To mark the 100th anniversary of the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, this website compiles some articles by the late Gary North (1942-2022) concerning that trial and the cultural forces that gave rise to it and resulted from it.

Phase 4: Whose Sanctions?

DARWINISM, DEMOCRACY, AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Christians do not object to freedom of speech; they believe that Biblical truth can hold its own in a fair field. They concede the right of ministers to pass from belief to agnosticism or atheism, but they contend that they should be honest enough to separate themselves from the ministry and not attempt to debase the religion they profess. . . . It is time for Christians to protect religion from its most insidious enemy.
William Jennings Bryan (1922)⁽¹⁾

With these words, the Great Commoner, three times the Democratic Party's nominee for President of the United States,⁽²⁾ former Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson,⁽³⁾ and the most famous ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.,⁽⁴⁾ launched in the New York Times an attack on Darwinism and on the liberal clergymen who held Darwin's views on human evolution.

Bryan's New York Times article was a warning shot to Presbyterian liberals, although he did not identify his own denomination as a source of the problem. Over two decades of relative public peace within the Church were about to be brought to a close. A new era of doctrinal, personal, and rhetorical confrontation was about to begin. It would last for a decade and a half, and would end with the exodus of the most doctrinally Calvinistic members of the denomination and the creation of two new ecclesiastical organizations by those members: the Orthodox Presbyterian Church⁽⁵⁾ in 1936 and the Bible Presbyterian Church in 1938.

As we shall see, however, Bryan's challenge to theological liberals was peripheral to his challenge to the American Establishment in the broadest sense. This battle would soon extend far beyond the narrow confines of the institutional Church.

Editors Bearing Gifts

As a politician, he should have been suspicious of any request by the editors of the New York Times to give him free space on page 1 of Section VII of the Sunday edition. He should have asked himself: "What's the catch?" The offer was bait, and he bit. He had little choice: to have refused would have played into the editors' hands. "We gave him a chance to respond, but he did not." Three years later, the hook attached to this bait led to the destruction of his reputation and the beginning of a half-century rout of the fundamentalist movement in America.

The editors had an agenda. It was initially defensive, for Bryan had an offensive agenda. His agenda had only recently been manifested by political events. Politics, not theology as such, was what caught the Times' attention. Publishing Bryan's essay also offered the added benefit of being able to sell Bryan's publisher advertising space for Bryan's recently published book, In His Image.

Bryan in 1921 had been invited to deliver the annual Sprunt lectures at the "other" Union: Union Theological Seminary of Richmond, Virginia, a conservative Southern Presbyterian seminary.⁽⁶⁾ The previous year, Machen had delivered the lectures that became The Origin of Paul's Religion. In October, Bryan delivered his lectures, which were published as In His Image.⁽⁷⁾ Chapter 4, "The Origin of Man," was subsequently published as a separate book, The Menace of Darwinism.⁽⁸⁾

The revival of confrontational rhetoric came from outside the Presbyterian Church. Political modernists initiated it. Theological modernists inside the Church merely followed the lead of their colleagues on the outside. Modern readers may be amazed at the level of vituperation. It is important to understand that basic to the strategy of the liberals has been the promulgation of a lie, still repeated: "The conservatives were guilty of excessive rhetoric." Theological conservatives were subsequently blamed by modernists and their spiritual heirs, who have written the history books, for what the modernists in fact adopted as a primary tactic: a level of confrontational rhetoric beyond the limits of acceptable public discourse, i.e., acceptable to liberals when used by conservatives, which the conservatives in fact did not use. What prompted this revival of rhetoric was a political issue that went to the very heart of the American experiment in the separation of Church and State: control over the content of public education.

Bluegrass Democracy

Between 1921 and 1929, 37 anti-evolution bills were introduced into state legislatures.⁽⁹⁾ These bills forbade the teaching of evolution in taxpayer-funded schools. In 1917, this demand had been made before the Kentucky legislature, and in 1921, a rider to this effect was attached to an appropriations bill in South Carolina.⁽¹⁰⁾ Kentucky began to debate such a law in early January, 1922. Bryan addressed a joint session of the legislature on January 19, devoting the second half of his speech to the question of teaching Darwinism in the public schools and universities supported by government funds. Representative George Ellis introduced such a bill a few days later.⁽¹¹⁾ Soon, Bryan received invitations to speak before the legislatures of Tennessee, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Ohio, Wisconsin, West Virginia, and Florida.⁽¹²⁾

This threat of the removal of tax subsidies for Darwinian evolution was regarded by modernists as a sword of Damocles over their collective heads. At the public university level, this was indeed a major threat. At the public school level, this threat was not yet a major threat, for American high schools rarely taught Darwinism. High school textbooks did not discuss Darwin's thesis to any appreciable degree, nor did they promote creationism. This was still true in the centenary of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1959. Hermann J. Muller, Nobel laureate in physiology, complained in The Humanist in 1959, "One Hundred Years Without Darwin Are Enough."⁽¹³⁾ We must bring the truths of Darwinism to the little child, he said.⁽¹⁴⁾ But the public school textbook publishers in the United States are too fearful of losing sales to promote Darwinism. "Are we then to allow the urge for profits to keep our children and, through them, all our people benighted and a hundred years out of date in their world view?"⁽¹⁵⁾ What was true in 1959 was even more true in 1922.

The modernists knew that the vast majority of the nation did not accept Darwinian evolution in 1922. This is why they greatly feared democracy on this issue, and feared Bryan above all, for he still could rally large numbers of the Democratic Party's troops, millions of whom who were in the pews of conservative churches on Sunday morning.

The Attack Begins

On February 2, the Times ran a story, "Darwinian Theory Stirs Up Kentucky." Support for the bill was evenly divided in the state, the Times asserted, with rural areas favoring it and cities against it. The battle had been going on for months, the story reported; then Bryan came to speak. The ex-commissioner of education told the press: "Such legislation belongs to the dark ages." He asked rhetorically: Why not teach the flat earth or a stationary earth?⁽¹⁶⁾ These two themes--medievalism and the flat earth--were to be invoked repeatedly in the attacks that followed.

On the same page, the Times reprinted a letter from Columbia University's president, Nicholas Murray Butler. Butler served as president of Columbia from 1901 to 1945. He had been the founder of the Industrial Education Association, which later established Columbia Teachers College, the most influential teachers institution in the United States. He served as Chairman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1925 until 1945. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.⁽¹⁷⁾ In short, he was a major figure in American education. He had written his letter to the president of the University of Kentucky, who had issued a national plea for assistance.

Butler's rhetoric never dealt seriously with Bryan's argument, namely, that the voters of a state can legitimately determine what their tax money is spent for. Butler's rhetoric was entirely specious. "The bill, as you describe it, seems to me to lack vigor and completeness. It should, I think, be amended before passage to include in its prohibition the use of any book in which the word evolution is defined, used or referred to in any way. It might even be desirable to include a prohibition of books that use any of the letters by which the word evolution could be spelled, since in this way some unscrupulous person might, by ingenious effort, evade the salutary provisions of the law." He then compared the bill with Soviet tyranny: "I take it for granted that the introducer of the bill is in close communion with the rulers of Soviet Russia, since he is faithfully reproducing one of their fundamental policies." This was all rhetoric and no logic.

Democracy Has Limits

The next day, the Times ran an editorial that did not shy away from the implications for democracy posed by the bill. The Times repudiated democracy. It invoked the flat-earth analogy. "Kentucky Rivals Illinois" began with an attack on someone in Illinois named Wilbur G. Voliva, who did believe in the flat earth. Next, it switched to Kentucky. "Stern reason totters on her seat when asked to realize that in this day and country people with powers to decide educational questions should hold and enunciate opinions such as these." To banish the teaching of evolution is the equivalent of banishing the teaching of the multiplication table.⁽¹⁸⁾

Three days later, the Times followed with another editorial, appropriately titled, "Democracy and Evolution." It began: "It has been recently argued by a distinguished educational authority that the successes of education in the United States are due, in part at least, `to its being kept in close and constant touch with the people themselves.' What is happening in Kentucky does not give support to this view."⁽¹⁹⁾ The Progressives' rhetoric of democracy was nowhere to be found in the Times' articles on Bryan and creationism, for the editors suspected that Bryan had the votes. For the Progressives, democracy was a tool of social change, not an unbreakable principle of civil government; a slogan, not a moral imperative. Though often cloaked in religious terms, democracy was merely a means to an end. What was this end? Control over other people's money and, if possible, the minds of their children.

The Divinization of Man by Default

Then the writer got to the theological heart of the matter: the divinization of man by default. Two theologians had sent telegrams to the president of the University of Kentucky complaining that Bryan's views dishonor God and man. "This will pain Mr. Bryan, who seems to hold that it is dishonorable to man as well as to God that man should have been created mediately out of the dust of the earth." But Bryan's creationist point was only that it dishonors God to identify hypothetically impersonal forces of nature--the only forces Darwin and his heirs believe in prior to the advent of purposeful man--as the source of creation.

This was only the beginning. In the Sunday supplement for February 5, John M. Clarke was given an opportunity to comment on the Kentucky case. He was the Director of the State Museum at Albany. His rhetoric returned to the important theme of the weakness of democracy in the face of ignorant voters. I cite the piece at length because readers are unlikely to have a copy of this article readily at hand, and when it comes to rhetoric, summaries rarely do justice to the power of words. It began:

Our sovereign sister Kentucky, where fourteen and one half men in every hundred can neither read nor write, is talking about adding to the mirth of the nation in these all too joyless days by initiating legislation to put a end to that "old bad devil" evolution. Luther threw an ink bottle at one of his kind; the Kentucky legislators are making ready to throw a statute which will drive this serpent of the poisoned sting once and for all beyond the confines of the State, and not a school wherein this mischiefmaker is harbored shall have 1 cent of public moneys.

He identified as the source of this bill "the distinguished Chautauqua savant, William Jennings Bryan," a sneer at both Chautauqua and Bryan. Chautauqua was the major lecture circuit for the nation. Founded by a pair of Methodists in 1874, Chautauqua soon became America's most successful early experiment in adult education prior to World War I. By 1918, 300,000 people were enrolled in 10,000 local circles, receiving an informal but structured education.⁽²⁰⁾ It had been run by the theological modernist, William Rainey Harper, from 1883 to 1897. (Beginning in 1892, he also organized the Rockefellers' University of Chicago.)⁽²¹⁾ Chautauqua openly promoted the science of evolution.⁽²²⁾ So, Clarke's sneer against Chautauqua was social, not ideological.

Invoking Old Testament language, Clarke predicted that the legislators "will smite the enemy hip and thigh." Why not amend the state's constitution and make the idea of evolution illegal? Again, he returned to the theme of the threat of democracy:

When the majority of the voters, of which fourteen and a half out of each hundred can neither read nor write, have settled this matter, if they are disposed to do the right thing they will not stop at evolution. There is a fiction going about through the schools that the earth is round and revolves around the sun, and if Frankfort [Kentucky] is to be and remain the palladium of reason and righteousness, this hideous heresay [heresy] must also be wiped out.

Here it was again: the flat earth. It has been a favorite rhetorical device used against biblical creationists for a long time. The claim that pre-Columbus medieval scholars regarded the earth as flat, it turns out, is entirely mythical--a myth fostered in modern times. Jeffrey Burton Russell, the distinguished medieval historian, has disposed of this beloved myth of the flat earth.⁽²³⁾ The modernists who have invoked this myth have not done their homework.

They have also not done their homework on medieval science in general, which was extremely sophisticated. This has been proven by the French historian of science and theoretical physicist, Pierre Duhem (1861-1916), whose ten volumes on the subject are exhaustive: Le système du monde. The first five volumes were in print in 1917; the second five volumes appeared in 1954-59. In between, the French academic community and publishing world suppressed their publication because they undermined one of the most cherished myths of the Enlightenment, namely, that medieval science was "medieval." The story of this exercise in humanist academic censorship has been written by his biographer, physicist and historian Stanley Jaki.⁽²⁴⁾ Even today, the only favorable references to Duhem that I have ever seen, other than in Jaki's writings, are two brief sentences in Robert Nisbet's History of the Idea of Progress (1980).⁽²⁵⁾

The theological issue for Clarke was, ultimately, the divinization of man by default, and the divinization of nature: capital N. "It may be that the conception of the continuity and unity of life from its starting point on earth up to the climax it has reached in man does magnify the place of humanity in the scheme of Nature. The doctrine of evolution predicates this, teaches that out of the struggles of the ages man has stepped forth as the supreme result, not a finished product, far from that, but with always the glory of a growing hope for something better beyond. It would seem as though no more inspiring thought could be imparted to youth. . . ." Here was a vision of autonomous man's progress, and Bryan was calling this into question. Bryan believed in progress, and democratic progress above all; he just did not believe in man's autonomy.

The Rural Masses

Then it was back to the rhetoric of contempt for the masses, and the elevation of the scientific elite. "It would seem reasonable to assume that the demonstration of the fundamental doctrine of all Nature, inorganic as well as organic, might well be left to those who have brought to bear upon it the highest intellectual refinements. But it is a pleasing thought to fancy the erudite Nebraskan in academic cap and--gown, of course; we almost said bells, inspiring the Democratic majority of Kentucky to vote that Evolution isn't so! and to penalize any one who dares say it is! It is by such means as this that civilization advances and America assures her own high place among the cultured nations of the world."⁽²⁶⁾ The allusion to cap and bells--the clown's costume in the medieval world--was not all that clever, but it surely revealed Clarke's contempt for Bryan, his democratic politics, and his Christianity.

On February 9, another Times editorial cited the Louisville Courier-Journal as having identified Bryan as the initiator behind the bill. Bryan had raised up "ignorant fanatics" who had "intimidated" legislators. The Times warned: "Kentucky is not the only State in the Union, by any means, for whose village theologians the name of Darwin is still one with which to scare children. . . ." A nice rhetorical flourish: "village theologians." Here was a theme that carried through subsequent Times editorials to the media's coverage of the Scopes trial three years later to the screenplay of Inherit the Wind: rural Americans as ignorant fanatics, and the readers of urban newspapers as intelligent people. The Times identified the Courier-Journal as the spokesman for "intelligent Kentuckians."⁽²⁷⁾

Challenging the Flow of Funds

In his essay, Bryan thanked the editor for having invited him to contribute. He need not have bothered. If ever there was a set-up, it was this.

After surveying at some length why he did not believe that Darwin's hypothesis was scientifically correct (Darwin's theory of sexual selection, already a scientific embarrassment in Bryan's day, was one reason),⁽²⁸⁾ he got to the heart of the matter from his point of view: democratic politics. "The Bible has in many places been excluded from the schools on the ground that religion should not be taught by those paid by public taxation. If this doctrine is sound, what right have the enemies of religion to teach irreligion in the public schools? If the Bible cannot be taught, why should Christian taxpayers permit the teaching of guesses that make the Bible a lie?" This surely was a legitimate question, one which has yet to be answered in terms of a theory of strict academic neutrality. But Paxton Hibben, in his 1929 biography of Bryan (Introduction by Charles A. Beard), dismissed this argument as "a specious sort of logic. . . . [Government-funded] schools, he reasoned, were the indirect creations of the mass of citizens. If this were true, those same citizens could control what was taught in them."⁽²⁹⁾ If this were true: the subjunctive mood announced Paxton's rejection of Bryan's premise--spoken on behalf humanist educators, from Horace Mann in Massachusetts to this week's multi-million dollar battle over selecting state-approved high school textbooks. When it comes to a threat to their self-accredited monopoly over public education, humanists can spot a "specious" argument at 300 yards. They reply, in rigorous logical fashion, "Citizens are morally and legally obligated to pay us to teach their children whatever we want to teach them, especially if they should disagree with what we teach."

Christians fund denominational colleges, Bryan pointed out. They pay to have their view of religion taught. He then raised a suggestion that, more than any other, was as welcome to the modernists, both political and theological, as a looking into a mirror was to Bela Lugosi's Dracula: "If atheists want to teach atheism, why do they not built [build] their own schools and employ their own teachers?" This was the heart of the matter, and remains so. He repeated this argument in his Preface to The Menace of Darwinism (p. 6). The thought of self-funding has always been abhorrent to liberals. Accepting rich men's money, yes; access to tithers' money and taxpayers' money, yes; but liberals avoid self-funding at all costs because it costs so much.⁽³⁰⁾

A year later, in a speech to West Virginia lawmakers, Bryan argued that scientists had no rightful claim on the taxpayers' money. It is not an infringement on freedom of speech for a state legislature to refuse to fund ideas that taxpayers oppose. He then uttered the words, more than any other words, that describe why education has been a political battle zone for two centuries around the world: "The hand that writes the pay check rules the school."⁽³¹⁾ It was this doctrine, more than any other, which professional educators had to destroy through court action, since they found it embarrassing to oppose it publicly, given liberalism's official commitment to democracy. Clarence Darrow's defense strategy at the Scopes trial in 1925 was to get the jury to declare Scopes guilty, so that the defense lawyers could appeal the decision to a higher court and get it reversed. This same strategy undergirded the secularization of American public education after 1960--which at last overturned the state laws that made possible the Scopes decision.

Other People's Money

The supreme judicial issue was this: control over other people's money. Bryan's attack was a direct shot at the heart of the modernist worldview and program, both political modernism and theological. The central assertion of modernism, from Lester Frank Ward's Dynamic Sociology (1883) to the present, is this: the moral authority and legal right an educated elite that understands the processes of Darwinian evolution to commandeer the instruments of political coercion, as well as public funds gained through the threat of State coercion, in order to guide scientifically the evolution of the social order. This was American Progressivism's main agreed-upon doctrine. It was also the non-negotiable demand of theological liberals, who applied modernism's doctrine of the commandeering of State assets to Church assets, irrespective of the theological confessions of laymen whose money funded the Church. The divisions that arose within modernism were many, but they all had to do with the political battle over the distribution of the loot.

If Bryan was successful in this political project, modernism could lose the war. Modernists understood, just as Unitarian Horace Mann had understood in the 1830's, that the public school system is America's only established Church.⁽³²⁾ "Perhaps the most striking power that the churches surrendered under religious freedom was control over public education," writes Church historian Sidney Mead.⁽³³⁾ Bryan was threatening to reclaim this power and reclaim America's future by means of the method that Ward had said is the best way to control other people's thinking: by excluding certain ideas from discussion in the public schools.⁽³⁴⁾ Ward called this the method of exclusion (his italics). "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."⁽³⁵⁾ Bryan assumed that in what he called a fair fight, the Christians would win. By excluding both creationism and Darwinism from the public schools, he believed that the Christians would win the debate. This was naive on his part, for the assumption of educational neutrality with respect to the Bible is inherently anti-theistic, but the modernists were determined not to permit Bryan's test.

The debate over Darwinism in the public schools was an aspect of the politics of plunder. The politics of plunder came early in America, and it came at the very heart of the Puritan society: the State's establishment of Church and school. Here was where the flow of ideas would be controlled through control over the flow of funds. The New England Puritans had imposed this control system by 1647. Ward had merely extended the Puritans' strategy in the name of Darwinism. New England in 1635 made local church attendance compulsory, and in 1638 legislated compulsory financial support of these churches.⁽³⁶⁾ In 1642, the General Court of New Haven established a local school; Hartford followed this example and allocated funds for its school.⁽³⁷⁾ In 1647, the General Court of Massachusetts passed a law mandating that every town of 50 or more inhabitants establish a school, and that tax money be used to pay for these schools if parents refused.⁽³⁸⁾ Connecticut imitated this statute in 1650.⁽³⁹⁾ Residents, in short, were threatened with civil violence if they refused to support Church and school with their money and their persons, whether or not they believed in what was being taught. They had to attend Church, and their children had to attend school, or the State would impose negative sanctions. While the compulsory local church attendance laws were not systematically enforced in New England after 1650,⁽⁴⁰⁾ the other elements of coercion remained. With the coming of disestablishment laws from 1776 through the 1820's, the churches were cut out of the distribution of the loot, but increases in both the level of funding and the level of coercion associated with the public schools in the nineteenth century more than offset this minimal ecclesiastical deliverance from civil bondage.

America's schools followed the theological path which the churches of New England travelled. The schools began as Calvinist strongholds; the New England Primer is representative. The First Great Awakening and the American Revolution moved them from Puritanism into pietistic nationalism; the Second Great Awakening reinforced this. In Massachusetts in the 1830's, Horace Mann moved them into Unitarianism. In Bryan's day, the war was fought between an implicit common-ground Unitarian theism, disguised as Protestant culture, and Darwinian modernism. Bryan, in the name of the Bible, was trying to retain the traditional classroom theism of Unitarianism; his opponents were trying to move the schools into secularism. The doctrine of evolution was the touchstone on both sides of the battle.

To seek to replace what is taught in taxpayer-supported schools is to seek to replace the existing Establishment. An Establishment understands this threat. It fully understood in 1922. The American Establishment in the 1920's was modernist: theological, political, or both. It was evolutionist in its view of the origin of man. Bryan had to be stopped. In 1925, he was stopped. But the trap was set in early 1922.

