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 A
Through billions of years of blind mutation, pressing against the shifting walls of their environment, microbes finally emerged as man. We are no longer blind; at least we are beginning to be conscious of what has happened and of what may happen. From now on, evolution is what we make it.
So wrote Hermann J. Muller, the 1946 Nobel Prize winner in physiology.1 Muller stated his position quite clearly. His statement of faith is almost universally believed within scientific and intellectual circles today. The idea is commonplace, part of the “conventional wisdom” of the age. Man will henceforth direct the evolutionary process. But who will represent man in this cosmic endeavor? Who will direct the process? Answer: Darwinian scientists.
Muller’s thesis regarding a new, man-directed evolution is worth considering in detail. It provides insight into the underlying vision and motivation of modern evolutionary science. The goal is the creation of a new humanity. Man, meaning scientific man, becomes the creator.
Muller was a disciple of Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin. Like Galton, he believed in eugenics: the scientific manipulation of human genetic inheritance. For decades, he was America’s leading scientific theorist of eugenics. He won his Nobel Prize for his research on how radiation affects genes.
Unlike his peers, he was consistent in his proclamation of scientific planning of the species. He was also a dedicated Marxist. He fled the United States in 1932 because of his sponsorship of a college student Marxist group at the University of Texas. He went to work at the Rockefeller-funded eugenical Institute for Brain Research in Germany even after Hitler came to power in March of 1933. Muller was technically a Jew; his mother was Jewish, which, by Rabbinical law, made him a Jew. Still, he remained in Germany through 1933. In June of 1933, he wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded the Institute’s work, asking it to pressure the Nazi government to keep the Institute’s work going under its director, who was being threatened with dismissal. The Nazi government did decide to allow him remain in charge.2 Muller continued to do research in Germany that advanced the cause of eugenics.
The Nazis soon passed eugenic laws mandating sterilization. Muller decided that it was no longer safe for him in Germany. He did not leave out of opposition to Nazi eugenics policies. He moved to the Soviet Union from 1934 until 1937, when Stalin found out that he did not follow Lysenko’s theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
His 1935 book, Out of the Night, detailed his vision of a new genetic world order.
The child on the average stands half-way, in its inherited constitution, between its father and the average of the general population, and so it would be theoretically possible even now—were it not for the shackles upon human wills in our society—so to order our reproduction that a considerable part of the very next generation might average, in its hereditary physical and mental constitution, half-way between the average of the present population and that of our greatest living men of mind, body, or “spirit” (as we choose). At the same time, it can be reckoned, the number of men and women of great though not supreme ability would thereby be increased several hundred fold. It is easy to show that in the· course of a paltry century or two (paltry, considering the advance in question) it would be possible for the majority of the population to become of the innate quality of such men as Lenin, Newton, Leonardo, Pasteur, Beethoven, Omar Khayyam, Pushkin, Sun Yat Sen, Marx.3
How can this be accomplished? By sperm banks. Through artificial insemination, “a vast number of children of the future generation should inherit the characteristics of some transcendentally estimable man ”4 Dare we say it? A superman will lead to the creation of a master race: the universal human race.
His view of eugenics was messianic. He announced that “we should be able to raise virtually all mankind to or beyond levels heretofore attained only by the most remarkably gifted.”5 He assured his readers that this can be done voluntarily. This can be done, on the one hand, by furthering birth control, providing low-cost abortions on demand, and universal child care outside the home, “with more motherly mothers, and hence more brotherly brothers.”6 This will require the end of capitalism: “the change from the profit system to socialization. . . .”7 There will be some, compulsion, of course. Science requires compulsion “in a negative role, as a potential force standing ready only to prevent exploitation of the enhanced possibilities of multiplication by unduly egoistic, aggressive, or paranoid individuals.”8 He did not use the words “forced sterilization.” In 1935, there was no need. Forced sterilization laws had been on the books ever since 1907, when Indiana passed the first one.
Muller believed in government planning of the economy and the scientific elite’s planning of the races. He is the consummate model of the scientist who used Darwinism to promote the sovereignty of the state. He was among the most respected evolutionists of his generation.
It might be objected that he was a lone wolf who was not representative of Darwinian geneticists in his era. With respect to his overt Marxism, this is correct. It is not correct with respect to his view of both genetic planning and economic planning.
In August 1939, in the week before World War II began, a meeting of geneticists was held in Edinburgh: the Seventh International Congress of Genetics. World-famous geneticists from around the world attended. In response to a question cabled by a non-attendee, “How can the world’s population be improved most effectively genetically?” a group of the attendees produced a detailed report.9 It became known as the Geneticists’ Manifesto. The paper announced six principles.
This will produce a new world order and a new humanity. Within “a comparatively small number of generations,” we are assured, this new era could come into existence, a world in which “everyone might look upon ‘genius,’ combined of course with stability, as his birthright. And, as the course of evolution shows, this would represent no final stage at all, but only an earnest of still further progress in the future.”17
Who signed this manifesto? Muller, of course, and six others initially. More added their signatures later, for a total of 21, including Julian Huxley, J. B. S. Haldane, C. H. Waddington, and Theodosius Dobzhansky.18
Theodosius Dobzhansky’s influence matched Muller’s. He taught zoology at Columbia University and several other universities. He concluded his essay, “The Present Evolution of Man,” which appeared in the widely read scientific American (September 1960), with these words:
Yet man is the only product of biological evolution who knows that he has evolved and is evolving farther. He should be able to replace the blind force of natural selection by conscious direction, based on his knowledge of his own nature and on his values. It is as certain that such direction will be needed as it is questionable whether man is ready to provide it. He is unready because his knowledge of his own nature and its evolution is insufficient; because a vast majority of people are unaware of the necessity of facing the problem; and because there is so wide a gap between the way people actually live and values and ideals to which they pay lip service.
Therefore, man must now direct the evolutionary process, but the majority of men will not face up to their responsibilities in this respect. He did not elaborate, but the implication is clear enough: a minority of men, who will face up to their responsibilities for directing the evolutionary process, must step in and provide the scientifically required leadership.
In a 1967 book, Dobzhansky discussed the role of the masses. They exist only in order to provide the raw numbers of humans out of whom will arise the elite. “Are the multitudes supererogatory? They may seem so, in view of the fact that the intellectual and spiritual advances are chiefly the works of elites. To a large extent, they are due to an even smaller minority of individuals of genius. The destiny of a vast majority of humans is death and oblivion. Does this majority play any role in the evolutionary advancement of humanity?” He admitted that the elites need the majority if they themselves are to survive. And the masses provide more than mere “manure in the soil in which are to grow the gorgeous flowers of the elite culture. Only a small fraction of those who try to scale the heights of human achievement arrive any- where close to the summit. It is imperative that there be a multitude of climbers. Otherwise the summit may not be reached by anybody. The individually lost and forgotten multitudes have not lived in vain, provided they, too, made the effort to climb.”19 It is mankind, a collective whole, that was the focus of his concern, but it is obvious that the elite members are the directing geniuses of the progress of man, as mankind struggles to reach the summit, whatever that may be. “Man is able, or soon will be able, to control his environments successfully. Extinction of mankind could occur only through some suicidal madness, such as an atomic war, or through a cosmic catastrophe.”20 Man, the directing god of evolution, need fear only himself, the new cosmic sovereign, or else some totally impersonal event, such as a supernova. Insofar as personalism reigns, man is sovereign.
It should be clear by now that the evolutionist is not humble. He has never viewed man as a helpless, struggling product of chaos. A cos mic leap of being has taken place. Dobzhansky spoke of two events of transcendence in the history of natural processes: the origin of life and the origin of man. Man is the second great transcendence. “Only once before, when life originated out of inorganic matter, has there occurred a comparable event.”21 As he wrote, “The origin of life and the origin of man are, understandably, among the most challenging and also the most difficult problems in evolutionary history.”22 The continuity of slow evolutionary change is clearly not an applicable law when these tremendous “leaps in being” occur. In fact, these two remarkable discontinuities are notable only for their magnitude; there have been others, such as the appearance of terrestrial vertebrates from fish-like ancestors.23
Nevertheless, the appearance of man was a true revolution: “The biological evolution had transcended itself in the human ‘revolution.’ A new level of dimension has been reached. The light of the human spirit has begun to shine. The humanum is born.”24 His language is unmistakably religious, as well it should be, given his presentation of a distinctly religious cosmology. The post-Darwin evolutionist is no less religious than the Christian creationist. Evolutionists reverse God’s or der of creation. The Christian affirms that a sovereign, autonomous, omnipotent personal God created the universe. The evolutionist insists that a sovereign, autonomous, omnipotent impersonal universe led to the creation (development) of a now-sovereign personal god, mankind.
Central to the task of eliminating God from the universe and time were two important intellectual developments. The first was the extension of space. The second was the extension of time, forward and backward.
The late-medieval and early modern world saw the shattering of the pre-modern world’s conception of the size of the universe. One of the standard arguments found in textbook accounts of the history of science is that when Copernicus broke the spell of the older Ptolemaic universe, which had hypothesized the sun and heavenly bodies circling the earth, he somehow diminished the significance of man. Astronomer William Saslaw repeated this standard analysis in a 1972 essay. He wrote, “by diminishing the earth, Copernicus also diminished our own importance to the Universe.”25
This kind of language goes back to the early years of the Darwinian controversy. Thomas H. Huxley, one of Darwin’s earliest defenders, and the most influential promoter of Darwin’s gospel in England in the nineteenth century, wrote these words:
For, as the astronomers discover in the earth no centre of the universe, but an eccentric speck, so the naturalists find man to be no centre of the living world, but one amidst endless modifications of life; and as the astronomer observes the mark of practically endless time set upon the arrangements of the solar system so the student of life finds the records of ancient forms of existence peopling the world for ages, which, in relation to human experience, are infinite Men have acquired the ideas of the practically infinite extent of the universe and of its practical eternity; they are familiar with the conception that our earth is but an infinitesimal fragment of that part of the universe which can be seen; and that, nevertheless, its duration is, as compared with our standards of time, infinite Whether these ideas are well or ill founded is not the question. No one can deny that they exist, and have been the inevitable outgrowth of the improvement of natural knowledge. And if so, it cannot be doubted that they are changing the form of men’s most cherished and most important convictions.26
This supposed diminishing of man was accompanied by the rise of humanism, and Copernicus’ theory was in fact basic to humanism’s growth. A diminished view of man has somehow led to an elevated view of man. How was this possible?
One lucid answer was provided by Arthur O. Lovejoy, the historian of ideas. He argued that the traditional account of the significance of Copernicus’ theory has been erroneous. It has misunderstood the place of the earth in the medieval cosmology. For them, hell was the center of the universe.
It has often been said that the older picture of the world in space was peculiarly fitted to give man a high sense of his own importance and dignity; and some modern writers have made much of this supposed implication of pre-Copernican astronomy. Man occupied, we are told, the central place in the universe, and round the planet of his habitation all the vast, unpeopled spheres obsequiously revolved. But the actual tendency of the geocentric system was, for the medieval mind, precisely the opposite. For the centre of the world was not a position of honor; it was rather the place farthest removed from the Empyrean, the bottom of the creation, to which its dregs and baser elements sank. The actual centre, indeed, was Hell; in the spatial sense the medieval world was literally diabolocentric. And the whole sublunary region was, of course, incomparably inferior to the resplendent and incorruptible heavens above the moon 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.27
To break the intellectual hold of the older medieval conception of the universe as well as man’s place on a cursed earth, the humanists found it convenient to promote Copernicus’ cosmography. The basic step in creating a new, autonomous universe did not reduce the cosmological significance of man, for it was a key to establishing the centuries-long intellectual process of shoving God out of the universe. It was necessary to reduce God’s significance in order to give to mankind the monopoly of cosmological significance. The infinite universe could be substituted for the once-central earth as the arena of man’s drama.
There is a problem, however. An impersonal universe, however large, cannot provide meaning. Man, therefore, can now become the source of meaning in (and for) the universe, by virtue of his exclusive claim to cosmic personalism28—the only source of personal purpose in this infinite universe. Even better from autonomous man’s perspective, this modern universe does not relegate man to the pit of sin and spiritual warfare, as the medieval view of the universe had done.
What the Copernican revolution did for man’s sense of autonomy and monopoly of power within the spatial dimension, Darwin’s revolution did for man’s sense of temporal autonomy. An analogous error in the textbook accounts of the history of science and the history of modern thought is that Darwin made man the descendant of apes (or pre-apes).29 This supposedly debased man’s view of himself and his importance in history. The opposite is the case. What Darwin did was to rescue rebellious Western man from Christianity’s theology of moral transgression and its doctrine of eternal doom.
(New York: Harper Torchbook, [1936] 1965), pp. 101–2.
A valuable analysis of the impact Darwinian thought had on late nineteenth-century religious thought was presented by Rev. James Maurice Wilson, Canon of Worcester, in a 1925 essay, “The Religious Effect of the Idea of Evolution.” Man became the focal point of religion, for “it is only in the study of man’s nature that we can hope to find a clue to God’s Purpose in Creation. Herein lies, as I think, the great service that the idea of evolution is rendering to theology.”30 Darwin freed man from the biblical God, concluded Rev. Wilson, and so did his contemporaries.
The evolution of man from lower forms of life was in itself a new and startling fact, and one that broke up the old theology. I and my contemporaries, however, accepted it as fact. The first and obvious result of this acceptance was that we were compelled to regard the Biblical story of the Fall as not historic, as it had long been believed to be. We were compelled to regard that story as a primitive attempt to account for the presence of sin and evil in the world But now, in the light of the fact of evolution, the Fall, as a historic event, already questioned on other grounds, was excluded and denied by science.31
Understandably, the rejection of the doctrine of the ethical rebellion of man against God, at a particular point in human history, necessarily transformed that generation’s interpretation of Christianity.
The abandonment of the belief in a historic “Fall” of a primeval pair of human beings has removed one of the great obstacles to the acceptance by our generation of the Christian Faith which had required that belief. Yet taken by itself it certainly tends to create, as well as to remove, a difficulty. For if there was no historic Fall, what becomes of the Redemption, the Salvation through Christ, which the universal experience of Christendom proves incontestably to be fact? How does Jesus save His people from their sins? He makes men better.32
Man now becomes a co-worker with a vague, undefinable God who does not judge. “It is the sins of the world and our sins that He who died on the Cross is taking away, by making us better. Salvation is not then thought of as an escape from hell; but as a lifting us all out from living lives unworthy of us. Religion so conceived is not the art of winning heaven, but the effort to become better and to work with God.”33
Man now becomes part of God, who in turn is part of the universe. There is a continuity of life through evolution. There is therefore a continuity of being. Wilson concluded:
The idea of evolution affects Christology because it assumes and implies continuity along with advance in creation. And it is this idea and fact of continuity, impressed on us from all quarters, that is now determining what men are able to believe concerning Divine action in every sphere. The evidence for continuity everywhere is overwhelming. The implicit or explicit recognition of it among educated people, and a general sense of it, are becoming universal and axiomatic What a chain it is! Begin anywhere: with your own intelligence as you read, or mine as I write. First go down the chain. Intelligence is not confined to those who can read and write. It is shared by every human being. It is shared by animals. It is not limited to animals. Plants cannot be denied a share of it. It is found in roots and leaves and flowers. Go down farther still; and farther. You cannot find the end of the chain. And then go up To us intelligence, mind, spirit, is now seen as one long continuous chain, of which we see neither beginning nor end. We are perhaps at least as far from the top of it as we are from the bottom.34
This is a modern version of the ancient religion known as panthe ism. It is certainly one reasonable extension of Darwinism. This is another reason why a generation of public school graduates in the late 1960s could turn to pantheism and then to forms of animism. The best-selling book, The Secret Life of Plants (1974), was essentially a defense of the animist cosmology, where sprites and personal “forces” inhabit plants and special regions of the earth.
This doctrine of the continuity of being was basic to ancient paganism, most notably in Egypt’s theology of the divine Pharaoh and his divine state. It is the oldest heresy of all, tempting man “to be as god” (Gen. 3:5). Rev. Wilson was being too modest. Man is not only closer to the top of the chain than to the bottom, he actually is the top. Dobzhansky made this point inescapably clear. He knew how erroneous the textbook account is; he knew that Darwin elevated mankind by making him the product of ape-like beings, which in turn were products of impersonal random forces governed only by the law of natural selection. He wrote:
It has become almost a commonplace that Darwin’s discovery of biological evolution completed the downgrading and estrangement of man begun by Copernicus and Galileo. I can scarcely imagine a judgment more mistaken. Perhaps the central point to be argued in this book is that the opposite is true. Evolution is a source of hope for man. To be sure, modern evolution has not restored the earth to the position of the center of the universe. However, while the universe is surely not geocentric, it may conceivably be anthropocentric. Man, this mysterious product of the world’s evolution, may also be its protagonist, and eventually its pilot. In any case, the world is not fixed, not finished, and not unchangeable. Everything in it is engaged in evolutionary flow and development.35
A changing, evolving world is at last free from the providence of God.
