridge botanist. Henslow secured for Darwin a position as naturalist for the voyage of the H. M. S. Beagle, a five-year cruise which changed Darwin’s life, as he freely admitted. Henslow also recommended that Darwin read Lyell’s newly published first volume of Principles of Geology, although Henslow warned against its uniformitarian thesis. The warning went unheeded. At the first port of call for the ship, in early 1832, Darwin’s observation of the St. Jago volcanic mountains and boulders, coupled with the uniformitarian vision of Lyell, converted him.
The voyage lasted from late 1831 through the fall of 1836. During that time Darwin collected, classified, made many notes, read books, speculated endlessly, and vomited (he was seasick throughout the trip). He sent reports back to England about his findings, and the ready market made by the geologizing mania saw to it that these essays were published and read. He returned to England a mildly prominent fellow. And, like other slow-starting sons, he undoubtedly could face his father—who had opposed the trip in the first place—with a good deal more confidence.
Darwin always regarded himself as a truly empirical investigator, a man in the tradition of Francis Bacon, the philosopher of scientific empiricism. He wanted to be known as a “fact man.” He freely admitted in his autobiography that he had difficulty in following long, abstract arguments.140 Commenting many years later on his early researches, he proclaimed: “My first note-book was opened in July 1837. I worked on true Baconian principles, and without any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale. ”141 Nevertheless, he wrote to Wallace in 1857 that “I am a firm believer that without speculation there is no good and original observation.”142 In 1860, he wrote to Lyell that “without the making of theories I am convinced there would be no observation.”143 Thus, we can side safely with Himmelfarb’s judgment: “As the notebooks amply demonstrate, he was speculating boldly from the very beginning of this period [1837], and his speculations were all directed to a particular theory -that of mutability. What is impressive about these early notebooks is not the patient marshaling of the evidence, which in fact was conspicuously absent, but rather the bold and spirited character of his thought. What clearly urged him on was theory capable of the widest extension and a mind willing to entertain any idea, however extravagant.”144
In the fall of 1838, Darwin read Rev. Thomas Malthus’ classic study in political economy, An Essay on the Principles of Population (1798). This, he later said, transformed him. Malthus’ hypothesis of a geometrically expanding population pressing against an arithmetically expanding food supply convinced him that the key to the species question is the struggle for existence. It is doubly interesting that Wallace admitted that it was his recollection of Malthus’ theory, during his fever, that triggered his formulation of the theory of natural selection. Once again, a minister had been crucial—indirectly, this time—in the steady progress of the theory of evolution. Darwin’s theory was basically complete as early as 1838. Lest we forget the circumstances of this intellectual breakthrough:
Darwin was only twenty-nine and barely out of his apprenticeship, so to speak, when, by this second leap of imagination, his theory took full shape. If this chance reading—or misreading—of Malthus, like his first general speculations about evolution, seems too fortuitous a mode of inspiration, the fault may lie not with Darwin but with the conventional notion of scientific discovery. The image of the passionless, painstaking scientist following his data blindly, and provoked to a new theory only when the facts can no longer accommodate the old, turns out to be, in the case of Darwin as of others, largely mythical.145
There was another relevant coincidence during this period. Between 1836 and 1839, Darwin simultaneously lost his early faith in the accuracy of the Bible,146 and he became afflicted with an unnamed physical sickness that remained with him for the remainder of his life, some 45 years. The sickness weakened him, so that he seldom left his home, could see few visitors, and could work only a few hours each day.147 Thomas Huxley was also afflicted with a lifelong “internal pain” and “hypochondriacal dyspepsia,” and like Darwin’s burden, it had come upon him within a year or two after he had abandoned his faith (a loss which occurred when he was eleven or twelve years o1d).148 Most of Darwin’s children suffered from this same affliction (one son, his namesake, was feeble-minded, and died very young—not a surprising event in the family life of a man who had married his first cousin). William, his eldest son, like his father, was never one to take needless chances with the weather. At his father’s funeral in Westminster Abbey, which was unfortunately conducted under cloudy skies, William sat with his gloves on top of his bald head, keeping out unnecessary drafts.149
It took Darwin 20 years to piece together the evidence for the theory he had decided was true at age 29, including eight years in classifying barnacles. (Non-evolutionists may fault his biological theory, but one thing is certain: that man knew his barnacles!) He had published an account of his voyage, plus numerous articles and monographs, but he told only close friends of his doubts concerning the fixity of the species. In the early stages of his labors, all he claimed to be asking was fair hearing for his theory as one among many.150 He admitted the “many huge difficulties on this view” to Asa Grey, the noted American scientist.151 Cautious, patient, modest to a fault: this is the legend of Charles Darwin. And modesty was a wise tactic, given the paucity of his position. In 1863, four years after the publication of the Origin, he wrote to one correspondent: “When we descend to details, we can prove that no one species has changed [i.e. we cannot prove that a single species has changed]—[note: apparently added by Francis Darwin, the editor]; nor can we prove that the supposed changes are beneficial, which is the groundwork of the theory. Nor can we explain why some species have changed and others have not.”152 Therefore, he warned, we must “always remember our ignorance.” But in 1871, his Descent of Man carefully defined the “neutral” ground on which the discussion of species would henceforth be conducted: “But it is a hopeless endeavor to decide this point, until some definition of the term ‘species’ is generally accepted; and the definition must not include an indeterminate element such as an act of creation.”153 His modesty had earlier overcome him in the Origin: “Thus, on the theory of descent with modification, the main facts with respect to the mutual affinities of the extinct forms of life to each other and to living forms, are explained in a satisfactory manner. And they are wholly inexplicable on any other view.”154 However, he was quite willing to debate the details with all comers, so long as they were willing to be truly scientific. Therefore, let all good men join hands and march under the banner unfurled in 1969 by Michael Ghiselin, when he reminded us all that “Darwin was a master of scientific method.”155 Let us all “beware” of Miss Himmelfarb’s book, taking care to read the one book Dr. Ghiselin thinks is an adequate biography of Darwin, in which we learn of the “extremes of hypocrisy and self-contradiction” of Darwin’s nineteenth-century critics, as well as the “venomous and confused counterattacks” these men used.156 If we do all these things, we shall become truly adapted to our intellectual environment, and we shall prosper—for as long as that climate of opinion survives.
The technical details of Darwin’s thought are best left to professional biologists. But we can consider the operating presuppositions and practical conclusions that Darwin set forth. Three of these are indeterminacy, continuity, and cosmic impersonalism.
