Welcome, Darwin, to Your World

Welcome, Darwin, to your world.

Welcome to a world of limitless possibilities unhindered by the impossible; a world of astonishing physical prosperity, social engineering, and utilitarian philosophy. Yes, this is your world: a world where we can make any choices we want, without consequences – a world where everyone knows ‘how’ but no one knows ‘why.’ A world unmoored from any anchor or rudder.

Astonishing, you say? I suppose you would say that. It is not particularly astonishing for us – we live in it every day, and it is the world of our daily lives. Although, I suppose you would see it as astonishing. But come along, sir, and join us – there is so much to see in this modern world, and you have played such a large part in it.

Perhaps the first and most striking thing that you notice in our modern world is the astonishing physical prosperity. Yes, science has transformed our lives. We ride in machines designed by science. We stare at screens designed by science. We constantly learn more about the world that we live in. Our telescopes peer into the deepest recesses of space. Our microscopes tease out the most minute mysteries of life. The secrets of atoms are evident to us, and we unleash their powerful potential.

Perhaps I could point out the numerous and astonishing ways that industrial science has created abundance, even excess, for the populations of the world today. It would not, of course, be true to say that this astonishing knowledge and abundance is the direct result of evolutionary theory – but it would be accurate to note the strong connection between the wholly naturalistic theory of evolution, and the materialistic mindset that has devoted so much time and energy to science and technology, to the detriment of the metaphysical.

Yes, the modern Darwinian world has been wildly successful in its attempts to master the physical world around us. We live in a world of limitless possibilities and new options – a world where we can choose our children, where the very crops we harvest have been modified at the cellular level. This is a world where we incessantly seek for, and find the answers to, the ‘how’s of nature around us.

Mr. Darwin, society itself has been reprogrammed to think along a new line. Now the impossible is possible. We are unhindered, we believe, by what was once ‘impossible’ or ‘unthinkable.’ If the species of the world are constantly adapting and improving, then surely the mass of humanity, the organism of society, can do the same, and in a much more purposeful method than by random chance. It is this thinking, this idea of social engineering, that has defined the most astonishing societal changes of the twentieth century, and are still at work in the twenty-first century.

For if society is unhindered, and can work to create what is best, then it ought to do so. We have outgrown eugenics, or at least we think we have – but abortion still plays a silent role in changing the shape of society. It remains a tool for society to eliminate what it sees as unprofitable. Not as if you would be entirely against that yourself, Mr. Darwin. You titled your book “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” You even said, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races,” and then you placed the ‘negro or Australian’ as some intermediate forms between ‘the baboon’ and the ‘Caucasian.’

It is true that racism is no longer smiled on in our society, and the connection between racism, eugenics, and Darwinism has been vociferously denounced. Very well. If we can forget the motto of the eugenics movement (‘Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution’), and forget the human zoos that caged men like Ota Benga (claiming to show the intermediate steps of human evolution), then we can forget, too, that other forms of social engineering and utilitarian philosophy have stemmed from Darwinism. Today it is the awful face of socialism that marches under the banner of Darwinism, though most have forgotten the link. Yes – Marxism, Communism, and their little sister, Socialism, draw their strength from the argument, that they are more advanced forms of the species of society, and an inevitable step forward for the organism of humanity.

There is no longer a sense of morality to hold these processes in check. If society today has learned to discover the ‘how,’ yet it has entirely forgotten to answer the question ‘why.’ The modern Darwinian world pours it resources and genius into the material, but forgets the metaphysical. We have discovered the relation of cause and effect in science, but forget, suppress, or ignore that there is a metaphysical beyond the physical, a supernatural beyond the natural. Society spends so much effort examining science that it completely ignores the possibilities beyond that – as if declaring that one vein of knowledge is more important than another.

And this leads us, sir, to a world that does not know why it exists – indeed, a world that genuinely believes that it has no reason to exist. Yes, your own scientists tell us, in the most forthcoming way, that this world exists with “no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pointless indifference.” This is what your own scientists teach us. Abandoning their role as students of the physical realm, they claim to be practitioners of the spiritual realm.

Hence – despite being the wealthiest, most prosperous, most knowledgeable, and perhaps most powerful civilization in the history of the world, people see their lives not as blessed, but as banal. With every physical comfort satisfied, the soul of society gropes to find a reason to continue, and turns to hackneyed commonplaces, shallow aspirations, or intense addictions to find purpose in a world stripped of reason.

This, Mr. Darwin, is your legacy.