Since the world is evolving it may in time become different from what it is. And if so, man may help to channel the changes in a direction which he deems desirable and good In particular, it is not true that human nature does not change; this “nature” is not a status but a process. The potentialities of man’s development are far from exhausted, either biologically or culturally. Man must develop as the bearer of spirit and of ultimate concern. Together with Nietzsche we must say: “Man is something that must be overcome.”36
Man, in short, must transcend himself. He must evolve into the pilot of the universe. He can do this because he alone is fully self-conscious, fully self-aware. “Self-awareness is, then, one of the fundamental, possibly the most fundamental, characteristic of the human species. This characteristic is an evolutionary novelty The evolutionary adaptive significance of self-awareness lies in that it serves to organize and to integrate man’s physical and mental capacities by means of which man controls his environment.”37 Man must take control of man and the environment.
Understandably, Dobzhansky despised Protestant fundamentalism. Above all, he had to reject the idea of creationism. To accept such a creed would be to knock man from his pedestal, to drag him away from the pilot’s wheel. In fact, scholarly fundamentalists enraged him.
There are still many people who are happy and comfortable adhering to fundamentalist creeds. This should cause no surprise, since a large majority of these believers are as unfamiliar with scientific findings as were people who lived centuries ago. The really extraordinary phenomenon is the continued existence of a small minority of scientifically educated fundamentalists who know that their beliefs are in utter, flagrant, glaring contradiction with firmly established scientific findings Discussions and debates with such persons is [sic] a waste of time; I suspect that they are unhappy people, envious of those who are helped to hold similar views by plain ignorance.38
What is the heart of the evolutionist’s religion? Dobzhansky made his humanism clear: “One can study facts without bothering to inquire about their meaning. But there is one stupendous fact with which people were confronted at all stages of their factual enlightenment, the meaning of which they have ceaselessly tried to discover. This fact is Man.”39 This is the link among all of man’s religions, he said. Man with a capital “M” is the heart of man’s religions; so, on these terms, evolutionism must certainly be the humanistic world’s foremost religion. It is not surprising that Dobzhansky’s book was published as one of a series, edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen: “Perspectives in Humanism.”
You need to understand from the beginning that evolutionism’s cosmology involves an intellectual sleight-of-hand operation. It appears initially to denigrate man’s position in a universe of infinite (or almost infinite) space and time, only subsequently to place man on the pinnacle of this non-created realm. Man becomes content to be a child of the meaningless slime, in order that he might claim his rightful sovereignty in the place once occupied by God. By default—the disappearance of God the Creator—man achieves his evolving divinity.
Uniformitarianism is the deeply religious and inherently unprovable assumption that rates of astrophysical and geological change observed today have been the same since the beginning of time. Differently put, uniformitarianism teaches that the processes that acted in the evolution of the universe and the earth were the same as those that operate today. (Some evolutionary scientists have finally abandoned this straightforward version of uniformitarianism,40 but it is the one which has long been acceptable to most scientists, especially geologists, astronomers, and life scientists.)
Science needs a constant, even the science of Einstein’s theory of relativity. That constant is the speed of light. By striking at the validity of such a constant, the Bible necessarily denies the doctrine of uniformitarianism in relation to origins of the universe. Either the transmission of light from the most distant stars began on the same day as the transmission of light from the moon, with the rays of light from all sources striking the earth on the day the heavenly bodies were created, or else the Genesis account of the creation is false. The Bible’s account of the chronology of creation points to an illusion, one created by the modern doctrine of uniformitarianism. The seeming age of the stars is an illusion. The events that we seem to be observing, such as novas (exploding stars), did not take place billions of years ago. If they did take place, they took place recently. If so, the speed of light is not a reliable constant. If the speed of light has been a constant since the creation of the earth, then the flashes of light which we explain as exploding stars are in no way related to actual historical events like explosions, unless the universe is relatively small. Either the constancy of the speed of light is an illusion, or the size of the universe is an illusion, or else the physical events that we hypothesize to explain the visible changes in light or radiation are false inferences. The speed of light should not be used to estimate the age and size of the universe.41
Genesis 1:14–16 has implications outside the discipline of astronomy. These verses are uniquely important for the biological and social sciences. First, they teach us that the origin of life was outside the cause-and-effect sequence of today’s environment. Plant life appeared before the creation of the sun. If biological processes were the same then as now, then chlorophyll preceded the appearance of the sun.
Light did not “call forth the plant”—not solar light, anyway. The biological processes of plant life were in operation before the existence of the star that today sustains all plant life. The sun, in this sense, was cre ated for the present benefit of the plants. The Bible’s account of creation reverses modern biological science’s interpretation of cause and effect. Plants had capacities for reproduction and survival before the present basis of plant life was created. Nothing could be further removed from the hypothesis of modern biology. Such a creationist view of reality indicates the future-orientation of cause and effect, as if the plants called forth the sun. God, of course, called forth both plants and sun, but from the point of view of chronology, the biblical account denies the past-orientation of secular theories of cause and effect. Science declares that every event has some set of prior causes. At least with respect to the creation of the world, the Bible denies that such causes were in any way environmentally determined by existing matter-energy.
A second implication of Genesis 1:14–16, which is related to the first, is significant in the social sciences as well as in the biological sciences. The stars, sun, and moon were created in order to serve the needs of plants, animals, and men. Modern science does not permit the use of the words “in order to” except when a human being or thinking animal is seeking to achieve some goal. The concept of cosmic purpose is not allowed to exist in modern science except in relationship to man. The processes of hypothetically autonomous nature are explained by modern science strictly in terms of purposeless prior events. The universe’s origins were purely random and therefore completely without purpose. What all modern science denies absolutely is the old Christian doctrine of teleology.
“Teleology” is not a commonly used word any longer. It refers to final causation: ultimate ends. Modern science is concerned only with prior causation. Cosmic impersonalism necessarily has to exclude any concept of final causation, since there can be no personal, directing agent who has created our world in order to achieve certain ends. Without a directing agent—a conscious, powerful planner—the concept of purpose is meaningless. Modern science denies the doctrine of transcendent cosmic personalism, so it also has to deny teleology, except with reference to the goals of man or men. It is man, and only man, who has brought purpose into the rationalist’s universe. Causation had to be purposeless causation prior to man. Final causation implies a personal agent who is directing creation towards a goal which was chosen prior to the appearance of man. This is precisely what the Bible affirms (Eph. 1). This is precisely what modern, rationalist science denies.
Teleology, the doctrine of final causation, was used by Aquinas as one of the five proofs of God. It became a popular apologetic device used by Protestants to defend the faith “rationally,” especially after the appearance of William Paley’s books, A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794) and Natural Theology (1802). The signs of design in creation point to God’s plan for the ages, Paley argued. He used the famous analogy of the clock and the universe: a designer must be postulated in both cases. (The radical Deist, whose universe is mechanistic, can use this analogy to prove God’s neglect of man’s affairs, thereby denying the doctrine of providence, which is why Paley also relied on the evidence of miracles—providential discontinuities—to state the case for Christianity.) Paley’s Evidences was still assigned to Cambridge University students just prior to World War I, though it is doubtful that many of them took it seriously. Malcolm Muggeridge certainly was unimpressed.42 Is the universe orderly because God has specific ends for it, and has therefore directed its operations? If the universe is orderly, can some other explanation be given besides conscious design?
It has been the goal of the modern evolutionist, ever since the days of Darwin, to find a suitable alternate explanation. Darwin’s answer was evolution through natural selection. George Bernard Shaw confidently stated that Darwin had thrown Paley’s watch into the ocean. Marjorie Greene added:
It was not really, however, the watch he threw away, but the watchmaker. Darwinism is teleologically decapitated; everything in nature is explained in terms of its purpose, but an unplanned purpose in which the organism is tool, tool user, and beneficiary all in one. And the artifact analogy is as basic to Darwinism, both old and new, as it is to natural theology: not only is the concept of natural selection grounded on the analogy with the great livestock breeders, but the organisms themselves are conceived in Paleyan terms as contrivances, aggregates of characters and functions of good—for what? For survival, that is, for going on and being good for, going on and being good for—and so on ad infinitum.43
Instead of eternity, the Darwinist substitutes infinite extension, at least until all energy is dissipated in the final cold of entropy. Instead of immortality, he substitutes the survival of the species. Anyway, the old-fashioned, less consistent Darwinist did these things. The new ones are growing less confident about man’s survival as they grow more consistent concerning man’s autonomous power, e.g., nuclear war or biological warfare that uses microbes that are genetically engineered to be racially specific.
The great enemy of modern science is purpose apart from man’s purposes. As the Medawars stated so clearly, “It is upon the notion of randomness that geneticists have based their case against a benevolent or malevolent deity and against there being any overall purpose or design in nature.”44 The old-fashioned version of Darwinism did include an element of purposefulness, at least in its language. The so-called “survival of the fittest” indicated that there was upward progress inherent in the processes of evolution. This phrase was coined by Herbert Spencer, the nineteenth-century sociologist, in his 1852 essay, “A Theory of Population, deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility,” and Darwin inserted the phrase into the fifth edition of The Origin of Species. Spencer’s language was ethical and teleological:
“From the beginning, pressure of population has been the proximate cause of progress.” Again, “those left behind to continue the race, are those in whom the power of self-preservation is the greatest—are the select of their generation.”45 The words “progress” and “select” are giveaways. Mere biological change is equated with progress, with all the nuances associated with “progress,” and the best are “selected” by nature, converting a random, impersonal process into something resembling purposeful action.
One reason why Darwinism swept nineteenth-century thought was because of the seemingly teleological implications of the language of Darwinism. The public was not yet ready to abandon teleology as rapidly as the more consistent scientists were. Even today, the language of evolutionists is still clouded by the language of final causation and purpose. A. R. Manser wrote:
Darwin’s theory is generally claimed to be non-teleological. But the very criterion of success in the “struggle for existence,” survival and/or expansion, seems to put a teleological notion back into the center of evolutionary thought. This explains why it is generally assumed that evolution is in an “upward” direction, that new species are an improvement of the old I am not claiming that this anthropomorphism is necessarily involved in Darwin’s theory itself, or that Darwin must have thought in these terms; all I claim is that this was one of the elements that made the theory acceptable both to scientists and to laymen. . . . From a historical point of view, it seems likely that many of the nonscientific supporters of Darwin would have been less willing to accept the theory if this prop had not been available.46
Furthermore, he pointed out, “even now it is clear that many biologists have to make a conscious effort to prevent themselves from lapsing into such a mode of thought or expression.”
From the beginning, Darwin used the analogy of the professional breeder in defending the idea of natural selection, and this led to continuing confusion on the part of readers, both scientific and amateur, who had assimilated his explanation of the so-called mechanism of evolution. Again and again, popularizers (including Harvard’s influential nineteenth-century biologist, Asa Gray) tried to combine some version of Paley’s Natural Theology with an activist version of natural selection. Darwin over and over had to explain that his language was not to be taken literally, that Nature is not a planning, conscious entity that selects one or another species to survive. Yet, in the first edition of Origin of Species, he had written that “Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is as immeasurably superior to man’s feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to Art.”47 No wonder he had to keep revising each edition to eliminate such language! The sixth edition was so far removed from the first that something like 75% of the first was rewritten by the final edition—rewritten as many as five times each, in the case of some sentences. The sixth edition was one-third longer than the first.48
As a result of constant criticism, he steadily abandoned natural selection as the sole cause of evolution. He adopted elements of the idea of Jean Baptiste Lamarck: the “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” an idea that has been repudiated by modern Darwinians. He referred back to an earlier statement in the first edition, in the conclusion of the sixth edition: “I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.”49 Those who have seen the triumph of Darwinism forget that for half a century after the publication of Origin of Species, the ideas of evolution and uniformitarianism came to be accepted universally, but the idea of natural selection as the mechanism (explanation) went into decline. As Robert M. Young commented:
As a result of successive theoretical and experimental developments in biology which seemed inconsistent with Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection, this aspect of his theory went into increasing decline, so much so that Nordenskiold’s standard History of Biology (written between 1920–24 and still in print [as of 1970—G.N.]) included long chapters chronicling the decline of Darwinism, in the same period as evolution was being increasingly accepted. “To raise the theory of selection, as had often been done, to the rank of a ‘natural law’ comparable in value with the law of gravity established by Newton is, of course, quite irrational, as time has already shown; Darwin’s theory of the origin of the species was long ago abandoned.” Within ten years, however, biologists were generally convinced that Darwin had been right in the first place 50
The phrase, “in the first place,” refers to the first edition of Origin, before he had begun to compromise the theory of natural selection so severely. What Darwin had accomplished in 1859 was impressive: the presentation of a seeming mechanism which could explain evolution. But his book was tinged with teleological elements in its language, thereby making far easier the spread of the idea of evolution among people who still wanted to believe in a semi-providence-governed universe. The public did not understand the importance of natural selection, despite the fact that this was Darwin’s hypothesis justifying belief in biological evolution. Even Darwin steadily abandoned the hypothesis as an all-encompassing explanation. He seems to have abandoned confidence in chance as a meaningful explanation of origins in his last years. In the last letter that he wrote to Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of “evolution through natural selection,” Darwin commended a book by William Graham, The Creed of Science, which was straightforwardly teleological in approach. Graham had written: “We are compelled to interpret the course of evolution as being under guidance; to believe that the final results were aimed at; that Nature did not stumble on her best works by sheer accident, Chance, as an explanation—and if design be denied, chance must be offered as the explanation—is a word expressing nothing, a word which, under pretence of explanation, affirms nothing whatever. It is this; but it is also much more serious; for it is the express denial of God and it is thus genuine atheism.”51 Darwin wrote to Graham that “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.’”52
But if not chance, then what? Modern science cannot accept explanations for events that are outside of nature itself. Modern science cannot accept final causation. Therefore, modern science had to abandon Darwin in the name of Darwinian presuppositions. Better the lawless laws of chance than God; better chaos than providence, says the secular scientist.
In biology, and especially genetics, the element of randomness enters at the very beginning of life. The scientist knows no way of predicting either chromosome combinations or genetic mutations. Furthermore, he does not know which environmental factors will prove conclusive in the development of the particular species in question. He may speak about the “survival of the fittest,” yet the only way to test the fittest is to see, in retrospect, which species actually do survive.
The so-called survival of the fittest is a tautology; it means simply the survival of the survivors. There is no mechanism today that geneticists can use that enables them to predict, in advance, which species will survive or which species will not. Darwin’s theory is therefore a descriptive theory, not a theory useful in scientific prediction. The heart of the meaning of the “survival of the fittest,” therefore, is not scientific but rather historical.53 More to the point, it is more religious than anything. It is a statement about God and His relationship with the creation. As one philosopher has written:
All that the statement “It is the fit that survive” can mean is that for any kind of organism in any circumstances there are some possible features whose possession is more conducive to survival than that of their alternatives. But the phrase “the survival of the fittest,” though it is something of a catchphrase, does indicate something of importance. It indicates that according to the theory there is nothing mysterious in the fact of the survival of some forms in preference to others; there is no need to postulate the unfathomable designs of a divine will.54
God is eliminated from biological science. This is the very essence of all modern, anti-teleological science. This is why science must not be teleological, the secularist argues.
