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Sample Chapter - INTRODUCTION
That human nature is an unsettled issue is driven home by the modern culture wars dividing Americans. In 2005 we witnessed another Scopes Trial in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and the media lit up with reports of fights in various states over good old evolution. Christians were again reminded of the threat to their cherished Biblical beliefs. Darwin, as usual, returned in the form of various and sundry liberals who espoused evolution and secular values. A conservative Christian named Ann Coulter wrote Godless: The Church of Liberalism, in which Darwinian evolution is portrayed as a false doctrine.1 While Coulter is a self-promoter and provocateur, her claim that most liberals are Darwinists is correct.Liberals may be often misguided or wrong, but they are on the side of truth when it comes to the fact of evolution. The ghost of Darwin seems destined to emerge from time to time because he represents an idea that Daniel Dennett rightly called dangerous. Indeed, only 40 % of Americans believe that Darwin was right, according to a study in 2005.2 The question of human origins and the development of life on earth are intense sore points among most Christians, especially Protestant fundamentalists, a group growing in power in recent times.The majority of Americans believe that humans did not arise from other forms of life.3 The Catholic Church, usually stubborn for good reason about changing doctrine, “embraced” evolution after more than a century and did it by essentially refraining from attacking it.Just as some “believe” in evolution because it is intellectually respectable, many oppose it entirely out of ignorance. The single event that forced Christianity to dance to a different tune was Darwin’s great 1859 book called On the Origin of Species.4 Darwin at once made himself immortal both for his science and his act of opening a can of worms he and his defenders could not close. That can remains open to this day! Darwinian evolution, modified by modern biology, became the cornerstone of all biological science. It was fully accepted both as a fact and as a substantiated theory of natural selection by 1959, the Darwin Centennial year.5 Without it life on earth would make little sense. At the college and university level, evolution remains firmly entrenched and scholars across the world debate usually fine yet sometimes important points of the field. The historical fact of evolution is accepted by professional biologists as well as scientists in general, but science education has never succeeded in raising biological literacy to an adequate level. The revolution in Western thought wrought by Darwin was always accentuated by its antagonistic relations with Christianity. Furthermore, two offshoots of Darwinism created even more enemies: race theory and Social Darwinism. These misapplications “muddied the water” for a Darwinian doctrine already under siege. Race theory was popular in Europe after Darwin’s Origin appeared. Ernst Haeckel, a renowned German biologist, published a book called History of Creation in which he proposed that human races were ordered hierarchically with Germans (Northern Europeans) as the superior race and Africans at the bottom. Approaching the twentieth century, Europe was a hotbed for eugenics, a science aimed at improving human stock as one would dogs or sheep. Thus, Haeckel’s ideas were fodder for a grand debate over the issue of science’s role in human progress. That Hitler was inspired by Haeckel left most of the West with a bitter taste for eugenics, Haeckel, and, of course, Hitler.6 Social Darwinism was Herbert Spencer’s doctrine emphasizing self-interest and capitalism as primary values. Taken to an extreme, it excuses brutality and abuse of the poor. In America a Russian immigrant named Ayn Rand became a best-selling novelist and founder of “Objectivism.” This movement was devoted to unmitigated capitalism and the supreme value of strong Machiavellian leadership. Darwin hated the extrapolations made from his theory to justify indifference to poverty and other excesses. Abuse of great ideas also occurred in the case of Einstein, who had to watch as even morals became “relative.” While capitalism thrived in America as in no other place, its supposed rationale called Social Darwinism received a torrent of criticism from the political left. Indeed, much of the left before WWII followed Marx’s teachings and felt sympathy for communism or socialism. While Darwin found that competition was a fact of evolution, he would be pleased that modern evolutionary psychologists are finding the roots of altruism, which is, after all, a major factor in human culture. The catastrophic defeat of communism and the worldwide spread of democracy and capitalism are historical phenomena which seem to vindicate Social Darwinism to a limited degree, but all modern societies protect the poor with social programs. While technological marvels capture the headlines, it was modern science that gradually pushed religion out of its domain.Religion could not compete with the scientific method of investigating nature, pure and simple.Christianity, often discomforted by scientific findings, must be given credit for encouraging reason and exploration as science thrived in the