Professional Educators Protest

The barrage of ink began again. On March 2, this headline announced a story on the annual convention of the National Education Association, the teachers' union: "Paint W. J. Bryan as a `Medievalist.'" He had adopted, the convention was told, "methods of the Dark Ages. . . ."

Columbia University economist E. R. A. Seligman again invoked the flat earth analogy: "Now, if we are going back to childhood, let's go all the way. Let's teach that the earth is flat and that the sun moves around it." He then recommended the creation of an exhibit that features the dinosaur and other extinct animals as proofs of evolution. (A decade later, Seligman served as Editor-in-Chief of the influential Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.)

Dr. Frank Spaulding, dean of Yale's graduate school of education, brought up the crucial issue of sanctions. To resort to politics in order to keep the doctrine of evolution from spreading reveals a "wavering faith." (Rhetorical question: Is this also true of today's Darwinians, who have used the Supreme Court to remove every trace of creationism from public school curricula? Real question: Or is it a matter of sanctions, without which no worldview can become operational?) Then he invoked Briggs' ancient argument: the true Christians are the liberals. True Christianity is open to the teaching of evolution in the public schools. Bryan's methods are wrong. "Such methods lead away from the true spirit of the Bible."⁽⁴¹⁾

So much for the "creation in the public schools" debate, a familiar one in our own day. There was to be no debate. The issues have not changed: control over tax money by the educational establishment, the public's suspicion of the good judgment of that establishment, the theoretical possibility of neutral education, the presuppositions of science, and Christian dreams of reforming tax-supported education. In short, so much for one more familiar battlefield of the politics of plunder.

It is now time to dig up one of the best-suppressed stories in American history. This, you will not find in the textbooks. It will not take much brainpower to figure out why.

Eugenics and the American Establishment (Pre-Hitler)

Henry Fairfield Osborn's response to Bryan was prominently featured on page 2 of the March 5 Sunday supplement. It is important to understand who he was and what (and who) he represented. He was one of America's earliest trained evolutionists, having studied under Thomas Huxley ("Darwin's bulldog").⁽⁴²⁾ In 1922, he was president of the Museum of Natural History in New York. He was professor of zoology at Columbia University. More important, he was a leading eugenicist, dedicated to the proposition that the scientific breeding of men is both possible and desirable. He had been a co-founder of the pro-eugenics Galton Society in 1918.⁽⁴³⁾ Galton, the origintor of eugenics, was Darwin's cousin. He had been knighted in 1908 and in 1909 had been awarded the Copley Medal, the highest honor of Britain's prestigious Royal Society.⁽⁴⁴⁾

Eugenics and Nordic Supremacy

Another co-founder was his lawyer friend, Madison Grant,⁽⁴⁵⁾ author of the then-famous (and now infamous) book, The Passing of the Great Race, published by Scribner's in 1916,⁽⁴⁶⁾ which by 1921 was in its fourth edition. It was a defense of the Nordic master race theory. Osborn wrote the prefaces to the first and second printings, which were retained in subsequent editions. This was reciprocated by Grant, who identified Osborn as one of the two men whose works he relied upon most heavily. The other was economist William Z. Ripley, who wrote The Races of Europe (1899).⁽⁴⁷⁾

Osborn's Preface to the 1916 first edition made plain his own views: in European history, "race has played a far larger part than either language or nationality in moulding the destinies of men; race implies heredity and heredity implies all the moral, social, and intellectual characteristics and traits that are the springs of politics and government."⁽⁴⁸⁾ Grant's book is a "racial history of Europe," which, Osborn insisted, "There is no gainsaying that this is the correct scientific method of approaching the problem of the past."⁽⁴⁹⁾ He called this methodology "modern eugenics."⁽⁵⁰⁾ The book is about the "conservation of that race which has given us the true spirit of Americanism. . . ."⁽⁵¹⁾ In the second printing (1917), he made himself perfectly clear: ". . . the Anglo-Saxon branch of the Nordic race is again showing itself to be that upon which the nation must chiefly depend for leadership, for courage, for loyalty, for unity and harmony of action, for self-sacrifice and devotion to an ideal. Not that members of other races are not doing their part, many of them are, but in no other human stock which has come to this country is there displayed the unanimity of heart, mind and action which is now being displayed by the descendants of the blue-eyed, fair-haired peoples of the north of Europe."⁽⁵²⁾ With the passing of the great race, the whole world faces a crisis: ". . . these strains of the real human aristocracy once lost are lost forever."⁽⁵³⁾

In Chapter 4, "The Competition of Races," Grant warned against the reduced birth rate of successful, wealthy races. It leads to "race suicide" when the encouragement of "indiscriminate reproduction" is heeded by the "undesirable elements."⁽⁵⁴⁾ Altruism, philanthropy, and sentimentalism are a threat because they "intervene with the noblest purpose and forbid nature to penalize the unfortunate victims of reckless breeding," which leads to "the multiplication of inferior types."⁽⁵⁵⁾ He then made his point clear: "Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race."⁽⁵⁶⁾

There is now scientific hope in this regard: "A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit--in other words, social failures--would solve the whole question in a century, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of victims of misguided sentimentalism."⁽⁵⁷⁾

This book became a best-seller in the United States when Adolph Hitler was a corporal in the German Army. Chronology here is important.

Grant, in turn, wrote the Introduction for fellow eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard's book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, published by Scribner's in 1921, the year that Scribner's published the fourth edition of Grant's book, one year before the company published Stoddard's The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Underman. (Scribner's was systematically cashing in on a rising tide of color: green.) In his Introduction, Grant informed his readers, "The backbone of western civilization is racially Nordic. . . . If this great race, with its capacity for leadership and fighting, should ultimately pass, with it would pass that which we call civilization. It would be succeeded by an unstable and bastardized population where worth and merit would have no inherent right to leadership and among which a new and darker age would blot out our racial inheritance" (pp. xxix-xxx). Wherever they looked, backward or forward, eugenicists saw a dark age. Christianity gave us the old one; Asians, Jews, southern and eastern Europeans, and Negroes threaten to give us a new one. The Nordic race is just barely hanging on for dear life: ". . . competition of the Nordic with the alien is fatal, whether the latter be the lowly immigrant from southern or eastern Europe or whether he be the more obviously dangerous Oriental against whose standards of living the white man cannot compete" (pp. xxx-xxxi). German translations of Grant and Stoddard were read widely years before the Nazis came to power in 1933.⁽⁵⁸⁾

Eugenics was a widely received faith among American Progressives after 1900. Walter Truett Anderson has described the origins of eugenics in the United States from the early years of the century. "America's gates swung open for eugenics. Lavish support came forth from the wealthy families and the great foundations. [Charles] Davenport established a research center--the Station for the Experimental Study of Evolution--with a grant from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and later added a Eugenics Record Office with grants from the Harriman and Rockefeller families."⁽⁵⁹⁾ Davenport's Station was set up in 1904.⁽⁶⁰⁾ The Eugenics Record Office was established in 1910 with money from Mary Harriman, Averell's sister. Over the next decade, she put at least $500,000 into the project.⁽⁶¹⁾ John D. Rockefeller, Jr. donated money to it.⁽⁶²⁾ He also gave money to start the American Eugenics Society,⁽⁶³⁾ which was co-founded by Osborn.⁽⁶⁴⁾ It was organized in 1923. It published A Eugenics Catechism in 1926, which included this insight: "Q. Does eugenics contradict the Bible? A. The Bible has much to say about eugenics. It tells us that men do not gather grapes from thorns and figs from thistles. . . ."⁽⁶⁵⁾

Eugenics and Forced Sterilization

The eugenics idea had political consequences. In 1907, Indiana passed the first compulsory sterilization law in America.⁽⁶⁶⁾ States passed laws against marriages between people who were "eugenically unfit." By the late 1920's, 28 states had passed compulsory sterilization laws; some 15,000 Americans had been sterilized before 1930. This figure rose by another 15,000 over the next decade.⁽⁶⁷⁾ (In 22 states, Federally restricted versions of these laws still existed in the mid-1980's.)⁽⁶⁸⁾ This was also the era of laws against interracial marriage; 30 states passed such laws between 1915 and 1930.⁽⁶⁹⁾ (These laws no longer exist.)

The U.S. Supreme Court, in Buck v. Bell (1927), upheld Virginia's model sterilization law, which was carried out on 19-year-old Carrie Buck. By a vote of 8 to 1, the Court upheld this before the girl was sterilized; her guardian had opposed the action. The Court included Progressives William Howard Taft and Louis Brandeis, who voted to uphold. The lone dissenter was Pierce Butler, a conservative, who wrote no opinion.⁽⁷⁰⁾ The Court's opinion, written by justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, announced: "We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough."⁽⁷¹⁾ Holmes was the justice most closely associated with the ideal of evolutionary law, whose book, The Common Law (1881), had articulated this ideal. Here was political modernism in action: the State as biological predestinator.⁽⁷²⁾

There was no vocal opposition. Writes Kevles: "Buck v. Bell generally stimulated either favorable, cautious, or--most commonly--no comment. Few if any newspapers took notice of the impact of the decision on civil liberties in the United States."⁽⁷³⁾ Carrie's daughter Vivian, who died young of an intestinal disorder, went through second grade. Her teachers regarded her as very bright.⁽⁷⁴⁾

Virginia also sterilized Carrie's sister Doris in 1928. She found out about this 52 years later. The physicians had told her that the operation was to remove her appendix. When she found out, she broke down and cried. "My husband and me wanted children desperately. We were crazy about them. I never knew what they'd done to me."⁽⁷⁵⁾ Obviously, the woman was a hopeless imbecile; she should have said, "My husband and I," and she used an indefinite pronoun reference: "they." No children for her! The U.S. Supreme Court, the state of Virginia, and Progressive Darwinian science agreed: "The Bucks stop here."

The United States became the model for pre-Nazi German racial hygienists after World War I.⁽⁷⁶⁾ The Nazis merely applied on a massive scale a program that their liberal predecessors had recommended. A decade before Hitler came to power, G. K. Chesterton predicted what was coming in Germany. He explained why in his book, Eugenics and Other Evils (1922). He called eugenics "terrorism by tenth-rate professors."⁽⁷⁷⁾ The influence of the eugenics movement in Germany accelerated after Hitler came to power in 1933. Sterilization had been illegal in Germany prior to Hitler; he changed the law in July, 1933.⁽⁷⁸⁾ Two million people were ordered sterilized by the Nazi's Eugenics Courts as eugenically unfit, 1933 to 1945.⁽⁷⁹⁾

In 1939, the year of the "Duty to be Healthy," the Nazi program of sterilization went to the next phase: "mercy killings" of mentally and physically handicapped people who were incarcerated in hospitals and mental asylums. One estimate is that some 200,000 people were killed in this way during World War II. Physicians superintended the massacre.⁽⁸⁰⁾ Proctor writes: "For several years [prior to 1939], German health officials had campaigned to stigmatize the mentally and physically handicapped as people with `lives unworthy of living.' Films like `Erbrank' (`The Genetically Diseased') portrayed well-groomed, white-coated psychiatrists patronizing ill-kempt patients cast as human refuse. . . . Propaganda efforts of this sort were important, for though the operation was both secret and illegal (a euthanasia law was drafted but never approved), there was an obvious need to deflect potential opposition--especially from the churches."⁽⁸¹⁾ The Nazis understood in 1939 what the humanist media in the United States had understood in 1922: churches could have become a major threat to their genetic ideal and program of forced sterilization for genetic purposes. As it turned out in both countries, however, churches remained mute on the issue.

In 1921, Osborn had used the Museum to host the Second International Congress of Eugenics.⁽⁸²⁾ At that Congress, he had announced: "The right of the state to safeguard the character and integrity of the race or races on which its future depends is, to my mind, as incontestable as the right of the state to safeguard the health and morals of its people. As science has enlightened government in the prevention and spread of disease, it must also enlighten government in the prevention of the spread and multiplication of worthless members of society, the spread of feeble-mindedness, of idiocy, and of all moral and intellectual as well as physical diseases."⁽⁸³⁾ Sanctions must be applied.

Osborn in 1922 was safely inside Rockefeller's charmed circle. He became one of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s advisors on conservation issues after he and Madison Grant created the Save-the-Redwoods League in 1919, which Rockefeller supported.⁽⁸⁴⁾ When Junior would bring his boys to visit the Museum of Natural History, Osborn would sometimes personally conduct their tour.⁽⁸⁵⁾ The Osborn family's connection to the Rockefellers went back to the days of John D., Sr.⁽⁸⁶⁾ Junior put Frederick Osborn, Henry's nephew, on the board of the Rockefeller Institute in 1938. It was through Frederick that the Rockefellers were drawn away from eugenics and into the population control movement.⁽⁸⁷⁾ (Liberalism's faith in population control has replaced its earlier faith, equally confident, in the now-politically incorrect eugenics movement as a means of reducing the number of those who, in Grant's words, "are themselves of no value to the community." Between 1965 and 1976, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations poured $250 million into population control projects.)⁽⁸⁸⁾

"Good Cop, Bad Cop"

The Times' editors adopted a version of the "good cop, bad cop" prisoner interrogation technique: a seemingly mild-mannered sterilizer began the public disemboweling of Bryan, and a hard-nosed sterilizer completed the operation.

Osborn's rebuttal to Bryan was rhetorically dispassionate. This made it unique among the Times' anti-Bryan articles. Instead of citing evolutionary dogma for Bryan, Osborn emphasized dead religious thinkers who supposedly had accepted evolution. One surely had: the nineteenth-century eccentric (and chaplain to Queen Victoria) Charles Kingsley. He is more famous as the author of Water Babies than for his theology. Kingsley had written a letter to F. D. Maurice proclaiming his commitment to evolution. The orthodoxy of his theology can be judged by another letter that he wrote to Maurice in 1863 to describe his new discovery that "souls secrete their bodies, as snails do shells. . . ."⁽⁸⁹⁾ Kingsley's social theories were racist to the core. After visiting Ireland during a famine, he wrote: "I am daunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don't believe they are our fault. I believe that there are not many more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better and more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours."⁽⁹⁰⁾

Osborn also cited Augustine at some length on how nature should teach us truth. He was unaware of, or deliberately ignored, the fact that Augustine wrote in the City of God: "For as it is not yet six thousand years since the first man, who is called Adam, are not those to be ridiculed rather than refuted who try to persuade us of anything regarding a space of time so different from, and contrary to, the ascertained truth?"⁽⁹¹⁾ Then he told Bryan that evolution is one kind of truth, religion another kind. If Bryan had entertained any doubts about his critics' opposition to the Bible's account of creation, Osborn's article would have cured him. But one citation was calculated to do real harm: Osborn's reference to the influence in his life of Princeton University's James McCosh, who had indeed been an evolutionist. Invoking the beloved McCosh was a good tactic in dealing with a conservative Presbyterian. Bryan, however, regarded theistic evolution as "an anesthetic which deadens the pain while the patient's religion is being gradually removed . . . a way-station on the highway that leads from Christian faith to No-God-Land."⁽⁹²⁾

On the whole, Osborn's essay was mild-mannered and polite. That was bait. Then came a hook. His article ran over to page 14, where it occupied a few inches in the middle of the page. Filling page 14 was a large headline and a long article by Princeton University's E. G. Conklin. The headline was prophetic of liberal rhetoric yet to come: "Bryan and Evolution. Why His Statements Are Erroneous and Misleading--Theology Amusing If Not Pathetic."

Dr. Conklin was one of the prominent biologists of the day.⁽⁹³⁾ He was quite familiar with Grant's Passing of the Great Race, having footnoted it in 1921 as his only source in a chapter on "Modern Races and Man."⁽⁹⁴⁾ It did not seem to bother him that Grant was a lawyer with no formal training in biology, genetics, anthropology, or any other natural science. Conklin followed this with references to Stoddard's Rising Tide of Color in his chapter, "Hybridization of Races."⁽⁹⁵⁾ He also cited Osborn's Contemporary Evolution of Man.⁽⁹⁶⁾

Conklin was a defender of what he called the religion of evolution.⁽⁹⁷⁾ As he said, "the greatest and most practical work of religion is to further the evolution of a better race."⁽⁹⁸⁾ "To a large extent mankind holds the power of controlling its destiny on this planet."⁽⁹⁹⁾ (Problem: when we say that man must control man's destiny, this means that some men must do the controlling, while others must be controlled.) He concluded his book with a section insisting that "the religion of evolution is nothing new, but is the old religion of Confucius and Plato and Moses and especially Christ which strives to develop a better and nobler human race and to establish the kingdom of God on earth."⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ It was an inspirational thought, how Moses and Jesus always seemed to be on the side of modernism, inside or outside the Church, despite modernism's denial of the literal truth of the Bible's account of Moses and Jesus--or perhaps because of this discrepancy.

As part of this kingdom-building effort, Conklin believed that the State should either segregate or sterilize citizens suffering from inherited defects, who presumably carry unfavorable genes.⁽¹⁰¹⁾ Society needs intelligent guidance, he said. He then adopted the passive voice, which evaded the famous question posed by Lenin: "Who, whom?" "In time, under intelligent guidance, the worst qualities of the race might be weeded out and the best qualities preserved. This is the goal toward which intelligent effort should be directed. This should be the supreme duty of society and of all who love their fellow man."⁽¹⁰²⁾ He ended this book with a quotation from the founder of the idea of eugenics, Galton.

In his Times article, Bryan had referred to the hypothesis of evolution as a guess. Conklin responded that it was a guess in the way that the law of gravitation is a guess. Then, in a tone more suitable for pre-Heisenberg science, let alone pre-Kuhn,⁽¹⁰³⁾ he announced that this guess "is supported by all the evidence available, which continually receives additional support from new discoveries and which is not contradicted by any scientific evidence. . . . In the face of all these facts, Mr. Bryan and his kind hurl their medieval theology. It would be amusing if it were not so pathetic." (The next time that all the evidence supports any proposed scientific hypothesis will be the first.) "Bryan and his kind" were surely not Conklin and his kind: theologians of State-enforced sterilization. "Bryan and his kind" were pathetic.

Osborn and Conklin were representative of scientific opinion in their day. Osborn in 1928 wrote a Foreword to Creation by Evolution: A Consensus, an anthology published by Macmillan.⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ Conklin in that volume waxed eloquent about the superiority of the facts of evolutionary development over "prescientific" concepts of acts of creation--"vastly more wonderful," in fact.⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ He attacked fundamentalists. This appeared in his concluding remarks in a chapter on embryology, which is evidence that theology was never far from his mind.

These men were dedicated eugenicists. When, after World War II, it became clear just how seriously the Nazis had taken these ideas, eugenics fell completely out of favor with the public. This decline had begun in the mid-1930's, for obvious political reasons.⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ In 1940, the Carnegie Institution shut down the Eugenics Record Office.⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ The surviving founders of the supposed academic discipline of eugenics just stopped talking about it. They were not penalized retroactively in any way for having advocated the monstrous policy of forced sterilization. There were no negative sanctions applied. Osborn became the founder of the Conservation Foundation in 1947, which Rockefeller's son Laurance helped launch.⁽¹⁰⁸⁾ He died in 1969, no longer quoted as an authority, but with his reputation intact. Yet in 1922, he and Conklin were used by the Times to launch the scientific and rhetorical assault against American fundamentalism. To this day, their representative victim, Bryan, is regarded as a scientific ignoramus. But Bryan's view of creation never led to the forced sterilization of anyone.

Bryan vs. Eugenics

Bryan recognized that a ruthless hostility to charity was the dark side of Darwinism. Had Darwin's theory been irrelevant, he said, it would have been harmless. "This hypothesis, however, does incalculable harm. It teaches that Christianity impairs the race physically. That was the first implication at which I revolted. It led me to review the doctrine and reject it entirely."⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ He cited the notorious (and morally inescapable) passage in Darwin's Descent of Man: "With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man."⁽¹¹⁰⁾ He could have continued to quote from the passage until the end of the paragraph: "It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."⁽¹¹¹⁾ It is significant that Darwin at this point footnoted Francis Galton's famous 1865 Macmillan's magazine article and his book, Hereditary Genius.