The secular scientist really does not want randomness all of the time. He wants predictable randomness. He wants the operation of the law of large numbers. He wants the laws of probability. He wants sufficient order to give him power, but he usually wants sufficient randomness to preserve him from the power of others, especially God. When the biologist speaks of randomness, he means man’s limited ability to predict the future, yet no scientist clings to a theory of total randomness. As Barker wrote concerning randomness as it applies to Darwinism: “It is an essential presupposition of the theory that variation should occur at random with respect to any advantage or disadvantage it may confer on the organism, in its relations with factors in its internal or external environment.”55 As he emphatically stated, “any theory that did not postulate randomness of this kind, or at least which involved its denial, could not count as a scientific theory.”56 Here is the heart of the argument concerning teleology. Any trace of teleology must be scrapped by secular science. The secular scientists have defined science to exclude all forms of final, teleological causation. Darwin, however confused he may have been, or however attracted to the teleological arguments of William Graham he may have become at the end of his life, made it plain in the final edition of Origin of Species that he could not accept any trace of God-ordained benefits in the processes of nature. “The foregoing remarks lead me to say a few words on the protest lately made by some naturalists, against the utilitarian doctrine that every detail of structure has been produced for the good of its possessor. They believe that many structures have been created for the sake of beauty, to delight man or the Creator (but this latter point is beyond the scope of scientific discussion), or for the sake of mere variety, a view already discussed. Such doctrines, if true, would be absolutely fatal to my theory.”57 Indeed; they would be absolutely fatal for all forms of modern secular science. Or, should I say, would have been up until now fatal for modern secular science.
There is an exception to the a priori denial of teleological causation in the universe. Man is this exception. The secularist has denied that there could be even a trace of final causation, meaning ends-dominated causation, anywhere in the origin of nature or in nature’s products. But when we come to a consideration of man, now freed from God or any other form of conscious causation external to man, the position of the secularists changes. Man is the new sovereign over nature. Nature’s otherwise mindless processes have now produced a thinking, acting creature, man. Man can learn the laws of nature, and he can then subdue nature to his ends. He can plan and execute his plans. Man proposes and man disposes, to quote Karl Marx’s partner, Frederick Engels.58 Nature has therefore transcended its own laws. A series of uncreated random developments has resulted in the creation of a planning being. Teleology has come into the world. Man, the new predestinator, can take over the directing of evolution, even as the selective breeders who so fascinated Darwin took over the breeding of animals and plants. What modern science has denied to God and nature, it now permits to man.
The Bible affirms that the stars were created by God for the benefit of His creatures on earth. The Bible absolutely denies the first principle of all secular natural science, namely, that there can be no teleology in nature prior to man. But the Bible also subordinates man and the creation to God, the Creator. Modern secular science comes to a new conclusion: there is teleology, but man—generic, collective mankind—is the source of this final causation. The Bible denies this. The Bible affirms that God proposes and God disposes, and that man is responsible before God (Rom. 9). God’s ends are sovereign over both man and nature.
The war between the first principles of the Bible’s account of creation and secular science is absolute. No compromise is possible. Christians who happen to hold advanced degrees in biology and geology may think that some sort of working compromise is possible, but the humanists deny it. George Gaylord Simpson called teleology “the higher superstition.” He wrote: “Another subtler and even more deeply warping concept of the higher superstition was that the world was created for man. Other organisms had no separate purpose in the scheme of creation. Whether noxious or useful, they were to be seriously considered only in their relationship to the supreme creation, the image of God.”59 Simpson was adamant: “There is no fact in the history of life that requires a postulate of purpose external to the organisms themselves.”60 This is clearly a statement of religious faith. Simpson then asked: “Does this mean that religion is simply invalid from a scientific point of view, that the conflict is insoluble and one must choose one side or the other? I do not think so. Science can and does invalidate some views held to be religious. Whatever else God may be held to be, He is surely consistent with the world of observed phenomena in which we live. A god whose means of creation is not evolution is a false god.”61 He thought that the world of observed phenomena—observed by us, today—automatically teaches historical evolution. It does, if you assume, a priori, that evolution is always true, and that every fact of the universe is in conformity with this dogma.
Secular science has attempted a sleight-of-hand operation. Denying the existence of any transcendent conscious purpose, and denying even the scientific consideration of such a transcendent conscious purpose, secular scientists conclude that there is no authority above man to deflect man’s conscious purposes. You cannot be a respectable scientist and assume transcendent purpose, since “postulating the transcendental always stultifies inquiry.”62 Nature must first be depersonalized.
As astronomy made the universe immense, physics itself and related physical sciences made it lawful. Physical effects have physical causes, and the relationship is such that when causes are adequately known effects can be reliably predicted. We no longer live in a capricious world. We may expect the universe to deal consistently, even if not fairly, with us. If the unusual happens, we need no longer blame kanaima (or a whimsical god or devil) but may look confidently for an unusual or hitherto unknown physical cause. That is, perhaps, an act of faith, but it is not superstition. Unlike recourse to the super- natural, it is validated by thousands of successful searches for verifiable causes. This view depersonalizes the universe and makes it more austere, but it also makes it dependable.63
The depersonalization of nature was originally asserted in terms of a philosophy that proclaimed nature’s autonomy. This autonomy for nature no longer will be permitted. Once man achieves his freedom from undesigned nature by means of his knowledge of nature’s laws, he can then assert his autonomous sovereignty over nature (including, of course, other men). There are no conscious ends in the universe that can overcome the conscious purpose of the planning elite. There is no court of higher appeal. R. J. Rushdoony summarized this new cosmology very well:
Humanistic law, moreover, is inescapably totalitarian law. Humanism, as a logical development of evolutionary theory, holds fundamentally to a concept of an evolving universe. This is held to be an “open universe,” whereas Biblical Christianity, because of its faith in the triune God and His eternal decree, is said to be a faith in a “closed universe.” This terminology not only intends to prejudice the case; it reverses reality. The universe of evolutionism and humanism is a closed universe. There is no law, no appeal, no higher order, beyond and above the universe. Instead of an open window upwards, there is a closed cosmos. There is thus no ultimate law and decree beyond man and the universe. Man’s law is therefore beyond criticism except by man. In practice, this means that the positive law of the state is absolute law. The state is the most powerful and most highly organized expression of humanistic man, and the state is the form and expression of humanistic law. Because there is no higher law of God as judge over the universe, over every human order, the law of the state is a closed system of law. There is no appeal beyond it. Man has no “right,” no realm of justice, no source of law beyond the state, to which man can appeal against the state. Humanism therefore imprisons man within the closed world of the state and the closed universe of the evolutionary scheme.64
Simpson, one of the most prominent paleontologists of the mid-twentieth century, offered us this interpretation of man, the new sovereign: “Man is the highest animal. The fact that he alone is capable of making such a judgment is in itself part of the evidence that this decision is correct He is also a fundamentally new sort of animal and one in which, although organic evolution continues on its way, fundamentally a new sort of evolution has also appeared. The basis of this new sort of evolution is a new sort of heredity, the inheritance of learning.”65
Simpson contrasted organic evolution, nature’s non-teleological, random development of nonhuman species, with the new social evolu tion of mankind. “Organic evolution rejects acquired characters in inheritance and adaptively orients the essentially random, non-environmental interplay of genetical systems. The new evolution peculiar to man operates directly by the inheritance of acquired characters, of knowledge and learned activities which arise in and are continuously a part of an organismic-environmental system, that of social organization.”66 A new Lamarckianism, with its inheritance of acquired characteristics, has arisen; it has brought with it a legitimate teleology. Man, the product of nature, can at last provide what autonomous nature could not: conscious control. “Through this very basic distinction between the old evolution and the new, the new evolution becomes subject to conscious control. Man, alone among all organisms, knows that he evolves and he alone is capable of directing his own evolution. For him evolution is no longer something that happens to the organism regardless but something in which the organism may and must take an active hand.”67
Man’s control over future evolution is limited, of course. He cannot choose every direction of a new evolution, nor the rate of change. “In organic evolution he cannot decide what sort of mutation he would like to have,”68 but he does have power, and therefore must make responsible decisions. “Conscious knowledge, purpose, choice, foresight, and values carry as an inevitable corollary responsibility.”69 Of course, we know that all ethics is relative, in fact, “highly relative.”70 “The search for an absolute ethic, either intuitive or naturalistic, has been a failure.”71 There are no fixed ethical principles. “They become ethical principles only if man chooses to make them such.”72 Man, the creative force behind today’s evolution, becomes at the same time the creator and judge of his own ethics. “Man cannot evade the responsibility of choice.”73 Whatever the outcomes of our search for ethical principles, this much is certain: “The purposes and plans are ours, not those of the universe, which displays convincing evidence of their absence.”74 We are the new predestinators, the source of the universe’s new teleology.
Man was certainly not the goal of evolution, which evidently had no goal. He was not planned, in an operation wholly planless His rise was neither insignificant nor inevitable. Man did originate after a tremendously long sequence of events in which chance and orientation played a part. Not all the chance favored his appearance, none might have, but enough did. Not all the orientation was in his direction, it did not lead unerringly human-ward, but some of it came this way. The result is the most highly endowed organization of matter that has yet appeared on the earth—and we certainly have no good reason to believe there is any higher in the universe.75
Man proposes, and man, working with nature, also disposes.
The humanistic philosophy of Darwinism is an enormously successful sleight-of-hand operation. It has two primary steps. First, man must be defined as no more than an animal, the product of the same meaningless, impersonal, unplanned forces that produced all the forms of life. This axiom is necessary in order to free man completely from the concept of final judgment. Man must not be understood as a created being, made in God’s image, and therefore fully responsible before God. Man is no more unique, and therefore no more responsible, than an amoeba. Second, man, once freed from the idea of a Creator, is immediately redefined as the unique life form in the universe. In short, he is and is not special, depending on which stage of the argument you consider.
Simpson provided the argumentation for both steps. First, man is just another life form.
This world into which Darwin led us is certainly very different from the world of the higher superstition. In the world of Darwin man has no special status other than his definition as a distinct species of animal. He is in the fullest sense a part of nature and not apart from it. He is akin, not figuratively but literally, to every living thing, be it an amoeba, a tapeworm, a flea, a seaweed, an oak tree, or a monkey—even though the degrees of relationship are different and we may feel less empathy for forty-second cousins like the tapeworms than for, comparatively speaking, brothers like the monkeys. This is togetherness and brotherhood with a vengeance, beyond the wildest dreams of copy writers or of theologians.76
Man has not been favored in any way by the impersonal and directionless process of evolution through natural selection. “Moreover, since man is one of many millions of species all produced by the same grand process, it is in the highest degree improbable that anything in the world exists specifically for his benefit or ill The rational world is not teleological in the old sense.”77
Second, man is unquestionably teleological in the new sense—the post-Darwin sense. Nothing was designed by God to meet the needs of man, but because man is now the directing agent of evolution, he can take control over everything. Furthermore, he does not need to humble himself as a steward before God. All of the fruits of the meaningless universe are now man’s, for he is the pinnacle, not of creation, but of evolution. Simpson moved to the second step of the argument a dozen pages later.
Man is one of the millions of results of this material process. He is another species of animal but not just another animal. He is unique in peculiar and extraordinarily significant ways. He is probably the most self-conscious of organisms, and quite surely the only one that is aware of his own origins, of his own biological nature. He has developed symbolization to a unique degree and is the only organism with true language. This makes him also the only animal who can store knowledge beyond individual capacity and pass it on beyond individual memory. He is by far the most adaptable of all organisms because he has developed culture as a biological adaptation. Now his culture evolves not distinct from and not in replacement of but in addition to biological evolution, which also continues.78
He elaborated: “The evolutionary process is not moral—the word is simply irrelevant in that connection-but it has finally produced a moral animal. Conspicuous among his moral attributes is a sense of responsibility. . . . In the post-Darwinian world another answer seems fairly clear: man is responsible to himself and for himself. ‘Himself’ here means the whole human species, not only the individual and certainly not just those of a certain color of hair or cast of features.” 79 Man, meaning collective man or species man, is sovereign. Individuals are responsible to this collective entity. Simpson made his position crystal clear.
Man is a glorious and unique species of animal. The species originated by evolution, it is still actively evolving, and it will continue to evolve. Future evolution could raise man to superb heights as yet hardly glimpsed, but it will not automatically do so. As far as can now be foreseen, evolutionary degeneration is at least as likely in our future as is further progress. The only way to ensure a progressive evolutionary future for mankind is for man himself to take a hand in the process. Although much further knowledge is needed, it is unquestionably possible for man to guide his own evolution (within limits) along desirable lines. But the great weight of the most widespread current beliefs and institutions is against even attempting such guidance. If there is any hope, it is this: that there may be an increasing number of people who face this dilemma squarely and honestly seek a way out.80
With these words, Simpson ended his book.
Are Simpson and Dobzhansky representative of post-Darwinian evolutionism? They are. It is difficult to find biologists who do not take this approach when they address themselves to these problems. Many, of course, remain silent, content to perform the most prosaic tasks of what Thomas Kuhn has called “normal science.”81 When they speak out on the great questions of cosmology, however, their words are basically the same as Simpson’s.
Thomas Huxley was one of those who began to make the case for step two. Darwin for the most part had been content to deal with step one, devoting himself to wrapping up the case for an anti-teleological universe, with its order-producing process of natural selection. Huxley, his contemporary and early defender, was ready to place man on the pinnacle of the evolutionary process. In his famous 1893 Romanes Lectures, “Evolution and Ethics,” Huxley announced: “The history of civilization details the steps by which men have succeeded in building up an artificial world within the cosmos. Fragile reed as he may be, man, Pascal says, is a thinking reed: there lies within him a fund of energy, operating intelligently and so far akin to that which pervades the universe, that it is competent to influence and modify the cosmic process. In virtue of his intelligence, the dwarf bends the Titan to his will.”82 Huxley was no optimist. He was convinced that eventually, the law of entropy would triumph.
If, for millions of years, our globe has taken the upward road, yet, some time, the summit will be reached and the downward route will be commenced. The most daring imagination will hardly venture upon the suggestion that the power and the intelligence of man can ever arrest the procession of the great year. . . . But, on the other hand, I see no limit to the extent to which intelligence and will, guided by sound principles of investigation and organized in common effort, may modify the conditions of existence, for a period longer than that now covered by history. And much may be done to change the nature of man himself.83
When Huxley spoke of man, he meant collective man:
Further, the consummation is not reached in man, the mere animal; nor in man, the whole or half savage; but only in man, the member of an organized polity. And it is a necessary consequence of his attempt to live in this way; that is, under those conditions which are essential to the full development of his noblest powers. Man, the animal, in fact, has worked his way to the headship of the sentient world, and has become the superb animal which he is, in virtue of his success in the struggle for existence. The conditions having been of a certain order, man’s organization has adjusted itself to them better than that of his competitors in the cosmic strife.84
Huxley strongly opposed Social Darwinism, with its ethic of individualism and personal competition in a free market, which he referred to as “fanatical individualism.”85 He reminded his listeners of “the duties of the individual to the State. . . .”86 We cannot look, he said, to the competitive processes of nature (meaning other species) as a guide for human social ethics and social organization, since “the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combatting it.”87
Huxley’s grandson, the biologist Sir Julian Huxley, delivered the Romanes lectures a half century after his grandfather had, in 1943. He attempted to reconcile the seeming dichotomy that his grandfather had presented, namely, the conflict between cosmic evolution and human ethics. He did so by focusing on the leap of being which man represents, a new evolutionary power that can direct the cosmic processes by means of his own science and values. In other words, he argued for continuity of evolutionary processes—a denial of any conflict between ethics and evolution—by stressing the radical discontinuity represented by man. The first great discontinuity was the appearance of life, which was Dobzhansky’s assertion, too.88 As life developed, “there increased also the possibilities of control, of independence, of inner harmony and self-regulation, of experience.”89 Animal brains made their advent. But then came nature’s crowning glory, man, meaning collective man. As he wrote, “during the last half-million years or so a new and more comprehensive type of order of organization has arisen; and on this new level, the world-stuff is once more introduced to altogether new possibilities, and has quite new methods of evolutionary operation at its disposal. Biological and organic evolution has at its upper end been merged into and largely succeeded by conscious social evolution.”90 This, of course, is the second great discontinuity in the history of evolution.
Earlier, I argued that evolutionists have reversed the order of creation. Instead of affirming that a sovereign, autonomous, omnipotent personal God created the universe, they argue that a sovereign, autonomous, omnipotent, and impersonal universe has created a now-sovereign personal god, mankind. Julian Huxley took this argument one step further. He also abandoned uniformitarianism, the device by which God was supposedly shoved out of the universe. The slow time scale of cosmic evolution now speeds up, for it now has a planning agent directing it. The new god, mankind, has the power to speed up evolutionary processes, even as Christians have argued that God demonstrated His power over time in creating the world in six days.