The heart of the Darwinian system is indeterminacy. The universe is a chance event. Darwin was self-conscious in his commitment to randomness. Take, for example, his definition of species, the origin of which his book was intended to demonstrate. There is no definition of species.157 This is Darwin’s chief contribution to biological science. He denied that there are any limits on genetic variation within the arbitrarily defined group called species. “Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change. ”158 The great chain of being, with its separate and permanent links, has become a multi-tiered escalator. The second chapter of the Origin reiterates this theme over and over: there are no reliable definitions (although, as we have already seen, there are unreliable definitions: creationists’ definitions). “Nor shall I here discuss the various definitions which have been given of the term species. No one definition has satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species.” (This is vaguely reminiscent of the old line, “I can’t define art, but I know what I like.” Unfortunately, Darwin is regarded as the Newton of biology.)
We are no better off when we seek his definition of that other crucial term, “variety”: “The term ‘variety’ is almost equally difficult to define. ”159 In short, to clear things up once and for all: “From these remarks it will be seen that I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, for convenience’ sake.”160 Got that? Excellent!
The biblical account of Genesis 1:24–25 indicates one very good definition: reproduction. Buffon’s definition corresponded with this one fairly closely: no infertile progeny. A perfect definition may no longer be possible in a post-Fall age; the ground has been cursed, and “nature” is no longer normative, even as a fool-proof pointer to the truth. But Buffon’s position is so vastly superior for operational purposes in day-to-day experiments that one can only conclude that the professional preference for Darwin’s indeterminate definition rests on a deeply religious commitment: evolutionary change in an indeterminate universe. When a variety is simply an “incipient species,”161 and species is undefined, it is no feat of genius to conclude that it is possible for varieties to vary and species to change. Everything is in flux.
Darwin was a theologian of the continuity of life. While he never faced the issue squarely, later evolutionists have concluded that organic life stemmed from inorganic matter. Thus, Darwinism is the theology of the continuity of everything. All “being” is basically one. Huxley was quite correct when he called Darwinian evolution “the revivified thought of ancient Greece.”162 This is the old Greek denial of a fundamental difference between God and the creation. This doctrine of continuity destroyed the semi-creationism of the early nineteenth century. There could be no special creations in the world’s history. To argue that such events could have occurred was to argue against the logic of uniformitarian science. Modern “Theistic evolutionists” and “successive creationists” may not grasp this fact, but Darwin and his followers did. God’s activities could no longer have any measurable effect in time. Eiseley made his point forcefully:
As one studies these remarks, and many like them, one can observe that the continuity in nature which had been maintained by Sir Charles Lyell against the catastrophists in geology has now been extended to the living world. The stability of natural law, first glimpsed in the heavens, had been by slow degrees extended to the work of waves and winds that shape the continents. Finally, through the long cycles of erosion and the uneasy stirring of the ocean beds, it was beginning dimly to be seen that life itself had passed like a shifting and ephemeral apparition across the face of nature. Nor could that elusive phantom be divorced from man himself, the great subject, as even Darwin once remarked. If fin and wing and hoof led backward toward some ancient union in the vertebrate line, then the hand of man and ape could be scanned in the same light. Even had they wished, the scientists could not stop short at the human boundary. A world, a dream world which had sustained human hearts for many centuries, was about to pass away. It was a world of design.163-
The continuity of change was as dear to Darwin as the continuity of being. Uniformitarianism pervaded all of his writings. Nature, he asserted, “can never take a great and sudden leap, but must advance by short and sure, though slow steps.”164 Admittedly, “The mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of even a million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations.” But even though the mind cannot grasp this, we are expected to drop our unwarranted prejudices against what we cannot grasp, and accept it. “Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction; for thus only can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed.” 165 We should not “hide our ignorance” by using terms like “plan of creation” or “unity of design.” Instead, we should stand firm alongside those “few naturalists, endowed with flexibility of mind, and who have already begun to doubt the immutability of species,” and wrap our newly flexible minds around a concept of uniformitarian change which no mind can grasp.166 This, you understand, is the scientific method.
The third feature of Darwin’s thought is cosmic impersonalism. Obviously, this is the product of both his philosophy of indeterminacy and uniformitarianism. They are intertwined. There is no personal God in Darwin’s system who can in any way affect the operations of random variation and statistical natural law. In general, this is regarded as the heart of the system. Biology, the last refuge of a personal God, was finally cleared of this embarrassing influence.
While he regarded nature as wholly impersonal, Darwin was never able to escape the language of personification in describing natural processes. The very phrase “natural selection” implied an active power, as he admitted, but he reminded his readers that this was simply a metaphor. But metaphors are powerful devices, however candid Darwin’s admission may have been. It made the transition from cosmic personalism to cosmic impersonalism that much easier. “So again it is difficult to avoid personifying the word Nature; but I mean by Nature, only the aggregate action and project of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by US.”167 The obvious conclusion is that his doctrine of natural law is completely nominalistic: we humans make the laws, since we observe and interpret the data of observation. We hope that the regularities “out there” conform to our vision of them, but how do we know? As he had written to his old teacher, Henslow, after five months at sea on the Beagle: “One great source of perplexity to me is an utter ignorance whether I note the right facts, and whether they are of sufficient importance to interest others.”168 And how do we know our theories are correct, once we have selected the facts? Furthermore, “it is lamentable,” as he wrote to Wallace, “how each man draws his own different conclusions from the very same facts.”169 Charles Darwin had a naive view of law, or else a grimly skeptical estimation of the public’s ability to bother about its intellectual nakedness, one way or the other.
To erase God from the universe of phenomena, he had to erase teleology, the doctrine of final causation. He went as far as the following admission to sweep away any trace of final cause: “There is no evidence, as was remarked in the last chapter, of the existence of any law of necessary development.”170 No necessary law of development; no necessary anything: the whole universe is random. How long should a species survive? “No fixed law seems to determine the length of time during which any single species or any single genus endures.”171 We are quite ignorant concerning the laws of variation within species.172 (He need not have been so ignorant; Mendel’s famous paper on genetics was available in 1865, prior to the sixth edition of the Origin, but none of Darwin’s contemporaries ever saw the significance of it, although reprints were sent to many scientific men. This truly great advance in biological science was not spectacular enough to be visible amidst the evolution controversy.) Darwin’s view of nature’s laws was indeterminate, however much he disliked the implications. He suffered with indeterminacy in order to maintain his cosmic impersonalism.