Darwin in the next paragraph wrote that sympathy, "the noblest part of our nature," leads men to do these racially debilitating things.⁽¹¹²⁾ Bryan replied: "Can that doctrine be accepted as scientific when its author admits that we cannot apply it `without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature'? On the contrary, civilization is measured by the moral revolt against the cruel doctrine developed by Darwin."⁽¹¹³⁾

Darwin was taken very seriously by many Progressives on the matter of charity. In her book, The Pivot of Civilization (1922), Margaret Sanger criticized the inherent cruelty of charity. She insisted that organized efforts to help the poor are the "surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding, and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents."⁽¹¹⁴⁾ Such charity must be stopped, she insisted. The fertility of the working class must be regulated in order to reduce the production of "benign imbeciles, who encourage the defective and diseased elements of humanity in their reckless and irresponsible swarming and spawning."⁽¹¹⁵⁾ Swarming (like insects), spawning (like fish): here was marvelous zoological rhetoric from the lionized founder of Planned Parenthood. "If we must have welfare, give it to the rich, not the poor," she concluded.⁽¹¹⁶⁾ "More children from the fit, less from the unfit: that is the chief issue of birth control."⁽¹¹⁷⁾

Bryan's challenge to the science of evolution seemed to threaten the continuation of the Nordic aristocracy in America by obstinately denying the theoretical basis of eugenics and proclaiming that all men are made in God's image. The dedicated eugenicists who were called in by the Times in 1922 to refute him were defenders of both Darwin and Galton; they wanted to push Darwinism to its logical conclusion. Over the next two decades, they did. So did Adolph Hitler, beginning eleven years later. When Hitler's experiment in applied Darwinism failed politically, Bryan's critics very quietly took this section of Descent of Man, as well as their own public careers in defense of eugenic sterilization, and dropped them down the Orwellian memory hole, where the data still rest in peace alongside the long-forgotten moral critique by Bryan, who had opposed Darwin on principle on this, the only known practical application of Darwin's thesis. Bryan is still pictured as a scientific buffoon in the history textbooks, and his detractors are still pictured as the fearless defenders of autonomous science. And what of the 30,000 Americans who were forcibly sterilized in the name of Darwinian science? Long dead, long forgotten, and therefore no longer a potential embarrassment.

Accomplices of Theological Modernism

In the same March 5 issue, a true master of supercilious rhetoric published his response in the form of a review of Bryan's In His Image. Here, in one paragraph, is the finest statement of the older modernism's view of the relationship between religion and science that I have ever read. Any modern reader who wonders why theological conservatives in the 1920's regarded theological modernism as a threat to everything they believed in need only consider the following:

It is not generally recognized that, parallel with the great march of science during the last sixty years, religion, so far from retrogressing, has also advanced; and that never before in the history of the world has the interest in the spiritual side of life been keener, nor the quality of religious thought finer and nobler. Religion, indeed, has also been undergoing an evolutionary process and adapting itself to modern ideas, modern conditions and modern needs. Many dogmas have been discarded and the essential truths of religion and morality separated from the obsolete husks which formerly surrounded them. Not the least part of this progressive movement has been carried on by theologians and professional teachers of religion. Naturally, from the standpoint of crude and outmoded beliefs the new faith looks like a collection of heresies. The primitive religionist still imagines that to accept the truths of science is to become an "infidel"; and, since there still survive those who hold this restricted view, an occasional recrudescence of pre-Darwinian superstition is to be expected.⁽¹¹⁸⁾

On March 10, the Kentucky anti-evolution bill failed by one vote in the House.

On March 14, Bryan replied in a letter to the editor. He referred only to Osborn and Conklin. "They dodge the real question and refuse to state how much of the Bible they regard as consistent with Darwin's hypothesis. But as far as evidence can be drawn from what they do say, it is evident that they regard the discovery of the bones of a five-toed horse as a greater event than the birth of Christ."⁽¹¹⁹⁾

The next day, the editors responded, and in this response, we see the arrogance of urban men who know they possess great influence because they buy ink by the truck load. They had contempt for small-town Protestant America: "Nominally addressing The Times, Mr. Bryan really, of course, was advertising himself as a purveyor of exactly such ideas as he knew would be received with most favor in the towns where his lectures are regarded as wonderful expressions of wisdom, piety, and virtue."⁽¹²⁰⁾ Dayton, Tennessee, was such a town.

Two days after the defeat of the Kentucky bill and two days before Bryan's letter to the editor was published came another shot at him in the Times, as we shall see.⁽¹²¹⁾ But first, we must consider Bryan's political career: what he believed and what he accomplished.

A David Without a Stone

Bryan faithfully served the rural Populists in the Democratic Party as a kind of stoneless David for three decades, from 1896 to 1925, although his political career had begun earlier. He had moved the Democratic Party from the pro-gold standard, low-tariff, balanced budget, limited government political party it had been prior to 1897--the party of Grover Cleveland--to the Populist-Progressive party that it became under Woodrow Wilson.

Bryan was the greatest master of political rhetoric of his generation. In 1907, 300,000 people paid to hear him. He could earn $25,000 in a summer of lectures⁽¹²²⁾ in an era in which the average urban worker earned well under $1,000 a year.⁽¹²³⁾ His "cross of gold" speech against the supposed evils of the traditional gold standard, delivered at the 1896 Democratic national convention, remains the most important political speech in American history. It launched his national career, enabling him and his brother Charles, the first master of the political mailing list, to transform the American political system by creating a Democratic Progressive party, which would be countered by Teddy Roosevelt after 1901 in his creation of a Republican Progressive party. Yet Bryan could not win. No matter what battle he entered, he always lost. Even when his Progressive political reform programs won out, which many did, others were given credit for these victories.⁽¹²⁴⁾ It was ominous that he had decided to launch an attack on modernists and evolutionists.

Political Radical, Theological Conservative

It is one of the peculiar ironies of history that Bryan became the spokesman for conservative American Protestantism, 1921-25--almost as surprising as the fact that he was a Presbyterian. Politically, he was a radical; theologically, he was ill-equipped. His parents were members of a Baptist church. He had wanted to be a Baptist preacher from his youth, but he was afraid of water. He witnessed his first Baptist immersion at age six and never got over it. This is why he joined the Presbyterian Church at age fourteen.⁽¹²⁵⁾ What is significant is that he joined the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.⁽¹²⁶⁾ It was revivalistic and four-point Calvinist.

His political radicalism seemed antithetical to his theology. Political columnist and historian Garry Wills has called his campaigns the most leftist ever conducted by any major party Presidential candidate in American history.⁽¹²⁷⁾ In the 1920's, Bryan criticized American churches for their indifference toward profiteering, business monopolies, and industrial injustice.⁽¹²⁸⁾ His view of business he called "applied Christianity" in a 1919 address of that title. In that same year, he declared that "we should drive all the profiteers out of the Presbyterian Church so that when they go to the penitentiary, they will not go as Presbyterians."⁽¹²⁹⁾ In a 1920 speech on state constitutional reform, Bryan denied that he was a socialist. He then called for a new Nebraska constitution that would "authorize the state, the counties and the cities to take over and operate any industry they please. . . . The right of the community is superior to the right of any individual."⁽¹³⁰⁾ He distrusted the bureaucracy in Washington, so he advocated that these controls on business be imposed by state and local governments.⁽¹³¹⁾ In terms of his political beliefs, Bryan was an advocate of the social gospel. He corresponded in a friendly manner with such social gospel leaders as Washington Gladden, Shailer Mathews, Charles Stelzle, and Progressive economist Richard T. Ely.⁽¹³²⁾ In 1919, he praised the Federal Council of Churches with these words: "It is, in my judgment, the greatest religious organization in our nation."⁽¹³³⁾

He was a believer in pure democracy and majoritarian wisdom. He believed that democracy "is a religion, and when you hear a good democratic speech it is so much like a sermon that you can hardly tell the difference between them."⁽¹³⁴⁾ He insisted that "the love of mankind is the basis of both,"⁽¹³⁵⁾ an Arminian view of the gospel. To defend this religious vision, Bryan offered as clear a statement of religious humanism as anything ever issued by the American Humanist Association: "Have faith in mankind. . . . Mankind deserves to be trusted. . . . If you speak to the multitude and they do not respond, do not despise them, but rather examine what you have said. . . . The heart of mankind is sound; the sense of justice is universal. Trust it, appeal to it, do not violate it."⁽¹³⁶⁾ Levine has summarized Bryan's political beliefs: "During the very years when Bryan stood before religious gatherings denouncing evolution he also went before political rallies to plead for progressive labor legislation, liberal tax laws, government aid to farmers, public ownership of railroads, telegraphs, and telephones, federal development of water resources, minimum wages for labor, minimum prices for agriculture, maximum profits for middlemen, and government guarantee of bank deposits."⁽¹³⁷⁾ Yet by 1922 he was fast becoming the most visible defender of theologically conservative Protestantism in the United States.

Bryan, more than any other figure in American history, had unleashed the forces of the politics of plunder. He had appealed to the rural masses and had cried out against the Eastern Establishment. He had brought the culture wars of the Populist Party into the mainstream. But three times he had lost, and in the persons of Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, the Eastern Establishment had its revenge, both on him and on the Cleveland wing of the Democratic Party. The shift from Whig politics to Progressivism had undermined "Clevelandism," but it had also undermined Populism. Only in 1933, after the election of Franklin Roosevelt, would Progressivism and Populism at last fuse nationally. Whiggism died with Cleveland, but it was Bryan who had killed it; Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson had participated only as pall-bearers at the funeral.

The Scopes Trial and Its Aftermath

Bryan called on modernists to resign voluntarily from the ministry, since they did not believe in the tenets of Christianity. This had been a familiar, though incredibly naive, theme of the conservatives ever since the 1892 General Assembly,⁽¹³⁸⁾ and would remain so. Machen used it repeatedly. Not one of those who took this line was ready publicly to identify the modernists for what they were, judicially speaking: covenantally disinherited sons who were attempting to steal the lawful inheritance of the true sons of the covenant. Such language would have been regarded as rhetorically inappropriate by the vast majority of those whose inheritance was at risk. Instead, conservatives adopted different forms of confrontational rhetoric--less judicial but nonetheless inflammatory. The Church would not tolerate such verbal challenges after 1925. That is to say, the victorious modernists who visibly gained control in 1926⁽¹³⁹⁾ would not tolerate rhetoric aimed against them. Because they held all the largest spears after 1926, they did not need rhetoric to achieve their goal. Their goal was power, and no later than 1926, they had definitively attained it in the General Assembly. Over the next decade, they would progressively apply what they had definitively achieved.

Confession Without the Confession

Bryan's leadership on the anti-evolution front placed him in a peculiar position. He was not a six-day creationist. That is to say, he was typical of all Presbyterian conservatives; he had abandoned the Westminster Confession on this point (IV:1). His position became public knowledge in 1925 when Darrow cross-examined him during the Scopes trial. Late in the exchange, Darrow asked him if he believed that the world was created in six days. Bryan startled his audience: "Not six days of twenty-four hours."⁽¹⁴⁰⁾ The creation might have lasted millions of years, but he did not want to commit himself on this point, he told Darrow.⁽¹⁴¹⁾

Bryan was not alone in this desire. Even Machen held to some sort of theistic evolution scheme. He revealed his views in private letters; in public he refused to comment on this subject.⁽¹⁴²⁾ Most Presbyterian conservative leaders had been studiously avoiding a fight with evolutionists for at least six decades. They had all abandoned the Confession's explicit words. This greatly hampered them. Bryan received little public support on this issue from conservative Presbyterian leaders.⁽¹⁴³⁾

It was fundamentalists outside the Presbyterian Church who supported Bryan in this battle. Because of this, he gained a reputation after 1921 for being a fundamentalist, which in fact he was, rather than a Calvinistic Presbyterian, which he was not. He was Arminian to the core. His view of God's election was framed in political terms. He said that the best description of the doctrine of election he had ever heard was offered by a Georgia Presbyterian preacher. "It's just this way--the voting is going on all the time; the Lord is voting for you and the devil is voting against you, and whichever way you vote, that's the way the election goes."⁽¹⁴⁴⁾ This was the state of Presbyterian theological conservatism in the fourth phase of the Presbyterian conflict.

In retrospect, the Scopes trial was a strange event. First, it was a widely covered media event: 200 reporters, 65 telegraph operators, and a Chicago station's radio broadcasts of the trial--the first American trial ever broadcast by radio.⁽¹⁴⁵⁾ Second, the jury was excluded from the trial's technical debates.⁽¹⁴⁶⁾ Third, neither Bryan nor the American Civil Liberties Union wanted it to be conducted as a criminal trial. Bryan offered in advance to pay any fine imposed on Scopes.⁽¹⁴⁷⁾ After the trial, Scopes, who never testified at the trial, told one reporter that he had not been present in the classroom on the day that evolution was covered in the textbook, and that he had feared being put on the witness stand, where he would have had to admit this.⁽¹⁴⁸⁾

Bryan died in Dayton on Sunday, July 26, five days after the trial ended. That morning he had led a local Southern Methodist congregation in prayer.⁽¹⁴⁹⁾ Its minister conducted the final services,⁽¹⁵⁰⁾ which was appropriate; Bryan had been far closer to John Wesley's Arminianism than to Presbyterianism's Calvinism. His reputation had been destroyed during the trial and posthumously by H. L. Mencken, who was the author of The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908). Mencken, following Nietzsche, was a promoter of the pre-Progressive social Darwinism: the survival of the fittest individual. He had written: "There must be a complete surrender to the law of natural selection--that invariable natural law which ordains that the fit shall survive and the unfit shall perish. All growth must occur at the top. The strong must grow stronger, and that they may do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of trying to lift up the weak."⁽¹⁵¹⁾ Nietzsche's philosophy was an extension of Darwinism, and Bryan opposed both, as he wrote in In His Image.⁽¹⁵²⁾ This is not how the public remembers the Scopes trial, however. As usual, the winners wrote the press releases and the screenplay.

The effect of the trial devastated fundamentalism as a cultural force. Henry M. Morris, a dispensationalist, six-day creationist, and the founder of the modern Creation Science movement, writes:

"One of the most disappointing aspects of the Scopes trial was its intimidating effect on Christians. Multitudes of nominal Christians capitulated to theistic evolution, and even those who retained their belief in creation retreated from the arena of conflict, using the fiction that it was somehow unspiritual to be involved in such controversies and urging each other to concentrate instead on `soul-winning,' and `personal Christianity,' with a great emphasis also on the soon return of Christ. The schools and government and society in general were, to all intents and purposes, simply abandoned to secular humanist control, and they have been firmly under that control ever since."⁽¹⁵³⁾

Picking Up the Fallen Torch

A year after Bryan died, Northern Baptist fundamentalist leader William Bell Riley wrote a book, Inspiration or Evolution? Riley had long been one of the major spokesmen for American fundamentalism, and this mantle of authority increased after Bryan's death. He was the main spokesman for the World's Christian Fundamentals Association until it faded in 1930.⁽¹⁵⁴⁾ Riley delivered the memorial address at the Great Commoner's funeral.⁽¹⁵⁵⁾ His biographer calls him "the chief executive of the fundamentalist movement. . . ."⁽¹⁵⁶⁾

In 1917, he wrote The Menace of Modernism, in which he pointed out the obvious: theological modernists had allies in the academic community. He fully understood this aspect of the modernists' strategy of subversion--perhaps better than any fundamentalist leader of his day. He also understood the uses of rhetoric. He once wrote that conservative ministers had about as much chance of being invited to speak at a state university as to be heard in a Turkish harem.⁽¹⁵⁷⁾

In the Foreword to Inspiration or Evolution?, Riley echoed Bryan's 1922 warning about evolution in the public schools, which was not surprising, since he had been preaching the same theme since 1922.⁽¹⁵⁸⁾ "But the public schools of America and the denominational schools are alike dependent for personal and financial patronage upon tax payers, millions of whom are the best citizens of America. This book is addressed particularly to this class, and is intended as `A call to arms!' If we silently and indolently endorse the destructive doctrines to which this volume calls attention, we will deserve the fate that is certain to befall both Church and State. The munitions of war for the Christian citizen are his voice and vote. He who does not employ both to preserve the democracy of America and the integrity of her true churches is a traitor to both country and Christ."⁽¹⁵⁹⁾ He fully understood that Bryan had been correct, that control over education by the taxpayers was crucial to rolling back the theory of evolution.

But it was not just public education that was under siege; it was Christian education, especially higher education. The book reprinted a speech he had delivered in 1921 at the Third Annual Conference on Christian Fundamentals. He identified William Rainey Harper as having been the chief propnent of theological modernism in higher education. Harper, he said, had been the main figure in the creation of an "Academic Octopus."⁽¹⁶⁰⁾ Harper had been the academic director of the Chautaqua program, and he became the first president of the Rockefellers' University of Chicago. Riley recognized the crucial role of the Rockefellers in American higher education. It was with a million-dollar grant in 1902 that the process began. "With this bait he saw the fish begin to rise from every denominational pool, and on October 1, 1905, he increased the wabbler by $10,000,000.00. This grant stirred every pond."⁽¹⁶¹⁾ In 1907, he added another $43 million. Riley identified the key agency: Rockefeller Senior's General Education Board, chartered by the U.S. Congress in 1903.⁽¹⁶²⁾ Here is how the deed was done, according to Riley:

The standardization of the colleges of the South is now sought. Let them consent to it, as we have already consented in the North, and see what will be the effect in the instance of a single college. A school, for example, that has a million dollar endowment accepts the standardization scheme and agrees to receive from the "Foundation Fund" through the "General Board of Education" $50,000 more. The moment that amount goes from the Rockefeller Fund, entire control of that institution as to curriculum, faculty, and board, passes practically into the hands of fifteen men living in and about New York, chief of whom is John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and in all fundamental matters the entire institution must consult the judgment of this fifteen, which, when it is remembered that John D. Rockefeller, Jr., is the real representative of these million, means the judgment of this one.⁽¹⁶³⁾

This was an exaggeration; no college surrenders that degree of sovereignty. Faculties are made up of people who guard their autonomy in the classroom. But there was a surrender: the acknowledgment of the legitimacy of a more standardized curriculum, as well as professional academic standards for new faculty members. Also, there was the lure of further money. The Rockefeller money would be seen as a down payment. There was a price to pay for additional funding.

Riley saw in 1921 what a pair of pro-Rockefeller biographers admitted openly in 1988: "It would be difficult to overstate the value of the work the GEB did in the ensuing half century. Ironically, it seems largely forgotten today. . . . To understand the GEB, one must see it as an agency of change, one of such remarkable accomplishments that it is scarcely an exaggeration to refer to it as revolutionary."⁽¹⁶⁴⁾ One of its major accomplishments was "reforming college administration and developing professional standards for graduate education throughout the United States. . . ."⁽¹⁶⁵⁾ Furthermore, "the work was done very quietly, with great circumspection and skill, for the good reason that, like any agent of change, the GEB was up against some form of established opposition in each of its successive missions. . . ."⁽¹⁶⁶⁾ By the time it was voluntarily shut down in 1960, the year Junior died, it had expended $324 million on its many projects.⁽¹⁶⁷⁾ Some $208 million had gone into higher education.⁽¹⁶⁸⁾ But setting standards for lower-level schools was also part of the plan. The GEB was the main factor behind the creation of the public school system in the South, through the funding of one professorship in education in every major state university in the South, and through lobbying in every state capitol. From a few hundred schools in 1900, the South's public school system grew to thousands in the 1920's.⁽¹⁶⁹⁾

For seven decades, we have needed a detailed study of the origin of higher education's accreditation octopus, but as yet such a book has not been published. Riley was on target. His suggestion that the GEB was the source of the secularization of Christian higher education has not been followed, either by the tenured recipients who are still profiting from the system of accreditation or the victims, who still send their best and brightest into the system for final certification.

Conclusion

Bryan launched the final phase of his long public career with his attack on Darwinism as a false religion. In His Image (1922) could have been ignored by the media and the Establishment had Bryan not understood the political implications of his confession. He understood that the public schools were the established Church in the United States, and that the teaching of Darwinism had to be stopped in public school classrooms. He understood this as surely as Darwinists today understand that creationism must not be taught in public school classrooms. He believed that because public schools are funded by taxes, voters have final authority over what is taught there. (He was incorrect; the U.S. Supreme Court has this authority, short of a Constitutional amendment to the contrary.) Bryan realized that if voters continued to defer to the educational experts, including scientific experts, the schools would remain in the hands of the educated elite that produces the textbooks. Bryan had devoted his public career to challenging elites. He ended his career just as he had started, but on a far more fundamental issue than the gold standard vs. free silver. This issue was at the heart of the debate between biblically revealed religion and modernism: the question of origins.

The Establishment recognized the severity of this challenge from the moment that Bryan's speech before the Kentucky legislature led to a bill to outlaw the teaching of evolution in taxpayer-supported schools. Gaining and maintaining control over these schools had been the most important tactic of Unitarianism and then modernism since the days of Horace Mann.⁽¹⁷⁰⁾ Bryan was threatening the most sacred cow in liberalism's pantheon of sacred cows. In January and February of 1922, the New York Times published one rhetorically savage article after another in order to lay the foundation of what would become America's most important religious battle in the 1920's. This battle ended in July of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. With it ended also the conservatives' influence in both the Presbyterian Church and the Northern Baptist Church.

Bryan in 1922 wanted his followers to gain control over the allocation of political plunder. He had been campaigning on this platform for three decades. He understood that modernist Progressives were now in control of the political process nationally. He was taking the fight to the hustings, where he had always had his greatest influence. Yet Bryan had delivered the Democratic Party into the hands of the Progressives. Like the sorcerer's apprentice, he now strove to reverse what his oratory and his brother's mailing lists had conjured. By challenging the modernists' right to override local democracy through the imposition of compulsory Darwinism in the public schools, he was invoking the last flickering traces of the Protestants' ideal of Christendom. He was invoking point four of the covenant--economic sanctions--in the name of point five: succession.