With this, a new type of organization came into being—that of self-reproducing society. So long as man survives as a species (and there is no reason for thinking he will not) there seems to be no possibility for any other form of life to push up to this new organizational level. Indeed there are grounds for supposing that biological evolution has come to an end, so far as any sort of major advance is concerned. Thus further large-scale evolution has once again been immensely restricted in extent, being now it would seem confined to the single species man; but at the same time immensely accelerated in its speed, through the operation of the new mechanisms now available.91
Why should this be true? Because man has replaced genetic mutation (ordered by natural selection) with language, symbols, and writing. “The slow methods of variation and heredity are outstripped by the speedier processes of acquiring and transmitting experience.”92 Therefore, “in so far as the mechanism of evolution ceases to be blind and automatic and becomes conscious, ethics can be injected into the evolutionary process.”93
Huxley, predictably, argued for ethical relativism. There can be no “Absolute” ethics.94 “The theologian and the moralist will be doing wrong so long as they cling to any absolute or unyielding certitude.”95 (We might ask the obvious questions: Would the “absolutizing” theologian or moralist always be wrong? Was Huxley absolutely certain of this?) In a later essay, Huxley criticized his grandfather’s view of ethics as being too static.
We can now say that T. H. Huxley’s antithesis between ethics and evolution was false, because based on a limited definition of evolution and a static view of ethics More than that, we perceive that ethics itself is an organ of evolution, and itself evolves. And finally, by adopting this dynamic or evolutionary point of view of ethics as something with a time-dimension, a process rather than a system, we obtain light on one of the most difficult but also most central problems of ethics—the relation between individual and social ethics, and perceive that the antithesis between the individual and society can also be reconciled.96
Evolution means, above all, process—the ethics of historical relativism. How can these two forms of ethics be reconciled? In his 1943 lecture, Huxley argued for the supremacy of individualistic ethics, since “it is clear on evolutionary grounds that the individual is in a real sense higher than the State or the social organism. . . . All claims that the State has an intrinsically higher value than the individual are false. They turn out, on closer scrutiny, to be rationalizations or myths aimed at securing greater power or privilege for a limited group which controls the machinery of the State.”97 He delivered this speech during World War II, and he made certain that his audience knew where he stood. “Nazi ethics put the State above the individual.”98 The Nazi method is against evolutionism “on the grounds of efficiency alone.”99 All of a sudden, evolutionism’s ethics of relativism grew rock-hard: “Furthermore, its principles run counter to those guaranteed by universalist evolutionary ethics.”100 The Nazis were doomed to fail, he concluded.
Four years later, in 1947, Huxley was calling for a one-world state. The atomic bomb had appeared, and civilization now had the possibility of destroying itself. (While the evolutionists never call thermonuclear holocaust “theocide,” this is what they mean: god can now commit suicide.) In short, “the separate regions of the world have, for the first time in history, shrunk politically into a single unit, though so far not an orderly but a chaotic one: and now the atomic bomb hangs with equal grimness over all parts of this infant commonwealth of man. . . . The threat of the atomic bomb is simple—unite or perish.”101 He went on:
So long as the human species is organized in a number of competing and sovereign nation-states, not only is it easy for a group to pick another group to serve as enemy, but it is in the group’s narrow and short-term interest that it should do so The specific steps which will have to be taken before we can reach this next stage of ethical evolution are somewhat various. There is first the practical step of discovering how to transfer some of the sovereign power of several nation-states of the world to a central organization. This has its counterpart in the moral world: for one thing, any practical success in this task will make it easier for men to abandon the tribalist ethics (for tribalist they still are, however magnified in scale) associated with the co-existence of competing social groups.102
Even more strongly: “This is the major ethical problem of our time— to achieve global unity for man Present-day men and nations will be judged by history as moral or immoral according as to whether they have helped or hindered unification.”103
Huxley provided documentation for Rushdoony’s assessment that “humanity is the true god of the Enlightenment and of French Revolutionary thought. In all religious faiths one of the inevitable requirements of logical thought asserts itself in the demand for the unity of the godhead. Hence, since humanity is a god, there can be no division in this godhead, humanity. Mankind must therefore be forced to unite.”104 This is another reason why Rushdoony called the United Nations a religious dream.105 Huxley confirmed this suspicion. Unity will advance mankind to the next stage of evolution. “I would suggest that the secondary critical point in human evolution will be marked by the union of all separate traditions in a single common pool, the orchestration of human diversity from competitive discord to harmonious symphony. Of what future possibilities beyond the human this may be the first foundation, who can say? But at least it will for the first time give full scope to man’s distinctive method of evolution, and open the door to many human potentialities that are as yet scarcely dreamed of.”106 But who will lead the orchestra? He did not ask or say.
Huxley ended this book on evolutionary ethics with a statement quite similar to the one introducing this appendix: “Man the conscious microcosm has been thrown up by the blind and automatic forces of the unconscious macrocosm. But now his consciousness can begin to play an active part, and to influence the process of the macrocosm by guiding and acting as the growing-point of its evolution. Man’s ethics and his moral aspirations have now become an integral part of any future evolutionary process.”107
This theme became a familiar one in later books by Huxley. No statement is more forthright, however, than the opening chapter of his 1957 book, Knowledge, Morality, and Destiny, which he titled “Transhumanism.” “As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself, able to understand something of its past history and possible future. This cosmic self-awareness is being realized in one tiny fragment of the universe—in a few of us human beings.”108 Here is the combination of “Flyspeck Earth” and “man, the new predestinator.” There is nothing humble about residing on a tiny bit of dust in an immense universe, whether one is a Christian or an evolutionist. Huxley repeated the now-familiar theme: man as a leap of being. “For do not let us forget that the human species is as radically different from any of the microscopic single-celled animals that lived a thousand million years ago as they were from a fragment of stone or metal.”109 He, too, affirmed that the two great discontinuities in the uniformitarian universe were the appearance of life and the appearance of man. Evolutionists use uniformitarianism to push God back to the pre-life past or into the post-life future, and to deny the six-day creation. They do not use uniformitarianism to refute these two great discontinuities.
We are supposedly now at another great period of evolutionary discontinuity. A new era is about to dawn. “The new understanding of the universe has come about through the new knowledge amassed in the last hundred years—by psychologists, biologists, and other scientists, by archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians. It has defined man’s responsibility and destiny—to be an agent for the rest of the world in the job of realizing its inherent potentialities as fully as possible.”110 An amazing bit of luck for all of us, isn’t it? It took ten billion years to get from the “big bang” to the advent of life in the solar system. Then it took another 3.497 (or possibly 3.498) billion years to get from life’s origin (3.5 billion until about 300,000 years ago) to that second great cosmological discontinuity, man. And now, here we are, ready for stage three, the ascension of man to his position of universal power. If you had been born a Neanderthal man (let alone a brontosaurus), or even an eighteenth-century Philosophe, you would have missed it. Missed what? This:
It is as if man had been suddenly appointed managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution—appointed without being asked if he wanted it, and without proper warning or preparation. What is more, he can’t refuse the job. Whether he wants to or not, whether he is conscious of what he is doing or not, he is in point of fact determining the future direction of evolution on this earth. That is his inescapable destiny, and the sooner he realizes it and starts believing in it, the better for all concerned.111
A new humanity is coming: “The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, and an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.”112
In case readers fail to recognize this ancient heresy, it is called gnosticism. This, in turn, was simply a variation of the original sin, the desire of man to be as God, to transcend man’s own creaturely limitations by seeking special knowledge. Adam sought the knowledge of good and evil. The gnostics, in the second and third centuries A.D. in Asia Minor and North Africa, sought mystical illumination. In the Middle Ages, alchemists sought self-transcendence through repetitive chemical rituals—the quest for the so-called “philosopher’s stone,” which was not simply a means of converting lead into gold, but a means of enabling the alchemist to transcend his own limits as a creature. It is not surprising, then, that with the rise of secular humanism—in the late-medieval and early modern periods, as well as today—has come occultism, sorcery, demonism, and the quest for mystical utopia, especially through the techniques of Eastern religion, which has always been evolutionary in philosophy.113 Humanism, whether Renaissance humanism or post-Darwinian humanism, is in league with occultism.114
It would be unproductive to multiply citations of the evolutionists’ sleight-of-hand operation. The Darwinists have used the dogma of cosmic purposelessness to free man from the constraints of biblical law and the threat of eternal judgment. Once freed from God, man is said to become the new predestinator. Dobzhansky, the Huxleys, Simpson, and others holding similar views have presented secular man with the humanists’ version of the dominion covenant. Man is to conquer. With the discovery by Watson and Crick of the make-up of the DNA molecule, scientists are now in the process of creating new forms of life. The General Electric Company filed patents on one new life form, and an appeals court in 1979 upheld the firm’s property right to this new species. The “gene splicers” are in our midst. Warnings are unlikely to stop the experimental mania of modern biological scientists. The technological imperative is too strong: “If it can be done, it must be done.”115 The hope of profits also lures research firms into the field. Financial success, which is likely over the short run at least, will bring in the competition. Recombinant DNA, the tool of the “gene splicers,” discovered in 1973, has opened a true pandora’s box of moral, intellectual, medical, and legal problems.116 As one popular book on the subject warned: “ ‘Man the engineer’ may soon become ‘man the engineered.’”117 The authors went on to cite recent statements by biological scientists that are in line with everything that has been said since the days of Thomas Huxley.
Over these past three billion years, one hundred million species have existed on this planet. Of those, ninety-eight million are now extinct. Among the two million that remain today, only one, Homo sapiens (“wise man”), has evolved to the point of being able to harness and control its own evolutionary future. Many biologists welcome this possibility, seeing it as a great challenge that will ennoble and preserve our species. “Modern progress in microbiology and genetics suggests that man can outwit extinction through genetic engineering,” argues Cal Tech biologist James Bonner. “Genetic change is not basically immoral. It takes place all the time, naturally. What man can do, however, is to make sure that these changes are no longer random in the gigantic lottery in nature Instead, he can control the changes to produce better individuals.” Bonner’s viewpoint is seconded by Dr. Joseph Fletcher, professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, who sees in genetic engineering the fulfillment of our cosmic role on earth. “To be men,” he believes, “we must be in control. That is the first and last ethical word.” Promises a third scientist, our newly developed eugenic potential will lead humanity to “a growth of social wisdom and glorious survival-toward the evolution of a kind of superman.”118
The book is well titled: Who Should Play God?
What a magnificent sleight-of-hand operation the defenders of evolution and humanism have accomplished! First, the universe was depersonalized. Darwin put it very forcefully: “It has been said that I speak of natural selection as an active power or Deity; but who objects to an author speaking of the attraction of gravity as ruling the movement of the planets? Everyone knows what is meant and implied by such metaphorical expressions; and they are almost necessary for brevity. So again it is difficult to avoid personifying the word Nature; but I mean by Nature, only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and bylaws the sequence of events as ascertained by us.”119 God was shoved out of the universe, leaving only humble man, whose power seems to be limited to “ascertaining laws,” which are the sequence of events observed by us.
Second, man was reduced to being a mere cog in a mighty machine, not the representative of an infinite God, governing the earth as a subordinate in terms of the dominion covenant. A few paragraphs later, Darwin wrote: “How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will be his results, compared with those accumulated by Nature during the whole geological periods! Can we wonder, then, that Nature’s productions should be far ‘truer’ in character than man’s productions; that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of higher workmanship?”120 Not the higher workmanship of the God of the Bible or even the deistic god of Paley’s Natural Theology, man is the “higher workmanship” of planless, meaningless, “random, yet cause-and-effect-governed” geological and biological process.
Third, evolutionists added a purposeful, meaning-providing conscious agent to this “random, yet cause-and-effect-governed,” previously impersonal process. Darwin gave the intellectual game away in the concluding paragraph of The Descent of Man (second edition, 1874): “Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future.”121 But not so distant a future after all! In 1957, Sir Julian Huxley concluded: “Assuredly the concept of man as instrument and agent of the evolutionary process will become the dominant integrator of all ideas about human destiny, and will set the pattern of our general attitude to life. It will replace the idea of man as the Lord of Creation, as the puppet of blind fate, or as the willing or unwilling subject of a Divine Master.”122
Man had lowly origins, but man is now the source of direction and meaning for the evolutionary process. This is Darwin’s intellectual legacy. As he concluded The Descent of Man, “We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”123 Notice that Darwin chose to capitalize the word “man” in his final reference to this exalted being, as befits the name of one’s deity. Man is no longer the image of God, but the image of apes, pre-apes, amoebae, and meaningless cosmic process. Still, he has this “god-like intellect,” which shows sympathy and benevolence. He is therefore “exalted.” But lowly, always the product of humble origins. In fact, it is precisely man’s humble, impersonal origins that provide him with his credentials of being the sole source of cosmic meaning.
There is no one higher than man, for there is no one—no self-aware Creator—who preceded man. Anyone who is not familiar with this monumental sleight-of-hand operation may fail to grasp this, the single most important intellectual transformation in the heart and soul of the religion of humanism. Marxism was an important subordinate stream in this intellectual transformation, but by the late twentieth century, few people outside of a handful of Western intellectuals really believed in the tenets of original Marxism. They may well have believed in exercising power in the name of the Marxist intellectual heritage, but the priests, no less than the laymen, had lost faith in the old dogma. They had not abandoned faith in Darwin’s dogma.
In 1959, Hermann J. Muller could write that The Origin of Species “was undoubtedly the greatest scientific book of all time . . . The result has been that this revolutionary view of life now stands as one of the most firmly established generalizations of science. . . .”124 It is a religion, as Muller’s words indicate: “We dare not leave it to the Soviets alone to offer to their rising generation the inspiration that is to be gained from the wonderful world view opened up by Darwin and other Western biologists.”125 On both sides of the Iron Curtain, the priesthoods were enlisting the faithful, offering them salvation by means of evolution. This is a religion that supposedly will provide meaning, and the objections of anti-evolutionists must be stifled for the sake of the masses: “The history of living things, and its interpretation, can be made a fascinating story that will give our young people a strong sense of the meaning of life, not only for plants and animals in general, but for mankind in particular, and for them themselves We have no more right to starve the masses of our youth intellectually and emotionally because of the objections of the uninformed than we have a right to allow people to keep their children from being vaccinated and thus endanger the whole community physically.”126 Statement after statement like this one can be found in the extraordinarily revealing book, Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition (1970).
The humility of post-Darwin humanists is a myth—a myth fostered by them, and one which has its roots in Darwin’s own sleight-of-hand operation. Anyone who thinks that man was anything but elevated by Darwinism has deluded himself. He has swallowed only the first bit of bait tossed to him by the Darwinians. There was more to come.
Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s first great promoter and Sir Julian’s grandfather, could write about earth, “the speck,” or the supposed fact that man is not the “centre of the living world, but one amidst endless modifications of life,”127 but this was (and is) part of an enormous deception. Consider the words of Philip Handler, who was the president of the National Academy of Sciences in 1976. He delivered this speech to the General Assembly of the International Council of scientific Unions, so it was not intended to be too off-beat, too radical, or too embarrassing to its author. You will not find his view of man’s role particularly long on humility.
How very privileged we are—we who have lived through the last half-century of science, that historic few decades in which the mind of man first came really to understand the nature of the atomic nucleus; first learned the history of our planet and identified the forces that continue to refigure its surface, the habitat of our species; the time when man’s mind first engaged the immense sweep and grandeur of the cosmos in what we believe to be its true dimensions; the time when our species commenced upon the physical exploration of the solar system. Ours is the fortunate generation that, for the first time, came to understand the essential aspects of the marvelous phenomenon which is life, a phenomenon describable only in the language of chemistry; came to understand the mechanisms that have operated over the eons of biological evolution. In short, ours may well be the first generation that knows what we are and where we are. That knowledge permitted the acquisition of new capabilities whereby we utilize an extraordinary assemblage of synthetic materials, each created for a specific purpose, whereby we manipulate our environment, communicate, move about, protect our health, avoid pain and even extend the power of our own intellects In a historic sense, the scientific endeavor began only yesterday, yet we have come a wondrous distance from our primeval ignorance in so short a time 128
This remarkable testimony of a prominent biologist’s faith was published in The Washington Post (Dec. 22, 1976), the most widely read newspaper in the political capital of the United States.
Evolution is the religion of modern humanism. It was also the religion of ancient humanism. The explanation is different evolution by natural selection—but the religion’s really important dogma has not been changed significantly since the primary version was presented to mankind by Satan: We shall be as gods (Gen. 3:5).