twentieth century.In contrast, Islam stifled science in modern times. Gradually Western civilisation simply became more secular in part because natural events were better explained by science. Miracles retreated to smaller niches and were no longer such powerful reminders of God’s personal interest. Skepticism grew as populations gained increasing amounts of education and wealth. Modern Europe became more rapidly secularized partly because two world wars left most people disillusioned about God’s purpose. Death, famine, and disease have a dampening effect on one’s faith unless a rational explanation can be found. Also, England’s modern nationhood followed Shakespeare into a much more secular era while France followed its Rational Man as the highest ideal.Germany, using Goethe as its Shakespeare, made religion a less important, private affair. Religion became largely irrelevant. Religion in early America was pluralistic and divided into enclaves. For Protestants it was denominationalism thriving in a land of religious freedom.No single Church power existed, as they did in Europe.As European governments slowly became more secular, the power of religion waned as church attendance dwindled. In America, the separation of church and state led to competition among churches and Protestantism grew into a civil religion. In the table below you can compare various countries on three issues: belief in God, the Bible, and evolution.7 Note the status of the USA as more religious than most countries and also more anti-Darwin than most.The countries that believe in evolution usually have little faith in God or Bible, such as New Zealand, Great Britain, Netherlands, Norway, and both Germanys.I am sure that France, the motherland of deconstructionism and existentialism, belongs in this group.
It is interesting that Israel, the recent homeland of the vast Jewish diaspora, despite the intensity of belief in the Talmud, Kabbalah, and Judaic traditions, really has secular overtones. It appears to be split down the middle between secularists and religionists.However, a recent article by Alexander Nussbaum called “Orthodox Jews and Science” shattered my naivete.8Nussbaum claims that denial of evolution is an article of faith among Orthodox Jews.Even Orthodox scientists condemn evolution and prefer the Torah over secular science.They must believe the Universe is 5,766 years old! Nussbaum did the study with Orthodox students at a secular university so this group demonstrates the antievolution extremism among American Orthodox Jews.9 Russia and E. Germany show the strong effects of Communist atheism over 80 years, but Germans believe in evolution while Russians do not. Here may be the results of Stalin’s Lysenkoism. Russians were taught that Lamarckian ideas were correct and not Darwin’s. They are thus suspicious of Darwinian evolution for completely different reasons than Christian fundamentalists!In 2005 Russian Life magazine reported that Russians, a highly superstitious people before communism,are returning to religion to the tune of over 50 percent! 10 America, in contrast to Europe, avoided war on its territory and retained much more of its nineteenth century religiosity. This is a country that usually claimed that 90%(most surveys) believe in God and to this day some 40% go to church weekly, which is higher than most countries. Among all types of Christians, however, it is the Southern Protestants who dislike Darwin the most. Baptists supply most of the opposition because Biblical fundamentalism rigidly adheres to the Bible chronology of the earth’s creation. Additionally, groups called Evangelicals run mega-churches where many thousands congregate to hear slick preachers, while high tech marketing beckons the faithful. These are generally anti-Darwin in direct proportion to the amount of Disneyification undergone.11 More recent surveys, done in 2005, find Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and Japan as the strongest believers in man as having evolved from earlier, different species.They are all over 80 % while Americans are at the bottom with 40%.12 America is a supremely materialistic country despite its mostly superficial religiosity.The current war over media sex content,the spread of porn, the hip hop fad, and myriad signs of inordinate drinking, parties, and corporate cheating remind thoughtful people that degeneracy may be the price we pay for our loss of a moral foundation. The liberal idea of full equality carries with it the stigma of non-judgmental humanism that directly conflicts with Christian morality. If you cannot judge evil acts or even incompetent performance, you are trapped in a state of moral decline which can only be judged as “decline” by an outsider with absolute standards.The only absolute is the doctrine of subjectivism that belittles science as just another way of knowing.Th us, the Luddites trying to undermine Darwin are the modern remnants of those Victorians who held the Bible to be the last hope of Man-as we were once collectively called. They represent, however, millions of Christians who feel dispossessed by Darwin’s victory.They feel a very strong need for a supportive religious doctrine and are alienated from what they deem is Darwinian nihilism. A competitive, materialistic society like America, putatively Christian yet so full of