WHY THE DARWIN DEBATES?

This is a quote from the latest issue of Rolling Stone Magazine:

“ When I ask Lemmy if he has a positive or negative view of humanity, he doesn’t hesitate: “ Oh, negative. Human nature is to blame for everything, innit?  We’re just a disease on this planet. Its going to shrug us off like crabs. Its too late anyway, with what we have done to the environment. Our kids are gone be wearing gas masks. We’re all gonna fry. “

Earlier, while discussing drugs, he expressed similar sentiments.

“ There’s a lot of sh-t talked about what’s bad for you, especially in America.   Everyone wants to be safe. Well, I got news for you:  You can’t be safe. Life’s not safe. Your work isn’t safe. When you leave the house, it isn’t safe.  The air you breathe isn’t going to be safe, not for very long.  That’s why you have to enjoy the moment.”

This little piece of ersatz existential philosophy issues from the mouth of one Lemmy Kilmister, the lead guitarist of  heavy metal band Motörhead.    The 63-year -old guitarist, according to the article, drinks a bottle of Jack Daniels a day, consorts proudly with prostitutes and lives in an apartment festooned with original Nazi paraphernalia.

Motörhead, for those who don’t know, was and is one of the original heavy metal bands, formed in 1975, playing a version of  hard core thrash metal that was the predecessor to punk rock.  Now it would come as little surprise to those who know something about rock culture, that a character of Lemmy Kilmister’s orientation and milieu would be a nihilist who has little patience for exploring purpose and meaning in life.  His sense of alienation and fatalism might be said to be typical of a world-weary rock star who has spent most of his  adult life seeking gratification from loud music, women, bottles, pills and needles.

Lemmy Klimister might be a jaded rock star, but don’t think that his negative narcissism and rejection of human exceptionalism  is restricted to his goth rock contemporaries or that his interview is a mere reflection of the magazine’s penchant for showcasing outlaw personalities.  The same issue of Rolling Stone features an article  which bombastically claims that every ocean on the planet is filled to the brim with floating plastic – the result of human degradation of our environment;  It is followed  by an interview with Madonna,  who insists, after one of the most lascivious careers in pop history,  that changing one’s identity on a regular basis is healthy recipe for human contentment;  and  then another  full length article which parades  the old trope that our real enemies are not lurking in caves on the Afghan-Pakistan border but in the Pentagon.

Well, you say,  it  IS Rolling Stone, the flagship of the counterculture.  What do you expect?

Yes, its Rolling Stone, but if you think these views and attitudes reflect only a thin current in the underground press you are wrong.   Those attitudes have, in one way or another, percolated into our social vocabulary, into our attitudes toward government, into our suspicion of religious thought and practice, into the television programs we watch , into the nightly news  we view and into our academies of learning.

Rolling Stone, in other words, is an underground paper no longer.  It is the voice of the mainstream.

There can be little doubt that this self loathing, fatalism and nihilism has derived from the increasing distance the West has placed between itself and the foundational idea of our civilization  -  that human life has both purpose and meaning.    The rapid secularization of  our culture , which followed the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the scientific discoveries which built upon Newtonian mechanics and the increasing role that  rationalism and science have played in forming our understanding our world , have  turned us away from exploring intentionality and purpose as key matters concerning our existence.   The question of ‘why  are we here?’  posed so adamantly by Aristotle, Plato and  some of the greatest philosophical minds in history  is today so loaded with angst, so distant from the focus of  modern scientific inquiry, so dangerously pregnant with the threat of violating the boundaries between ‘Church and state’, that few dare openly contemplate it.

There is also no doubt that 150 years ago, the Darwinian intellectual revolution played a key role in this transformation.  Darwin himself knew that his theory of evolution by natural selection would spur a burgeoning atheistic movement and that if  his theory gained hold, there would be no turning back.  For if natural processes alone, devoid of an intelligent mind or force, were responsible for life on earth , then the notion of a God , responsible for the creation and management of all life forms, could be dispensed with.

