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 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of its publication, yet Darwin’s theory of evolution is still the subject of ongoing and often acrimonious debate — why? The conflict is usually presented as being between science and religion, and if accepted this allows all non-Darwinists to be summarily dismissed as anti-evolutionary religious zealots (Creationists), but a short enquiry will show this is a radical oversimplification of what is really at stake here. Which, of course, is not the idea of evolution itself, but Darwin’s account of how it all happened, and especially so as it concerns rationality.
For example, an Australian professor of philosophy, the late David Stove, was a self-proclaimed atheist who was credited with having a “razor sharp’ mind, and yet in his book Darwinian Fairytales (1995) he dismisses Darwinism as “a ridiculous slander on human beings”. If we add to this the work of the Harvard-trained lawyer Norman Macbeth who’s Darwin Retried: An Appeal to Reason (1971) was and still is a devastatingly rational critique of Darwinism, containing no suggestion of a religious bias; then we may then reasonably ask what it is that is so very wrong with Darwin’s rationality, and is there perhaps a largely unnoticed root cause underlying it all? My answer is an emphatic YES, and one of such magnitude that any realm of scientific enquiry other than ‘origins’ would have disallowed it immediately, i.e that there was here a largely unconscious ulterior motive from the very outset.
The late Sir Karl Popper, the doyen of the scientific method, argued that science was the only guarantor of an ‘open society’, and that as such it must constantly revise its conclusions on all important issues whenever and wherever there was any room for doubt. What Popper required of science, therefore, was a fully conscious and continuous commitment to openness and honesty. That he did not exempt Darwinism from this kind of rigorous re-appraisal was made very clear when he praised Macbeth’s above work, calling it “most meritorious...a truly valuable book”.
Let me, therefore, in the spirit of responsibility espoused by Sir Karl Popper, try here to open up for public discussion an issue that has been around for a long time, but is very rarely discussed. It concerns the logical validity of the language in which Darwinism is presented, and whether it is at all scientifically acceptable? There have long been a significant few who have expressed serious doubts about this, and have even wondered whether Darwin really understood what he was doing. This concern was well expressed by Stanley Edgar Hyman in his book, The Tangled Bank:
“Darwin starts by insisting that nature is not a goddess but a metaphor. As soon as he begins to talk about nature, however, she is transformed into a female divinity with consciousness and will.”
Does it really matter if in a supposedly Mindless (Godless) theory, words are being used in such a way that nature becomes “a female divinity” to whom intentional metaphors like ‘selection’, ‘design’ or ‘mechanism’ attribute consciousness, and volitional metaphors like ‘survival’ attribute will — after all these are only ‘words,’ and what can words do to influence a science that is based upon empirical observation?
A Revealing Mental Experiment
Just for a moment let us consider what the world would look like if the kind of metaphorical language used by Darwin to dispense with God the Designer, were to be similarly used to dispense with ‘man the designer’. If someone, say, were to advance a theory claiming that all of our vast array of man-made machinery had come about entirely without deliberate intent — through the operations of chance and natural law alone. But then in explaining how all that machinery both developed and functioned, they found that they had to make constant ‘metaphorical’ use of the language of human volition and intentionality — including technical terms of every description — and then try to justify this usage on the grounds that the theory’s great founder had established a ‘convention’ that made it permissible. What would the modern scientific world think of such a theory, and of such a justification?
They would, hopefully, laugh it hysterically out of court, if for no other reason than if the theory were true then every engineer and technician would be made immediately redundant; and we would all then stand around twiddling our thumbs for a year — or perhaps a hundred million years — waiting for all the useful mechanisms we needed to materialize by themselves — no, not by themselves, but out of natural law when combined with suitably chosen ‘words.’ But if as scientists we decided to accept this theory, we would then need to mount a really determined effort to overlook the theory’s mistaken use of language— because to admit it would be to admit that the theory had and could explain absolutely nothing.
Needless to say we don’t want to put our engineers and technicians out of work, we like and need our machines too much, but science did very badly want to put God out of work, so a theory that in the equivalent human context would be seen as the height of scientific absurdity, somehow became inspired wisdom when applied to the natural world. With materialism as science’s foundation, are we not just concocting fairytales wherein the word ‘selection’ plays the role of fairy godmother — magically granting materialism’s every wish, and without the hazard of ever being ‘wrong’? (No theory that is immune from criticism can ever be ‘scientific’ — see Sir Karl Popper).
To even appear credible, any theory based upon ‘selection’ needs to be the exact opposite of our legal system — in that it must strive to obscure in every way possible the otherwise crucial and obvious distinction between the concepts ’accidental’ and ‘intentional, legal accountability would then completely disappear — and scientific accountability also? — as when one compares the conscious decision making of professional animal breeders (as Darwin did, and others have often done since) directly with the idea of random ‘natural selection.’ And because ‘selection’ is a mental term it lends itself very easily to just such a false comparison — even though in the context of a Mindless theory it is logically totally invalid — yet so widespread is this error that even the National Geographic succumbed to it (on page 17 of its November 2004 issue). Perhaps now we can see why it is that the theory is so very vulnerable on rational grounds. When it was brought to the attention of Stephen J. Gould, that ‘survival of the fittest’ was a tautology that could provide no evidence, and was asked from where the evidence arose, he confidently asserted that the missing evidential criteria was “good engineering design,” (see Norman Macbeth ‘Darwinism, a Time for Funerals’) thereby demonstrating, if more proof is needed, how totally Darwinism is dependent upon the blatant anthropomorphic misuse of intentional and volitional metaphor — canceling its status as a basis for genuine scientific enquiry — but by now it is so “bred into the bone” that many will continue (with no argument) to throw rationality to the wind so as to prolong its demise.
A genuinely scientific alternative to Darwinism can be found in the rigorous and insightful thought of one of our first evolutionists, I refer to J.W. von Goethe, a contemporary of Darwin and the man who discovered the intermaxillary bone, the original evolutionary ‘bone of contention’. Dr. Aaron G. Filler attempted to develop these insights in his book The Upright Ape: A New Origin of Species (2007) although in it he fails to refute materialism, as Goethean science most certainly does.
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And finally, if one wishes to understand how it is that so many intelligent people can have been so wrong for so long, then perhaps Goethe’s poem Faust can help us.
In Prof. Alan P. Cotterell’s work Goethe’s View of Evil (1982) the following quote appears from Part 1 of Faust, in which the ‘prince of liars’ tells an earnest student how to use words to good effect:
Student: Yet in each word some concept must there be.
Mephistopheles: Quite true! But don’t torment yourself too anxiously;
For at the point where concepts fail,
At the right time a word is thrust in there.
With words we fitly can our foes assail,
With words a system we prepare,
Words we quite fitly can believe,
Nor from a word a mere iota thieve.
Cottrell then comments: “This is not only the undermining of thinking, it is its annihilation.”
It means that words are used just for their ‘effect’ on the mind, and with no regard to their real conceptual content or to rationality itself; whether one wishes to attribute this ruse to Mephisto or not is a matter of choice, but if one does it is certainly a devilishly clever one that has managed to fool at least six-generations of scientists—perhaps though only because they wanted to be fooled—for as any good con-man knows—willing belief is always a prerequisite for making any such “system” work.
Don Cruse
Ponoka, Alberta, Canada
Phone: 403 704 1341
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