One of occultism’s universal themes is the appearance of a new creation, some sort of positive human mutation.129 But do serious scientists take this vision very seriously? Some do, as indicated by their explicit statements concerning recombinant DNA and genetic engineering. Another bit of evidence appeared in The Wall Street Journal (Sept. 10, 1979), on the back page. An expensive advertisement was run by Pertec Computer Corporation, apparently some sort of “public service” advertisement. It featured a photograph of America’s most prolific author, Dr. Isaac Asimov, who had written over 200 books at the time the ad appeared.130 He held a Ph.D. in biochemistry, but he was more famous for his science fiction stories and his popularizations of modern natural science. During one period of 100 months, Asimov turned out 100 books. He did all his own typing (90 words a minute), almost every day, for most of the day. He has at least one book in nine of the ten Dewey decimal classification categories. He did not write a book on philosophy. In short, he was no raving lunatic. The advertisement read: “Will computers take over?”
Asimov addressed the question of computer intelligence. Could computers ever become more intelligent than men? Asimov’s answer: the knowledge stored by a computer is not the same as man’s knowledge. They are two separate developments. “The human brain evolved by hit-and-miss, by random mutations, making use of subtle chemical changes, and with a forward drive powered by natural selection and by the need to survive in a particular world of given qualities and dangers. The computer brain is evolving by deliberate design as the result of careful human thought, making use of subtle electrical charges, and with a forward drive powered by technological advancement and the need to serve particular human requirements.” From the “hit-andmiss” random evolution of man’s brain, to man the battling and planning survivor, to the forward-driven computer (impersonal, purposeless mechanism, to purposeful organic agent, to personalized mechanism): here is the standard, post-Darwin account. But Asimov blazed new trails. The two forms of intelligence are too different to be compared on the same scale. We cannot make such comparisons. We must keep the systems distinct. Each should specialize. “This would be particularly true if genetic engineering was deliberately used to improve the human brain in precisely those directions in which the computer is weak.” We must avoid wasteful duplication he said.
Consequently the question of “taking over” need never arise. What we might see, instead, would be symbiosis or complementation, human brain and computer working together, each supplying what the other lacks, forming an intelligence pair that would be greater than either could be alone, an intelligence pair that would open new horizons, not now imaginable, and make it possible to achieve new heights, not now dreamed of. In fact, the union of brains, human and human-made, might serve as the doorway through which human beings could emerge from their isolated childhood into their combination adulthood.
The advertisement sold no product and did not instruct him to clip a coupon or take any sort of action. It simply offered a message—a message of a new evolution.
The same theme is found in the first Star Trek movie, released in December of 1979. The movie’s science advisor was Asimov. The movie is about a future space ship crew that confronts an unimaginably powerful intelligence. This intelligence turns out to be an enormous machine, one which had been built by a civilization run entirely by machines. It literally knows everything in the universe, yet it is travelling back to earth to seek the “Creator” and to join with the “Creator” in a metaphysical union (Eastern mysticism). The machine is perfectly rational, totally devoid of feeling, and is a “child” at the very beginning of its evolution. It turns out that the center of the machine’s guidance system is a centuries-old United States space probe, the Voyager, which had been sent into space to seek knowledge and send back that knowledge to earth. Hence, the “Creator” was man. The movie ends when an officer of the crew joins in metaphysical union with the machine, along with a mechanical robot built by the machine—a robot that duplicated his ex-lover. The officer, the female robot, and the enormous machine then disappear. Science officer Spock, a human-Vulcan genius—a mutant product of two races—announces that a new being has just evolved from the fusion of man, man-made machinery, machinery-made machinery, and a machine-made robot that is “almost human” (actually, Deltan, whatever the planet Delta produces; the lady had a shaved head to match her vow of chastity). Spock, a cult figure from the mid-1960s through the next 45 years, who had been seeking total rationalism (his Vulcan side) to the exclusion of feeling (his human side), now is content to remain with the humans on board the Starship Enterprise, apparently satisfied with his somewhat schizophrenic mind-emotion dualism. And why not? He had seen the perfectly rational (the huge machine), and it had been lonely, seeking its “Creator.” To make the next evolutionary step, it required fusion with mankind. Spock, with his pointed ears and his computer-like brain, is as close to that next evolution as any Vulcan-human could ever hope for. The movie, based on a popular television series of the late 1960s, immediately attracted ticket buyers among the millions of “trekkies,” their cult-like fans.
If Asimov’s vision does not border on the occult, what does? If the message of that computer company’s advertisement and the Star Trek movie does not represent a religious position, what else should we call such a message? Science? Science fiction? “Mere” entertainment? Or a combination of all three, which in addition is also a religion?
Readers may think that I am belaboring a point, but this point is crucial for understanding the confessional foundation of modern humanism. Charles Darwin created an intellectual revolution. That intellectual revolution still affects us. He did not simply provide interesting new evidence concerning historical geology or biological reproduction; he created a new world-and-life view. It was this new perspective on man’s origins, not the factual data, that made Darwin’s Origin of Species an instant best-seller. The clergy in Darwin’s day recognized the threat to the biblical world-and-life view which was posed by the Origin. As Philip Appleman observed:
Theologians worried because they saw, perhaps more clearly than others, the philosophical implications of post-Darwinian thought. It was not just that Darwin had complicated the reading of Genesis, or even that he had furnished impressive scientific authority for the nineteenth-century habit of thinking in terms of wholes and continuities rather than in discrete parts and rigidities; or that the evolutionary orientation stressed context and complexity—though all of these influences could be bothersome when used by “materialists.” The worst threat of all was that Darwin’s universe operated not by Design but by natural selection, a self-regulating mechanism Natural selection pictured the world in a constant process of change, but without any prior intention of going anywhere in particular or of becoming anything in particular. This was a devastating proposition to the conventional theologian–more so, perhaps, than the Copernican theory had been, because it struck so close to home. Natural selection therefore seemed, to many, hopelessly negative, fraught with blasphemy and conducive of despair.131
This despair was initially covered over by optimism concerning the power of man to take over the direction of the evolutionary process, an optimism that still survives, though not without fear and foreboding on the part of some scientists and philosophers.
So it made a difference to philosophers and theologians that man not only evolved, but evolved by natural selection rather than by a vital force or cosmic urge of some sort. Darwinism seemed uncompromisingly non-teleological, non-vitalist, and non-finalist, and that basic fact could not help but affect the work of philosophers. “Once man was swept into the evolutionary orbit,” Bert James Lowenberg has written, “a revolution in Western thought was initiated. Man was seen to be a part of nature, and nature was seen to be a part of man. The Darwinian revolution was not a revolution in science alone; it was a revolution in man’s conception of himself and in man’s conception of all his works.”132
Appleman chronicled the decline in the opposition to Darwinism on the part of Roman Catholics and other theologians. “The activities of science, relentlessly pushing back the margins of the unknown, have in effect been forcing the concept of ‘God’ into a perpetual retreat into the still-unknown, and it is in this condition that ‘God’ has frequently come to have meaning for modern man.”133
The modern evolutionist is a defender of a concept of process that removes God and His control from the universe, so that man and man’s sovereignty can be substituted for the supposedly nonexistent God. Meaningless process is the evolutionist’s god of origins. Only when a meaningful God who created the universe in terms of His eternal, unchanging decree is finally removed from our thought processes, can our thought processes take control of all other processes, the modern evolutionist argues. Evolutionary process is the humanist’s god of origins, a god whose crucial purpose for man is to remove from the question of origins any concept of purpose. Man’s monopoly of cosmic purpose is supposedly assured as a direct result of the non-purposeful origins of the universe. This is why Rushdoony took such pains to contrast process philosophy and creationism.134
It is revealing to read the attempted refutation of Rushdoony written by a self-proclaimed orthodox Christian geologist (who argued for a 4.6 billion-year-old earth).135 He had no understanding of what process philosophy is and how Darwinism promotes it. “Rushdoony’s fears are unfounded. An affirmation of process in itself certainly does not constitute an attack on the sovereignty of God. Scripture reveals in [sic] the sovereignty of God in history, in day-to-day affairs, in the ordinary rising and setting of the sun. Process is going on all about us now, and God is every whit as sovereign as He was in the creation.”136
Exactly what kind of creation did Dr. Young have in mind? A creation in which the sun, moon, and stars were created after the earth? Not necessarily.137 The six-day creation? No, because “we have no human interpretation of Genesis 1 that is infallible.”138 A view of Genesis 1 which says that Adam and Eve were created on the sixth day? No, because the genealogies in the Bible do not tell us enough to say that man is only a few thousand years old.139 “On the basis of these considerations it is probably virtually impossible for the Christian to identify, from the fossil record, the time when special creation occurred.”140 In short, he asserted, everything the Bible says is indeterminate with respect to chronological time. Therefore, he continued to use the 4.6 billion-year-old date as his operating presupposition, thereby providing himself with full acceptability within the state university faculty of secular humanists where he was employed. If he believed otherwise, he would have had to give up that work which he has chosen as his profession, namely, providing explanations for the hypothetically one-billion-year-old rocks. He said as much: “If Scripture really does teach unequivocally that the universe was miraculously created in 144 hours a few thousands of years ago, then I, as a Christian geologist, will be willing to stop scientific interpretation of the supposedly one-billion-year-old rocks of northern New Jersey which I have been studying for the past several years. Obviously my only task now is to describe those rocks and to find valuable resources in them. If the mature creationist interpretation of Genesis 1 is correct, I am wasting my time talking about magmas and metamorphism inasmuch as these rocks were created instantaneously in place.”141
Those of us who, like myself, believe in the Bible’s narrative of a six-day creation, must conclude that Dr. Young did indeed waste his time by studying those rocks in terms of a uniformitarian presupposition. He also used money confiscated from me by the state of North Carolina, where Dr. Young taught when I lived there. The state used my money to hire Dr. Young to indoctrinate students with uniformitarianism. Dr. Young then wrote an intellectual defense of his uniformitarian faith, so that other Christians might be convinced! Confiscated tax dollars were promoting Dr. Young’s professional religion, uniformitarianism. (His professed religion has been compromised by his professional, academic religion. He later taught at Calvin College.)
We must not be naive. The uniformitarian interpretation of geolo gical processes is a religion. It has led to a more consistent religion, that of evolution through natural selection. The god of uniformitarian, meaningless, directionless process was created by nineteenth-century humanists and compromising Christian geologists—whose intellectual and spiritual heirs are still publishing books—in order to provide an explanation of this world which did not require full allegiance to the plain teaching of Genesis 1. The god of uniformitarian geology, whose high priest was Charles Lyell, metamorphosed (evolved?) into a far stronger deity, the god of evolution through natural selection. Charles Darwin became the founder and high priest of this new god, whose kingdom is the whole academic and scientific world. Finally, Darwin’s god of meaningless process has developed into the modern god, mankind, who will take over the operations of evolutionary process.
Anyone who fails to recognize the satanic nature of uniformitarianism’s process divinity is hopelessly naive, for it is this divinity who has torn the eternal decree of God from the presuppositions of modern man, leaving man with only random process, or man-directed tyrannical process, to comfort him. Christians cannot afford to be hopelessly naive, even if this self-imposed naiveté is their justification for remaining on the faculties of state university geology or biology departments. The price of such naiveté is still too high, for them and for their equally naive Christian readers, who do not recognize a theological battle when they see it.
The social philosophers of the late nineteenth century grappled with the same fundamental intellectual problems that faced the biologists. What is the nature of evolution? Is the species Homo sapiens governed by the same laws as those governing other species? Is “survival of the fittest” a law applying to mankind? If so, in what ways? Is competition primarily individualistic—man vs. man, man vs. environment—or primarily collectivist, with mankind as a united species seeking to conquer all other opponents for the domination of the external world?
There is no question concerning the existence of purpose. The economists and sociologists of the late nineteenth century, no less than those of the twenty-first, accepted the reality of human purpose. Like today’s professional social thinkers, the leading defenders of the “new evolutionism” were often atheists and agnostics, in their methodology certainly, and usually also in their private beliefs. They did not rely on grandiose concepts of cosmic purpose. Man’s purpose was sufficient to explain human cause and effect. But the word “man” posed a major problem: Was collective man, meaning mankind, the proper focus of concern, or was the individual man the source of purpose? Are we to speak of some sort of overarching purpose of man the species, or should we be content to explain the workings of political economy in terms of multiple individualistic purposes? Is our methodology to be holistic or individualistic? Are we to proclaim the sovereignty of “man, the purposeful, planning individual” or “man, the purposeful, planning species”? Are we talking about the survival of the fittest species, or about the survival of the fittest individuals within a particular species? Can we speak of the survival of the fittest species without stating the conditions for the survival of the most fit individuals within the species? What, in other words, is meant by “fit”?
The Social Darwinists of the late nineteenth century, led by the British sociologist-philosopher Herbert Spencer and Yale University’s sociologist William Graham Sumner, focused on the individual. Individual action is primary, they said. Individuals have purposes; collective wholes do not. Sumner stated the case for individual rights in his book, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883):
The notion of civil liberty which we have inherited is that of a status created for the individual by laws and institutions, the effect of which is that each man is guaranteed the use of all his own powers ex clusively for his own welfare. It is not at all a matter of elections, or universal suffrage, or democracy. All institutions are to be tested by the degree to which they guarantee liberty. It is not to be admitted for a moment that liberty is a means to social ends, and that it may be impaired for major considerations. Anyone who so argues has lost his bearing and relation of all the facts and factors in a free state. A human being has a life to live, a career to run. He is a centre of powers to work, and of capacities to suffer.142
His conclusion was straightforward: “It is not at all the function of the state to make men happy. They must make themselves happy in their own way, and at their own risk.”143
As a Darwinist, Sumner believed in the survival of the fittest. (Spencer had coined the phrase in 1852.) Sumner criticized social reformers who believed that the civil government should intervene to help the weak and defenseless members of society. “They do not perceive, furthermore, that if we do not like the survival of the fittest, we have only one possible alternative, and that is the survival of the unfittest. The former is the law of civilization; the latter is the law of anti-civilization. We have our choice between the two, or we can go on, as in the past, vacillating between the two, but a third plan—the socialist desideratum—a plan for nourishing the unfittest and yet advancing in civilization, no man will ever find.”144
Spencer was so worried about the survival of the least fit that he questioned even private charity, although he accepted the legitimacy of such charity, because its alternative—allowing the poor to reproduce their kind without guidance from those giving the charity— frightened him. As he said, “the problem seems insoluble.”145 There is only one possible answer: suffering. We cannot alleviate the misery of the poor in general. “Each new effort to mitigate the penalties on improvidence, has the inevitable effect of adding to the number of the improvident.”146 Charity leads to more mouths to feed.
Having, by unwise institutions, brought into existence large numbers who are unadapted to the requirements of social life, and are consequently sources of misery to themselves and others, we cannot repress and gradually diminish this body of relatively worthless people without inflicting much pain. Evil has been done and the penalty must be paid. Cure can come only through affliction. The artificial assuaging of distress by state appliances, is a kind of social opium eating, yielding temporary mitigation at the eventual cost of intenser misery.147
Ultimately, it would be best even to eliminate private charity. “If left to operate in all its sternness, the principle of the survival of the fittest, which, as ethically considered, we have seen to imply that each individual shall be left to experience the effects of his own nature and consequent conduct, would quickly clear away the degraded.”148
Through the competition of individuals in a free market, the greatest possible output will be achieved, and this leads to greater wealth for those who survive, as well as greater strength for the species as a whole. Social Darwinism did not argue that there is not purpose in the universe, or that individuals do not belong to a species. Through voluntary cooperation in production, the division of labor increases each participant’s wealth. Yet the higher a species, the more an individual member must live in terms of his own production and skills.149 Man cannot escape this law of nature, Spencer wrote.
Of man, as of all inferior creatures, the law by conformity to which the species is preserved, is that among adults the individuals best adapted to the conditions of their existence shall prosper most, and that the individuals least adapted to the conditions of their existence shall prosper least—a law which, if uninterfered with, entails the survival of the fittest, and the spread of the most adapted varieties. And as before so here, we see that, ethically considered, this law implies that each individual ought to receive the benefits and the evils of his own nature and consequent conduct: neither being prevented from having whatever good his actions normally bring to him, nor allowed to shoulder off on to other persons whatever ill is brought to him by his actions.150
This is the methodological individualism of right-wing Social Darwinism.