He was convinced that chance governs the variability of any genetic (he did not use the term, of course) inheritance.173 Time, he said, is important only to give scope to selection.174 And, wonder of wonders, “We have almost unlimited time. ”175 (He was forced to give up his open checkbook of time when Lord Kelvin, the physicist, offered his theory of heat loss for the earth, which Darwin thought he had to accept: 300,000,000 years of organic life in the first edition of the Origin disappeared in later editions. Instead, we read: “Unfortunately we have no means of determining, according to the standards of years, how long a period it takes to modify a species ”176) Yet it appalled him to argue for an indeterminate universe, with or without unlimited quantities of time in which chance could operate. To Asa Gray, who never abandoned his faith in God’s design in nature, he confessed: “I am conscious that I am in an utterly hopeless muddle. I cannot think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of Design Again, I say I am, and ever shall remain, in a hopeless muddle.”177 And so he remained. To abandon a non-teleological universe would have meant abandoning his life’s work.
How did he view his labors? What did he think was the significance of those years in the laboratory and the study? In his autobiography, written in 1876, he was forced to reflect upon the meaning of his life. What impressed him was his victory over Rev. William Paley, whose Natural Theology had influenced him so greatly before his voyage on the Beagle. First, he took Paley’s argument from the regularity of the universe and reversed it; for once, he returned to a vision of impersonal, totally sovereign natural law—in contrast to his former doubts, which favored the randomness of nature. He had long ago abandoned faith in the miracles of Christianity, for “the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become.”
Nevertheless, he admits, “I was very unwilling to give up my belief. . . . Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress.” (Even his loss of faith was uniformitarian, in his recollections!) This was sent just one year after the publication of the Origin. At last he was free from Paley: “The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered.”178 What little cosmic personalism that still remained in Paley’s rationalistic universe was now officially rejected.
When challenged by Asa Gray to defend his anti-teleological attitude, Darwin did not call forth his notes on barnacles or some new theory of coral reef formation. He replied from his heart, and his heart was exceedingly religious. What he really hated was the Christian doctrine ofa totally sovereign God. He hated this God more than he feared a random universe.
With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.179
He could not believe that the eye was designed, despite the inescapable difficulty that it is a totally complex element of the body that needs to be complete before it can function at all. How could this organ have evolved? What good was it during the countless millennia before it was an eye? Darwin was familiar with this objection, but he could not believe in specific design. However, in order to save his hypothetical universe from the burden of total randomness—from “brute force”—he was willing to admit that natural laws had been designed, a conclusion wholly at odds with his own theoretical methodology. But he was not satisfied with this conclusion, either.
So, he feigned modesty. These questions are beyond human intellect. Questions of biology, factual and theoretical, are answerable, but not questions that are raised as a direct product of the biological answers. This has been a tactic of “neutral” scientists for years: challenge the conclusions of a culture’s presuppositions by referring to neutral science, but claim honest ignorance when discussing the presuppositions of the methodology of neutral science. As he wrote to W. Graham, two decades later, contradicting his earlier defense of designed natural laws: “You would not probably expect anyone fully to agree with you on so many abstruse subjects; and there are some points in your book which I cannot digest. The chief one is that the existence of so-called natural laws implies purpose. I cannot see this.” Here is the dilemma of modern, Kantian philosophy: Law or no law? When defending the total reliability and stability of “autonomous” natural science against the claims of Christians in favor of God’s miraculous interventions, natural law is absolute. But when faced with the totalitarian implications of absolute natural law—a law so complete and systematic that it indicates design rather than randomness as its foundation—the “neutral” scientist throws out “so-called natural laws.” God may neither thwart absolute natural law, nor claim credit for the existence of such law, because it really is not absolute after all. Absolute randomness is therefore a philosophical corollary of absolute, impersonal law, and Darwin was uncomfortable with both horns of his dilemma. So, he appealed once again to ignorance, since he had to agree that chance is not sovereign:
But I have had no practice in abstract reasoning, and I may be all astray. Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?180
Notice Darwin’s implicit faith. He has absolute confidence in his “monkey-descended” (or, for the purists, “ancestor-of-monkey-descended”) mind when it concluded that his mind had, in fact, descended from some lower animal. But when the implications of this religiously held belief came into direct conflict with a belief that man’s mind can be relied upon precisely because man is made in the image of God, then he doubted the capacity of his monkey-descended mind to grapple with such abstract questions. We are intelligent enough to know that we are not intelligent enough to know; we can have sufficient confidence in our minds to rest assured that we can have no confidence in our minds. God is locked out of His universe by man’s simultaneous confidence and lack of confidence in his own logic. Neither doubt nor confidence is allowed to point to God. Cosmic impersonalism is thereby assured; autonomous man is defended by his supposedly autonomous science. Like the universe around man, his own thought processes are simultaneously absolute (man is descended from lower animals; no other theory is valid181) and contingent (man cannot trust his own speculations when they concern absolutes).
Anyone who imagines that the implications for philosophy of Darwinism are not both widespread and important in modern life is embarrassingly naive. It was not the details of the Darwinian system that captivated European thought—Darwin had to repudiate much of his system anyway. He once admitted to his earliest supporter, J. D. Hooker, that he was proficient “in the master art of wriggling.”182 Few biologists could follow all of his arguments; if they had done so, they would have grasped the fact that his retreat into the categories of “use and disuse” represented a revival of Lamarckianism. But they did not read his works that closely. Liberated men scarcely question the logic or fine points of their liberator’s scriptural canon. What did capture the minds of intellectuals, and continues to captivate them, is Darwin’s rejection of meaning or purpose; the Darwinian universe has no traces of final or ultimate causation.
A marvelous statement of the Darwinian faith was presented in the Britannica Roundtable (Vol. I, #3, 1972), a slick magazine which was on the intellectual level of the Sunday newspaper’s magazine insert, but which paraded under the banner of high culture. C. P. Snow, widely ballyhooed in the early 1960s because of his propaganda favoring the fusion of the “two cultures”—autonomous rational science andthe equally autonomous humanities—offered us his personal credo in “What I Believe.”
I believe life, human life, all life, is a singular chance. A fluke, which depended on all manner of improbable conditionings happening at the same time, or in the same sequence of time. Between ten and twenty billion years ago there was a big bang, and the universe started. Before that, time did not exist: this is something our minds are not able to comprehend It has all been a very unlikely process, with many kinds of improbability along the way If any asked me on what basis I make these assumptions, I have no answer. Except to affirm that I do. Some will say I am making them because, under all the intellectual qualification, I am a residual legatee of the Judeo-Christian tradition. I doubt that. I have a nostalgic affection for the Anglican Church in which I was brought up, but for me its theological formulations have no meaning. Nor have any theological formulations of any kind.
“Nobody in here but us non-theologians,” Snow affirmed. His little credo went out to those who purchased their Encyclopedia Britannicas in the hope of upgrading their minds and their children’s social position. In fact, I would guess that it is likely that they read through this slick magazine more often than they looked up references in their dust-covered set of encyclopedias. Sooner or later, ideas have consequences.