crime, disorder, and signs of degeneracy, has to have internal political strife on a large scale because ideological differences have become far more acute since the vast political upheaval of the sixties.. Europe long ago evolved into secularism, as I said earlier, and now struggles to retain social cohesion and public morality in an age of pluralism and serious immigration problems. America, in contrast, has less social cohesion and far greater religiosity than Europe,but its more open employment laws make it a more effective “melting pot.”Violence and political protest by unassimilated Muslims disturb life in nearly all European countries attempting generous immigration policies. It is also true that America faces the grim reality of subversive politics of illegal immigration and Hispanic political machinations aimed at replacing the Anglo-European cultural tradition. By no means is America fully integrated, despite the torrent of diversity ads on TV. Fundamentalists in America have fought Darwin since the Scopes Trial of 1925.13 It is ironic that our vast scientific institutions seem powerless to stop the political strategies of a few “institutes” that support and propagate creation science and its newest offspring, the ID or Intelligent Design group. Of course in a free society they have every right to fight Darwinian ideas, but the National Academy of Sciences, among others, failed do an effective job of educating judges and juries, school boards, and publishers about the unanimity of support for the modern theory of evolution.However, in the Kansas conflict, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Teachers Association joined in denying any access to their copyrighted materials so long as state science standards undermined evolution. While the long fight between religion and science seems endless, a courthouse in Harrisburg, Pa., was the scene of a historic showdown in September-November of 2005. In the case of Kitzmiller, et.al. v. Dover Area School Board, a federal judge, John E.Jones III, decided in favor of the parents and against the School Board.His decision, laid out in 139 pages, may have momentous import because of its comprehensivesness, which may set the tone for future lawsuits.14 While Darwin’s victory in Dover may not end the ID assault on school science, it surely is a sign of impending closure. The grand struggle may go on in other arenas, but the schoolhouse would finally be sacrosanct if the US Supreme Court upholds the Dover decision down the line. Biology, like chemistry, will be taught purely as normal, unpoliticized science. “Teach the controversy” will persist in Bible Belt states until it is again challenged and carried to the Supreme Court.Such a result is inevitable.15 Making schools safe for Darwin will not destroy religion any more than modern historical forces have already done. The future of religion will be impacted by various factors that may well create an ebb or flow in signifi cance.The least educated in every culture indulge in superstition and mythology, with assorted gurus and shamans catering to their gullibility. Our Constitution allows for free practice of religion and separation of Church and State. However, like Europe, America may face ever greater moral decline because there is no universal morality taught to children in a fragmented, multicultural society. A society that is ever more secular must of necessity think about these two disparate, dissonant forces as they impinge on our moral life and our beliefs. Ordinary people may always need the easily assimilated Christian faith to serve as a moral guide and source of inspiration and their ignorance of science will serve them well in sustaining their faith. Liberal elements in Christianity will always find a way to adapt to scientific realities so accommodation will help keep the flame of religion alive. It is well that we remind ourselves that only one society ever lived with atheism as its mandated religion: the former USSR. Th is was a historic anomaly and secular Europe may be a far better model of societies living without religion.Ironically, religion may be their undoing as Islamic subversion underlines the difficulty of “diversity” as a blind immigration policy.The religious vacuum of a “lost” Europe could lead to destruction of its democratic institutions before the fearless incursions of uncompromising Islamic fanatics.Passive unbelievers with one child are no match for fanatical believers who have three or four. For the purpose of school science it is wise(and constitutional) to keep religion out of biology; however,as I just mentioned, the enormous significance of public morality may force us to depend on religion as the historic foundation of morality for the near future. Judaism, after all, contains a powerful morality that guides most conservative Jews and, very likely, many liberal ones. While the Ten Commandments are kept out of courthouses, they retain for millions an unmitigated power. In trying to restore a semblance of public morality in an America at war with itself, Christianity may prove to be an essential tool. Islam, like Christianity, contains rabid fundamentalists who believe in the inerrancy of the Koran (Bible). However, Islamic radicals do not tolerate criticism and are willing to die to defend their orthodoxy. Salmon Rushdie