Right-wing Social Darwinists had to assume that there is a relationship between the prosperity of the productive individual and the prosperity of the species. In other words, the prosperity of the effective competitor leads to an increase of strength for the species. One obvious and troublesome exception seems to be success at offensive warfare, where the most courageous and dedicated men wind up killing each other, leaving the cowards and weaklings to return home to reproduce. Spencer realized this and specifically denied that offensive wars are a productive form of intra-species competition.151 On the whole, though, individuals who compete successfully will be able to take the society along with them. The human race therefore ensures its survival by permitting the full competition of all its members. The one (society) is strengthened by the continual competition of its parts (individuals). This is the message of Darwin, which the Social Darwinists asked late nineteenth-century readers to believe.
This faith involved confidence in the integrating capacity of the free market. The “cut-throat” competition of individuals leads to social progress. Men need capital to equip them for the battle against nature, Sumner said. Capital is man’s great tool of survival.
Undoubtedly the man who possesses capital has a great advantage over the man who has no capital, in the struggle for existence. . . . This does not mean that the one man has an advantage against the other, but that, when they are rivals in the effort to get the means of subsistence from Nature, the one who has capital has immeasurable advantages over the other. If it were not so, capital would not be formed. Capital is only formed by self-denial, and if the possession of it did not secure advantages and superiorities of a high order, men would never submit to what is necessary to get it.152
This sounds plausible, until you realize that the disadvantaged man is, in fact, in direct competition for scarce resources, and if one man gets more of nature’s goods out of the earth, then in some circumstances, his neighbor may be harmed (e.g., in a drought, when only one man can buy water, or in a famine, when only one of them can buy food). Since the neighbor is also a part of impersonal nature, then one aspect of man’s struggle with nature is the defeat of his neighbor in the struggle for limited resources. Why, then, should we be so confident in the law of the survival of the fittest? Can we say for sure that the inheritors of the rich man’s capital will use it for the survival of the species, in the same way that evolutionists argue that the heirs of a successful mutant amoeba will have a better chance of surviving? Even here, is it really the original species that survives, or is the mutant a stepping stone in a new development which will not benefit the non-mutant original species? May not the mutant subspecies wipe out the original species in the competition for survival? Isn’t that precisely what the survival of the fittest is all about—not the survival of species, but survival of mutant or genetically better equipped members of a particular species?
Let us consider an impossibility. What if the members of some lower species a billion years ago recognized the advent of a mutant member? The original members see that the newcomer possesses certain genetic advantages which will enable it to compete more successfully for the limited supply of food, shelter, and space. It will pick off the most desirable females (if it is male). Its progeny will survive, while the progeny of the original members of the older “about-to-be-superseded” population will be less likely to survive. The new tribe member, with its mutant genes, is the first representative of a somewhat different future species. After all, that is what evolution is all about.
The members of the older species recognize that whatever comes out of the “loins” of the mutant a million years or billion years down the evolutionary road, the heirs will not be the same species. In fact, if such an heir walked down the path right now, it would be regarded by everyone in the community as an enemy, dangerously different, and fit to be killed in the competition. In short, what would be the most rational response of the original members of the species? Wouldn’t the smart thing be the immediate execution of the mutant, that herald of a conquering alien race, that emissary of future foreign conquerors?
The modern evolutionist would say that such a hypothetical scenario is preposterous. Why? Because lower species are ignorant. They do not understand evolution. They do not recognize mutants. Quite true, but man does. Men do know these supposed laws of evolution. How, then, do we convince today’s species, Homo sapiens, not to kill off the mutants? If the primary form of evolution is now cultural and intellectual—a familiar theme among all evolutionists—then how does the average man protect himself against the “mutant” intellectual? How does the average man defend himself against the gene-splicing experts who proclaim themselves to be capable of altering the course of evolution, who say that some time in the future, they will be able to create a new race of supermen? How do the average members escape Aldous Huxley’s brave new world? And if the right-wing Social Darwinists are correct, how does the poor man without capital guarantee the survival of his progeny, if he sees that the success of his rich neighbor is a threat to his family’s success? If we recognize the mutants, will we kill them? If we do kill them, will the race survive without them?
But if we don’t, will some mutant heirs win out?
The answer of modern social evolutionists and non-Social Darwinists is not all that clear. Generally, they have countered the right-wing Social Darwinists in the name of a higher reason, a collective human reason. Man is the capstone of an unplanned evolutionary process. He has transcended this undirected process, or at least may be about to transcend it. Through conscious planning, elite members of the race will be able to integrate the plans of all the members into an overarching whole, and this overarching whole will guarantee the survival of all, including the “least fit,” who might otherwise be prepared to kill off the “mutants.”
What other approach would be better? If you believed that you are a “mutant”—an expert, a rich man, the member of the planning elite— wouldn’t you come to the “about-to-be-superseded” masses and tell them that you are “just one of the boys,” and “we're all in this together,” and that we all need to buckle down “for the sake of humanity”? In other words, wouldn’t you devise a social philosophy which would promise to the masses sufficient benefits to guarantee their survival in the competition? Or would you continue to shout them down as members of an about-to-be-superseded species, telling them that it is their responsibility to play the game by your ferocious rules or else get off the playing field, when getting off the field means death?
If you were really a mutant, then the one thing you would not have is numerical superiority. The one thing you could not risk would be a head-on collision with the massive numbers of “about-to-be-superseded” voters, troops, or whatever. You would make your sales pitch in terms of the greatest good for the greatest number. You would tell the masses that the greatest good for the greatest number involves playing the game by your rules, which on the surface seem to be democratic, but which in fact are radically elitist. You would deny that blood lines count, or that the feudal principle is valid. You would offer them democracy, bureaucracy, universal free education, welfare redistribution, and so forth. Then you would select only those members of the masses who showed themselves willing and able to compete in terms of the elitist system. You would give a few of them scholarships to the best universities, and you would recruit them into what they believe (and you may even believe) is “the inner circle.” You would expand the power of the government, and then you would open high-level positions in that government only to those specially chosen by the ruling power.
What you would do, in short, is to construct precisely the statist system which exists today in every major industrial nation—a system that in the 1930s was called fascism, but which can also be called socialism, communism, the corporate state, the business-industrial complex, the new federalism, the Programming, Planning and Budgeting System (PPBS), or just to make your real goals explicit, the New World Order. What you would construct, in the name of man-controlled evolution, is a new Tower of Babel.
The logic of the right-wing Social Darwinists was bound to fail. The “robber barons” (an unfortunate term) of the late nineteenth century may have appreciated the ruthless logic of right-wing Social Darwinism during the period of their upward mobility, but once they were established as the dominant forces in the market, they abandoned the market’s competition in the name of “economic stability.” In short, they preferred monopoly to competition. By 1900, the large American conglomerates began to look to government intervention, all in the name of protecting the consumer, for protection against newer, innovative, “cut-throat” firms.153
Almost at the same time, the Progressive movement in the United States began to make itself felt in politics. This political-intellectual movement was run by elitists for elitists, and it proclaimed a philosophy of economic interventionism. The state was now to replace the free market as the engine of evolution. The market was too free, too uncontrolled, too individualistic for the Progressives. They wanted to direct market forces for national, and later international, ends. They lost faith in the progress-producing automatic forces of market competition. The free market was too much like the hypothetical competition of evolutionary change. There was no way to guarantee the survival of humanity if humanity proved to be less fit. The external environment had to be manipulated to conform to the needs of mankind, thereby reversing the purposeless, anti-teleological processes of natural selection. Man, the new source of direction and meaning, must assert his dominance by means other than random competition. Random competition was fine for pre-human, pre-teleological evolution, but it will no longer suffice. The “survival of the fittest” henceforth would mean “the survival of the fitters.” Planning man (collective man) would fit the environment (including other men) to fit his needs, aspirations, and skills.
With the Progressive movement came a new version of social Darwinism: left-wing social Darwinism. Within two decades, 1885–1905, it replaced right-wing social Darwinism. One intellectual, perhaps more than any other, was responsible for shifting American evolutionists’ outlook from right-wing social Darwinism’s free market competition to modern statism’s central planning and interference with market forces. It was not Karl Marx. It was a long-forgotten government bureaucrat, one of the founders of American sociology, Lester Frank Ward.
Lester Frank Ward wrote Dynamic Sociology (1883), the first comprehensive sociological treatise written in the United States.154 He has been described as the father of the American concept of the planned society.155 He was born in Illinois in 1841. His father was an itinerant mechanic and his mother the daughter of a clergyman. He was poor as a youth, but he still found time to teach himself Latin, French, German, biology, and physiology. He was self-disciplined. He joined the U.S. Treasury Department in 1865. He continued his studies at night school, and within five years he had earned degrees in medicine, law, and the arts. In the mid-1870s he worked for the Bureau of Statistics, and it was at this time that he concluded that a study of statistics could lead to the formulation of laws of society, which in turn could be used in a program of social planning. He continued his self-education in the field of paleontology, and in 1883, the year Dynamic Sociology appeared, he was appointed chief paleontologist of the U.S. Geological Survey. Finally, after publishing five books in sociology, he was appointed to the chair of sociology in 1906 at Brown University, the same year that he was elected the first president of the newly formed American Sociological Association.156
Ward’s Dynamic Sociology was ignored for a decade after its publication, selling only 500 copies.157 In 1897, a second edition was issued, and within three years he was considered one of the leaders in the field. After his death in 1913, his reputation faded rapidly. He had laid the groundwork for American collectivism in the name of progressive evolution, but he was forgotten by the next and subsequent generations.
Ward broke radically with Spencer and Sumner. He had two great enemies, intellectually speaking: the social Darwinist movement and all supernatural religion. It is difficult to say which he hated more, although religion received the more vitriolic attacks. Dynamic Sociology stands as the first and perhaps the most comprehensive defense of government planning in American intellectual history. It was published about 15 years too early, but when his ideas caught on, they spread like wildfire. In fact, they became the “coin of the realm” in planning circles so rapidly that the source of these ideas was forgotten. Because the book is almost unknown today, and because Ward’s concepts and language are so graphic, I am providing an extended summary and analysis of his thought.
In Dynamic Sociology, we have the heart and soul of modern, post-Darwin social evolutionist philosophy. Ward did not pull any punches. He did not try to evade the full implications of his position. Modern thinkers may not be so blatant and forthright, but if they hold to the modern version of evolution—man-directed evolution—then they are unlikely to reject the basic ideas that Ward set forth. If you want to follow through the logic of man-directed evolution, you must start with Ward’s Dynamic Sociology.
Ward was forthright. He made it clear that the enemy is revealed religion, which in the United States in the early 1880s, meant Christianity. In the 82-page introduction to the book, in which he outlined his thesis, Ward announced that those people claiming to have received divine inspiration, and those who have founded religious systems, have been found by modern medicine to be not only “pathological” but to be burdened by “an actually deranged condition of their minds.”158 Because of the power these religious leaders have wielded historically, “we can only deplore the vast waste of energy which their failure to accomplish their end shows them to have made.”159 (Waste, above all, was what Ward said his system of social planning would avoid.) There is no evidence, he wrote in volume II, that religion provides any moral sanctions whatever. As a matter of fact, we find in the advanced countries that individuals who avow no religion are the true moral leaders. “The greater part of them are found among the devotees of the exact sciences. Yet there is no more exemplary class of citizens in society than scientific men. . .”160 Furthermore, the “criminals and the dangerous classes of society are generally believers in the prevailing faith of the country which they infest. . . .”161 In any case, morals precede religion. “It is morality which has saved religion, and not religion which has saved morality.”162 Prayer is a social evil, because it is “inconsistent with that independence and originality of mind which accompany all progressive movements.”163 It deters effective action. He then devoted several pages to a demonstration of the anti-progressive influences of all religion, but he provided examples primarily from paganism and animism.164 He said religion leads to a retreat from this world and a divorce between man and nature.165 There are two methods for modifying the external world to make it conform to man’s needs: science and religion. There is a perpetual conflict between these two methods, and religion will lose this war.166
Ward’s second intellectual enemy was right-wing Social Darwinism. They misunderstood evolution, he argued. Nature’s ways are not man’s way. The progress of nature is too slow, and it is so inefficient that earth’s resources will not be able to support such slow progress forever. What is needed is “something swifter and more certain than natural selection,” and this means man.167 We need a new teleology, he argued—the crucial argument of all post-Darwin social and even biological evolutionists. The evolutionary process needs a sure hand to guide it. We must adopt, he said at the end of the second volume, “the teleological method.”168 We must reject Social Darwinism (although he never used this phrase to designate his opponents). Here is the familiar and central argument of modern evolution, predictably formulated first by a social scientist rather than a natural scientist:
Again, it becomes necessary to combat the views of those scientists who, having probed deep enough to perceive how nature works, think they have found the key to the way man should work, thus ignoring the great distinguishing characteristic of intellectual labor. Having found the claims of those who believe that nature is a product of design and outside contrivance to be unsound, they conclude that there is no design or contrivance, and having seen that results in the organic world are produced through rhythmic differentiations, they infer that results in the superorganic world should be left to the same influences. Nothing could be more false or more pernicious. Scientists of this school, from the weight which their opinions must have, are really doing more to counteract the true tendencies of social progress than those who openly oppose them. All social progress is artificial. It is the consequence of teleological foresight, design, and intellectual labor, which are processes diametrically opposed in principle to the processes of nature. If in learning the law of evolution we must apply it to society, it would have been better to have remained ignorant of that law.169
Because the chief opponents of Social Darwinism were orthodox Christians, this statement indicates that Ward hated the right-wing social Darwinists’ ideas more than he hated Christian orthodoxy.
Who was he challenging? Spencer and Sumner. He was attacking Sumner’s whole methodology of investigating the conflicts found in nature and then transferring this conflict principle to human society. After all, it was Sumner who wrote in What Social Classes Owe to Each Other that “We cannot get a revision of the laws of human life.
We are absolutely shut up to the need and duty, if we would learn how to live happily, of investigating the laws of Nature, and deducing the rules of right living in the world as it is.”170 Not so, announced Ward. “Civilization consists in the wholesale and ruthless trampling down of natural laws, the complete subordination of the cosmical point of view to the human point of view. Man revolutionizes the universe. The essential function of Knowledge is to aid him in accomplishing this revolution.”171 Man must exercise dominion.
Ward set forth the basic conflict between the two forms of evolutionary thought. It is a question of properly interpreting the concept of adaptation, the central idea in Darwinian evolution. No one has made the issues any clearer.
All progress is brought about by adaptation. Whatever view we may take of the cause of progress, it must be the result of correspondence between the organism and the changed environment. This, in its widest sense, is adaptation. But adaptation is of two kinds: One form of adaptation is passive or consensual, the other form is active or provisional. The former represents natural progress, the latter artificial progress. The former results in a growth, the latter in a manufacture. The one is the genetic process, the other a teleological process.172
Ward was clearly a proponent of activism.
How did Ward refute the “passive” evolutionists (Social Darwinists) in the name of Darwin? Ward came up with this fundamental idea: Nature’s processes are wasteful.173 This is completely in accord with Darwin and Wallace. It was their recognition of the enormous pressure of multiplying populations—a multiplication which pressed upon the limits of the environment—which leads to the survival of certain genetically advantaged members of any given species. The failure to survive caught their attention: the millions of extinct species that did not gain the advantage of random genetic changes that would have enabled them to compete successfully in the slowly changing environment, as well as the enormous number of non-survivors in each generation. The idea began with Malthus: the assertion that populations multiply far more rapidly than the food supply necessary to ensure the survival of all members of the multiplying species. Darwin cited Malthus’ observation in the first paragraph of Darwin’s 1858 essay, which appeared in the Linnean Society’s Journal.174
Waste is nature’s way, and waste was Ward’s sworn enemy. “The prodigality of nature is now a well-understood truth in biology, and one that every sociologist and every statesman should not only understand but be able to apply to society, which is still under the complete dominion of these same wasteful laws. No true economy is ever attained until intellectual foresight is brought to bear upon social phenomena. Teleological adaptation is the only economical adaptation.”175 Here was Ward’s battle cry against right-wing social Darwinism: The civil government alone is capable of stamping out unplanned, natural, non-teleological waste.
Where do we find waste? In natural processes and in the free market. Free trade is enormously wasteful. “Free trade is the impersonation of the genetic or developmental process in nature.”176 He also understood that free trade is the archetype of all free market processes, and that defenders of the free market, from David Hume and Adam Smith to Spencer and Sumner, had used free trade to defend the idea of market freedom. Therefore, Ward concluded, market freedom is a great social evil. Do people establish private schools to educate children? Stop this waste of educational resources; the state alone should educate children, for the state alone is teleological, truly teleological. Better no education than private education, because “no system of education not exclusively intrusted to the highest social authority is worthy of the name.”177 Here is a key phrase: the highest social author ity. If true foresight, true design, and true planning are to be brought into the wasteful world of nature and free markets, then the state, as the highest social authority, must bring them. Therefore, “education must be exclusively intrusted to the state. . . .”178 The state is the highest social authority in Ward’s system.