Most modern commentators, both philosophers and professional scientists (Himmelfarb excepted), see Darwin’s denial of teleology as his most important intellectual contribution. It is not simply that science can see no traces of purpose or design in the universe; science now affirms that it has shown that there is no design or purpose in the universe. If there is, it is wholly internal to the non-rational recesses of the human personality, and the behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner did his best to reduce that noumenal realm of mystery. George Gaylord Simpson, the world-famous Darwinian paleontologist, stated quite forthrightly that “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned.”183 You just cannot make it any plainer than that.
Darwin’s work, wrote Loren Eiseley, “had, in fact, left man only one of innumerable creatures evolving through the play of secondary forces and it had divested him of his mythological and supernatural trappings. The whole tradition of the parson-naturalists had been overthrown. Mechanical cause had replaced Paley’s watch and watch maker.”184 Man has to view this mechanical cause as essentially random, however, since man’s mind is finite. Nevertheless, in spite of this lack of omniscience, man can see the random universe as sufficiently orderly and absolute to remove God from the premises. So we are now at last set free from God: “The evolutionists discovered that nature ‘makes things make themselves’ and thus succeeded in apparently removing the need of a Master Craftsman.”185 Impersonal, random biological variation within the framework of an impersonal, random, passively pruning environment is the key to all purposeful, orderly life. But man now makes his own purpose; or, as C. S. Lewis warned, some elite men now seek to define and impose purpose and meaning for all the others.186
The cosmic impersonalism, the indeterminacy, and the continuity of natural processes have all combined to produce a remarkably discontinuous leap: Man. Man now is to take over the direction of the processes of evolution. Man is now to make the cosmos personal; he shall determine it. As Simpson said, “Plan, purpose, goal, all absent in evolution to this point, enter with the coming of man and are inherent in the new evolution, which is confined to him.”187 Julian Huxley said the same thing.188 Cosmic impersonalism is now transcended. Man, the product of nature (immanence), now takes control of nature (transcendence). Freed from God’s sovereignty by nature’s random, impersonal sovereignty, man now affirms his own sovereignty, to impart meaning and purpose to the formerly random forces of evolutionary process. Our first true god has come at last!
Darwinian man is simultaneously transcendent and immanent with respect to nature, just as orthodox Christian man has been. But there is this fundamental difference: Christian man gained his claim of transcendence over some of nature’s physical processes only by maintaining his meekness under God and His laws. He achieved limited sovereignty over nature by means of his complete dependence on God’s total sovereignty. But Darwinian man has dispensed with God’s sovereignty in order to grant such sovereignty (temporarily and as a theoretical limiting concept) to random, impersonal nature. Once this transfer of sovereignty has taken place, Darwinian man reclaims his sovereignty, as the legitimate heir of nature. Man then becomes the official king of nature, and like Napoleon Bonaparte, he has been careful to place the crown on his own head (not relying on the Pope or any other theological agent).
Eiseley was quite correct when he said that Darwin’s work destroyed the labors of the parson-naturalists. This did not keep the parsons from flocking to him in droves, bearing symbolic frankincense and myrrh, in his later years. This typical yet pathetic development only served to intensify his hostility to religion. His cousin remarked that he was far more sympathetic to religious critics than the fawning ecclesiastics who lauded his work.189 Preposterously,
The religious managed to find in Darwinism a variety of consolations and virtues not dreamed of even in natural theology. One distinguished botanist bewildered Darwin by declaring himself a convert on the grounds that the theory finally made intelligible the birth of Christ and redemption by grace. A clergyman was converted on the grounds that it opened up new and more glorious prospects for immortality. And theologians declared themselves ready to give up the old doctrine of “the fall” in favor of the happier idea of a gradual and unceasing progress to a higher physical and spiritual state.190
Himmelfarb hit the nail on the head when she wrote that the Darwinian controversy was not between theists and evolutionists, but between the reconcilers and irreconcilables on both sides of the controversy.191 In our century, the irreconcilable Christians (and, I gather, Orthodox Jews) have diminished in number. The new evolutionists do not care enough one way or the other whether Christians do or do not rewrite their religion to conform to the Darwinian universe. The historian, John C. Greene, bent over backward to say nice things about the various theological compromises of men like Russell Mixter and James O. Buswell III, but he was only stating an inescapable fact (from the consistent Darwinian point of view) when he concluded:
These theories may help to conserve belief in the inspiration of the Bible, but it is difficult to see how they can be of much scientific value [When Greene referred to the inspiration of the Bible, he had in mind the heretical Barthian variety, as he said two pages later.] As science advances, moreover, the maintenance of what these writers call “verbal inspiration” is likely to prove possible only by continual reinterpretation of the Bible. In the long run, perpetual reinterpretation may prove more subversive of the authority of Scripture than would a frank recognition of the limitations of traditional doctrines.192
The compromisers are trapped.
The best summary was made by Richard Holt Hutton back in 1879, and the fact that hardly a pastor in the conservative churches today sees the truth of this statement constitutes one of the most chilling facts of contemporary religious life. “The people who believe today that God has made so fast the laws of His physical universe, that it is in many directions utterly impenetrable to moral and spiritual influences, will believe tomorrow that the physical universe subsists by its own inherent laws, and that God, even if He dwells within it, cannot do with it what He would, and will find out the next day, that God does not even dwell within it, but must, as Renan says, be ‘organized’ by man, if we are to have a God at all.”193 From the natural law of the parson-naturalists, to Robert Chambers’ “Christian” evolution, to Charles Darwin’s autonomous law, to Julian Huxley’s evolving human master of the evolutionary process: the development has seemed almost irreversible. It has led us into three cultural quagmires: the modern chaotic world of impotent existentialism, the modern bureaucratic world of the planners, and the modern retreatist world of visionless, compromised religion.
There is only one accurate doctrine of creation: creation out of nothing. All other systems partake either of pantheism or deism, both implying a finite Creator. The Bible’s account avoids both pitfalls. A totally sovereign God created the universe out of nothing in six days, according to His own trinitarian counsel. He then placed man, His subordinate representative, in authority over the creation. Man rebelled against the Creator, thereby bringing the wrath of God upon himself and, to some extent, on the creation itself. But, in His grace, God revealed Himself to men, both in the creation (the testimony of which is always rejected by rebellious men) and in His verbal, written word, the Bible. He has informed men of His creative acts in bringing all things into existence in six days—a period of time identical to the six days in which men are to labor at their vocations. Men are to subdue the earth to the glory of God and in terms of His natural laws, as interpreted by His written word. Man is subordinate to God, operating entirely in terms of His ethical laws, and he is both under and over laws of nature. Nature responds to mankind’s authority in terms of mankind’s ethical relationship to God, especially with respect to man’s obedience to the external laws of God. God’s law, both natural and revealed through the Bible, is man’s tool of godly subduing.