The neo- Darwinists, those who have inherited the mantle of the Darwinist thought, passed down from Thomas Huxley, via Herbert Spencer through the Scopes Trial and on toward our own time, have adopted the atheistic tradition, which has marched in step with Darwinism in its crusade to transform our understanding of the origins  and development of life.  Thus when Richard Dawkins, Darwin’s staunchest modern defender claims,
“ Darwin makes it possible to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist,”  he is really stating that he was now free of any obligation to contemplate  purpose and meaning for existence.  Darwin had fixed  it so that the question itself would have little impact on our appreciation of the mechanics of the universe – and that the investigation itself had become meaningless.

Today our magazines, television programs, scientific journals, academies and  even our political culture are suffused with notions which on the one hand, avoid entirely the question of meaning in life and on the other, deride the  attempt to grapple with it as an atavism, belonging to an age devoid of rationality.   In the process, of course,  they also castigate humanity as the source of  the earth’s problems, reject  democracy as a force for good in encouraging the spread of human liberty,  deny the absolute sanctity of human life and brazenly promote rampant sexual license.   The gradual secularization of our society has betokened a break with fundamental notions which underlie civilizational values.  Western civilization, in short, is rapidly ceasing to believe in itself.

Did Darwin intend to wreak such a wholesale transformation of society?   Probably not.  But the consequences are nevertheless with us and they are profound.

Need examples?   Here is Peter Singer, renowned Princeton professor and philosopher:

“ The life a new born baby is of less value  than the life of a pig, dog or chimpanzee.  All we are doing is catching up with Darwin. He showed us in the 19th Century that we are simply animals. Humans assumed we were a separate part of creation and that there was some kind of magical line between Us and Them. Darwin’s theory eradicated the foundations of that entire Western way of thinking about our species.”

Or Nobel Laureate, Steven Weinberg:

“ The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.”

Or the Texas biologist Erik Pianka:

” We are no better and have no more rights to life than bacteria.”

(Pianka famously advocated, at a public lecture at St. Andrews University in 2006, that over population in the world should be addressed by the deliberate spread of the ebola virus which could effectively eradicate 90% of humanity)

Or this  slice of ineluctable pop culture wisdom from the Bloodhound Gang:

“ You and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals
So lets do it like the do (it) on the Discovery Channel.”

Given the shrinking acceptance of human exceptionalism and the belief  that human beings are on par with every other feature of nature,  is it really any wonder that the Spanish legislature has  recently passed a statute which extends certain human rights to apes;  that Ecuador’s new constitution extends legal rights to the environment or that Switzerland allows  biologists to be prosecuted for conducting research on plants which have been illegally harvested – the suits being brought on behalf of the plants themselves.

It is also not such a stretch to claim that the gradual erosion of  the belief in man’s uniqueness has contributed  to the spread of a radicalism, with its roots steeped in 60s liberation politics, which has redefined culture in the direction of  emancipation,  experimentation  and the casting off of  traditional assumptions abut family, education and sex.   The social thrust of our age  is to emphasize that human beings, with no purpose nor reason for existence, should, as the Nike ad says “just do it”   – satisfying any urge for individual gratification or personal fulfillment, regardless of the social costs.

But even as the movement to debunk human purpose spreads, enormous gaps in Darwinian theory continue to be exposed.  In the field of micro-biology, the investigation of cellular structure has revealed  DNA,  the informational building block of the universe, to be so complex as to be almost beyond human understanding;   In geology and paleontology, the sudden appearance of species  without  a discovered ancestry, continues to perplex ( just as it  did Darwin in the instance of the Cambrian Explosion); in astrophysics, big bang theorists are unable to approach their subject without embracing some level of cosmology  which suggests purpose.  As science probes deeper into the origins of the universe, the questions themselves about  ultimate cause and development of life grow more confounding and complex.

Perhaps at the root of this issue is not we know of the world and the universe, but rather what we don’t.  As humans have increasingly developed theories and tools to probe the universe’s deepest secrets, we are correspondingly confronted with the frustrating awareness that the human mind may not be capable of grasping the deepest mysteries of the universe’s beginnings.  This notion, that we simply can’t know everything, that we are too limited and too restricted by our physiognomy to appreciate the physical and metaphysical dimensions of the universe, is apostasy to the scientific community.   That is because over the past 150 years that community has elevated  the human mind as the supreme arbiter of universal knowledge and truth –  with science to be employed as its ultimate barometer.