Bryan's opponents recognized this threat and feared it. They had a major tactical problem. His arguments rested forthrightly on an official principle of American democracy, namely, that he who pays the tax-collecting piper should call the political tune: "No taxation without representation!" Bryan was a staunch defender of Progressivism's principle that the State has both the moral authority and moral obligation to confiscate wealth from one group in order to give it to another group. But he had always been more of a Populist than a Progressive. He believed that the State should confiscate the wealth of a minority -- the rich -- in the name of the majority, not in order to fund some elite group, and surely not a humanistic elite of Bible-scorning educational bureaucrats, with the hard-earned money of God-fearing Americans. He appealed to majority rule. This was a powerful appeal.

To refute him, his opponents had to downplay the obvious: they were taxing the political majority -- Christians -- in order to educate all children in terms of religious principles at odds with what most parents believed. They were not merely stealing money; they were stealing hearts and minds as well. (The Progressives' power religion tactic was re-stated clearly half a century later by an American general in Vietnam: "When you've got them by the -----, their hearts and minds will follow.") So, unable to defend their compulsory education program in terms of the democratic principle of majority rule, these professed democrats resorted to the negative sanction of ridicule and misrepresentation: flat earth, medievalism, etc. The rhetorical standard which they established in the public press would soon be adopted by their allies inside the Presbyterian Church against Bryan and his ecclesiastical allies. Inside the Church, as well as outside, the crucial issue was sanctions.

So far, they have won the debate in the tax funded schools and the media. It is time for creationists to return to the principle of disestablishment. The State should not finance either churches or schools. The educational establishment will fight this to the death . . . its death.

If this book helps you gain a new understanding of the Bible, please consider sending a small donation to the Institute for Christian Economics, P.O. Box 8000, Tyler, TX 75711. You may also want to buy a printed version of this book, if it is still in print. Contact ICE to find out. [email protected]

Skip past endnotes

Endnotes:

1. Bryan, "God and Evolution," New York Times (Feb. 26, 1922), VII, p. 10.

2. 1896, 1900, 1908.

3. He had resigned in 1915 in protest against Wilson's violations of neutrality in support of the British in World War I. He resigned on June 7, 1915, exactly one month after the sinking of the Lusitania. LeRoy Ashby, William Jennings Bryan: Champion of Democracy (Boston: Twayne, 1987), pp. 159-60.

4. Wilson was no longer a ruling elder.

5. Originally called the Presbyterian Church of America.

6. The book became a best-seller: over a hundred thousand copies. Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 57.

7. New York: Revell.

8. New York: Revell, 1922.

9. Lawrence W. Levine, Defender of the Faith: William Jennings Bryan: The Last Decade, 1915-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 276.

10. Ibid., p. 277.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., p. 278.

13. Reprinted in Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition, edited by Philip Appleman (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 544-51.

14. Ibid., p. 548.

15. Ibid., p. 550.

16. New York Times (Feb. 2, 1922), p. 12.

17. Grolier's Encyclopedia (1990): "Butler, Nicholas Murray."

18. New York Times (Feb. 3, 1922), p. 14.

19. Ibid. (Feb. 6, 1922), p. 12.

20. Theodore Morrison, Chautauqua: A Center for Education, Religion, and the Arts in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 65.

21. George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 241.

22. Samuel Christian Schmucker, The Meaning of Evolution (Chautauqua, New York: Chautauqua Press, 1913).

23. Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (New York: Praeger, 1991).

24. Stanley L. Jaki, "Science and Censorship: Hélène Duhem and the Publication of the 'Système du monde,'" Intercollegiate Review (Winter 1985-86), pp. 41-49. Cf. Jaki, Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984).

25. Alexander Koyré refers to him--last name only--as an anti-Newtonian, but without naming his books. Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, [1957] 1970), p. 100.

26. Clarke, "Evolution and Kentucky," New York Times (Feb. 5, 1992), VII, p. 12.

27. Ibid. (Feb. 9, 1922), p. 16.

28. The theory which comprised Part II of Descent of Man, which in turn constituted over half of the book.

29. Paxton Hibben, The Peerless Leader: William Jennings Bryan (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1929), p. 371.

30. It leads to such debacles as Seminex, the Seminary in Exile, the short-lived port in the storm for liberals after they were fired by Concordia Seminary in the mid-1970's.

31. Cited in Levine, Defender of the Faith, p. 278.

32. Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 68.

33. Ibid., p. 66.

34. Lester Frank Ward, Dynamic Sociology; or Applied Social Science, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, [1883] 1907), II:547-48. See Chapter 10, below, under the section "Machen's Plea for Pluralism."

35. Ibid., II:548.

36. Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 152.

37. Ibid., pp. 180-81.

38. Ibid., pp. 181-82.

39. Ibid., p. 182.

40. Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625-1725 (New York: Capricorn, [1938] 1964), p. 106.

41. New York Times (March 28, 1922), p. 12.

42. Julian Huxley, Memories (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 82.

43. Its full title was The Galton Society for the Study of the Origin and Evolution of Man.

44. Daniel V. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985, p. 57.

45. Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), p. 53.

46. On the impact of this book, see Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (New York: Knopf, 1977), pp. 166-71.

47. Madison Grant, "Introduction," The Passing of the Great Race, 4th ed., revised (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1921), p. xxv.

48. Ibid., p. vii.

49. Ibid., p. viii.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid., p. xix.

52. Ibid., p. xi.

53. Ibid., p. xiii.

54. Ibid., p. 47.

55. Ibid., p. 48.

56. Ibid., p. 49.

57. Ibid., pp. 50-51.

58. Karl Holler, "The Nordic Movement in Germany," Eugenical News (Sept.-Oct. 1932); cited in Chase, Legacy of Malthus, p. 635. The translated edition was published in 1925, as was Lothrop Stoddard's Revolt Against Civilization. Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 99.

59. Walter Truett Anderson, To Govern Evolution: Further Adventures of the Political Animal (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), p. 153.

60. Kevles, Eugenics, p. 45.

61. Ibid., pp. 54-55.

62. Ibid., p. 55.

63. Ibid., p. 60; cf. John Ensor Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Century (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988), p. 454.

64. Harr and Johnson, p. 456.

65. Kevles, Eugenics, p. 61.

66. In England that year was formed the national Eugenics Education Society. Kevles, Eugenics, p. 59.

67. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p. 97.

68. Kevles, Eugenics, p. 111.

69. Anderson, To Govern Evolution, p. 155.

70. Kevles, Eugenics, p. 111.

71. Ibid.

72. No more eloquent or flagrant example of this new American Progressive religion can be found than the book written by Alex Carrel, a 1912 Nobel Prize winner in "medicine or physiology" and an employee of the Rockefeller Institute, Man the Unknown, co-published by Harper & Brothers in 1935.

73. Kevles, Eugenics, p. 112.

74. Ibid.

75. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), p. 336.

76. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p. 98.

77. Cited in George Grant, Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood, 2nd ed. (Franklin, Tennessee: Adroit, 1992), p. 94.

78. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p. 101.

79. Chase, Legacy of Malthus, p. 135.

80. Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: "Euthanasia" In Germany, c. 1900-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). This book is too recent to have received academic reviews regarding its evidence.

81. Robert N. Proctor, "Review of Burleigh's Death and Deliverance," New York Times Book Review (Feb. 5, 1995), p. 3.

82. Chase, Legacy of Malthus, p. 277.

83. Cited in ibid., p. 278.

84. Harr and Johnson, Rockefeller Century, pp. 212-13.

85. Ibid., p. 212.

86. Ibid., p. 457.

87. Ibid.

88. Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 293.

89. Cited in William Irvine, Apes, Angels, and Victorians: The Story of Darwin, Huxley, and Evolution (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), p. 142.

90. Cited in Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the Rise of Medieval Europe (New York: Talese-Doubleday, 1995), p. 6.

91. Augustine, City of God (New York: Modern Library, 1950), XVIII:40, p. 648.

92. Bryan, "Preface," Menace of Darwinism, p. 5.

93. Kevles, Eugenics, p. 88.

94. Edwin Grant Conklin, The Direction of Evolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), p. 35n.

95. Ibid., pp. 38n, 39n.

96. Ibid., p. 54n.

97. Ibid., ch. 10.

98. Ibid., p. 241.

99. Ibid., p. 245.

100. Ibid., p. 246.

101. Conklin, Heredity and Environment in the Development of Men, 6th ed. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1930), p. 309. The first edition was published in 1917.

102. Ibid., p. 348.

103. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

104. Edited by Frances Mason.

105. Ibid., p. 79.

106. Daniel J. Kevles, "Genetic Progress and Religious Authority: Historical Reflections," in Responsible Science: The Impact of Technology On Society, edited by Kevin B. Byrne (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), p. 43. Cf. Kevles, Eugenics, ch. 11.

107. Kevles, Eugenics, p. 199.

108. Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), p. 401.

109. Bryan, In His Image, p. 107.

110. Ibid., pp. 107-108.

111. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (New York: Modern Library, [1871] n.d.), p. 501.

112. Ibid., p. 502.

113. Bryan, In His Image, p. 109.

114. Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization (New York: Brentano's, 1922), p. 108; cited in Grant, Grand Illusions, p. 27.

115. Sanger, ibid., p. 115; cited in Grant, ibid.

116. Ibid., p. 96; cited in Grant, ibid., p. 28.

117. Sanger, "Birth Control," Birth Control Review (May 1919); cited in Grant, ibid., p. 27.

118. Austin Hay, "The Crusade Against Darwinism," New York Times Book Review and Magazine (March 5, 1922), p. 5.

119. New York Times (March 14, 1922), p. 14.

120. Ibid. (March 15, 1922), p. 18.

121. See Chapter 8, below.

122. David Sarasohn, The Party of Reform: Democrats in the Progressive Era (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), p. 36.

123. Contemporary estimates (journalistic guesses), cited in George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900-1912 (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), p. 3.

124. David D. Anderson, William Jennings Bryan (Boston: Twayne, 1981), pp. 190-91.

125. Levine, Defender of the Faith, p. 246.

126. Hibben, Peerless Leader, p. 48.

127. Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 99.

128. Levine, Defender of the Faith, p. 253.

129. Cited in ibid., p. 252.

130. The Commoner (Feb. 1920), pp. 8-9; cited in ibid., p. 195.

131. Ibid., p. 196.

132. Willard H. Smith, "William Jennings Bryan and the Social Gospel," Journal of American History, 53 (June 1966), pp. 45, 47. On Ely's connection to the social gospel, see Benjamin G. Raider, "Richard T. Ely: Lay Spokesman for the Social Gospel," ibid., pp. 61-74.

133. The Commoner (May 1919), p. 11; cited in ibid., p. 48.

134. The Commoner (Oct. 28, 1904), p. 2; cited in Smith, "Social Gospel," p. 42.

135. Ibid., p. 43.

136. Cited in Levine, Defender of the Faith, p. 218.

137. Ibid., p. 364.

138. The "Portland Deliverance." See Chapter 5, above: section on "The 1892 General Assembly: Portland, Oregon."

139. I believe they had gained definitive control by 1920, when the Church did nothing to those officials who had indebted it to pay the bills of Rockefeller's Interchurch World Movement.

140. Ray Ginger, Six Days or Forever: Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes (New York: Oxford University Press, [1958] 1974), p. 171. Darrow asked him if he accepted the date of creation (Bishop Ussher's estimate) of 4004 B.C. Bryan said he had never made such a calculation. Darrow: "What do you think?" Bryan: "I do not think about the things I don't think about." Darrow: "Do you think about the things you do think about?" Bryan: "Well, sometimes." Ibid., p. 169. The prosecuting attorney realized that this testimony had thrown his case off-track; he told Bryan that he would not allow him to testify the next day. The next day, July 21, the judge expunged it from the record. Darrow protested, and asked the judge to call in the jury to deliver a guilty verdict. Ibid., p. 175. The judge complied. Darrow told the jury to convict Scopes, so that a higher court could settle the case. The jury did. Ibid., pp. 176-77.

141. Ibid., p. 173.

142. Longfield, Presbyterian Controversy, pp. 69-70.

143. An exception was Clarence E. Macartney, who was a vociferous opponent of evolution. Ibid., pp. 70-72.

144. The Commoner (Feb. 17, 1905); cited in Willard H. Smith, The Social and Religious Thought of William Jennings Bryan (Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado, 1975), p. 174.

145. Henry M. Morris, A History of Modern Creationism (San Diego: Master Book Press, 1984), p. 63.

146. Ibid.

147. Wills, Under God, p. 100.

148. Ginger, Six Days, p. 180.

149. Ibid., p. 192.

150. Ibid., p. 193.

151. Cited in Wills, Under God, p. 102.

152. Bryan, In His Image, pp. 123-24, 126.

153. Morris, History, p. 67.

154. William Vance Trollinger, Jr., God's Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwesern Fundamentalism (Madison: University of Wosconsin Press, 1990), p. 33.

155. Ibid., p. 50.

156. Ibid., p. 33.

157. Cited in ibid., p. 35.

158. Ibid., p. 48.

159. W. B. Riley, Inspiration or Evolution (Cleveland, Ohio: Union Gospel Press, 1926), p. 5.

160. Ibid., p. 164.

161. Ibid., p. 173.

162. Ibid.

163. Ibid., p. 176.

164. Harr and Johnson, Rockefeller Century, p. 70.

165. Ibid.

166. Ibid., p. 71.

167. Ibid., p. 75.

168. Ibid., p. 79. The two main figures in distributing the funds in the early years were Jerome Greene and Abraham Flexner. Ibid.

169. Ibid., p. 76.

170. R. J. Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education: Studies in the History of the Philosophy of Education (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1963).

Table of Contents Crossed Fingers

Webmaster's Introduction to Appendix A of Gary North's commentary on Genesis, "From Cosmic Purposelessness to Humanistic Sovereignty"

The word translated "rulers" comes from the Greek word from which we derive our English word "anarchist" ("a + archist" -- the first "a" is the Greek letter "alpha," known as the "alpha privative," meaning "not" -- a[n]archist -- the letter "n" bridges the "alpha privative" and the word "archist").

When Jesus speaks of "rulers of the Gentiles" or "rulers of the nations" His hearers may have (justifiably) thought of 1 Samuel 8, when Israel demanded of God, "Make us a king like the gentiles."

An "archist" believes he has the right to impose his will on other people by force or threats of violence. He need not rely solely on persuasion. He need not give others anything of value in exchange for what he wants from others. He can threaten violence, and carry out those threats if he doesn't get what he wants. The "archist" claims to have a Monopoly on Violence. It would be sinful for others to engage in such violent extortion or vengeance, but the "archist" claims a "legal" and moral right to do what others must not do.

Jesus clearly says His followers are not to be "archists." They are to be "servants."

Another word for "archist" is "statist." A Christian society is an archist-free society.

Gary North's essay "From Cosmic Purposelessness to Humanistic Sovereignty" is a critique of the most important sleight-of-mind, bait-and-switch scam in modern thought: Darwinism's transformation of "man, the unplanned speck" into "man, the planning god." It lies at the heart of modernism. Humanists use a two-step argument to get to their fundamental principle: the sovereignty of archist man.

North's Appendix contains the names of Progressive Era scientific planners you've never heard of. They were famous and well-respected during The Progressive Era. Their progeny rule us today. North says this Appendix is "the most important academic article of my career." It shows in great detail, with exhaustive footnotes, the real meaning of Darwinian Progressivism. Evolution is nothing less than the religion of archism. If you read nothing else in this "Reader's Guide," read the next article. If you lean "libertarian" and you're a "theistic evolutionist," this essay should "red pill" you.

Progressivism gave rise to "The Administrative State." During the Progressive Era, which might be dated from 1887, when the Interstate Commerce Commission was formed, to 1930, liberal elites believed in "scientific socialism." The Administrative State

The French and Russian revolutions were explicitly religious revolutions. See the impressive work by the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (1980). See also Marx's Religion of Revolution. Billington begins with the French Revolution and ends with Lenin. It is by far the most detailed account of the conspiratorial and occult religious origins of revolution. The revolution of Administrative Law is the religion of science and rationalism, while violent revolution is the religion of chaos (irrationalism). Humanism/Autonomy is constantly fluctuating between rationalism and occult irrationalism. Cornelius Van Til spent his career exposing this humanist dialecticism. This is why the irrational occult chaos of BlackLivesMatter burning cities is supported by all the rational, Harvard-educated fancy-suit elites in the industrial "complexes" listed above.

Sovereignty and Dominion

AN ECONOMIC COMMENTARY ON GENESIS

Gary North

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

North says

This is the support volume for my economic commentary on Genesis.

Appendix A and Appendix C are two of the three most important academic articles I have ever written.

This is Appendix A. Appendix C is below. Footnote numbering in these appendices has not been corrected from the scan of the pdf.

Appendix A

FROM COSMIC PURPOSELESSNESS TO HUMANISTIC SOVEREIGNTY

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.

A. The Legacy of Hermann Muller

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.

Hermann J. Muller, “One Hundred Years Without Darwinism Are Enough,” The Humanist, XIX (1959); reprinted in Philip Appleman (ed.), Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 570. I first saw an incomplete version of this quotation in an article by Elisabeth Mann Borghese, “Human Nature Is Still Evolving,” in The Center Magazine (March/April 1973), a publication of the now defunct Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a Santa Barbara humanist think-tank which was influential in the 1950s and 1960s. It was founded by Robert Maynard Hutchins. My point: this is a standard idea among liberals and humanists.

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.

Edwin Black, War on the Weak: Eugenics and the American Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), pp. 302–3.

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.

1. A Genetic New World Order

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

Hermann Muller, Out of the Night (New York: Vanguard, 1935), pp. 112–13.

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.

Ibid. , p. 111.

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.

Ibid. , p. 113.
Ibid. , p. 106.
Ibid. , p. 107.
Ibid. , p. 118.

2. The Geneticists’ Manifesto

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.

There is no valid way to assess the “intrinsic worth of different individuals without economic and social conditions which provide approximately equal opportunities for all members of society instead of stratifying them from birth into classes with widely different privileges.”¹⁰ [This means: (1) there are valid, though unmentioned ways to do this; (2) civil governments must create the proper equal-opportunity society.–G.N.]
There must be no race prejudice. “This requires some effective sort of federation of the whole world, based on the common interests of all peoples.”¹¹
Children must be raised by parents who have “a very considerable economic security,” including education and medical funding. This means a world in which “dwellings, towns and communities are reshaped with the good of children as one of their main objectives.”¹²
There must be birth control, which requires a society in which “the superstitious attitude toward sex and reproduction now prevalent has been replaced by a scientific and social attitude.”¹³
People and the state must recognize biological principles. Heredity and environment are both major factors—factors that “are under the potential control of man and admit of unlimited but interdependent progress.”¹⁴ This requires “some kind of conscious guidance of selection.”¹⁵
To guide selection, there must be “an agreed direction for selection to take ” This cannot be accomplished “unless social motives predominate in society. This in turn implies its socialized organization.”¹⁶

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

On this background, see Eugenical News (June 1946), pp. 33–34. The full document was republished. This was the post-War era. The pre-War eugenics movement was fading in popularity, due to Hitler’s use of forced sterilization, which gave the practice a bad press. But the laws remained on the books for two more decades.
“The ‘Geneticists’ Manifesto’,” Studies in Genetics: The Selected Papers of H. J. Muller (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1962), p. 545. He died in 1967.
Ibid. , pp. 545–46.
Ibid. , p. 546.
Idem.
Idem.
Ibid. , p. 547.
Idem.
Idem.
Ibid. , p. 548.

B. Man Must Plan

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 cosmic 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

Theodosius Dobzhansky, The Biology of Ultimate Concern (New York: New American Library, 1967), p. 132.
Ibid. , p. 129.
Dobzhansky, Scientific American (Sept. 1960), p. 206.
Dobzhansky, Biology of Ultimate Concern, p. 45.
Ibid. , p. 50.

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 order 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.

Ibid. , p. 58.

C. Making the Universe Bigger

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.

1. The Copernican Revolution

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

William C. Saslaw, “An Introduction to the Emerging Universe,” in Saslaw and Kenneth C. Jacobs, (eds.), The Emerging Universe (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1972), no page number, but introductory paragraph.

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

Huxley, “On Improving Knowledge” (1886), in Frederick Barry (ed.), Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1929), pp. 227–29.

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.

2. The Darwinian Revolution

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.

Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (New York: Harper Torchbook, [1936] 1965), pp. 101–2.

Chapter 1.
Predictably, some overly sensitive evolutionist, upon reading this reference to man’s ancestors, the apes, will be horrified. “Darwin never said that man descended from apes!” On this point, let me quote George Gaylord Simpson, Harvard’s prestigious paleontologist: “No one doubts that man is a member of the order Primates along with lemurs, tarsiers, monkeys and apes. Few doubt that his closest living relatives are apes. On this subject, by the way, there has been too much pussyfooting. Apologists emphasize that man cannot be a descendant of any living ape-a statement that is obvious to the verge of imbecility—and go on to state or imply that man is not really descended from an ape or monkey at all, but from an earlier common ancestor. In fact, that common ancestor would certainly be called an ape or monkey in popular speech by anyone who saw it. Since the terms ape and monkey are defined by popular usage, man’s ancestors were apes or monkeys (or successively both). It is pusillanimous if not dishonest for an informed investigator to say otherwise.” Simpson, This View of Life: The World of an Evolutionist (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), p. 12.