All other systems place man in a position either of total impersonal autonomy (transcendence), or total impersonal passivity (immanence), or—as in the case of Darwinian thought—both simultaneously. The deist’s god is on vacation, leaving man in full control of the semiautonomous world machine. The pantheist’s god is indistinguishable from the organic, living creation. In either case, God is silent concerning ethics. The deist’s god ignores the world; the pantheist’s god is impotent to speak in a voice separate from the world. Thus, man is seen as rationally autonomous from God (eighteenth-century Continental deism) or irrationally immersed in and part of God. In neither case is there a final ethical judgment by a self-contained, sovereign, personal God in whose image man is created. Man either rules over nature as a totalitarian despot, or else he is completely subservient to nature, like some oriental slave. The universe is closed to any judgment outside itself in both pantheism and deism; man has no higher court of appeal than nature itself. In both cases, nature ignores ethics. As Simpson put it: “Discovery that the universe apart from man or before his coming lacks and lacked any purpose or plan has the inevitable corollary that the workings of the universe cannot provide any automatic, universal, eternal, or absolute ethical criteria of right or wrong.”194
What should be inescapably clear by now is this; there is no doctrine of ultimate origins that is not intensely religious. Similarly, there is no philosophical system that does not possess a doctrine of creation— the origin of all things and the constitution which presently sustains all things. For Christians to tamper with the plain meaning of the Bible in order to make it conform to the latest findings of this or that school of evolutionary thought is nothing short of disastrous. It means an amalgamation of rival and irreconcilable religious presuppositions. Neither Darwin nor the orthodox Christian can escape the philosophical and theological implications of methodology. Both Darwin and the compromising Christians tried to push questions of philosophy and epistemology (knowledge) into the background, as if there could be some universally shared scientific methodology that is independent of philosophical presuppositions. But when the chips were down, Darwin always sided with atheism; he refused to acknowledge that the God of the Bible could have created or influenced the world in the ways explicitly affirmed by the Bible. Evolutionism is methodological atheism, whether Hindu, or Buddhist, or Lamarckian, or Darwinian. It always was; it always will be.
Darwinian thought is fundamentally Greek paganism. This was recognized very early by Darwin’s hatchet-man, Thomas Huxley. In Huxley’s assessment of the impact of Darwin’s thought, which Huxley wrote for the Life and Letters of Charles Darwin in 1887, he expressed his opinion:
The oldest of all philosophies, that of Evolution, was bound hand and foot and cast into utter darkness during the millennium of theological scholasticism. [Actually, scholastic philosophy lasted only from the twelfth century through the fifteenth as a cultural force in Europe, but Huxley means simply medieval Christian thought in general– G.N.] But Darwin poured new lifeblood into the ancient frame; the bonds burst, and the revivified thought of ancient Greece has proved itself to be a more adequate expression of the universal order of things than any of the schemes which have been accepted by the credulity and welcomed by the superstition of seventy later generations of men.
Indeed; all three of the accepted “scientific” evolutionary cosmologies today are simply footnoted revivals of Greek cosmological thought.
First, consider George Gamow’s “primeval atom” or “big bang” theory—the exploding “ylem” of matter-energy that created all the elements of the universe in the first half-hour of its existence. Plato’s theory of creation outlined in the Timaeus dialogue was its analogue in Greek thought. Second, there is the so-called steady-state theory (Fred Hoyle, the famous British astronomer, used to believe in this one). Matter and energy are continuously being created out of nothing. Everything continues today as it always has. This is the Aristotelian outlook, and it undergirded the geology of Hutton and Lyell. It is the uniformitarian theory. Finally, there is the theory of the oscillating universe: big bang, explosion outward, slowing, imploding inward, crash, and new big bang. Marx’s partner, Engels, held this faith. It is quite similar to the Stoic theory of a cyclical cosmos. As Toulmin and Goodfield noted: “The disagreement between supporters of these views today is just about complete. Nor does there seem to be any real hope of reaching an accommodation without abandoning elements which are regarded as indispensable to the theories.”195 In short, rival pagan faiths are no less in opposition to each other, despite their unity against cosmic personalism. It was true in the days of Greece; it is equally true today.
“Details apart,” wrote Toulmin and Goodfield, “the general resemblances between twentieth-century cosmology and its ancestors are no mere coincidence. Rather, they prompt one to look for an equally general motive.” There is not sufficient evidence today to prove any theory of the earth’s history, so the same old a priori refrains are repeated, generation after generation. As the authors concluded, “cosmological theory is still basically philosophical,” and certain “obstinate and insoluble” problems and objections “still face us which cannot be evaded by dressing them up in twentieth-century terminology.”196 Either time had an origin, thereby making discussion of what happened “before” impossible; or else time is infinite in both directions, thus forcing us to ask forever, “Before then, what?”
Secularists, who too often spend little or no time thinking about the internal contradictions of their own presuppositions, like to ridicule Christians with stupid questions like “Who created God?” or “Where did God get the ‘stuff’ to build the universe?” as if they had some non-theistic answer to these questions. They do not. They have a tendency to ignore their own rootless systems of philosophy, however, which gives them great confidence in challenging the revelation of the Scripture. They prefer to have faith in the impersonal “ylem” or impersonal, infinite, steady-state time or impersonal cosmic cycles; a personal Creator God is too preposterous for their sophisticated tastes.