had to hide from the fatwa issued against him! The treatment of women in Islamic states, including honor killings and various forms of subjugation, implies a very uneasy if not impossible assimilation problem in liberal democracies. In Europe and America accommodation with Islam is formidably difficult because extremism is fairly common and growing. When I contend that Christianity has moral value in America, I do not mean that it alone should nourish our character, because the highly educated, by discrediting religion, often flounder in the morass of liberal relativism. Most of what we call Christian virtues may be taught without religion, as is done in Europe, but I foresee a very long transition in America during which we learn to teach moral values in a way that carries authority without religion.Civilization depends absolutely on civic virtues and shared moral values that must be learned upon the foundation of our moral instinct.We already have a growing problem of public disorder that tough policing cannot ever stop because socialization was formerly done by the family,church, and school.These institutions have been largely rendered ineffectual by changes in our laws, pervasive narcissism, and liberal values such as non-judgmentalism and child rights. Authority has been emasculated.In this turmoil the police, our last barrier of protection, are now called to schools as the “first line” of protection because teachers cannot touch children!Many character education projects have appeared recently to fill the growing void, but they, too, will be dichotomized into religious vs. secular types.This is a schism that will split the culture for a very long time. With the church relatively weak, our society of the future must rely on the family to teach character in ways which were lost in the transition to liberal humanism and subjective values. Teachers in schools must be able to punish “bad” behavior without fear of lawsuits and inform children of “poor” work without fear of parental reprisal.Shame must be restored if we are ever to restore the moral sense to its fullest expression. Judgments are the foundation of all morality, and, indeed, meritocracy and capitalism.The rule of law and a developed sense of morality are essential foundations of a functioning democracy and they depend on parents and teachers who are real authorities to build civility into our youth by calling bad behavior by its real name! Children cannot “discover” their own morality because moral development, as Piaget and Kohlberg once told us, requires stages that involve internalizing rules and learning limits.16 By modeling good behavior and setting limits, parents gradually instill character that can last a lifetime. Some fear and shame based on punishment, wholly anathema to permissive parents, are essential for moral development. The problems I have discussed are a reflection of the culture wars warned about in a book called One Nation, Two Cultures by the renowned historian Gertrude Himmelfarb.17 Himmelfarb believes that Americans will learn to live with their divisions rather than create civil strife.She also believes that the Christian forces will gradually become more secular and tolerant. Losing to Darwin is but one step in that historical process. Compared to America’s single culture war, Europe is more complicated. It has Culture War A and Culture War B, according to George Weigel.18 A is the war we have in the U.S. between liberals with a post-modern moral relativism that is highly allergic to judgments about differences of almost any kind and Christians with firm moral standards.European post-modern activists want same-sex marriage laws, restriction of free speech, and abrogation of religious freedom. Culture War B is the battle to define civil society, the meaning of tolerance and pluralism, as well as the limits of multi-culturalism. Muslims, representing often antithetical values, are infiltrating a Europe at war with its own history! Culture War B may be creeping into America as university “review committees” screen research proposals that are deemed pernicious if they have the slightest negative implications for “victim groups” such as blacks, Hispanics, or Native Americans. Science will be impeded and stultified by the noose of political correctness in the service of fraudulent equality. Whatever the larger implications already afoot in Western society, the freedom to learn about scientific truth is a basic one. None of us wish to miseducate our children. Darwin may soon be finished with the courts of America and we will have to face the meaning of his discovery whether we like it or not. Science always strives to find the truth while religion and politics often attempt to manipulate science to their own ends. In some spheres such efforts to distort science are indeed powerful and therefore effective in keeping truth at bay. I will touch upon these matters later. The title of this book alludes to the looming issue of human nature that was placed before the world by Darwin’s two books, The Origin and The Descent of Man. I will give the reader a brief taste of Darwin’s life and his famous voyage on the Beagle, followed by a discussion of his work and his legacy.Little discussed in politically correct America is Darwin’s view of Homo sapiens in the form of at least four distinct