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

James Maurice Wilson, “The Religious Effect of the Idea of Evolution,” in Evolution in the Light of Modern Knowledge: A Collective Work (London: Blackie & Son, 1925), p. 492.
Ibid. , pp. 497–98.

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 pantheism. 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.

Ibid. pp. 498–99.
Ibid. , p. 501.
Ibid. , pp. 501–2.

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.

Dobzhansky, Biology of Ultimate Concern, p. 7.
Ibid. , pp. 8–9.

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.

Ibid. , pp. 68–69.
Ibid. , pp. 95–96.
Ibid. p. 96.

D. Uniformitarianism

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

See, for example, Simpson, This View of Life, p. 132. Simpson denied that rates of geological change observable today have always prevailed. “Some processes (those of vulcanism or glaciation, for example) have evidently acted in the past with scales and rates that cannot by any stretch be called ‘the same’ or even ‘approximately the same’ as those of today.” However, he still clung to uniformitarianism as a principle, though unprovable, because it is scientifically necessary to assume its existence: “Gravity would be immanent (an inherent characteristic of matter now) even if the law of gravity had changed, and it is impossible to prove that it has not changed. Uniformity, in this sense, is an unprovable postulate justified, or indeed required, on two grounds. First, nothing in our incomplete but extensive knowledge of history disagrees with it. Second, only on this postulate is a rational interpretation of history possible, and we are justified in seeking—as scientists we must seek—such a rational interpretation” (p. 133). Cf. Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution: Explosion, Not Ascent,” New York Times (Jan. 22, 1978); Ever Since Darwin (1977), and The Panda’s Thumb (1980), both published by Norton, New York. Gould was a Harvard professor of paleontology, just as Simpson was. See also Steven N. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable (New York: Basic Books, 1982).

E. Cosmic Purpose

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 created 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 story written by Walter Sullivan in the New York Times (Dec. 20, 1978) reported on four quasars that appeared to be moving through space at speeds far in excess of the speed of light. Scientists were frantically trying to find some sort of explanation for this phenomenon, since it challenged the modern world’s only accepted constant, namely, the speed of light. Nevertheless, John Kolena, Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, could write in total confidence in a letter to the Editor: “The earth’s age is thus based neither on ‘assumptions’ nor on ‘faith’ but on a law of nature, experimentally verified literally millions of times without exception.” He was referring to the radioactive decay of uranium atoms. He ended his letter with an appeal to the Deist’s God of the eighteenth century: “Those of us who still need to believe in God should in fact, be even more impressed by his or her decision to make just a few natural laws and yet keep the universe running so well for so many billions of years without any necessity for active intervention.” Durham Morning Herald (Nov. 1, 1979). It is inspiring to know that such a God (male or female) should be so smart as to create the world and then conveniently disappear for 13 billion years, in order to demonstrate His (or Her) majestic sovereignty. Meanwhile, the quasars went merrily along, at eight times the speed of light. Maybe.

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.

Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time: The Green Stick (New York: William Morrow, 1973), p. 75.
Marjorie Greene, “The Faith of Darwinism,” Encounter (Nov. 1959), p. 53.

F. Whose Purposes?

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

Peter and Jean Medawar, “Revising the Facts of Life,” Harper’s (Feb. 1977), p. 41.

Cited by William Irvine, Apes, Angels, and Victorians: The Story of Darwin, Huxley, and Evolution (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), p. 30.

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:

A. R. Manser, “The Concept of Evolution,” Philosophy, XL (1965), p. 22.
Cited by Robert M. Young, “Darwin’s Metaphor: Does Nature Select?” Monist, LV (1971), p. 462.
Ibid. , p. 496.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6th ed. (New York: Modern Library, [1871]), p. 367.

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

Young, Monist (1971), p. 497. Cf. Simpson, This View of Life, pp. 14ff.

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

Cited by Young, ibid. , pp. 486–87.
Cited by Young, ibid. , p. 486. One difficulty in attributing this passage as a late opinion of Darwin’s is that he had questioned the purely random universe in earlier correspondence, such as his Nov. 26, 1860, letter to Asa Gray: The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 2 vols., ed. Francis Darwin (New York: Appleton, 1887), II, p. 146. (http://bit.ly/DarwinLife2)
A. R. Manser, Philosophy (1965), pp. 24–25. Cf. Simpson, This View of Life, p. 96.

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.

A. D. Barker, “An Approach to the Theory of Natural Selection,” Philosophy, XLIV (Oct. 1969), p. 274.
Ibid. , p. 278.
Ibid. , p. 283.
Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 146.

G. Man: The New Predestinator

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.

Frederick Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, [1877] 1934), p. 348. Engels wrote: “We have already seen, more than once, that in existing bourgeois society men are dominated by the economic conditions created by themselves, by the means of production which they themselves have produced, as if by an extraneous force. The actual basis of religious reflex action therefore continues to exist, and with it the religious reflex itself It is still true that man proposes and God (that is, the extraneous force of the capitalist mode of production) disposes. Mere knowledge, even if it went much further and deeper than that of bourgeois economic science, is not enough to bring social forces under the control of society. What is above all necessary for this, is a social act. And when this act has been accomplished, when society, by taking possession of all means of production and using them on a planned basis, has freed itself and all its members from the bondage in which they are at present held by these means of production but which now confront them as an irresistible extraneous force; when therefore man no longer merely proposes, but also disposes—only then will the last extraneous force which is still reflected in religion vanish; and with it will also vanish the religious reflection itself, for the simple reason that then there will be nothing left to reflect” (pp. 347–48).

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.

1. A Sleight-of-Hand Operation

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.

Simpson, This View of Life, p. 7.
Ibid. , p. 175.
Ibid. , p. 232.
Ibid. , p. 170.

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 un-designed 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

Ibid. , p. 5.
Rushdoony, “Introduction” to E. L. Hebden Taylor, The New Legality (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1967), pp. vi–vii. The text of this citation was incorrectly printed in Taylor’s book and was later corrected by Mr. Rushdoony.

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

2. The New Evolution

Simpson contrasted organic evolution, nature’s non-teleological, random development of nonhuman species, with the new social evolution 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

Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of Its Significance for Man (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, [1949] 1969), p. 286.
Ibid. , p. 187.
Ibid. , p. 291.

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.

H. Evolutionism’s Sleight-of-Hand

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.

Idem.
Ibid. , p. 310.
Ibid. , p. 297.
Ibid. , p. 311.
Idem.
Idem.
Ibid. , p. 293.
Ibid. , pp. 293–94.

1. Simpson on Teleology

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.

Simpson, This View of Life, pp. 12–13.
Ibid. , p. 13.

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

Ibid. , p. 24.
Ibid. , p. 25.
Ibid. , p. 285.

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.

2. Thomas Huxley on Teleology

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

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1962] 1970), coined this phrase. For an extended discussion of Kuhn’s important distinction between “normal science” and “revolutionary science,” see Imre Lakatos [LakaTOSH] and A. E. Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
T. H. Huxley, “Evolution and Ethics,” (1893), in Collected Essays, 9 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1893), IX, pp. 83–84.

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

I. The Theology of Self-Transcendence

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.

Ibid. , p. 85.
Ibid. , p. 92.
Ibid. , p. 92.
Idem.
Idem.
Theodosius Dobzhansky, “The Present Evolution of Man,” Scientific American (Sept. 1960), p. 206.

1. The Order of Creation

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

Julian Huxley, “Evolutionary Ethics,” (1943), in T. H. Huxley and Julian Huxley, Touchstone for Ethics, 1893 – 1943 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1947), p. 13. Reprinted by Arno Press.
Ibid. , pp. 133–34.
Ibid. , p. 134.

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

2. Relativism and Statism

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.

Ibid. , p. 135.
Idem.
Ibid. , p. 129.
Ibid. , p. 138.
Ibid. , p. 217.

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

Ibid. , pp. 138–39.
Ibid. , p. 147.
Ibid. , p. 148.
Idem. Huxley could resist taking a swing at the Old Testament for its exaltation of the idea of a special chosen people. “In this the Nazis merely translate into modern terms the ethics of tribes or peoples in an early barbarous phase of the world’s history, such as the ancient Hebrews before the prophetic period” (p. 147).
Ibid. , p. 197.
Ibid. , pp. 247–49.

3. A Unified God

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

Ibid. , p. 255.
R. J. Rushdoony, This Independent Republic: Studies in the Nature and Meaning of American History (Vallecito, California: Ross House, [1964] 2001), p. 130.
Rushdoony, “The United Nations: A Religious Dream,” in Politics of Guilt and Pity (Vallecito, California: Ross House, [1970] 1995), pp. 184–99. He wrote two other essays on the religious quest of the United Nations: “The United Nations,” in Rushdoony, The Nature of the American System (Vallecito, California: Ross House, [1965] 2001), ch. 7, and “Has the U.N. Replaced Christ as a World Religion?” in Our Church: Their Target (Arlington, Virginia: Better Books, 1966), ch. 10.
Huxley, “Conclusion,” Touchstone for Ethics, p. 255. This is a quotation from an earlier book by Huxley, published by the United Nations’ Educational, scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO): The Prerequisites of Progress (Paris: Editions Fontaine, 1947).

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.

4. A New Evolution

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:

Ibid. , p. 257.
Julian Huxley, Knowledge, Morality, and Destiny (New York: Mentor Book, [1957] 1960), p. 13.
Idem.
Idem.

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

Ibid. , pp. 13–14.
Ibid. , p. 17.
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, [1947] 1967), pp. 87–89. Cf. Thomas Molnar, God and the Knowledge of Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (New York: Vintage, [1964] 1969).

5. Genetic Engineering

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

Gary North, Unholy Spirits: Occultism and New Age Humanism (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1986), ch. 10. (http://bit.ly/gnoccultism)
The idea of the technological imperative is the foundation of the critical book by Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage [1964] 1967).
John Lear, Recombinant DNA: The Untold Story (New York: Crown, 1978).
Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard, Who Should Play God? (New York: Dell, 1977), p. 14.

The book is well titled: Who Should Play God?

J. Darwin’s Intellectual Revolution

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.

Ibid. , p. 21. See also Michael Rogers, Biohazard (New York: Knopf, 1977); June Goodfield, Playing God: Genetic Engineering and the Manipulation of Life (New York: Random House, 1977); Nicholas Wade, The Ultimate Experiment: Man-Made Evolution (New York: Walker & Walker, 1977).
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, ch. 4; in The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man (New York: Modern Library edition), p. 64.

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.

Ibid. , p. 66.
Ibid. , p. 920.
Julian Huxley, Knowledge, Morality, and Destiny, p. 54.
Darwin, op. cit. , p. 920.

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).

Hermann J. Muller, “One Hundred Years Without Darwinism Are Enough,” The Humanist, XIX (1959); reprinted in Philip Appleman (ed.), Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition, p. 545.
Idem.
Ibid. , p. 547.

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

Thomas H. Huxley, “On Improving Natural Knowledge” (1866), Collected Works, I, p. 39.
Philip Handler, “Science and Hope,” Science: A Resource for Mankind, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Bicentennial Symposium (Oct. 10–14, 1976), pp. 12–13. (http://bit.ly/HandlerHope)

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).

K. Fictional Science, Science Fiction

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?”

Cf. Gary North, Unholy Spirits, ch. 10.
Time (Feb. 26, 1979).

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?

L. Christian Orthodoxy vs. Process Philosophy

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

Philip Appleman, “Darwin: On Changing the Mind,” Epilogue in Appleman (ed.), Darwin, pp. 636–37.
Ibid. , p. 637.
Ibid. , pp. 638–39.

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

R. J. Rushdoony, The Mythology of Science (Vallecito, California: Ross House, [1967] 2001), pp. 53–54, 85. (http://bit.ly/rjrtmos). Process philosophy, which is basic to all evolutionary systems, leads inescapably into relativism. The implicit relativism of evolutionism cannot be reconciled with the implicit authoritarianism of the biblical doctrine of creation. Rushdoony’s discussion of evolutionism is fundamental: “In this concept, being is evolving and is in process. Because being is in process, and being is seen as one and undivided, truth itself is tentative, evolving, and without finality. Since being has not yet assumed a final form, since the universe is in process and not yet a finished product, truth itself is in process and is continually changing. A new movement or ‘leap of being’ can give a man a new truth and render yesterday’s truth a lie. But, in an order created by a perfect, omnipotent, and totally self-conscious Being, God, truth is both final, specific, and authoritative. God’s word can then be, and is inevitably, infallible, because there is nothing tentative about God himself. Moreover, truth is ultimately personal, because the source, God, is personal, and truth becomes incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ and is communicated to those who believe in Him. Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, as the way, the truth, and the life, is also the Christian principle of continuity. The Christian doctrine, therefore, involved a radical break with the pagan doctrine of continuity of being and with the doctrine of chaos. It also involved a break with the other aspect of the dialectic, the pagan, rationalistic concept of order. Order is not the work of autonomous and developing gods and men but rather the sovereign decree of the omnipotent God. This faith freed man from the sterile autonomy which made him the helpless prisoner of Fate, or the relentless workings of a blind order.” Rushdoony, The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy (Vallecito, California: Ross House, [1971] 2007), pp. 151–52. (http://bit.ly/rjroam)
Davis A. Young, Creation and the Flood: An Alternative to Flood Geology and Theistic Evolution (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1977), p. 87.

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.)

Ibid. , p. 49.
Ibid. , pp. 128–29.
Ibid. , p. 133.
Ibid. , p. 151.
Ibid. , p. 155.
Ibid. , p. 82.

We must not be naive. The uniformitarian interpretation of geological 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.

M. Social Darwinism: Phase I

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”?

1. Right-Wing Social Darwinism

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 exclusively 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

William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, [1883] 1952), p. 30. (http://bit.ly/SumnerSC)

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

Ibid. , p. 31.
Sumner, cited by Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. ed. (New York: George Braziller, 1959), p. 57.
Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Ethics (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Classics, [1897] 1978), II, p. 409.
Ibid. , II, p. 408.
Ibid. , II, p. 409.
Ibid. , II, p. 408.

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.

Ibid. , II, p. 278.
Ibid. , II, p. 33.
Ibid. , II, pp. 37–39.

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?

Sumner, Social Classes, p. 66–67.

2. Deceiving the Victims

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.

3. American Progressivism

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.

Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History (New York: Free Press, 1963); Frederic C. Howe, Confessions of a Monopolist (Dearborn, Michigan: Alpine, [1906] 1977).

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.

N. Social Darwinism: Phase II

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.

Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, p. 69.
Clarence J. Karier, Shaping the American Educational State: 1900 to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1975), p. 139. Cf. Sidney Fine, Laissez-Faire and the General Welfare State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), pp. 253–64.
Ward’s biography is supplied by Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, pp. 68–71.
Ibid. , p. 70.

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.

1. Supernaturally Revealed Religion

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

Lester Frank Ward, Dynamic Sociology; or Applied Social Science, as Based Upon Statistical Sociology and the Less Complex Sciences, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1883), I, p. 12. (These volumes are posted by Google Books: http://bit.ly/WardDS1 and http://bit.ly/WardDS2.)
Ibid. , I, p. 17.
Ibid. , II, pp. 281–82.
Ibid. , II, p. 282.
Ibid. , II, p. 283.
Ibid. , II, p. 286.
Ibid. , II, pp. 287ff.
Ibid. , II, p. 298.
Ibid. , II, p. 305.

2. Right-Wing Social Darwinism

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:

Ibid. , I, p. 16.
Ibid. , II, p. 627.

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

Ibid. , II, p. 627–8.

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.

Sumner, Social Classes, p. 14.
Ward, Dynamic Sociology, II, p. 473.

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.

Ibid. , I, p. 72.

3. Reducing Waste by Central Planning

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.

Ibid. , II, p. 494.
Charles Darwin, “The Linnean Society Papers,” in Appleman (ed.), Darwin, p. 83.

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

Ward, Dynamic Sociology, I, pp. 74–75.
Ibid. , I, p. 74; II, p. 398.
Ibid. , II, p. 572.
Idem.
Ibid. , II, p. 576.

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.”)

Ibid. , II, p. 578.
Idem.
Ibid. , II, p. 579.
Ibid. , II, p. 580.
Ibid. , II, pp. 581–82.
Ibid. , II, p. 582.

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.

4. The Elite vs. the Masses

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.

Ibid. , I, p. 31.
Ibid. , I, pp. 54–55.
Ibid. , I, p. 55.
Ibid. , II, p. 252.
Ibid. , II, p. 249.
Ibid. , I, p. 37.

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

Ibid. , II, p. 448.
Idem.
Ibid. , II, p. 485.
Ibid. , II, pp. 597–98.
Ibid. , II, p. 486.
Ibid. , II, p. 487.

5. State-Run Education

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.

Idem.
Idem.
Ibid. , II, p. 584.
Ibid. , II, p. 588.
Idem.
Ibid. , II, p. 591.

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.

Ibid. , II, p. 590. Cf. Ward, “Education,” (1871–73), in Karier (ed.), Shaping the American Educational State, pp. 145–59.
Ibid. , II, p. 600.
Ibid. , II, pp. 623–24.

“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

6. Education as Censorship

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:

Ibid. , II, p. 624.
Ibid. , II, p. 547.
Idem.
Idem.
Idem.
Idem.

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

Ibid. , II, p. 548.
Ibid. , II, p. 549.
Ibid. , II, p. 591.
Idem.
Ibid. , II, p. 535.

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.

7. Salvation by Knowledge

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

Ibid. , II, p. 505.
Ibid. , II, p. 503.
Ibid. , II, p. 368.

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

Ibid. , II, p. 385.
Ibid. , II, p. 508.
Ibid. , II, p. 238.
Ibid. , II, p. 241.
Ibid. , II, p. 467.
Ibid. , II, p. 407.

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

Ibid. , II, p. 395.
Ibid. , II, p. 396.

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.

8. The State as Society

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)

Ibid. , II, p. 399.
Ibid. , II, p. 397.
Ibid. , II, p. 373.
Ibid. , II, p. 455.

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.

9. Population Control

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.

J. D. Unwin, “Monogamy as a Condition of Social Energy,” The Hibbert Journal, XXV (Winter 1927); reprinted in The Journal of Christian Reconstruction, IV (1977–78); Unwin, Sex and Culture (Oxford University Press, 1934).
Ward, Dynamic Sociology, II, p. 468.
Sumner, Social Classes, p. 22.
Ward, Dynamic Sociology, II, pp. 251–52.

10. The Society of Satan

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

Ibid. , II, p. 307.
Ibid. , II, p. 465.
Ibid. , II, p. 466.
Ibid. , II, p. 465.
R.J. Rushdoony, “The Society of Satan,” Christian Economics (1964); reprinted in Biblical Economics Today, II (Oct./Nov. 1979), p. [2]. (http://bit.ly/rjrsos)

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

Ward, Dynamic Sociology, II, pp. 12–13.

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

Ibid. , II, p. 13.
Gary North, Treasure and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Luke (Dallas, Georgia: Point Five Press, [2000] 2012), ch. 4.
Ward, Dynamic Sociology, II, p. 508.
It is a familiar theme in science fiction to speculate that man, through technology, will overcome the last remaining barrier of nature, the speed of light, to guarantee his dominion of the entire universe, and not just the solar system and those stars close enough to make sub-speed-of-light travel conceivable. Man will conquer the last remaining uniformitarian limit, since it has achieved its goal: shoving God out of the universe of time and space. Man will direct the processes of time.

O. Darwinian Economic Theory

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.

Chapter 4.

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.

C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown- Ups (New York: Macmillan, 1946), p. 42.

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.

Israel Kirzner, An Essay on Capital (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1966), p. 38.

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.

Conclusion

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

Published by:

Point Five Press

P.O. Box 2778

Dallas, GA 30132

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)

Davos and Trans-humanism

"Davos" is a group of archists, archist wanna-bes, and archist admirers, who meet regularly in Switzerland. "Transhumanism" means man taking control of evolution to bring about a synthesis between human beings and computers.

There was recently a speech at a Davos meeting in which the speaker succinctly stated the thesis of this website: that evolution is a religion which seeks to move archists from dependent spectators of the impersonal laws of nature, to active god-like creators. From unguided "natural" selection (as Darwin described) to archist-planned and guided selection.

Evolution is a religion. Man is the new god. And as Hegel noted, autonomous man tends to worship the most visible accomplishment of man, the State. "The State is god walking on the earth."

Davos plans have been brought to light by a comedian named J.P. Sears. His video is here:

MIRACLES, ENTROPY, AND SOCIAL THEORY

Gary North

From:
INHERITANCE AND DOMINION
An Economic Commentary on Deuteronomy
Chapter 18

And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no. And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live. Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee, neither did thy foot swell, these forty years (Deut. 8:2-4).