Yet if we are compelled to regard secular opponents of the biblical doctrine of the six-day creation as naive, then those Christians who try to amalgamate Genesis 1 and one (or all) of the secular cosmologies are doubly naive. Philosophically, the concept of process undergirds the secular positions. Toulmin and Goodfield recognized this. R. J. Rushdoony, in his study, The Mythology of Science, recognized this. Instead of the fiat word of God—a discontinuous event which created time and the universe—we are expected to believe in the creativity of impersonal process. As Rushdoony argued, “the moment creativity is transferred or to any degree ascribed to the process of being, to the inner powers of nature, to that extent sovereignty and power are transferred from God to nature. Nature having developed as a result of its creative process has within itself inherently the laws of its being. God is an outsider to Nature, able to give inspiration to men within Nature but unable to govern them because He is not their Creator and hence not their source of law.”197 Is it any wonder, then, that the first modern cosmological evolutionist, Immanuel Kant, was also the premier philosopher of the modern world? Is it any wonder that his theory of the two realms—autonomous external and random “noumena” vs. scientific, mathematically law-governed “phenomena”—is the foundation of modern neo-orthodox theology, which has eroded both Protestantism and Catholicism? Is it any wonder that Kant’s “god” is the lord of the noumenal realm, without power to influence the external realm of science, without even the power to speak to men directly, in terms of a verbal, cognitive, creedal revelation? This is the god of process theology, of evolution, of the modern world. It is the only god that humanists allow to exist. The God of Deuteronomy 8 and 28, who controls famines, plagues, and pestilences in terms of the ethical response of men to His law-word, is not the God of modern, apostate evolutionary science. He is not the god of process theology. The Christian with the Ph.D. in geology who says that he just cannot see what process has to do with the sovereignty of God is telling the truth: he cannot see. Had he been able to see, no “respectable” university would ever have granted him a Ph.D. in geology, at least not in historical geology.198
The Bible does not teach the theology of process. It does not tell us that an original chaos evolved into today’s order, and will become even more orderly later. That is the theology of the Greeks, of the East, and the modern evolutionist. It is not a part of the biblical heritage. Even the so-called “chaos” of Genesis 1:2—“And the earth was without form and void”—does not teach a “chaos into order” scheme. Prof. Edward J. Young offered considerable proof of the fact that the Hebrew phrase translated “without form and void” should be rendered, “desolation and waste.” It signifies that “God did not create the earth for desolation, but rather to be inhabited. . . Such an earth has not fulfilled the purpose for which it was created; it is an earth created in vain, a desolate earth.”199 Young cited Isaiah 45:18, which contains the same Hebrew words: “For thus saith the LORD that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; and there is none else.” What is described in Gen. 1:2 is a great primeval sea, which was uninhabitable and therefore desolate. (See verse 9: “let the dry land appear.”) The “chaos” factor, so heavily relied upon by compromising biblical expositors, not only does not conform to Greek speculation, but is intensely anti-modern: the desolation implies purpose, that great bugaboo of modern science. Any attempt to view Gen. 1:2 in terms of some original chaos plays into the hands of the Darwinians, for it compromises the element of purpose in the creation.
One popular variation on this theme is the so-called “gap hypothesis,” which argues that in Gen. 1:1 God created the earth, only to shake up the elements in Genesis 1:2 as a result of Satan’s fall. He then created the new, six-day earth in Genesis 1:3–27. There are three things wrong with this view, at the very least. First, the Bible does not teach anything like this; it is obviously a jerry-built interpretation that has become popular in order to give an explanation for the apparent age of the uniformitarians’ earth. Second, the uniformitarians are entitled to dismiss it, since a true “chaos” would have been a complete erasure of the previously existing earth, thus removing the “precious” traces of age that the “gapologists” so desperately desire. Third, as already mentioned, it compromises the explicit traces of purpose in the creation’s original desolation. A fourth reason is at least possible: Satan fell on the seventh day, after God had pronounced the whole creation “good.”
The step-by-step retreat of Christian thinkers from the six-day creation—universally acknowledged in 1725, and generally believed until 1800—has been a disastrous, though temporary, setback for Christian orthodoxy. Sadly, Christians were not usually dragged, kicking and screaming, into Lyell’s uniformitarian and Darwin’s purposeless evolution. They accepted each new scientific “breakthrough” with glee. At best, each resistance attempt was a three-stepped process: (1) it is not true; (2) it is not relevant, anyway; (3) we always knew it was true, and Christianity teaches it, and teaches it better than any other system. No wonder Darwin was irritated; a good, purposeless universe could not be left in peace by these silly people!
The battle lines should be clear: Christianity or error, the six-day creation or chaos, purpose and meaning or cosmic impersonalism and randomness. It is not hard to understand why the religion of modernism clings to Darwinian thought. It is also not surprising why occultist Max Heindel could write The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception or Mystic Christianity: An Elementary Treatise upon Man’s Past Evolution, Present Constitution and Future Development (1909). But why Christians should give one second’s consideration of the possibility of evolution—ancient or modern, occultist or scientific—is a mystery.
The compromise with uniformitarian principles has been a steady, almost uniformitarian process within Christian circles. Gillispie, describing the steady capitulation of early nineteenth-century Christian naturalists, shows how disastrous the retreat was for orthodoxy. At each stage, the Christians, copying the mythical act of King Canute, shouted “thus far and no farther” to uniformitarianism. “And at every stage except the last, progressives admitted that a further step, the possibility of which they disavowed while they unwittingly prepared it, would indeed have had serious implications for orthodox religious fidelity.”200 But each new uniformitarian “discovery” was assimilated into the supposedly orthodox framework nonetheless, despite the fact that at every preceding capitulation, the proponents of that compromise admitted that the next step (now greeted passively or even enthusiastically) would be unnecessary, impossible, and utterly wrong. (Any similarity between nineteenth-century Christian progressives and today’s Christian progressives is hardly coincidental.) The progressivists of the 1840s, like the compromisers of today, would not face up to reality. They could not admit to themselves or their few orthodox opponents the fact that Robert Nisbet has called to our attention: “It is hard today to realize the degree to which the attack on Christianity obsessed intellectuals of rationalist and utilitarian will. Christianity had much the same position that capitalism was to hold in the first half of the twentieth century. It was the enemy in the minds of most intellectuals. Uniformitarianism, above any other single element of the theory of evolution, was the perfect point of attack on a theory that made external manipulation its essence and a succession of ‘catastrophes’ its plot.”201
Thomas H. Huxley, the scientist who helped spread the gospel of Darwinism more than any other man in the second half of the nineteenth century, was vitriolic in his hostility to orthodox Christianity, with its insistence on the doctrine of creation. He knew there could never be any compromise between Darwinism and creationism. He announced in his important defense of Darwin in 1859:
In this nineteenth century, as at the dawn of modern physical science, the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew is the incubus of the philosopher and the opprobrium of the orthodox. Who shall number the patient and earnest seekers after truth, from the days of Galileo until now, whose lives have been embittered and their good name blasted by the mistaken zeal of Bibliolators? Who shall count the host of weaker men whose sense of truth has been destroyed in the effort to harmonise impossibilities—whose life has been wasted in the attempt to force the generous new wine of Science into the old bottles of Judaism, compelled by the outcry of the same strong party?202
Huxley was totally confident in the long-term success of Darwinism. In fact, he believed that this victory of science (which he dutifully capitalized, as one should do when spelling out the name of any divinity one worships) had already been secured. He viewed this triumph as the result of an intellectual war.
