What is the whore of Babylon - part 5

Charles Darwin didn't use his theories to attack Christianity. Not exactly. No, that mantle was picked up by a man who called himself "Darwin's Bulldog", Thomas Huxley. Huxley, in his scientific paper Man's Place in Nature took a basic scientific observation (that successive generations of living organisms seem to adapt to their environment through a process called natural selection) and began the process of crafting it into a religion. but it was his grandson, Julian, that just went all crazy with it.

Julian Huxley developed a system of belief that he called, "evolutionary humanism". Huxley famously stated: "Many people assert that this abandonment of the God hypothesis means the abandonment of all moral sanction. This is simply not true. but it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture, that we must construct something to take its place."

And so he did. This 'new' religion was going to meet in places like a church, sing songs like hymns, and study all the moral goodies that evolution compelled them to believe.

Of course nobody much went along with this. You see, evolution doesn't compel you to believe anything in the moral sphere. Huxley should have snapped on this being one of the main members of the British Eugenics society (eugenics is the study of selective breeding and weeding out of humans) during the same time that one of the main members of a little German eugenics club-- an Adolf Somebody-or-other -- was busy "weeding out" 13 million human beings in his concentration camps.

Science is like that. It can tell you what you are seeing. But it can't tell you what it is worth; it can't tell you whether it is good or bad. At least it's not supposed to. The funny thing is -- that doesn't seem to be stopping anybody. Evolution should state that more complex living organism derive from more simple organism over time through the process of natural selection... and that's it. But it doesn't. There's a 'company line' of sorts that is attached to evolutionary teaching that says things like: evolutionary theory teaches us that God is a product of the human mind (uh, it does?), evolution teaches us that women are wrongfully repressed by the male dominated culture (I don't remember seeing that in the fossil record), or evolution shows us that homosexuality is a valid form of sexual expression, (actually evolution has a problem even explaining homosexuality. You know, natural selection and all).

The 19th century was where we said goodbye to science 'the method of discovery' and began to say hello to science 'the religion'. The same century that gave us a whole new host of objects of idolatry (like the icons of romance stories) also gave gnostics a new and potent foundation for religious use. With Christianity, it was like trying to manipulate a person who doesn't want to do what you're telling him. But with science, it's like moving a puppet. Science makes no attempt to defend itself. It crunches the numbers and then stands dumbly while the person viewing those numbers uses them for whatever purpose they choose.

Not all scientists are gnostics of course, but quite a few are. The concentrations gets ever higher if you look at something like the modern "skeptic" movement. Two centuries ago a spirit of gnosticism had sufficiently infused the scientific community to create the battle lines that we see today between science and "faith". Make no mistake, that battle is not between observation and faith-based revelation, it is between one religion and another.

Because this battle rages, many of my fellow Christians get angry with me for defending evolution. They think I've sided with the enemy. It's the same thing as when a scientist like Stephen Jay Gould tries to assert that science has no business making religious claims for any sort of moral judgement, and then a whole host of his colleagues ask him if he would kindly shut the hell up.

This is a conflict between two ideologies. And it is about to turn bloody.

Next post: what is this going to look like in the 'half a time'.