The theocentric focus of this law is the absolute sovereignty of God over the creation, including man. God broke the laws of nature in order to sustain His people in the wilderness. This should persuade all men to obey God. God had fed Israel miraculously with manna. In the midst of their national humiliation, there had been life-giving grace. But that was not all: "Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee, neither did thy foot swell, these forty years" (v. 4). Their clothes had not worn out. Their feet had not become swollen. Moses made it clear that God's grace had not been a one-time event. It had been a continuous process for four decades. He reminded them of this because a miracle sustained for decades ceases to be regarded as a miracle. It becomes a familiar aspect of daily life. It seems to be an inherent part of the environment, but it isn't. Men expect benefits in this life. When these benefits are continual, men regard them as normal.

This law was not a land law. It related to Israel's wandering, but its intent was man's universal obedience: "And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live." Jesus cited this law to Satan in the famous stones-into-bread temptation (Matt. 4:4). It is clearly a cross-boundary law.

A miracle is abnormal. It is a supernatural act of deliverance or blessing which disrupts the normal pattern of events. But the normal pattern of events is itself a manifestation of grace, beginning with life itself. This grace need not imply God's favor; it is nevertheless an unmerited gift to men and angels, both fallen and unfallen.⁽¹⁾ Both historical continuity and discontinuity are acts of God's grace. The former is so continuous -- a series of life-sustaining acts strung together infinitesimally close -- that its gracious character is perceived only through faith, which in turn is an initially discontinuous event that through self-discipline is supposed to become continuous.

The miracles of the wilderness era were so continuous that they took on the appearance of common grace. Moses reminded Israel of the special position which the nation had in God's eyes, as proven by their patch-free clothing. God had actively intervened in history to sustain them in preparation for the promised day of judgment. The day of judgment is a day of sanctions, positive and negative, depending on one's covenantal status. The day of negative sanctions was about to arrive inside the boundaries of Canaan. For the Israelites, this would bring the promised inheritance. For the Canaanites, this would bring the promised disinheritance; their cup of iniquity was at long last full (Gen. 15:16).

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

I have written a book on the apologetic uses and misuses -- mostly misuses -- of the second law of thermodynamics.⁽²⁾ I wrote it for two reasons: 1) to refute a socialist propagandist who had presented a defense of State economic planning in terms of the need to reduce entropy; 2) to refute modern Creation Science insofar as the second law has been invoked to thwart the construction of an explicitly creationist social theory. In both cases, the theorists have misused the second law of thermodynamics.

The first law of thermodynamics is called the law of the conservation of energy. It states that the total energy of the universe -- a supposedly closed system -- does not change. Potential energy may become kinetic (changing) energy, but total energy does not change. Modern physics is built on this law. The condition described by the first law of thermodynamics is one reason why there can never be a perpetual motion machine. It would have to produce more usable energy (work) than it began with. It would have to do its work and then re-supply itself with an amount of potential energy equal to or greater than it expended in doing the work. This is sometimes called a perpetual motion machine of the first kind.

The second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system, potential energy can become kinetic energy, but kinetic energy -- energy transformed -- cannot become potential energy. Therefore, the energy available for usable work declines over time (classical thermodynamics). As an example, temperature moves from hot to cold, but it does not move from cold to hot unless external heat is applied. Another example: a brick may fall from a wall to the ground, but it will not rise from the ground to the wall unless additional energy is added to the process from outside the system, such as someone who lifts it. Put chronologically, time does not move backward. Contemporary humanism teaches that from the moment just after the Big Bang until that frozen waste called the heat death of the universe, energy is dissipated.⁽³⁾ Sir Arthur Eddington called this time's arrow, and it creates a serious cosmological problem for evolutionists. Time's arrow proceeds from order to disorder, whereas evolution's arrow supposedly moves from less order to greater order -- from the simple to the complex. These two processes have yet to be reconciled by means of an appeal to the thermodynamic laws governing the universe as a closed system.

In any physical process -- potential energy to kinetic energy -- there will always be heat loss or heat dispersion, also described as an increase in randomness, within a closed system (statistical thermodynamics). This loss of coherence is sometimes called entropy. Entropy is a measure of the increase in randomness. The work performed by a machine is a one-time event. The energy has been dissipated, some of it into heat loss. In a machine without oil or some other lubricant, the grinding of metal is audible to all: heat is being produced and then dissipated. There is no lubricant in nature that can overcome all of this heat loss. This is entropy's law. This is a second reason why there can be no perpetual motion machine: heat loss. The machine cannot regain all of the energy expended in work because some of that kinetic energy is lost through heat dispersion.

Perpetual clothing is the equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. This passage proves that, in principle, a perpetual motion machine is possible, but it takes supernatural resource inputs to make it run. The system -- nature -- is not closed all of the time. Whenever it is closed, however, clothing always wears out through friction. Everything wears out. Feet swell and then wear out. People attached to feet wear out. This is the second law of thermodynamics at work. Where work is performed in a closed system -- no new infusions of energy or anything else from outside -- the second law guarantees that there is a permanent loss of potential energy, so that some day, potential energy will dissipate -- become random -- and cease to perform any work. The universe eventually will go into permanent retirement, sometimes called the heat death of the universe. This is inevitable, unless . . . unless the second law of thermodynamics is violated by what is known in Christian circles as the final judgment, or unless the second law of thermodynamics is violated by miracles, or unless the second law of thermodynamics is not actually a law but merely a familiar process regionally and temporally that is not in fact universal. Most physicists regard it as universal,⁽⁴⁾ which is why most physicists: 1) deny any final judgment other than the impersonal heat death of the universe; 2) deny the existence of miracles.

Once you admit the existence of miracles that are generated and sustained from outside the system of the universe, you thereby deny the universality of the second law of thermodynamics. If the universe is an open system, then the second law need not always apply. Unless you see God as a kind of pipeline operator who siphons off useful energy from other parts of the universe in order to overcome the negative effects of entropy in this region of the universe, you must regard miracles as a violation of the second law. To define miracles as consistent with the second law, you would have to explain the patch-free clothing of the Israelites as having caused a loss of potential energy somewhere else in the immense closed system called the universe. "Entropy still ruled in the wilderness, but its effects on Israelite clothing were offset by God, who drained off potential energy from some other region." Ultimately, this strictly physical approach to miracles would force Christians to explain the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ in terms of permanently lost potential energy and the existence of a heat sink into which wasted energy was dispersed.

In the Garden of Eden⁽⁵⁾

Adam had a nose. He had a sense of smell. But what was there to smell? The fragrance of flowers is a product of the second law of thermodynamics: the move from order to disorder. The millions of tiny particles that activate our sense of smell are distributed randomly, which is why we smell them rather than step in them. They do not pile up.

Consider another example. What if Adam had wanted to build an internal combustion engine? Without a carburetor, the liquid known as gasoline would not power an automobile except in one fiery propulsion event. The carburetor breaks up the liquid into tiny droplets and distributes them randomly in a heat chamber where these particles can be ignited safely by an electric spark. Were it not for the second law of thermodynamics, there would be only one explosion, not thousands per minute.

What if Adam had wanted to play a friendly game of solitaire? He would have pulled out a deck of cards and shuffled them. No cheating here! Shuffling a deck of cards makes the order of the cards unpredictable. Why? Because their order has moved toward randomness. Why? Because of the second law of thermodynamics.

This means that the second law of thermodynamics operated before the Fall of man. This was admitted once by Henry M. Morris, who elsewhere has built his apologetic for creationism on the second law. In an essay addressed primarily to scientists rather than the general Christian public, he made this statement regarding the operation of the second law in Eden: "The formal announcement of the second law in its post-Fall form is found in Genesis 3:17-20. . . . Thus, as best we can understand both Scripture and science, we must date the establishment of the second law of thermodynamics, in its present form at least, from the tragic day on which Adam sinned. . . ."⁽⁶⁾ To speak of the "second law in its post-Fall form" and "in its present form at least" is an unobjectionable way to discuss the second law. It suggests that we must distinguish the pre-Fall and post-Fall operations of the second law. This implies that we should distinguish a cursed from an uncursed operation of that law. We live in a cursed-entropy world, not an entropy-cursed world. But as far as I am aware, nowhere else in his writings does Morris discuss the implications of this distinction, nor do his colleagues in the Creation Science movement. This is a major weakness in that movement. A discussion of entropy prior to Adam's Fall is long overdue in Creation Science -- so overdue that I suspect that a full discussion would raise objections to the ways in which the movement has used the second law in the past, as well as the ways in which the members of the movement have refused to use it.

The correct use of the second law of thermodynamics in Christian apologetics mandates tight constraints. To argue that the world is running down because of entropy is incorrect. Prior to Adam's rebellion, the second law of thermodynamics operated in a world that was in no way running down. The second law today operates differently from the way it did in Eden. That is, the physical effects of the second law of thermodynamics were in some fundamental way changed by God after the Fall of man. These effects have been cursed.

Entropy is a fact of life, like death and taxes. Prior to the Fall of man, it was equally a fact of life, before death and taxes had appeared. Despite entropy's cursed effects, we can and should work to achieve longer life spans and lower taxes. The Bible prophesies a future era of longer life spans (Isa. 65:20). Why not lower taxes to match? Why not reductions in entropy? Entropy is a cost. We can find ways of lowering costs. Motor oil reduces metallic friction and therefore reduces entropy. With respect to entropy's economic costs, they have been steadily reduced since the Industrial Revolution. That entropy exists, there can be no doubt, although if it operates in the subatomic realm, it has not yet manifested itself. That entropy, as a cost of production, can have significant effects on a particular social order is also not doubted. But that a serious social theory can be constructed in terms of entropy as an ever-growing social cost is highly doubtful, as socialist Jeremy Rifkin's failed attempt indicates. He ceased writing about entropy within few years after he announced it as a major intellectual breakthrough, substituting time-management as the culprit of capitalism.⁽⁷⁾

Continuity and Discontinuity

The Christian's case against Darwinian evolution can be based on the second law of thermodynamics only on the unstated assumption that today's universe is not governed by the physical laws of the pre-Fall universe. The Christian must be very careful how he uses the second law. He cannot accurately say that entropy did not exist in Eden, because it did operate there. Pollen's move from an ordered to a disordered (random) state -- entropy -- was what activated Adam's sense of smell. What was missing in Eden was hay fever, not entropy. Entropy was not cursed before the Fall; today it is. But this is not how modern defenders of Creation Science usually state their case. They state it incorrectly, as if the second law of thermodynamics did not operate prior to the Fall. They do not distinguish between the uncursed and cursed effects of the second law; instead, they distinguish between a world before the second law was imposed by God and today's fallen world under its despotic rule. They argue that the second law came into existence as a result of God's curse. Morris writes: "This law states that all systems, if left to themselves, tend to become degraded or disordered. . . . This, then, is the true origin of the strange law of disorder and decay, universally applicable, all-important second law of thermodynamics. Herein is the secret of all that's wrong with the world. Man is a sinner and has brought God's curse on the earth."⁽⁸⁾ In 1982, he wrote: "It is well to be reminded that the two greatest laws of science -- the universal principles of conservation and decay -- are merely the scientific formulations of, first, God's completed and conserved work of creation, and second, His curse on the creation because of sin."⁽⁹⁾ It is as if he had forgotten his properly qualified statement in 1981: "The formal announcement of the second law in its post-Fall form is found in Genesis 3:17-20. . . . Thus, as best we can understand both Scripture and science, we must date the establishment of the second law of thermodynamics, in its present form at least, from the tragic day on which Adam sinned. . . ."⁽¹⁰⁾ Morris' inaccurate formulation of the second law is widely cited in creationist circles, where it is invoked repeatedly in the apologetic against Darwinism. Hardly anyone knows about his correct formulation, which would force creationists to qualify this apologetic and thereby weaken it rhetorically, though strengthen it logically.

Invoking the second law of thermodynamics is a strictly negative apologetic tactic, and, as we shall see, it falls on deaf humanist ears. The Christian uses this argument to refute a Darwinist's assertion that ours is the only world there has ever been or will ever be. The Christian says: "If this really is the only world there has ever been, then the second law of thermodynamics tells us that things could not have evolved from less order to more order. Entropy denies Darwinism." To which the faithful Darwinian replies: "But the second law applies only to closed systems, and the earth is not a closed system." The proper Christian response is: "Then how did the universe itself evolve from disorder to order?" To which the no longer faithful Darwinian responds: "In the nanosecond of the Big Bang, when the second law did not apply."

The Darwinist must invoke cosmic discontinuity -- the evolutionist's equivalent of the Bible's doctrine of creation out of nothing -- in order to secure the present continuity of nature's evolutionary processes. Many leading Darwinists have now capitulated to discontinuity, e.g., defenders of what is known as "punctuated equilibrium," the physically unexplainable, extremely rapid, comprehensive biological transformations of entire species.⁽¹¹⁾ But this does not shake their faith in the naturalism of the laws of evolution, any more than the existence of miracles shakes the Christian's faith in the universality of the laws of thermodynamics. Each side explains the existence of exceptions to the not-quite universal laws of thermodynamics in terms of its respective presuppositions regarding the origins of the universe. In short, neither side is willing to admit that the universe has been governed by the second law of thermodynamics throughout history, if we define history as including either the garden of Eden or the Big Bang.

The Christian's legitimate apologetic use of the second law of thermodynamics is therefore extremely limited in scope: to force the Darwinist to abandon uniformitarianism, i.e., the original Darwinian doctrine that the processes of nature that we observe today have always been operational. This doctrine is what provided the pre-Darwinian geologists with their evolutionary time scale, which was crucial to their denial of the accuracy of Genesis 1. This discovery of what John McPhee has called "deep time" led to the next intellectual revolution: Darwinism.⁽¹²⁾ Darwin adopted Hutton's and Lyell's uniformitarian geology before he restructured biology.⁽¹³⁾ But rare is the contemporary Darwinist who is silenced by the uniformitarian argument for cosmic continuity. He is willing to invoke cosmic discontinuities whenever convenient, now that he and his peers have agreed that Darwin's continuity-based arguments have permanently shoved the Bible's God out of the universe and out of men's thinking. Having made such effective epistemological and cultural use of Darwinian continuity, evolutionists today feel secure in invoking discontinuity whenever convenient, in much the same way that the creationists invoke miracles. Punctuated equilibrium -- unexplainably huge discontinuities in macro-evolution -- is modern Darwinism's equivalent of the Israelites' crossing of the Red Sea.

Darwinists want their cosmic miracles to be impersonal, so as to avoid considering God's final judgment. They want final judgment to be the impersonal eternal heat death of the universe long after they and everything else has died, not the highly personal eternal flames of the lake of fire. In contrast, Christians want their historical miracles to be personal, long before everything has died, in order to invoke God's final judgment. They want to escape the meaninglessness of the impersonal heat death of the universe in order to believe in the meaningfulness of God's highly personal judicial declaration, "Not guilty!"

Is the Social World Running Down?⁽¹⁴⁾

Those who invoke the second law as an argument against Darwinism are almost always premillennialists. Most of the others are amillennialists. As pessimillennialists, they also are highly tempted to argue that the social order is analogous to the physical order. It, too, is visibly running down. Nothing can restore it except: 1) the premillennial return of Jesus Christ to set up an earthly millennial kingdom (where the second law will be annulled or else overcome by regular miracles); 2) the amillennial return of Christ at the final judgment (after which the second law will be annulled).

Not many pessimillennialists will actually go into print on this point. In a flyer produced by the Bible-Science Association and the Genesis Institute (same address), we read the following: "The creationist realizes that the world is growing old around him. He understands that things tend to run down, to age, to die. The creationist does not look for the world to improve, but to crumble slowly -- as in erosion, decay, and aging."⁽¹⁵⁾ This is a philosophy of self-conscious defeat, a cry of cultural despair. It is also not the kind of philosophy that anyone would normally choose to challenge socialists or other humanists.

The whole idea of social entropy as an aspect of physical entropy is wrong-headed. First, the entropic process of cosmic physical decay takes place in humanistic time scales of millions of years. Such a time scale is irrelevant for social theory, whether Christian or pagan. Societies do not survive for millions of years -- not so far, anyway.

Second, what does it mean to say "the world will [or will not] improve"? What world? The geophysical world? What does an ethical or aesthetic term such as "improve" have to do with the physical world? Scientific evolutionists have been careful to avoid such value-laden adjectives with respect to historical geology or biology, at least with respect to the world prior to mankind's appearance. Without a moral evaluator, says the Darwinist, there can be no meaning for the word "improve."

Christians should be equally careful in their use of language. The Christian should argue that God evaluates any improvement or degeneration in the external world, and therefore men, acting as God's subordinates, also make such evaluations. But there is no autonomous impersonal standard of "world improvement," as any evolutionist readily admits. So, the flyer apparently had as its point of reference not the geophysical world but rather man's social world.

The flyer says that things tend to run down. "Evolution demands that things `wind up' even as we see them run down. Therefore the evolutionist looks for things to improve." This implies that Christians should not look for things to improve. Again, what do we mean by "improve"? If things only tend to run down, this implies that sometimes things don't run down. If so, then there must be decay-offsetting progressive forces in operation. What might these be? The main one is the gospel of salvation. Regeneration restores ethical wholeness to men. Another offsetting factor is obedience to the law of God. God's law enables men to rebuild a cursed world. In other words, ethics is fundamental; entropy isn't. This is why entropy, to the extent that any such phenomenon applies to the affairs of men, is only a tendency.

The reason why I keep citing this short document (tract) is because it is the one creationist document I have seen that even mentions social theory, and even then only vaguely. I would have been happy to consider other documents from Creation Scientists that deal with entropy in relation to social theory, but I have been unable to find any. In 1988, I searched the complete set of the Creation Social Sciences and Humanities Quarterly and found nothing on the topic. There is zero interest in this topic in modern evangelicalism. There is almost as little interest in the relationship between creationism and the social sciences. By 1895, 36 years after the publication of Origin of Species, Darwinism had captured virtually every academic field. By 1995, 34 years after the publication of Morris and Whitcomb's Genesis Flood, this thin quarterly magazine had 600 subscribers.

Why this silence on social theory? It may be that the entropy paradigm is so powerful that six-day creationists have become pessimistic about the possibility of constructing the foundations of a self-consciously biblical social science. Perhaps they have been baffled by some variation of this question: "If entropy is the dominant factor in life, how can there be progress in social institutions, including the family and the institutional church?" The answer that I offer is simple enough: both the resurrection and bodily ascension of Jesus Christ have made possible the historical overcoming of many of the cursed aspects of entropy in the physical universe, and to whatever extent that entropy-related curses affect social institutions, these effects can be offset even more rapidly than in the physical realm. Why? Because the three main institutions of society -- family, church, and State -- are covenantal. Point four of the biblical covenant model -- sanctions⁽¹⁶⁾ -- offers legitimate hope in comprehensive healing in history. This healing is both personal and institutional.⁽¹⁷⁾ The closer we get to man, who is made in God's image, the more the covenant's sanctions of blessings and cursings become visible.

I suspect that there is a better explanation for pessimillennialists' silence on social theory. It is not that pessimillennialists have become paralyzed in their development of social theory by the power of the concept of entropy. Rather, it is the other way around: their pessimillennialism has governed their use of the concept of entropy. Their inherently pessimistic social theory has led to a particular application of the entropy concept: the denial of entropy in the pre-Fall world. They see physical entropy much as they see the social world: inherently debilitating rather than cursed in its effects. They see entropy as the dominant factor in a physical world governed by physical decay; they see disorder as the dominant factor in a social world governed by moral decay. They see isolated islands of physical order in a world of escalating physical disorder; they see isolated islands of social order in a world of escalating social and moral decay. They view the physical universe as declining into oblivion apart from occasional miracles; they see history as declining into oblivion apart from rare events of individual salvation. The physical world must march toward physical chaos until God calls the process to a halt at the final judgment. The social world must also march toward social chaos until God calls the process to a halt at the final judgment. In neither case does the New Testament doctrine of Christ's bodily resurrection and ascension to the right hand of God play any theoretical role. In both cases, the Old Testament's curses are left unaffected by the New Testament's blessings. In both cases, the Old Testament's tale of rebellion and destruction is dominant. In neither case does New Testament biblical theology play any role. The New Testament's message of comprehensive redemption -- the Great Commission -- is denied in the name of the Old Covenant's pre-ascension setbacks.

When I published Is the World Running Down?, I did not expect Creation Scientists to respond to it in print. I was correct; almost no one did. More to the point, no one in the movement has ever written a book on entropy and social theory; mine remains the only Christian book that deals with the subject, which minimizes the connections between physical entropy and social entropy. I admit freely that physical entropy imposes costs on production processes, but the key question is social: Which social order best encourages the discovery and implementation of technological reductions in these costs? Creation Scientists do not bother to ask this question. The Creation Science movement has not produced a single social theorist since The Genesis Flood appeared in 1961. This is ominous for the Creation Science movement. It means that the movement's attempt to reconstruct modern natural science has not only failed to persuade the vast majority of natural scientists, it has persuaded no social scientists. Why is this ominous? Because the success of Darwinism can be measured by its penetration of all other academic fields within a single generation.