There are other forms of economic waste. Take the example of the railroads. “That unrestricted private enterprise can not be trusted to conduct the railroad system of a rapidly growing country, may now be safely said to be demonstrated.”179 The state should operate them, as is done in Europe. Ward was America’s first sociologist—though hardly the last—who called for the total sovereignty of the state in economic affairs. Here is his reasoning. His reasoning is shared, to one extent or another, by modern evolutionists. “While the railroad problem is just now the most prominent before the world, and best exemplifies both the incapacity of private individuals to undertake vast enterprises like this, and the superior aggregate wisdom of the state in such matters, it is by no means the only one that could be held up in a similar manner and made to conform to the same truth.”180 Ward’s next paragraph presents his basic conclusion: “Competition is to industry what ‘free trade’ is to commerce. They both represent the wasteful genetic method, destroying a large proportion of what is produced, and progressing only by rhythmic waves whose ebb is but just less extensive than their flow.”181
The question arises: Is the state truly economical? Ward’s answer: Unquestionably! “Now, of all the enterprises which the state has thus appropriated to itself, there is not one which it has not managed better and more wisely than it had been managed before by private parties.”182 These include transportation, communications, and education. The greater the profitability of any private enterprise, the more need there is for state control, he concluded.183 In fact, the legitimate purpose of state interference is to make business unprofitable! For instance, the state-operated railroads offer lower rates than private firms did, “which, from the standpoint of the public, is the kernel of the whole matter. The people should look with suspicion upon extremely lucrative industries, since their very sound financial condition proves that they are conducted too much in the interests of the directors and stockholders and too little in that of the public.”184 Ward then set forth the guiding principle of government bureaucrats and state-operated businesses, from his day to ours: Losses testify to efficiency. “The failure of the state to make them lucrative should also be construed as an evidence of the integrity and proper sense of duty of the officers of the state.”185 (Yes, he really wrote this. I am not quoting it out of context. It is the end of the paragraph, and he stated in the next paragraph that it is a fact “that whatever the state does is usually better, if not more economically, done than what is done by individuals.” Then, to make sure his readers got the picture, he wrote on the same page: “It might similarly be shown that all the functions of government are usually performed with far greater thoroughness and fidelity than similar functions intrusted to private individuals.”)
Despite his praise of the state, he admitted that, in his day, the state had not advanced sufficiently to become truly scientific. In the introduction to his book, he freely admitted that governments have always avowed that they were working for the benefit of mankind, but government “has almost without exception failed to realize the results claimed ”186 In fact, Ward went so far as to write this amazing paragraph: “Let us admit, however, as candor dictates, that almost everything that has been said by the advocates of laissez faire about the evils of government is true, and there is much more that has not been said which should be said on the same subject. Let us only take care not to admit the principle in its abstract essence, which is the only hope there is for the ultimate establishment of a teleological progress in society.”187
Why this failure in practice (in volume I, anyway)? Answer: the failure of legislators to understand the laws of society, which are “so deep and occult that the present political rulers have only the vaguest conception of them ”188 The practical answer is to train legislators in the laws of sociological science. “Before progressive legislation can become a success, every legislature must become, as it were, a polytechnic school,189 a laboratory of philosophical research into the laws of society and of human nature.190 (vol. II, p. 249). No legislator is qualified to propose or vote on measures designed to affect the destinies of millions of social units until he masters all that is known of the science of society. Every true legislator must be a sociologist, and have his knowledge of that most intricate of all sciences founded upon organic and inorganic science.”191 Not the philosopher-king, as Plato had hoped for, but the sociologist-legislator, will bring true teleology into the affairs of man.
This brings us to the question of elites. Ward’s conception of teleology requires scientific planning and scientific legislation. There must be experts who provide the necessary teleological leadership. We find in Ward’s book a characteristic dualism between the capacities of the elite and the capacities of the masses. The elite are unquestionably superior. Ward did not say that they are genetically superior, but they are nevertheless superior. Yet the masses outnumber the elite. What the elite must do, then, to gain the confidence of the masses, whose lives will be directed by the elite, is to proclaim their devotion to the needs of the masses. What statists of all shades of opinion have proclaimed as their ultimate goal, Ward set forth in Dynamic Sociology. Ward’s commitment to the elite as a class is also their commitment.
The first step is to assert the beneficence of the elite. They are working for us all. They are the true altruists. “It is only within a few centuries that such [altruistic] sentiments can be said to have had an existence in the world. They now exist in the breasts of a comparatively few, but it is remarkable how much power these few have been able to wield.”192 You see, “The normal condition of the great mass of mankind, even in the most enlightened states, is one of complete indifference to the sufferings of all beyond the circle of their own immediate experience. In moral progress, almost as much as in material progress, it is a relatively insignificant number of minds that must be credited with the accomplishment of all the results attained.”193 This is the grim reality: “A very few minds have furnished the world with all its knowledge, the general mass contributing nothing at all.”194 However, we need not worry about this problem today. Public education is overcoming this uneven distribution of knowledge.195 In fact, public education is making this distribution of knowledge far easier, since this process is “a comparatively simple and easy one.”196 In other words, the elitist planners, best represented by scientists and teachers, are raising the level of knowledge and consciousness possessed by the masses. The elite planners are really working to produce a new evolution, and the masses will be allowed to participate in this elevation of humanity. They will not perish in a non-teleological, natural evolutionary leap. There are two ways of elevating man: (1) scientific propagation of human beings (artificial selection) and (2) rational change of environment, which means an increase of human knowledge.197 “The amount of useful knowledge possessed by the average mind is far below its intellectual capacity ”198 This is a key to evolutionary advance: “That the actual amount of such knowledge originated by man, though doubtless still below his ability to utilize it, is sufficient, if equally distributed, to elevate him to a relatively high position, and to awaken society to complete consciousness.”199
The public schools are therefore fundamental in the teleological evolutionary process. They are the change agents of the new evolution. Competitive private schools are evil.200 The state must have an educational monopoly. “The system of private education, all things considered, is not only a very bad one, but, properly viewed, it is absolutely worse than none, since it tends still further to increase the inequality in the existing intelligence, which is a worse evil than a general state of intelligence would be.”201 Fortunately for society, he argued, private education has no academic standards, since parents control or at least heavily influence private education. Therefore, with respect to private education, “The less society has of it the better, and therefore its very inefficiency must be set down as a blessing.”202 The radical elitism here should be obvious, but Ward was kind enough to spell out the implications (something later elitist evolutionists have not always been willing to do).
Lastly, public education is immeasurably better for society. It is so because it accomplishes the object of education, which private education does not. What society most needs is the distribution of the knowledge in its possession. This is a work which can not be trusted to individuals. It can neither be left to the discretion of children, of parents, nor of teachers. It is not for any of these to say what knowledge is most useful to society. No tribunal short of that which society in its own sovereign capacity shall appoint is competent to decide this question.203
Are there to be teachers? Yes, but very special kinds of teachers, namely, teachers totally independent from “parents, guardians, and pupils. Of the latter he is happily independent. This independence renders him practically free. His own ideas of method naturally harmonize more or less completely with those of the state.”204 True freedom, true independence, is defined as being in harmony with the state. This, of course, is the definition of freedom that Christianity uses with respect to a man’s relation to God.
Was Ward a true egalitarian, a true democrat? Did he really believe that the masses would at long last reach the pinnacle of knowledge, to become equal with the scientific elite? Of course not. Here is the perennial ambivalence of the modern evolutionists’ social theory. Society needs planning and direction, and “society” is mostly made up of individuals, or “the masses.” So, they need direction. They need guidance. They cannot effectively make their own plans and execute them on a free market. Teleology is too important to be left to the in competent masses, acting as individuals on a free market. The masses simply are not intelligent enough. “Mediocrity is the normal state of the human intellect; brilliancy of genius and weight of talent are exceptional. . . . This mass can not be expected to reach the excessive standards of excellence which society sets up. The real need is to devise the means necessary to render mediocrity, such as it is, more comfortable.”205 (Aldous Huxley, brother of Sir Julian Huxley, and grandson of Thomas Huxley, saw this clearly. He wrote Brave New World to describe the techniques usable by some future state to “render mediocrity, such as it is, more comfortable”: drugs, orgiastic religion, and total central control.)
The goal of total educational equality is really a myth. Then why such emphasis on public education? Control! Teachers are to serve as the new predestinators. “One of the most important objects of education, thus systematically conducted, should be to determine the natural characteristics of individual minds. The real work of human progress should be doubled with the same outlay of energy if every member of society could be assigned with certainty to the duty for whose performance he is best adapted Most men are out of place because there has been no systematic direction to the inherent intellectual energies, and the force of circumstances arid time-honored custom have arbitrarily chalked out the field of labor for each.”206 Ward’s next paragraph tells us how we can overcome this lack of external directions.
“The system of education here described affords a means of regulating this important condition on strictly natural principles. . . . A school should be conducted on scientific principles.” Teachers can discover “the true character of any particular mind,” and then a safe conclusion can be drawn “as to what mode of life will be most successful, from the point of view of the interest both of the individual and of society.”207
There is another important function of public education and all other tax-funded information services: the total control over informa tion and its distribution. We cannot make progress compulsory, Ward said. “No law, no physical coercion, from whichever code or from whatever source, can compel the mind to discover principles or invent machines. . . . To influence such action, other means must be employed.”208 Men act in terms of their opinions, “and without changing those opinions it is wholly impossible perceptibly to change such conduct.”209 Here is the planner’s task: “Instill progressive principles, no matter how, into the mind, and progressive actions will result.”210
There are political pitfalls to overcome. “The attempt to change opinions by direct efforts has frequently been made. No one will now deny that coercion applied to this end has been a signal failure.”211 Is there some answer to this dilemma? Can the planner find a way to alter men’s opinions without using coercion? Yes. The planner must restrict access to competing ideas—another form of evil competition. “There is one way, however, in which force may and does secure, not a change of existing opinion, but the acceptance of approved beliefs; but this, so far from weakening the position here taken, affords a capital defense of it. The forcible suppression of the utterance or publication in any form of unwelcome opinions is equivalent to withholding from all undetermined minds the evidence upon which such views rest; and, since opinions are rigidly the products of the data previously furnished the mind, such opinions cannot exist, because no data for them have ever been received.”212 In short, another crucial key to social progress is systematic censorship. He called this the “method of exclusion.” He wrote:
It is simply that true views may as easily be created by this method of exclusion as false ones, which latter is the point of view from which the fact is usually regarded. The more or less arbitrary exclusion of error, i. e., of false data, is to a great degree justifiable, especially where the true data supplied consist of verified experiences, and all the means of reverifying them are left free. But the same end is practically attained by the intentional supply, on a large scale and systematically carried out, of true data without effort to exclude the false. This, however, is the essence of what is here meant by education, which may be regarded as a systematic process for the manufacture of correct opinions. As such, it is of course highly inventive in its character, and the same may be said of all modes of producing desired belief by the method of exclusion.213
The government’s schools guarantee that competing data are excluded. “Assume an adequate system of education to be in force, and the question of the quantity and quality of knowledge in society is no longer an open one.”214 What about the freedom of the teacher? Basically, there is none. “To the teacher duly trained for his work may be left certain questions of method, especially of detail; but even the method must be in its main features unified with a view to the greatest economy in its application. This must necessarily also be the duty of the supreme authority.”215 As Ward said, “The state education implied in the foregoing remarks is, of course, the ideal state education.”216 Of course it is, if you are a teleological evolutionist.
The elites who control the government’s education system are the agents of social change and progress. “The knowledge which enables a very few to introduce all the progressive agencies into civilization tends not in the least to render the mass of mankind, though possessing equal average capacity for such service, capable of contributing any thing to that result.”217 Then what are the masses, really?
In contrast to this small, earnest class, we behold the great swarming mass of thoughtless humanity, filled with highly derivative ideas vaguely and confusedly held together; eagerly devouring the light gossip, current rumor, and daily events of society which are intensely dwelt upon, each in itself, and wholly disconnected from all others; entertaining the most positive opinions on the most doubtful questions; never looking down upon a pebble, a flower, or a butterfly, or up at a star, a planet, or a cloud; wholly unacquainted with any of the direct manifestations of nature, . . . passing through a half-unconscious existence with which they keep no account, and leaving the world in all respects the same as they found it.218
Ward understood quite well that the self-proclaimed scientist and change agent would anger the masses—at least the masses in 1883— and they would ridicule his pretensions. “The unscientific man looks upon the scientific man as a sort of anomaly or curiosity The man of science is deemed whimsical or eccentric. The advanced views which he always holds are apt to be imputed to internal depravity, though his conduct is generally confessed to be exemplary.”219 How does the man of science, the elite determiner of the next evolutionary social advance, rid himself of guilt about his feelings? Perhaps even more important, how should he deflect the suspicion concerning his intentions among these masses of emotional incompetents? One very good way is to tell them that the elite is on their side! Ward did. “It will be a long time before the world will recognize the fundamental truth that it is not to apotheosize a few exceptional intellects, but to render the great proletariat comfortable, that true civilization should aim.”220 It was the self-imposed task of the believers in statist planning by elites to buy off the proletariat by making proletarians comfortable, or at least by promising to make them comfortable soon, just as soon as the evolutionary leap of social being takes place.
Ward, as with all evolutionists, believed in the dominion covenant, or rather a dominion covenant. This covenant rests on elite knowledge. Man elevates himself through knowledge. Man is therefore saved by knowledge. This is Satan’s temptation: Ye shall be as gods, if ye eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Ward wrote: “We see in this brief sketch what a dominion man exercises over all departments of nature, and we may safely conclude that he has not yet reached the maximum limit of his power in this direction. But that power is wholly due to his intellectual faculty, which has guided his act in devising indirect means of accomplishing ends otherwise unattainable.”221 Men are not innately evil. “Mankind, as a whole, are honest.”222 Man’s problem is not sin; it is ignorance. “If all the people knew what course of action was for their best interest, they would certainly pursue that course.”223 It would be possible, through education, to eliminate crime. “The inmates of our prisons are but the victims of untoward circumstances. The murderer has but acted out his education. Would you change his conduct, change his education.”224
What we must do, then, is to raise society’s consciousness. Consciousness, not conscience, is the problem.
After dynamic opinions of the universe, of life, and of man have been formed, it is easy to rise to the position from which society can be contemplated as progressive and subject to a central control. The duties of society toward itself are manifest enough so soon as its true character can be understood The great problem remains how to bring society to consciousness. Assuming it to have been brought to consciousness, the dynamic truths with which it must deal are comparatively plain. The mouthpiece of a conscious society is the legislature.225
In short, the visible symbol of a fully conscious society is the self-con scious divinity of the state. Society must agree about any particular course of action, but once unanimity of opinion is reached—and it is the function of public education to promote it—then debate ends. “Let there be no excuse for anyone to debate a question which has at any time or place, or in any manner, been once definitively answered.”226 Like the laws of the Medes and the Persians, once the divine ruler has made a law, it must not be broken (Dan. 6:8,12).
Does this mean that democracy will allow all men to have a veto power over the decisions of the rulers? Of course not. The elite must continue to rule.
Deliberative bodies rarely enact any measures which involve the indirect method. If individual members who have worked such schemes out by themselves propose them in such bodies, the confusion of discordant minds, coupled with the usual preponderance of inferior ones, almost always defeats their adoption. Such bodies, miscalled deliberative, afford the most ineffective means possible of reaching the maximum wisdom of their individual members. A radical change should be inaugurated in the entire method of legislation. By the present system, not even an average expression of the intelligence of the body is obtainable. The uniform product of such deliberations falls far below this average. True deliberation can never be reached until all partisanship is laid aside, and each member is enabled to work out every problem on strictly scientific principles and by scientific methods, and until the sum total of truth actually obtained is embodied in the enactment. The real work can not be done in open session. The confusion of such assemblies is fatal to all mental application. There need be no open sessions. The labor and thought should be performed in private seclusion, the results reached by others should in this way be calmly compared by each with those reached by himself, and in a general and voluntary acquiescence by at least a majority in that which really conforms with the truth in each case should be deliberately embodied as law. The nature of political bodies should be made to conform as nearly as possible with that of scientific bodies 227
What, then, becomes of unanimity, of open covenants openly arrived at (to cite President Woodrow Wilson’s unheeded principle of diplomacy)? It should be obvious. When Ward said that he wanted unanimity, he really meant scientific planning without opposition. “The legislature must, therefore, as before maintained, be compared with the workshop of the inventor.”228 There is no opposition to the inventor in his workshop, it should be pointed out.