subspecies.For Darwin it was easy to see that these subspecies were not equal but were all human and worthy of respect. In America Darwin gained acceptance only slowly, but it was in America that his theory was updated and strengthened by three American biologists and called the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Despite general acceptance by scientists everywhere, evolution was opposed by creationists who chose the school biology program to draw a line in the sand. I will discuss the defeat of creationism as intelligent design in the Dover “Scopes” Trial of 2005. Finally, scientific progress now enables us to decide between “apes or angels.”Among the world’s leading democracies, neo-Darwinism is accepted by more than 50 percent of the population-except in the U.S. Europe now has risen to over 75 percent across its region.19 Regardless of their biological knowledge, Europeans accepted secular values and neo-Darwinism. Europeans do not feel less human for having ape ancestors in their lineage.They have, however, largely given up the idea that Heaven awaits their alleged souls. Human nature is not fully understood but its genetic foundation is under intense analysis by armies of researchers either bent on pure science or medical breakthroughs.The neuroscientist Gerald Edelman, who sees the brain as a Darwinian mechanism, has a model that will greatly enhance our understanding of brain operation as it is verified by further research.20 Edelman believes that robots will “ape” many human traits without ever becoming fully human. Others, however, are not so sure! It would be supremely ironic if the Christian fear of ape ancestry was displaced by a greater fear of robotic human nature. Darwin’s discovery of our “apeness” is now a simple fact of zoological taxonomy which provides a foundation for further speculation.Our quest now is to understand the genetic basis for mind, belief, and personality.Genes somehow build our brains and make us uniquely human, a form of ape whose brains are in some respects qualitatively superior to those of all other creatures.Buried beneath sublime poetry, music, or mathematical cerebration is the older ape of our ancestry, but angels are now seen for the fantastical fabrications they always were. We may turn out to be automatons but the vast complexity of our brains will protect our egos. We have ignorance and self-deception as means of escape from reality anyway. Darwin never found “progress” in nature. Whatever man created culturally, he was first and foremost an animal that belonged to nature.“Free will,” the darling of leftist humanism, derives originally from Christianity, its primary enemy. Thus, as John Gray argues, humanists grasp at free will and progress as central dogmas while much of Christianity retreats to the margins with more doubt than their humanist cousins.21 Learning to live with nature may be far wiser than our current “conquest” which is upsetting global climate patterns and destroying many existing species. Liberal humanism is engaged in human emancipation similar to the Christian project of mortal redemption.History may have no ultimate purpose but liberalism is satisfied with its “Heaven on Earth” equality project. Liberals dream of a global civilization of equals that demands the diminution of Western power.By empowering the weak and poor, they hope to create their egalitarian paradise.Religions, however, are a formidable obstacle to such a project, for they differ in significant ways. Liberalism fails miserably in its belief that Muslims will become reasonable and peaceful once they shed their poverty. Today’s virulent extremists awaiting 72 virgins in paradise are usually highly educated and absolutely uncompromising. Liberals, using reason and relative values, will be devoured by the increasing hordes of radical Islamists whose version of paradise is viewed as vastly superior to that of the West. While we can thank Darwin for identifying our family tree and disabusing us of our wishful thinking, we are less certain of his revelations of human diversity. As modern genetics increasingly supports Darwin’s observations on human variability, the West is embroiled in a political war over the interpretation and meaning of these findings.Secular humanism, set adrift from Christianity in part because of Darwin, now opposes the facts of human inequality first pointed out in 1871 by the great naturalist. As in Galileo’s day, science is under siege for discovering uncomfortable truths.Popes are no longer the enemy, but doctrinaire liberals within the scientific community are! Darwin, the immortal hero of science, gave us ideas that offend both sides in the culture wars. Liberals generally accept evolution and make it a foundation of their materialism, but they despise the idea that human races might be unequal.Conservative Christians hate the idea of evolution without god, but, until recently, they accepted biological inequality without debate. To understand who we are we must have the courage to follow Darwin’s route to human nature, clearing the brush of superstition and myth while recognizing that our common humanity may not be enough to overcome the problems of extreme diversity. Struggle and strife, part of the basis of evolution, may well be ineradicable. |
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