As I said earlier, three decades after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, the worldwide intellectual community had become overwhelmingly Darwinian. In almost every academic discipline in the social sciences and the humanities, Darwinists had laid totally new intellectual foundations; each field had been totally reconstructed to conform to Darwinism. By 1890, the Progressive Movement in the United States was ready to restructure civil government and social theory, including theology, in terms of the Darwinian ideal of scientific central planning.⁽¹⁸⁾ So were Progressivism's cousins in Europe, the Social Democrats. The absence of any similar effort, let alone success, among Creation Science's adherents outside of the natural sciences, indicates that there is either something missing in or radically wrong with the movement's entropy apologetic. This was one of my main themes in Is the World Running Down?: the incompatibility of Creation Science's entropy apologetic with biblical social theory. Our physical world is not a closed system; neither is our social world. God intervenes in nature and history. He intervened in the corporate life of Israel during the wilderness period, overcoming entropy in the area of apparel.

Pessimillennialism and Social Theory

I argue that the Creation Science movement has a hidden but widely shared eschatological agenda: pessimillennialism. Dispensational premillennialists and amillennialists want to believe that the social world must continue to deteriorate alongside the physical world, and a whole lot faster. They accept what might be called "the uniformitarianism of social deterioration." Evil is always compounding in such a view. This steady increase in evil is fast approaching that point on the social graph when the curve will turn sharply upward and begin to approach infinity as a limit: the exponential curve. In other words, pessimillennialists believe that things will soon get so bad socially that Jesus will just have to come again in person to straighten everything out by force. This time of exponential social evil is almost upon us; therefore, they conclude, the Second Coming is just around the corner. They believe that there is not enough time remaining to reverse this process of deterioration. Furthermore, there is no possibility of doing so: social entropy is as universal as physical entropy is. No long-term reversal of social entropy is compatible with the entropy apologetic. The institutional church is seen as socially impotent; the gospel is seen as exclusively personal; and fulfilling the Great Commission⁽¹⁹⁾ is seen as an impossible dream.

Until Creation Science begins to have an impact on social thought, it will be unable to counteract Darwinism, which long ago reconstructed social theory in its own image. The presuppositions underlying modern biological evolution appeared first in the social theories of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, not in the natural sciences.⁽²⁰⁾ Then, after 1880, the free market social theory of pre-Darwinian evolutionism was abandoned; replacing it was reform Social Darwinism: State planning. Evolutionistic social theory laid the foundations of biological Darwinism, just as pessimillennialism laid the foundations of Creation Science's entropy apologetic. Until the eschatological agenda of Creation Science is openly discussed, Creation Science will continue to be irrelevant outside of the natural sciences. Until pessimillennialism is abandoned by Creation Science, Creation Science will continue to be irrelevant in the area of social theory. Pessimillennialism makes impossible the development of a specifically biblical social theory.⁽²¹⁾

Premillennialists presumably believe in "universal social entropy." But there is neither a formula governing social entropy nor any way scientifically to identify or measure this supposed phenomenon, unlike physical entropy. Premillennialists implicitly assume that this universal social entropy will be reversed or offset during the future millennium. They do not say this explicitly, however. Premillennialists refuse to discuss the topic of entropy's operations during the coming millennium. Perhaps they choose not to think about such matters; in any case, they refuse to write about them. Henry M. Morris ignores the topic in his commentary on the Book of Revelation. He says that entropy will be repealed after the final judgment,⁽²²⁾ but he is conveniently silent with respect to entropy during the millennial kingdom. Most premillennialists believe that things will no longer decline morally and socially during the millennium.⁽²³⁾ Presumably, premillennialists also believe that the effects of physical entropy will somehow be offset during the millennium. They never discuss this, and so I cannot know for sure what they believe on this point. I doubt that they do, either. On the other hand, if entropy's effects will be offset cosmically, then the millennium will constitute one gigantic miracle. If they will be offset at a price by normal scientific and technological progress, then we can in theory do the same thing now without the bodily return of Jesus to rule from Jerusalem or Colorado Springs or wherever He will set up headquarters. In either case, entropy is not a permanently debilitating factor in social organizations. Either a series of miracles will offset it, as took place in the wilderness era, or mankind's efforts in reducing costs will offset it.

Amillennialists see no permanent future reversal of social decline in history; a better day is not coming on this side of the Second Coming. In this sense, amillennialists are what Rushdoony once said they are: premillennialists without earthly hope. Neither of these pessimillennial creationist groups sees any advantage in devoting time and money to a study of biblical social theory. Why bother? Isn't everything is going to hell in an entropic handbasket? Isn't everything doomed? Wouldn't any investment of time and money in developing a creationist social theory constitute a waste of scarce economic resources, like polishing brass on a sinking ship?

Moses had an answer for such rhetorical questions: no!

Conclusion

A very clever professor of engineering once stated a specific form of the second law of thermodynamics: "Confusion (entropy) is always increasing in society. Only if someone or something works extremely hard can this confusion be reduced to order in a limited region. Nevertheless, this effort will still result in an increase in the total confusion of society at large."⁽²⁴⁾ If knowledge were the product of physical creation -- or if life were -- then his theorem would be correct in this sin-cursed (but not entropy-cursed) world. Moses' account of the wilderness indicates that life is not strictly physical. Other laws apply. It is worth noting that the famous physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, insisted that life is governed by laws different from those established by modern physical theory. In his book, What Is Life?, he wrote: "What I wish to make clear in this last chapter is, in short, that from all we have learnt about the structure of living matter, we must be prepared to find it working in a manner that cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of physics."⁽²⁵⁾

To persuade Israel that promise precedes law, and therefore that grace precedes law, Moses reminded them of their experience in the wilderness. God had overcome the laws of nature by feeding them with manna and by keeping their clothing from wearing out. In modern terminology, God had suspended the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy in these areas had been reduced to zero. There had been neither wear nor tear on their clothing.

This was miraculous. Moses expected Israel to understand this. God's active intervention into the processes of nature had been continuous for four decades. He had overturned the laws of nature in order to humble them without killing them. To keep them both humble and alive in the wilderness as a test of their covenantal commitment, He had performed a series of miracles that constituted one long miracle. They had passed the test. Now, Moses was telling them, God would secure the long-promised kingdom grant for them through military conquest. But their continued covenantal corporate obedience would be required by God in order for the nation to maintain this kingdom grant.

This Mosaic world-and-life view offers hope for society. Whenever men remain covenantally faithful through obedience to God's Bible-revealed laws, social progress is not only possible, it is assured. God's kingdom grant was given to the church by Jesus after His resurrection: "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen" (Matt. 28:18b-20). This kingdom grant was sealed by His ascension in history. "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father. And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it" (John 14:12-14). Therefore, Jesus instructed us, "If ye love me, keep my commandments" (v. 15).

The Great Commission will be fulfilled prior to the final judgment: "Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. For he hath put all things under his feet. But when he saith, all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is excepted, which did put all things under him. And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all" (I Cor. 15:24-28). The termination of entropy's curse will coincide with the termination of death: the last enemy to be subdued. No more worn out clothes and no more swollen feet: what was in the wilderness evermore shall be, world without end, amen.

Footnotes:

1. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 2.

2. Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988).

3. But will electrons quit moving? Will atoms still be there? Does the second law apply to subatomic realm?

4. They are not equally sure regarding the subatomic realm.

5. This section is based on "Entropy in the Garden of Eden," Is the World Running Down?, pp. 124-26.

6. Henry M. Morris, "Thermodynamics and Biblical Theology," in Emmett L. Williams (ed.), Thermodynamics and the Development of Order (Norcross, Georgia: Creation Research Books, 1981), pp. 129-30.

7. North, Is the World Running Down?, Appendix F: "Time for a Change: Rifkin's `New, Improved' Worldview."

8. Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Record: A Scientific and Devotional Commentary on the Book of Beginnings (San Diego, California: Creation-Life, 1976), p. 127.

9. Henry M. Morris, Evolution in Turmoil (San Diego, California: Creation-Life, 1982), p. 174.

10. Morris, "Thermodynamics and Biblical Theology" (1981), op. cit., pp. 129-30. Emphasis added.

11. The main proponent in the United States is Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould.

12. McPhee is quoted by Stephen Jay Gould, Time's Arrow/Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 2.

13. Robert A. Nisbet, Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 182-84.

14. This section is based on Is the World Running Down?, ch. 3: "Entropy and Social Theory."

15. What's the Difference? Creation/Evolution? (no date), p. 2.

16. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 4.

17. Gary North, Healer of the Nations: Biblical Blueprints for International Relations (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).

18. Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought, 1865-1901 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), Part 2.

19. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).

20. F. A. Hayek, "The Results of Human Action but not of Human Design" (1967), in Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (University of Chicago Press, 1967), ch. 6; S. S. Schweber, "The Origin of the Origin Revisited," Journal of the History of Biology, X (1977), pp. 229-316.

21. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).

22. Henry M. Morris, The Revelation Record (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House, 1983), p. 441.

23. An exception is accountant-turned-theologian Dave Hunt. See Hunt, Beyond Seduction: A Return to Biblical Christianity (Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House, 1987), p. 250. For a critique, see Is the World Running Down?, pp. 257-63.

24. W. L. Everitt, Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois. Cited in Paul Dickenson, The Official Rules (New York: Delacorte Press, 1978), p. 48.

25. Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (Cambridge University Press, [1944] 1967), p. 81.

If this book helps you gain a new understanding of the Bible, please consider sending a small donation to the Institute for Christian Economics, P.O. Box 8000, Tyler, TX 75711. You may also want to buy a printed version of this book, if it is still in print. Contact ICE to find out. icetylertx@aol.com

Table of Contents

Jerusalem vs. Athens: "Classical Christian?"

The Scopes Trial involved a Tennessee law forbidding the teaching of Darwinism. There are many "Christian Schools" which use textbooks approved by state governments (in order to obtain "certification" or "accreditation" from the government). These textbooks subtly inculcate Darwinism. As Henry Morris pointed out, virtually every field of study -- sociology, law, psychology, economics, etc. -- is based on "evolutionary theory," which really boils down to secular humanistic thinking in every area. Darwin was not the first to advance some kind of naturalistic or evolutionary theory of life. Evolutionary thinking has been going on for thousands of years.

Some "Christian Schools" market themselves as "Classical Christian Schools." The term "classical" is defined as "relating to ancient Greek or Latin literature, art, or culture," and points to what Edgar Allan Poe called, "the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome." "Classical" antiquity was more secular than previous empires, like Babylon and Egypt, and so is favored by modern Secular Humanists.

Christian philosopher Cornelius Van Til has said, "There is no alternative but that of theonomy and autonomy. "Classical" culture represents a clear manifestation of human autonomy. John M. Frame, a student of Van Til, has provided A History of Western Philosophy and Theology which demonstrates the antithesis between Theonomy (God's Law) and autonomy (man's law) throughout the history of philosophy and "liberal" theology.

The Classical Christian Curriculum: Marriage to a Corpse

Gary North
July 16, 2014

Remnant Review

To understand Christian homeschooling today, you must understand the work of R. J. Rushdoony. You need to understand two things. First, he saw education as a war of the worldviews. Second, he utterly rejected the underlying concept behind the so-called classical Christian curriculum: religious syncretism. The second position was an extension of the first.

What is syncretism? This dictionary definition is accurate: "The amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought."

From the 1960's through the 1990's, the homeschool movement in the United States faced an escalating battle with state governments. The movement was overwhelmingly made up of Protestant fundamentalists who had decided that they could no longer cooperate with the educational philosophy and programs of the tax-funded schools, K-12. State by state, regulation by regulation, these were the front lines of the war of the worldviews. The states did not want students to escape from state control over the state's curricula and teaching philosophies. Also, because state funding of local districts depends on enrollment, every child pulled out of the schools cuts the income of the school district.

Throughout this period, Rushdoony was the premier spokesman for the religious rights of parents in this war against humanistic state education. This culminated in 1994 with a Texas Supreme Court decision, in which the school districts in Texas were dealt a massive blow against their control over homeschooling parents. The educational bureaucrats never recovered.

THE BATTLEGROUND IN TEXAS, 1985-1994

The states varied in their threats against homeschooling families. In Texas, the showdown came in a court case: Leeper v. Arlington. A Google search reveals hundreds of articles on this case. A total of 80 families in the state were prosecuted by school districts for criminal violations of a 1985 compulsory attendance law. In 1985, attorney Shelby Sharpe filed a class action suit against all 1,100 school districts. The result came after nine years of litigation. The initial decision came in 1987.

The Tarrant County District Court ruled that home schools are indeed private schools. On April 13, 1987, presiding Judge Charles J. Murray issued a decision (binding on all 1,100 school districts) which was a complete vindication of the rights of parents to educate their children at home in the State of Texas.

The state appealed. In 1991, an appeals court upheld the local judge's decision. The state appealed. In 1994, the Texas Supreme Court voted 9 to 0 in favor of the parents. At that point, the state was definitively beaten. The districts were fined several hundred thousand dollars. That threw the fear of the state into them. That ended the school districts' authority or willingness to interfere with parental rights in education.

In 2013, the Texas Commissioner of Education reminded the school districts and parents of state policy.

The issues surrounding students schooled at home continue to be of significant interest to parents and school districts. Because of the number of inquiries the Texas Education Agency (TEA) receives regarding this matter, I am providing some general information with respect to the Agency's position on home schooled students.
The decision rendered in Leeper et al. vs. Arlington ISD et al. clearly establishes that students who are home schooled are exempt from the compulsory attendance requirement to the same extent as students enrolled in private schools. Students should be disenrolled by school officials when they receive written notice either by signing withdrawal forms or a letter of withdrawal. It is not necessary for the parents to make a personal appearance with school officials or present curriculum for review.

The school districts' defeat had been total.

That decision sent a memo to school districts across the United States. They began to back off after 1994.

The key witness in the Leeper case was Rushdoony. He was brought in by attorney Sharpe because he was the most recognized defender in the United States of Christian education. After the victory, Sharpe said this: "His testimony was way beyond anything I'd hoped for. It was one of the few times in my career that I ever saw a witness destroy the attorney who was trying to examine him." Rushdoony's complete testimony is here.

RUSHDOONY ON EDUCATION

To understand Rushdoony's position on the right of parents to educate their children, you must understand his position on education in general. He saw it as a matter of religion. He saw parents as agents of God. He saw state education as humanistic and deeply religious. He presented his case in the name of religious liberty. He saw Christian education as inherently at war with the supposed neutrality of state education. State education is part of a rival religion, he argued: the religion of humanism.

He identified this humanism with classical education, especially Greek humanism. He was religiously and philosophically opposed to what is known today as the classical Christian curriculum.

In 1958, Rushdoony's first book appeared, a book on the Christian philosopher Cornelius Van Til: By What Standard? The crucial chapter in the book is chapter 1: "Behold, it was Leah." He referred back to Jacob's wedding night and the deception of his father-in-law, who substituted Leah for Rachel.

The Christian thinker, laboring as he often must on alien ground, has too often embraced as his own a non-Christian principle which he believed would be fruitful in terms of Christian thought. He has made bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh a principle which he has believed would bear fruit in a Christian world-view. This resultant hybrid world-view he believed would fall heir to this world's substance and show mastery and dominion over the human mind. In this expectation, early Christian thinkers embraced Platonism; the scholastics, Aristotelianism; the men of the enlightenment era Cartesianism and rationalism, and men of the 19th and 20th centuries, Kantianism, existentialism, and other alien brides, hoping thereby that in the dark they held Rachel. But, "in the morning, behold, it was Leah"! (pp. 1-2)

In this article, I follow through on this theme: "Behold, it was Leah." I focus especially on classical culture as Leah.

In 1961, his next book appeared: Intellectual Schizophrenia: Crisis, Culture, and Education. It was a full-scale attack on the concept of tax-funded education. He argued that such education is never neutral, and it is always coercive. He called on Christian parents to pull their children out of the tax-funded schools.

In 1963, his magnum opus on education appeared: The Messianic Character of American Education. He wrote a lengthy section against the use of Greek philosophical categories in Christian education. This appears on pages 14 through 16. Greek education was inherently the servant of the state -- a redemptive state. So is American public education, he argued.

Because Greek thought had no conception of an independent and self-sufficient God who is the source of all true authority, it could not develop the authority of this God-related reason. For the Greeks, authority came from the polis, not from God. Its deity when manifest as authority was immanent and not transcendent, and lacking in more than local scope, usually in terms of the city-state (p. 15).

He made it clear that he had no use for any curriculum that attempted to combine classical education and the Bible.

Thus, the American college before 1860 was extensively geared to a Christian concept of life, while following a medieval and celibate pattern, and a classical, Greco-Roman, curriculum, aiming to produce young gentleman in terms of the Enlightenment concept of man. Its concept of a liberal education was thus not systematic but rather traditional. A radical clarification of issues was only to come much later with the progressivists, whose greatest function perhaps was to challenge and steadily shatter the conglomerate and syncretistic character of proceeding educational theory (pp. 1-2).

Rushdoony made it clear where he stood. Yet we see today in the Christian educational movement a process which Peter -- citing Proverbs -- described as a dog returning to its vomit (II Peter 2:22). We see a systematic attempt to restore the syncretism of the compromised Christian curriculum that prevailed in the United States before 1860. The so-called classical Christian curriculum is simply a newly baptized and dumbed-down version of what prevailed prior to 1860.

What was so significant about 1860? That was the year that the world first heard about Darwin's Origin of Species, which had been published in November 1859. Darwin dealt classical education a death blow. With Darwinism, there are no permanent standards, meaning ethical, educational, intellectual, biological, or anywhere else. Darwinism destroyed the concept of natural law, a concept that had been the foundation on which Christian apologists and philosophers had built their system, appealing back to Greek philosophical categories. These categories had been developed by way of Socratic reasoning as a way to defend the legitimacy of the two empires that had replaced the Greek city-state: the first was Alexander's; the second was Rome's.

In 1871, Darwin finally got enough courage to allow the publication of the Descent of Man. In that book, he became open about what was implied in the first book. Mankind was the product of non-purposive processes of nature. God did not direct the evolutionary process. Nature itself had no purpose. It was all a matter of natural selection.

Almost immediately, the president of Harvard College, Charles Elliott, began to re-shape higher education. He began to implement the elective system. In 1869, in an article in The Atlantic, he had announced his assault on classical education, especially education tied to a reading knowledge of Greek and Latin. He demanded the modernization of higher education. His demand was met almost universally. The only holdouts were a handful of college presidents who administered faculties made up primarily of retired ministers. The most prominent such university was the College of New Jersey, which in 1896 was re-named Princeton University. In 1902, Woodrow Wilson engineered a coup d'état against the existing president, who was a self-conscious Calvinist, and under Wilson, Princeton became just another Ivy League university.

In his book, The Biblical Philosophy of History (1969), Rushdoony explained what took place in the final third of the 19th century. Darwinism swept aside natural law theory, which had been taught as part of the classical curriculum.

Nature has, inherent within itself, its own processes and laws which govern reality. Hence, man's attitude is one of laissez-faire; there must be no interference with nature's laws and controls. Planning was thus transferred from God to nature. Darwinism destroyed this faith in nature. The process of nature was now portrayed, not as a perfect working of law, but as blind, unconscious energy working profligately to express itself. In the struggle for survival, the fittest survive by virtue of their own adaptations, not because of natural law. Nature produces many "mistakes" which failed to survive and become extinct species and fossils. The destiny of the universe is extinction as its energy runs down (p. 7).

That was the end of classical education. That was the end of classical philosophy. In other words, that was the end of the syncretism that had prevailed in Western education prior to 1860. But this fact has yet to sink into the thinking of Protestant Christians, who are still operating on the assumption that Darwinism has not completely re-structured the thinking of modern man.

So, we find poorly educated Protestants who do not understand the implications of Darwinism for every realm of scholarship. They cling to classical education, meaning a G-rated adaptation of a hybrid system. They ignore what it really was, which I spell out in detail here. It was always a syncretistic system. They are still promoting a dead educational system that could not defend itself against Darwinism, and which surrendered educationally no later than 1900.

Darwinism killed Leah. Rushdoony was correct on this point in 1969. What we find today is a modern curriculum that is the academic equivalent of necrophilia: the classical Christian curriculum.

In his 1981 book, The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum, Rushdoony began with a frontal assault against both Greek education and Roman education. He identified both as humanism incarnate. He identified both as statist.

The statist purpose of humanistic education was even more clearly emphasized by the Romans. According to Grimal, "Roman morality has a very distinct aim -- the subordination of the individual to the City." Religion and piety had reference to the City, for the gods with the gods of the City, and religion, by binding man to the gods, bound them to the City of the gods. . . .
The liberal arts curriculum thus had a statist orientation. Man's liberty, man's salvation, was to be found in faithful subordination of himself and all his being to the City of Man. The chief end of man, a political and social animal, was to glorify the state and to serve and enjoy it all the days of his life.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Christianity came into rapid conflict with Rome and the entire world. It was a battle between Christ and Caesar, between the City of God and the City of Man, for control of the world and of history. One hand, the emphasis was on the triune God and His eternal decree, and on the other hand the emphasis was on the primacy of time, on the civil order as the order of the incarnation and divinity, and on the temporal decree of the total state.(pp. 5-6).