Scientists must lead the legislators. Men of informed opinion must tell them what needs to be done. Then the legislators can pass laws that will compel the masses to follow the lead of the scientists into a new realm of “comfort.” Ward was quite explicit about this.
The problem is a difficult and complicated one. While legislators as a class are far behind the few progressive individuals by whose dynamic actions social progress is secured, it is also true that, as a general rule, they are somewhat in advance of the average constituent, sometimes considerably so. This is seen in many quasi-scientific enterprises that they quietly continue, which their constituents, could they know of them, would promptly condemn. The question, therefore, arises whether the legislators may not find means, as a work of supererogation, to place their constituents upon the highway to a condition of intelligence which, when attained, will in turn work out the problem of inaugurating a scientific legislature and a system of scientific legislation.229
With these words, he ended chapter XI, “Action.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines “supererogation” as “The performance of good works beyond what God commands or requires, which are held to constitute a state of merit which the Church may dispense to others to make up for their deficiencies.” Ward may have known what he was writing; the state, as the dispenser of salvation, needs saints to build up merit to pass along to the proletariat, who can do nothing by themselves. Scientists and legislators are the saints.
When Ward wrote “society,” he meant the state. “When we speak of society, therefore, we must, for all practical purposes, confine the conception to some single automatic nation or state or, at the widest, to those few leading nations whose commercial relations have to a considerable extent cemented their material interests and unified their habits of thought and modes of life.” Yet even this is too loose a definition, he wrote. “Only where actual legislation is conducted can there be said to exist a complete social organism. Wherever any such complete social organism exists, it is possible to conceive of true scientific legislation.”230 Where there is no scientific legislation, therefore, there is no true society.
There was one, and only one, area of life where laissez faire was said to be legitimate. That was the area we call morality. Morality “is a code which enforces itself, and therefore requires no priesthood and no manual. And strangely enough, here, where alone laissez-faire is sound doctrine, we find the laissez faire school calling loudly for ‘regulation.’”231 For example (we could easily have predicted this example), “It is a remarkable fact that loose conduct between the sexes, which is commonly regarded as the worst form of immorality, seems to have no influence whatever upon the essential moral condition of those races among whom it prevails.”232 (When J. D. Unwin’s studies showing the conflict between polygamy and cultural progress were published in the 1920s and 1930s, they were systematically ignored. The fornicators and adulterers who are the self-proclaimed scientific elite prefer not to have this dogma of the irrelevance of adultery shattered by historical research.233)
Ward rejected the non-teleological (personal and individual teleology) Darwinism of the right-wing Social Darwinists. He rejected entirely their thesis that social progress must involve personal misery and competition. That is the way of nature, not mankind, Ward argued. A proper society, meaning state, “aims to create conditions under which no suffering can exist.” This may involve the coercive redistribution of wealth by the state, for a good social order “is ready even to sacrifice temporary enjoyment for greater future enjoyment—the pleasure of a few for that of the masses.”234 Sumner was correct when he described this sort of social policy: “The agents who are to direct the State action are, of course, the reformers and philanthropists. Their schemes, therefore, may always be reduced to this type—that A and B decide what C shall do for D I call C the Forgotten Man, because I have never seen that any notice was taken of him in any of the discussions.”235 Ward called citizen C “the rich,” and let it go at that. His intellectual heirs have not improved much on this strategy, especially when they run for public office.
We must understand precisely what Ward was trying to create: a totalitarian state. As he wrote, “the present empirical, anti-progressive institution, miscalled the art of government, must be transformed into a central academy of social science, which shall stand in the same relation to the control of men in which a polytechnic institute stands to the control of nature.”236 He was a defender of despotism.
There is one final feature of his system which bears mentioning. The basis of Darwin’s analysis of evolution through natural selection was Malthus’ observation that species reproduce too fast for their environments. Then only a few will survive, concluded Darwin and Wallace. Ward accepted this as it pertained to nature. But man is a new evolutionary life form, and man’s ways are not nature’s ways. Man’s successful heirs are not supposed to be those individuals who by special genetic advantages or inherited wealth will be able to multiply their numbers. Man, unlike the animals, advances by means of state planning. If society is to prevent suffering, as Ward said is necessary, then the multiplication of those who receive charity must be prohibited. (This was the same problem that baffled Spencer.) “This fact points to the importance of all means which tend to prevent this result.”237 Three children are probably the maximum allowable number. “In an ignorant community this could not be enforced, but in a sufficiently enlightened one it could and would be.”238 In short, “What society needs is restriction of population, especially among the classes and at the points where it now increases most rapidly.”239 But who are these classes? The masses, of course, since the present moral code (1883) of having large families “is tacitly violated by intelligent people, but enforced by the ignorant and the poor, a state of things which powerfully counteracts all efforts to enlighten the masses.”240 The state needs to provide universal education to the masses to uplift them, but there are so many that the state’s resources are strained to the limit. The answer: population control. In short, in Ward’s version of the dominion covenant, “be fruitful and multiply” must be abolished, and the state, not individuals acting in voluntary cooperation, is to exercise dominion over nature. The rise of the family planning movement in Ward’s era, and the appearance of zero population growth advocates in the mid-1960s, can be explained by means of the same arguments used in understanding Ward’s humanistic version of the dominion covenant.
Ward proclaimed in the name of man-directed evolution that which Rushdoony described as the society of Satan. Rushdoony’s four points apply quite well to the outline of the society sketched by Ward.
First, it is held that man is not guilty of his sin, not responsible for his lawlessness, for the sources of his guilt are not personal but social and natural Second, a society is demanded in which it is unnecessary for man to be good. Everything is to be provided so that man may attain true blessedness, a problem-free life Third, a society is demanded in which it is impossible for men to be bad. This is a logical concomitant of the second demand. It is a demand that there be no testing Fourth, a society is demanded in which it is impossible for men to fail. There must be no failure in heaven or on earth. All men must be saved, all students must pass, all men are employable, all men are entitled to rights. As Satan stated it baldly in the wilderness, giving in short form the program for the “good” State, “If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” Make it unnecessary for man to work, unnecessary for man to be good, impossible for man to be bad. Provide man with such a cushion of social planning, the temptations asserted, that man might neither hunger nor thirst, work or suffer, believe or disbelieve, succeed or fail, be good or evil. Let his every need be met and his world ordered in terms of his wishes. Let it be a trouble-free world, cradle-to-grave security; let there be no failure. No failure is tolerable, and none recognized, save one, God’s, for having dared to create a world in which we can suffer for our sins, in which we can be tried and tested, in which we can be good or evil, in which we can and must be men. Let us through communism, socialism or our welfare state construct a world better than God’s, a world in which failure is impossible and man is beyond good and evil.241
What are some of the basic themes of the society of Satan, the evolutionist’s new paradise, as described by Ward? What are the principles—cosmological principles—by which such a society is deduced? Here is a brief summary:
No teleology (purpose) in the natural realm (I, 57; II, 32).
Human consciousness is teleological (II, 9).
Human teleology is opposed to laissez faire (1, 55).
Man now directs nature and evolution (I, 29; II, 89).
The state directs social evolution (1, 37).
The state is society (II, 397).
Science is the basis of progress (II, 497, 507).
A scientific elite directs progress (II, 504, 535).
The masses are thoughtless (II, 506, 600).
The masses can be taught (II, 598, 602).
The state must monopolize education (II, 572, 589, 602).
Censorship is mandatory (II, 547).
Nature wastes; man should not (II, 494).
Competition is wasteful (1, 74; II, 576, 584).
Competition is laissez faire (I, 74).
Mankind is honest (II, 508).
Man’s problem is lack of knowledge (II, 238).
Ignorance produces crime (II, 241).
Dominion is by means of the intellect (II, 385).
Government is to be founded on secrecy (II, 395).
Dissent can be illegitimate (II, 407).
Morality is strictly an individual matter (II, 373).
Scientists are selfless (II, 583).
Believers in God’s teleology are immoral (II, 508).
State administration is almost always better (II, 579).
Profitless management is honest management (II, 582).
Population control is mandatory (II, 307, 465).
The masses must be made comfortable (II, 368).
The social goal is zero suffering (II, 468).
The society of Satan is the kingdom of autonomous man. This is the continuing theme of post-Darwin evolutionists. Again, let us see what Ward had to say.
In his pursuit of information with regard to the nature of the universe and his position in it, he must be deterred by no fears. If he can evade the action of natural laws, he has no other source of apprehension. Nature has neither feeling nor will, neither consciousness nor intelligence. He can lay open her bowels and study her most delicate tissues with entire impunity. Except as the great creative mother of all things, she is absolutely passive toward all sentient beings. Man’s right to probe and penetrate the deepest secrets of the universe is absolute and unchallenged. It is only he himself who has ever ventured to question it He has been the servant of Nature too long. All true progress has been measured by his growing mastery over her, which has in turn been strictly proportional to his knowledge of her truths.242
Man is autonomous, the rightful master over nature. Here is autonomous man’s self-assigned dominion covenant: “This is why, in the second place, man should assume toward Nature the attitude of a master, or ruler.”243 Man can seek exhaustive knowledge and therefore total power. He can claim the right to attain the attributes of God.
Here is evolutionist’s creed. The universe was not created by God. It was not designed for man. Man must be thrown into the mud of insignificance only for a moment—to sever him from the idea of a personal God—and then he can become master of the earth. Satan also tempted Jesus along these same lines: Worship me, and all this world shall be yours (Luke 4:7).244 Ward allowed man only one brief paragraph to grovel in the mud of insignificance:
Anthropocentric ideas are essentially immoral. They puff their holders with conceit and arrogance, and lead to base, selfish abuses of power, warped by interest and passion. The old geocentric theory had the same tendency. All narrow views about nature not only contract in the mind, but dwarf and disfigure the moral nature of man. It is only when the eyes commence to open to the true vastness of the universe and the relative insignificance of human achievements, that it begins to be thought not worth while to boast, to oppress, or to persecute.245
Once freed of God and meaning—personal significance that is established in terms of the decree of God and man’s status as God’s image-bearer—then it is up, out of the mud, and on to the stars.246
Man cannot escape the dominion covenant. It is inherent to his being. He can only modify it. The evolutionists also operate in terms of Genesis 1:28.247 Let us reread the words: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” The entire scheme of modern post-Darwin evolution is built upon the premise that animals do, in fact, multiply to the limits of their environments.
Post-Darwin scientists also argue that by means of mastering the scientific laws of evolution, man can have dominion over the creation, including other men. When men start talking about “Man taking control of man,” as the C. S. Lewis character warned in That Hideous Strength, 248 watch out: some men are planning to take control of others. But now that man has achieved mastery, or is about to, he must stop reproducing so fast, stop multiplying, so that he can demonstrate to himself that he is no longer governed, as the animals are, by the Malthusian law of population growth. Man must not fulfill this part of the dominion covenant, for a process of compound population growth points inevitably to the limits of the environment, which is finite. It means that man will face either the limits to population growth—a sign of his own finitude—or else the limit of time, namely, the day of judgment. Both limits thwart autonomous, evolution-directing man. Man must thereby voluntarily limit his population, meaning that some men—the elite—will have to pass laws limiting the population growth of the stubborn, traditional, uneducated masses. Man must exercise dominion through genetic engineering, power politics, centralized economic planning, public education, and other techniques of control. He must act as God does, not multiplying but directing, not pressing against the limits of a finite environment, but mastering it for his own ends. And, to paraphrase Lewis, when you hear men speak about mastering the environment for the benefit of man, watch out: it will be the confiscation of the productivity of the environment for the uses of the elitist planners.
The overwhelming intellectual success of the philosophy of interventionism has been due, in large part, to the greater consistency the logic of interventionism has with post-Darwin evolutionism. Free market economists who cling to evolutionism have suffered an academic fate similar to that suffered by the right-wing Social Darwinists, namely, their case for the reliability of spontaneous market forces cannot compete with the case for man’s directing hand through state power. Men want meaning, purpose, and confidence in their own survival. While Mises and Hayek rejected the old “dog eat dog, man eat man” philosophy of right-wing Social Darwinism, they did not succeed in convincing the modern evolutionists of the validity of the competitive, unhampered market. That sort of institutional arrangement does not seem to be in synchronization with the modern evolutionists’ vision of man-directed, elite-directed, teleological evolution.
Israel Kirzner, Mises’ disciple, wrote his theory of capital in terms of teleology. He said that “The principal point to be emphasized is that capital goods, thus defined, are distinguished in that they fall neatly into place in a teleological framework.”249 He was speaking of individuals’ teleological frameworks, however, not Man’s teleological framework.
Modern economists want the luxury of using statistical aggregates in their work. Kirzner demonstrated that the methodological presupposition undergirding all economic aggregates is the premise, stated or unstated, that there exists a single planning agent, with a single integrated plan. The quest for that single planning agent, with his single integrated plan, is enhanced when we operate in terms of the assumption, stated or unstated, that this planning mind does, in fact, have to exist. Couple this quest, whether implicit or explicit, with modern evolutionism’s longing for a new evolution—the emergence of a new personal sovereign who can offer this impersonal, meaningless universe a comprehensive plan with comprehensive meaning—and you have created serious problems for the defenders of the free market.
The case for the free market as an impersonal, spontaneous, unplanned institution that can nevertheless successfully integrate the multitudinous plans of acting men is generally at odds with the intellectual spirit of the twenty-first century. Men are seeking cosmic purpose, having been told that collective mankind is capable of imposing such purpose by means of scientific planning and even genetic engineering. They are less likely to abandon this quest in exchange for the free market’s decentralized planning mechanism, its freely fluctuating price system, and its system of economic calculation for private individuals. The price that post-Darwin evolutionists are asked to pay, religiously speaking, is simply too high. In short, the defenders of the free market have priced themselves out of secular humanism’s marketplace of ideas.
This is not to say that every modern economist is self-consciously a defender of the kind of planning outlined by Lester Frank Ward. Not very many economists are that confident about centralized economic planning. This is also not to say that the majority of men, or even a majority of trained social scientists, understand fully the sleight-of-hand operation of modern evolutionism, with its shift from purposeless origins to man-directed evolutionary process. Nevertheless, the climate of opinion in the twenty-first century is strongly influenced by this sleight-of-hand operation, and its conclusions regarding the sovereignty of planning over collective mankind have permeated the thinking of those who probably do not fully understand the epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions of these conclusions. The fact is, autonomous men want their godhead unified, and the hydra-headed, impersonal, spontaneous institution we call the free market is not sufficiently conscious and purposeful to satisfy the longings of modern men for cosmic personalism, meaning humanism’s version of cosmic personalism, meaning deified Man.
We should not hope to succeed in making a successful case for the free market by using the logic of Kant, the logic of Darwin, or the logic of Mises, Hayek, Friedman, and other Kantian Darwinists. We should not hope to convert modern evolutionists to the free market ideology if we ground that defense in terms of a less consistent version of evolutionism. The older Darwinist heritage simply does not gain large numbers of adherents, precisely because modern evolutionists are involved in a religious quest for man-directed cosmic evolution, and this quest is at odds with the logic of decentralized markets.
If the case for the free market is to be successful in the long run, it must be made in terms of a fully consistent philosophy of creationism and theocentric cosmic personalism. The case for the free market must be made in terms of the doctrines of divine providence, biblical revelation, the image of God in man, and the dominion covenant. While this intellectual defense may not impress today’s humanistic evolutionists, including Christian scholars whose methodology is still grounded in humanistic evolutionism, it will enable Christians to have a foundation that will survive the predictable disruptions of the economic, political, intellectual, and social universe of the modern evolutionists. We must not try to establish the intellectual foundations of the kingdom of God in terms of the presuppositions of a doomed evolutionist religion. We may be able to use the conclusions of selected secular economists, when these conclusions are in conformity with biblical premises, but it is we who must pick and choose in terms of the Bible, not they. We must abandon evolutionary presuppositions in every area of human thought, including economics.
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
Published by:
Point Five Press
P.O. Box 2778
Dallas, GA 30132
All rights reserved. Written permission must be secured from the publisher to use or reproduce any part of this book, except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles.
Printed in the United States of America.
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)