It is true that if philosophers have suffered, their cause has been amply avenged. Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain. But orthodoxy is the Bourbon [referring to the French monarchy, the House of Bourbon—G.N.] of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget; and though, at present, bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the beginning and the end of sound science; and to visit, with such petty thunderbolts as its half-paralyzed hands can hurl, those who refuse to degrade Nature to the levels of primitive Judaism.203
His next paragraph begins with this unforgettable sentence: “Philosophers, on the other hand, have no such aggressive tendencies.” Why not?
The majesty of Fact is on their side, and the elemental forces of Nature are working for them. Not a star comes to the meridian of their methods: their beliefs are ‘one with the falling rain and with the growing corn.’ By doubt they are established, and open inquiry is their bosom friend. Such men have no fear of traditions however venerable, and no respect for them when they become mischievous and obstructive; . . .204
He knew his contemporary enemies well. He realized clearly, as they did not, that their hypothesis of continuing special creations “owes its existence very largely to the supposed necessity of making science accord with the Hebrew cosmogony; but it is curious to observe that, as the doctrine is at present maintained by men of science, it is as hopelessly inconsistent with the Hebrew view as any other hypothesis.”205 Darwinian scientists from Huxley’s day to the present have been able to make the same criticism of later attempts of Christian scholars to compromise the teachings of Genesis 1 and evolution. Sadly, Huxley’s barb applies quite well to these professional academic compromisers: they are like the Bourbon kings. They never seem to learn that there can be no successful compromise between the rival cosmologies.
The six-day creation is not a narrow cosmology. It is as broad as the creation itself and the revelation of that creation given by its Creator. Evolution and uniformitarian geology (however modified the uniformitarianism may be) may appear very broad-minded, but only in the sense of Matthew 7:13: “Enter ye in at the strait [narrow, tight] gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.”
Gertrude Himmelfarb’s book, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959) created a kind of revolution itself. It is very good on midnineteenth-century British thought, and why Darwin appealed to that culture. Reprinted by Peter Smith, Gloucester, MA 01930.
Philip Appleman’s Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton, 1970), is very important because of its extracts from Darwin’s major works, as well as contemporary criticisms and evaluations of Darwin. It also includes modern evaluations. Conclusion: man must now take control over the evolutionary process.
Henry Morris’ book, The Troubled Waters of Evolution (C. L. P. Publishers, P.O. Box 15666, San Diego, CA 92115), ch. 2, has many citations from modern evolutionists who have adopted the “man, the animal, becomes man, the predestinator” paradigm. It becomes obvious, after reading pages of these citations, that evolutionism is a religion.
On the coming of Darwinism, see the biography of William Irvine, Apes, Angels, and Victorians (McGraw-Hill, 1955); Charles Coulston Gillispie, Genesis and Geology: The Impact of scientific Discoveries Upon Religious Beliefs in the Decades Before Darwin (Harper Torchbook, [1951], 1959); Francis C. Haber, The Age of the World: Moses to Darwin (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959); and Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (Harper Torchbook, 1965). Also useful is Robert Nisbet’s book, Social Change and History (Oxford University Press, 1969). He deals with “development” as an idea and an ideal in Western thought. Loren Eiseley’s Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men who Discovered It (Anchor, [1958] 1961) is important, especially for the chapter on Alfred R. Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, who concluded that man’s mind could not have evolved by slow, steady steps.
On the humanistic implications of evolution, see George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (Yale University Press, [1949] 1967) and This View of Life (Harcourt, Brace, 1964). Simpson gives us most of the clichés of modern humanism. Any he may have neglected are provided by Sir Julian Huxley, in Knowledge, Morality, and Destiny (Mentor, 1957), and his essay, “Evolutionary Ethics,” in Touchstone for Ethics, 1893–1943 (Harper & Bros., 1947). Theodosius Dobzhansky’s The Biology of Ultimate Concern (New American Library, 1967) offers a clear introduction to man, the new divinity.
Indispensable, of course, is anything written by Lester Frank Ward, especially his 1883 classic, Dynamic Sociology (Greenwood Press). He used the idea that man has transcended animalistic evolution to promote the idea of a planned society. The new evolution will be a man-directed evolution.
On the importance of the doctrine of creation in the development of modern science, the works of Stanley Jaki are indispensable. Jaki argues that it was only in the Christian West, where men believe in linear time, that science ever developed. Cyclical time, which is the almost universally shared view in pagan societies, never has been conducive to scientific progress. Jaki’s erudition and documentation are extraordinary. His works have been neglected by all but a handful of specialists in the historiography of science. His more easily available books include The Road of Science and the Ways to God (University of Chicago Press, 1978), a book that is slow reading but overwhelming in its impact; The Origin of Science and the Science of Origins (Gateway Editions, 120 W. La Salle, Suite 600, South Bend, IN 46624); and The Milky Way: An Elusive Road for Science (New York: Natural History Press, 1975). Extremely important is Science and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe (Scottish Academic Press, 33 Montgomery St., Edinburgh, Scotland EH7 5JX) and the small book, Cosmos and Creator (Scottish Academic Press).
Also important are the works by the French scholar, Pierre Duhem. His 10-volume Système du monde, published from 1913 through the 1950s, presents a similar thesis to Jaki’s books. English-language readers can read translations of two books by Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (Atheneum, 1962) and To Save The Phenomena: An Essay on the Idea of Physical Theory from Plato to Galileo (University of Chicago Press, 1969).
It is difficult to recommend a list of books on Christian economics, since the thesis lying behind my writing of this book is that the Christian world has neglected the whole question for three centuries. There is nothing on a par with Adam Smith’s Wealth of the Nations or Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action. The best we have available are collections of essays, monographs on certain topics, and one very introductory textbook. The textbook is Tom Rose’s Economics: Principles and Policy from a Christian Perspective (Mott Media). He co-authored (with Robert Metcalf) The Coming Victory (Christian Studies Center, Memphis, TN 38111).
I compiled a collection of 31 essays, An Introduction to Christian Economics, published by Craig Press in 1973. It is presently out of print. It is scheduled to be reprinted by the Institute for Christian Economics. I wrote these essays for several magazines and newspapers from the late 1960s through the early 1970s.
For those interested in Marxism, my out-of-print book, Marx’s Religion of Revolution: The Doctrine of Creative Destruction (1968) might be useful. No one who makes a detailed study of socialism can afford to miss Ludwig von Mises’ classic refutation, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922), which is available from Liberty Classics (7440 N. Shadeland, Indianapolis, IN 46250). It was published in the United States by Yale University Press in 1951.