I do not wish to belabor the point. From the beginning of his career until the end, Rushdoony opposed what would be called today the classical Christian curriculum. He laid down the philosophical foundations for a complete reconstruction of the modern curriculum, and this reconstruction involves the abandonment of both classical culture and Darwinian evolution. He argued that Darwinian evolution has completely destroyed the concepts that had undergirded classical education, and that any attempt to return to such syncretism is futile. From day one, the bride on the other side of the bed was Leah.

What is annoying to me is simple to explain: the people who appeal to Rushdoony's books as justifications for Christian education have neither read nor understood his books. They come in the name of a reconstructed education, and they bring a corpse. They bring Leah, exhumed from her grave of 1860. They baptize the remains, they hike the price, and they tell parents that this is Christian education: classical Christian education.

Behold it is Leah, and Leah is dead.

There is a lot of money in this. The money flows in from naïve Christian parents, who have understood none of this. It is a marketing technique that is based on intellectual necrophilia. Leah was always desperately ill, and Charles Darwin buried her alive.

WAR OF THE WORLDVIEWS

Christian curriculum promoters love to use the word "worldview." They use it all the time. They keep telling the parents that their curriculum will provide a Christian worldview. They never define this worldview. They never define the presuppositions of Christian education. They never define the presuppositions of classical education. But they tell the trusting parents that this is a consistent Christian worldview. They tell them that they need to buy this curriculum, in order to make certain that their children have a Christian world-and-life view. But they never define it. They never show how their curriculum is systematically Christian. They never show how it can be conformed with classical education, which was based on a rival set of presuppositions. It was based on a rival worldview, which placed the state at the center of society. It placed the city-state at the center, and after the city states all fell to Alexander, it placed the Alexandrian Empire at the center. When Alexander's empires fell to the Romans, it placed the Roman Empire there. This was how natural law theory was first presented.

How is it that Christianity, which was at war spiritually with the classical world, and which was persecuted almost unto the death by the Roman Empire for almost three centuries, somehow is consistent with the worldview of classical religion, classical politics, and classical philosophy? To ask the question is to answer it. There is no consistency. There never was. But this is not an acceptable answer to the people who sell the necrophiliac Christian curriculum.

The reason why I wrote my article showing what the classical religion was really all about, is because I wanted to make it clear that what is palmed off on parents as a classical curriculum is a warmed-over, G-rated whitewash of classical religion, classical philosophy, and classical politics. It is surely a whitewash of classical education, which rested on the gymnasium and the debauchery associated with it.

How was it that the unified worldview of Greece and Rome was at war, first with the religion of the Hebrews, and then with the religion of the Christians? How was it these rival worldviews fought to the death? How was it that syncretism was possible between rival religious worldviews and rival civilizations? How was it that the Greeks and the Romans, in their attempt to be consistent, recognized that Christianity could not be absorbed into the classical world? It was a war to the death. Nevertheless, these naïve Christian parents are shelling out money to sellers of necrophiliac curricula that clearly are theologically schizophrenic. They are an attempt to bring back the pre-1860 syncretism that Rushdoony warned was fatal to begin with, and which died at the hands of Darwinism.

Christian parents don't know any of this. They had rotten educations. They have never studied classical religion and classical culture. They have never studied classical education. They don't know what went on in the gymnasia.

These curriculum developers do not want to sit down and develop a completely comprehensive curriculum based on rival worldviews. If they did, it would begin with an attack on classical culture in the name of the Bible. But the sellers of these curriculum materials do not want to take the responsibility for re-structuring their curriculum materials, so they piece together a syncretistic system of education, based on a complete whitewash of classical education. They sell it to unsuspecting parents, who in turn give it to their hapless children.

To subject children to this syncretism is irresponsible. Either teach each system as a separate worldview, so that students can see the differences clearly, or else teach the war as it took place in the history of the West.

There's too much money in this for them to abandon it. There is too much work for them to re-structure it. So, the necrophilia continues.

Behold, it is Leah, and Leah is dead.

DEFENDING THE CLASSICAL CHRISTIAN CURRICULUM

The so-called, self-proclaimed classical Christian curriculum sells like hotcakes. Why does it sell? Because the promoters have persuaded the buyers that there is a fundamental unity between classical civilization and Christianity. There is a fundamental unity of principles, including religious professions of faith, that will link forever the world of pagan Greece, pagan Rome, and Christianity. In fact, the promoters say, you cannot discuss Christianity without also discussing classical religion and classical culture, because there is a fundamental fusion between the two systems.

Doubt me? Consider this promotional.

1. Truth and beauty. In classical education, children are to sink into timeless pieces of literature, examine, appreciate, and replicate artistic masterpieces, enjoy nature, and relish in musical marvels. Where there is real beauty, there is truth.

Timeless principles? This is Plato -- his unproven analogy of the cave. This is Parmenides' system of fixed standards, immune to Heraclitus' endless historical change. This is Socrates' theory of the metaphysically existing ideas, way out in the void. This is Greek humanism to the core.

Here is my challenge. Spell out these timeless principles. Show me what they are, where they come from, and why they are timeless. Show me how they are autonomous: self-regulating and self-attesting. Show me how their existence can be defended in terms of Socratic reasoning. Van Til said they cannot be. So did Rushdoony. Show me that these autonomous timeless principles have been adopted and applied in many societies, because they are timeless. Show me how Athens and Jerusalem ever came to an agreement on these principles. Show me when.

I do not think any defender of the classical Christian curriculum can answer these questions. I know this: so far, none of them has done so in public. It is as if they are unaware of these fundamental issues of epistemology: "What do we know, and how can we know it?"

As the late-night TV Ronco ads used to say: "But wait! There's more!"

Classical Conversations is a classical, Christian education. Some might see those words placed together and not see the connection. In fact, some might go as far as to say they don't connect. It probably won't surprise you to hear me say, well, they do go together! Actually, I'm a firm believer that classical + Christian are better suited to each other than classical + humanistic. But, I didn't always know that.

I am saying it: the words don't connect.

I am not making this up. This promotional is representative of the whole sorry deception, which in some cases is self-deception. This has gone on for 30 years in Christian day school and homeschool circles. There is a seemingly endless supply of confused, poorly educated Protestant parents who do not recognize an oxymoronic curriculum when the see it.

Stick the word "classical" in front of "Christian," and there will be buyers.

If asked -- they never are -- the sellers will no doubt insist that this curriculum is in no way a compromise, that this is not a manifestation of religious syncretism. But it is. Christian parents should examine the curriculum to see if it presents a sharp contrast between classical humanism and Christianity, lesson by lesson, course by course.

Understand, I am not saying that students should not be exposed to the history, philosophy, politics, religion, and literature of the classical world. I am saying that such an examination should not be presented as if there were some overarching unity between classical civilization and Christianity. Such unity did not exist in theory or practice. This was why Christians were persecuted by Rome for almost three centuries. The emperors were being consistent with classical civilization. A careful study of classical civilization should make it clear to students why this conflict existed. The model was Marcus Aurelius: the only philosopher-king in the history of Rome, and a systematic persecutor of Christians. Justin Martyr was one of his victims.

ACTS 17

There is something deeply wrong theologically when a Christian operates with the assumption that Paul's sermon in Athens, recorded in Acts 17, was not a categorical rejection of the entire classical religious world. Paul did not appeal to Plato. He did not appeal to Aristotle. He appealed rather to the Greek world's theological insurance policy, namely, the unknown God. Just in case there might be an unknown God who was not being properly worshipped, the Greeks worshiped him, at least once in a while. Paul's message was simple: the God of the Bible isn't buying it. You can't buy your way into salvation, based on an appeal to some unknown God.

In other words, Paul said, there was a fundamental conflict between the worldview of classical Greece, as it existed in the time of Jesus, and the worldview of Jesus and the new church. He could also have made exactly the same statement with respect to the religion of Judaism, as it had been taught to him by Gamaliel. There was no compromise possible there, either. The Talmudic school recognized the influence of Hellenic Judaism, and it rejected Hellenism out of hand. Talmudic Jews recognized clearly that Hellenism was an invasion of an alien religion into the community of the faithful.

How is it that Christians who would instantly recognize the incompatibility of an Islamic Christian curriculum, a Buddhist Christian curriculum, or a Hindu Christian curriculum, rush out to spend money on a classical Christian curriculum? Somehow, Protestant evangelicals are convinced today that there is a fundamental unity between classical religion, classical culture, and Christianity. This is why they insist that their children suffer what they never had to tolerate, namely, a study of Latin. This will make their children, at best, readers of pigeon Latin. Instead of assigning their children a textbook in Koine Greek grammar, so they can read the New Testament in the original language, or assigning their children Hebrew, so they can read the Old Testament, they assign their children Latin. Why? The ability to read a little bit of Latin is not basic to any academic discipline or any profession in the world. The ability to read Latin is regarded as a peculiarity -- not a bad thing, but of no particular career value. Why spend years trying to master a dead language?

I think my favorite example of people who could speak Latin, appears in the movie Tombstone. There, the alcoholic, consumptive, womanizing Doc Holliday interacts with the murderous Johnny Ringo. They traded phrases in Latin. It never happened, but it was a great scene in the movie. That was in 1881. This was considered an oddity, even back in 1881.

Why would parents want their children to be able to read Latin, but not Arabic? Which is more important today? Which has been more important for the last 500 years? Why not Chinese? Why not Spanish? It takes years to master a language out of a textbook. Why waste this time on a dead language? Anyone can buy low-cost translations of the Latin classics and the Greek classics. We can download translations made prior to 1923 free of charge. But this is not good enough for Christian parents who cannot read Latin. They are determined that their children will be able to read Latin.

They don't know what their children are supposed to read in Latin. They know nothing of the Latin church fathers. They know little of Renaissance literature in Latin. But they want their children to read Latin. They just can't say why.

There is a reason why, but parents have not thought of it. Historical scholarship.

MEDIEVAL LATIN

The ability to read Latin was important in the late medieval world, because literacy was limited, and scholarship crossed kingly borders. Universities conducted classes in Latin. Students from around Europe attended. There were so few literate people, that it was necessary that literate people communicate with each other by letter, and the only common language was Latin. So, in the context of the late medieval world and even the Renaissance, it made sense for an educated person to be able to read Latin. The division of intellectual labor was such that it was necessary to have the ability to read Latin, and educated men possessed this ability.

With the coming of printing and the coming of cheap translations, literacy spread to the middle classes. It became profitable for someone to learn how to read, because it was possible for someone of middling resources to be able to buy printed books. At that point, there was a separation between those who could read Latin, who were people who had gone to a university, or who had been trained by a scholar who read Latin, and those people who were literate, but who could only read in the vernacular.

From that time on, the elite prided itself, collectively speaking, on the ability to be able to read at least a little Latin. That was what distinguished them from such people as businessmen who could read and who had knowledge of accounting. These businessmen were not the social equals of the first families of Europe. The first families of Europe wanted to maintain their status, which they granted only to themselves, and therefore they trained at least some of their young men in the language of Latin. It was a matter of social status to be able to read Latin.

This continued to separate the formally educated classes from the self-educated classes until the early 18th century. People did not speak in Latin, even in major universities, after 1500. But they read a little Latin, and that was sufficient to identify them as part of the social elite. Latin became little more than a pathway to social status.

The desire to read Latin is today a desire to achieve social status. It is not based on a desire to translate long-ignored manuscripts or long-forgotten books.

Within two decades, translation software will translate any remaining neglected Latin works. Years spent in mastering late-medieval Latin will prove to have been wasted years.

SYNCRETISM

It is true that the early Christian philosophical defenders of the faith relied on Greek wisdom to defend their position. They did not appeal to the scholarship or philosophy of Rome, because there wasn't any. Whatever existed in Rome was a derivative of the remnants of Greek culture. There were common religious practices, especially regarding the care and feeding of the dead. There were common gods. But if we are talking about philosophy, Rome was Greek.

The early Christian philosophers tended to appeal to Plato. They did not appeal to Greek religious practices. They surely did not appeal to the moral practices of Greece and Rome, especially regarding sexual behavior. But there was an importation of Greek philosophical categories, mainly Platonic categories, in the first few centuries of the church. This was limited to highly educated people. Only indirectly did these categories filter down to the common believer.

Literacy faded throughout what had been the Roman Empire after the fall of Rome to the barbarians in the late fifth century. Literacy was limited to small pockets of educated men, especially monastic centers in Ireland. Nobody other than monks and bureaucrats could afford the time to learn how to read. Nobody else could afford to buy the hand-copied manuscripts of the ancient world.

In the 11th century, there was a revival of classical learning by way of Islam. It went from Islam to Jewish scholars in Spain, and from there across the Pyrenees into northern Europe. By the 13th century, Latin translations of Greek works were becoming common among educated men in northern Europe.

The Protestant Reformation was in part a reaction against the church's fusion of Aristotelian logic and Christian morality, but a clean break with the classical world was not made by the Reformers. Leaders were products of the universities, and their categories were influenced by Greek philosophical categories. The debates that had arisen in the pre-Socratic world carried down into the Protestant Reformation. They still do.

The Christians always had an intellectual inferiority complex with respect to classical learning. This extended into Oxford and Cambridge. For a decade, the cavalry officer Oliver Cromwell was technically in charge of the curriculum at Oxford, because he was the Lord Protector. He made no changes in the curriculum. This was in the 1650's.

Higher education in the Protestant world, as in the Catholic world, and surely in the Eastern Orthodox world, was based on Greek philosophical categories. This did not end until 1860.

VAN TIL'S RESISTANCE

In the Netherlands in the late 19th century, there grew up a body of scholarship within Calvinist circles that began with a rejection of Greek philosophical categories. An immigrant to the United States, Cornelius Van Til, adopted this outlook as his own. In the 1920's, in graduate seminars under the legendary classicist and atheist A. A. Bowman, Van Til studied the Greek classics of philosophy in the Greek language. The students had to make translations of the original documents, and use these in their debates in the classroom. There were three men who did this, and I studied under two of them. One of them was Philip Wheelwright, an expert on Heraclitus, and the other was Van Til.

Van Til made a clean break with scholasticism, but also a clean break with the classical philosophical tradition. He began to re-structure what is traditionally called apologetics, namely, the philosophical defense of the faith. This represented a radical reconstruction of Protestant thought. He was not followed by many, but there is no question that he launched the first self-consciously anti-classical philosophical defense of Christianity.

He said the defense of the faith had been compromised from the very beginning by the early Christian apologists. He wrote a series of syllabi for his classes on this: Christianity in Conflict.

He was adamant that the rival worldviews of Christianity and classical philosophy cannot be reconciled in any way. They are rival worldviews. He argued this repeatedly throughout his career.

Van Til's thought became foundational to Rushdoony's thought. It undergirded his attack on Greek humanism.

THE DARK SIDE OF CLASSICAL CULTURE

Rushdoony was well aware of the occult side of classical culture. He wrote about this in two chapters in his book, The One and the Many (1971): Chapter IV, "The Unity of the Polis," and Chapter 5, "Rome: The City of Man." He recognized that the rationalism of classical philosophy was matched by the occultism of classical religion.

To conceal the extent of the conflict between Christianity and classical culture, the promoters of the classical Christian curriculum conceal from parents the extent of the occultism, the debauchery, and the culture of war that classical culture incarnated. They pretend that these elements were somehow peripheral to classical religion and its outcome, classical culture. They pretend that the occult side of classical culture was not integral to classical education -- what we call a package deal. In short, they deny the relevance of the war of the worldviews. They pretend that the two cultures were consistent, and they pretend that they have produced curriculum materials which bring together the two in a coherent synthesis.

This marketing strategy works. It sells. Parents buy it. This is because the parents have had such terrible educations in ancient history. They have accepted the myth of neutrality, even though they think they haven't. The public schools' textbooks have long concealed the occultism and the statism of the classical world. Then they explain the West in terms of the triumph of Greek humanism, which was succeeded by social Darwinism of the statist, central planning variety after 1890.

If readers want to know why I am so opposed to the classical Christian curriculum, this is why. Classical education was Leah, and Leah is dead.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (1864)
Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization (1902)
Alfred Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth (1915)
Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1922)
Gilbert Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion (1925)
Charles Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (1944)
Robert Flaceliere, Love in Ancient Greece (1960)
Ethelbert Stauffer, Christ and the Caesars (1955)
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1: Plato (1963)

To learn more about "A Century of Mass Ignorance and Mass Death," see our sister website, www.TheRealScopesTrial.com

About this Website

This website was originally created by Gary North -- or at least it's advertised in The Road to Dayton, his booklet on the Scopes Trial:

This website is now administered by Vine & Fig Tree. Our agenda runs counter to Gary North's, but not by much. We advocate 100% pure laissez-faire capitalism

The “Vine & Fig Tree” worldview is seen in Micah 4:1-7, where we beat our "swords into plowshares." "learn war no more," and everyone enjoys peace under his own "vine and fig tree."

"Learn war no more" means abolishing West Point and Annapolis.
"Swords into plowshares" means cutting the "defense" budget by 100%.

Gary North was not an "anarchist," but insisted that human beings needed a "civil government," even though North advocated abolishing some 99.99% of the existing government. According to Martin Selbrede of the Chalcedon Foundation, North's father-in-law believed that the entire budget permitted by Biblical Law for all levels of government in the United States -- federal, state, and local combined -- was about $500 million. That's million with an "M," not billion with a "B." That puts Rushdoony and North on the farthest fringe of non-anarchist conservatism. It is only a peculiar commitment to a doctrinal position that keeps Rushdoony and North from embracing the position Murray N. Rothbard called "anarcho-capitalism." Rushdoony said that Biblical Theocracy was the closest humanity would ever get to Rothbard's anarcho-capitalism (which Rushdoony called "radical libertarianism").

The hidden agenda of this website is now to advocate for anarcho-pacifism. The Scopes Trial is just getting our foot in the door. Although six-day creationism is assumed by this website, converting you to that position is not the goal. The goal is simply to get you thinking outside the box.

Most Christians -- and even most liberals -- are ignorant about the real issues in the 1925 Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. William Jennings Bryan, who opposed the teaching of evolution, was not what most folks today would call a fundamentalist. He was more of a liberal. In a narrow sense, Bryan was theologically conservative, and defended the deity of Christ, but he was politically liberal -- a Progressive. He opposed evolution because he believed it led to the oppression of the poor and the un-Favoured Races. He was, of course, completely correct about this, even though, from a Christian fundamentalist perspective, he was wrong about history and the creation of the world. William Jennings Bryan was not a six-day creationist. He was anti-eugenics. He was anti-genocide. He stood up for non-archists.

1925-2025:A Century of Mass Ignorance and Mass Death

The Real Scopes Trial, and My Free Book Exposing It

The Scopes Trial of 1925: What Really Happened

Video: The Scopes Evolution Trial of 1925, What Really Happened, Part 2

The Significance of the Scopes Trial

DARWINISM, DEMOCRACY, AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Editors Bearing Gifts

Bluegrass Democracy

The Attack Begins

Challenging the Flow of Funds

Eugenics and the American Establishment (Pre-Hitler)

"Good Cop, Bad Cop"

Bryan vs. Eugenics

Accomplices of Theological Modernism

A David Without a Stone

The Scopes Trial and Its Aftermath

Picking Up the Fallen Torch

Conclusion

Endnotes:

Lester Frank Ward: Godfather of American Central Planning

Bibliography

Lester Frank Ward

Social Darwinism

FROM COSMIC PURPOSELESSNESS TO HUMANISTIC SOVEREIGNTY

A. The Legacy of Hermann Muller

1. A Genetic New World Order

2. The Geneticists’ Manifesto

B. Man Must Plan

C. Making the Universe Bigger

1. The Copernican Revolution

2. The Darwinian Revolution

D. Uniformitarianism

E. Cosmic Purpose

F. Whose Purposes?

G. Man: The New Predestinator

1. A Sleight-of-Hand Operation

2. The New Evolution

H. Evolutionism’s Sleight-of-Hand

1. Simpson on Teleology

2. Thomas Huxley on Teleology

I. The Theology of Self-Transcendence

1. The Order of Creation

2. Relativism and Statism

3. A Unified God

4. A New Evolution

5. Genetic Engineering

J. Darwin’s Intellectual Revolution

K. Fictional Science, Science Fiction

L. Christian Orthodoxy vs. Process Philosophy

M. Social Darwinism: Phase I

1. Right-Wing Social Darwinism

2. Deceiving the Victims

3. American Progressivism

N. Social Darwinism: Phase II

1. Supernaturally Revealed Religion

2. Right-Wing Social Darwinism

3. Reducing Waste by Central Planning

4. The Elite vs. the Masses

5. State-Run Education

6. Education as Censorship

7. Salvation by Knowledge

8. The State as Society

9. Population Control

10. The Society of Satan

O. Darwinian Economic Theory

Conclusion

COSMOLOGIES IN CONFLICT: CREATION VS. EVOLUTION

Greek Speculation

Eastern Monism

Cosmological Evolution

Augustine’s Cosmology

Medieval Cosmology

Renaissance Cosmology

Geological Evolution

Buffon’s System

Hutton’s Uniformitarianism

Lyell’s Uniformitarianism

Biological Evolution: Pre-Darwin

The Idea of Progress

Organic Evolution

1925-2025:
A Century of Mass Ignorance and Mass Death