I offer a critique of the epistemology of modern schools of economic thought in my essay, “Economics: From Reason to Intuition,” in North (ed.), Foundations of Christian Scholarship (Ross House Books, P.O. Box 67, Vallecito, CA 95251). Two humanist books criticize the assumption of value-free economics: Walter E. Weisskopf, Alienation and Economics (E. P. Dutton, 1971) and Mark A. Lutz and Kenneth Lux, The Challenge of Humanistic Economics (Benjamin/Cummings), published in 1979.
Two issues of The Journal of Christian Reconstruction are devoted to the topic: “Christian Economics” (Summer, 1975) and “Inflation” (Summer, 1980): P. O. Box 158, Vallecito, CA 95251.
Books on economic development by the British economist, P. T. Bauer, are important: Dissent on Development (1972) and Equality, The Third World and Economic Delusion (1981), Reality and Rhetoric (1984), all published by Harvard University Press. He is the co-author (with Basil Yamey) of The Economics of Under-Developed Countries (Cambridge University Press, 1957). Bauer stresses the importance of freedom, the attitudes of citizens, people’s willingness to sacrifice for the long run, and similar issues. He says that without the proper attitudes toward economic success and the freedom to pursue personal goals, long-term economic growth is unlikely.
Complementary to Bauer’s books are Helmut Schoeck’s Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (Harcourt, Brace, 1970) and Edward Banfield, The Unheavenly City Revisited (Little, Brown, 1974). Both books point to the importance of the future-orientation of economic actors for the success of the economy. Banfield argues that economic classes should be defined in terms of future-orientation, not income or capital. My book, Successful Investing in an Age of Envy (1981), applies the insights of Schoeck and Banfield to the economy and politics.
The works of Wilhelm Röpke are very important, not simply because he was a fine economist (greatly influenced as a young man by Mises), but because his perspective was far more broad than virtually all other free markets economists. He asked the tough questions about the effects of market freedom on social institutions. He was interested in the moral foundations of freedom, not just in questions of economic efficiency. Most important are his books, A Humane Economy (1957), distributed by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 14 S. Bryn Mawr, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010; Economics of the Free Society (1963), published originally by Henry Regnery Co., Chicago; Against the Tide (1969), a posthumously published collection of his essays, distributed by I.S.I.; Civitas Humana (1948); The Social Crisis of Our Time (1950); and International Economic Disintegration (1942); all published in London by William Hodge & Co. (British books are most easily ordered through Blackwell’s, Broad Street, Oxford, England.)
The books written by Murray Rothbard, the anarcho-capitalist, are all very clear, well documented, and powerfully argued. They include Man, Economy and State (1962), America’s Great Depression (1963), and What Has Government Done to Our Money? (1964), available from the Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington, NY 10533. His book denying the legitimacy of all civil government is very good on the economic effects of various kinds of government regulation and taxation: Power and Market: Government and the Economy (1970).
F. A. Hayek’s books are basic to any understanding of the free market. The most important are: The Road to Serfdom (1944), The Constitution of Liberty (1960); Individualism and Economic Order (1948); Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (1967); and the trilogy, Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973–80), all published by the University of Chicago Press. Also important is his study of the rise of socialist thought, The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952), which has been reprinted by Liberty Press.
By far the best book on the economics of information is ex-Marxist economist, Thomas Sowell: Knowledge and Decisions (Basic Books, 1980), which provides more unique insights, page for page, than any economics book I have ever read. His Race and Economics (David McKay Co., 1975) is also very good, as are Markets and Minorities (1981) and Ethnic America (1981), both published by Basic Books.
Two books by Bettina Greaves are suitable for an introduction to free market thought: Free Market Economics: A Syllabus and Free Market Economics: A Basic Reader, published by the Foundation for Economic Education. FEE also publishes the monthly magazine, The Freeman (subscription by request, free). Address: Irvington, NY 10533. Very important are the works of R. J. Rushdoony, which are related to questions of economics: The Institutes of Biblical Law, Vol. I (Craig Press, 1973), and Vol. II (Ross House Books, P.O. Box 67, Vallecito, CA 95251); Politics of Guilt and Pity (1970) and The One and the Many (1971), both published by Thoburn Press, P.O. Box 6941, Tyler, TX 75711. Also important for political and social theory is The Foundations of Social Order: Studies in the Creeds and Councils of the Early Church (1969), also published by Thoburn Press.
The sociologist Robert Nisbet has written many books that are important for social theory, including The Quest for Community (Oxford University Press, 1952), The Sociological Tradition (Basic Books, 1966), Tradition and Revolt (Vintage, 1969), Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development (Oxford University Press, 1969), The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought (Crowell, 1973), Twilight of Authority (Oxford University Press, 1975), and History of the Idea of Progress (Basic Books, 1980). Nisbet is a pluralist and decentralist, in marked contrast to so many sociologists. His essay, “The Year 2000 and All That,” Commentary (June, 1968), is important for its investigation of the fascination of the coming of the third millennium, A.D., in Enlightenment thought.
End of Volume 2
Other Books by Gary North
An Economic Commentary on the Bible, 31 vols. (1982–2012)
Marx’s Religion of Revolution (1968, 1989) An Introduction to Christian Economics (1973) Puritan Economic Experiments (1974, 1988)
None Dare Call It Witchcraft (1976)
Unconditional Surrender (1980, 2010) Successful Investing in an Age of Envy (1981) Government by Emergency (1983) Backward, Christian Soldiers? (1984)
75 Bible Questions Your Instructors Pray You Won’t Ask (1984)
Coined Freedom (1984) Conspiracy: A Biblical View (1986) Honest Money (1986)
Unholy Spirits (1986, 1994) Dominion and Common Grace (1987) Inherit the Earth (1987)
Liberating Planet Earth (1987)
Healer of the Nations (1987)
The Pirate Economy (1987)
Is the World Running Down? (1988)
When Justice Is Aborted (1989)
Political Polytheism (1989)
Judeo-Christian Tradition (1990)
The Hoax of Higher Criticism (1990)
Victim’s Rights (1990)
Millennialism and Social Theory (1990)
Westminster’s Confession (1991)
Christian Reconstruction (1991), with Gary DeMar
The Coase Theorem (1992)
Salvation Through Inflation (1993)
Rapture Fever (1993)
Tithing and the Church (1994)
Baptized Patriarchalism (1995)
Crossed Fingers (1996)
The Covenantal Tithe (2011)
Mises on Money (2012)
Sovereignty and Dominion
An Economic Commentary on Genesis
Volume 2
Gary North
Sovereignty and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Genesis
Volume 2
Formerly: The Dominion Covenant: Genesis
Copyright © Gary North, 1982, 1987, 2012
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