But hubris and self reverence will never serve us humans well in advancing science or increasing our understanding of the mechanisms of the universe.  We should never forget that  Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, were among our first scientists  but, as they would have defiantly underlined themselves  – they were philosophers first,  concerned as much with why things work, as with questions of how.    The great tragedy of our age is that we have lost the desire, and perhaps even the ability, to ask why.  And that failure may leave us vulnerable to the assault of ideologies and movements that have no problem in asking that question and offering answers that are at complete odds with our views on the sanctity of human life and the necessity for human progress.

The  AFA Darwin Debates, to be held in the month celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of the Species, is, then, an attempt to bring the question of purpose and intentionality back into public discussion.   It is not, frankly,  important to us whether  a God (or Gods) emerges from the debates as the source of  universe’s laws and their application.  Nor is it our desire to discredit evolutionary theory,  which we believe has played an enormously important role in elevating our understanding and appreciation of our origins.

But we are concerned that without such a debate, without informed discussion which embraces a range of options for understanding life, we run the risk of  allowing  our civilization to slide into a swamp of intellectual and spiritual stagnation,  convinced that we are a blight on this earth and that we have no more reason for living than trees, stones or birds.

Nothing, in the end, can be more deadly to a civilization than its own recognition that it has no reason for being. Yet while we struggle with these issues, we shouldn’t forget that the certainty that there is a purpose to life, is really not so far behind us.

After all, Lemmy Klimister’s father was a vicar.

THE HEAVY TREAD OF INTOLERANCE

Leftist academics are quite fond of proclaiming that freedom of speech in America is an illusion.  Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Ward Churchill, Tariq Ali and many of their  acolytes have consistently argued that their views are not given sufficient coverage in the press and that the doors of many institutions remain closed to the expression of their views.

The charge itself is notoriously off  the mark.   For not only are these doyens of the far left free to catapult their poisonous cocktail of anti- Americanism, anti-Semitism and general contempt for American exceptionalism into our academic institutions, they have also become campus media darlings, their pronouncements taken with the utmost seriousness and afforded standing ovations for their most prolix and incendiary comments.

Rather, it would seem that those who stand for true Western values of openness and debate have a much better case for alleging creeping censorship in the United States.

Cases in point:

• On July 9, Robert Spencer was scheduled to speak at the American Library Association convention in Chicago but was canceled at the last minute after pressure from the Council on American-Islamic.  Spencer, the editor of JihadWatch.com and an associate fellow of the American Freedom Alliance, was invited to join a panel forum at the ALA’s annual General Meeting on the topic “Perspectives on Islam: Beyond the Stereotyping.” According to his attorney, William J. Becker Jr., as he was leaving to catch a plane for the event, Spencer learned that it had been cancelled. According to reports he later read on the Internet, Ahmed Rehab, Chicago executive director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), was responsible for bringing about the cancellation. In a letter to ALA, Rehab wrote: “I ask you to rescind the invitation to Mr. Spencer in order to maintain the integrity of the panel and the reputation of the ALA.” Mr. Spencer, he argued, offered “grotesque viewpoints that lie well outside the bounds of reason and civilized debate.”

• On September 20, an appearance the Norfolk Naval Base in Virginia by Brigitte Gabriel, a Christian Lebanese advocate for the rights of Muslim women and the President of Act for America! was cancelled.   It appears that the decision was made after  pressure was exerted by members of the Naval Academy amidst concerns about offending Muslims.  It was not the first time Ms. Gabriel has been confronted by hostility to  her appearances.  In April 2006  she was invited to give a lecture sponsored by Professor David Patterson of the Judaic Studies Program. When news about of her appearance spread, the Muslim community both on and off campus launched a full-scale campaign to stop her lecture. They demanded that Dr. Patterson cancel  her speech. E-mails flooded the University of Memphis administration and Dr. Patterson from Muslim students on campus and Muslims in the community and mosques.  

• On October 8,  the well known blogger Pamela Geller was scheduled to appear on The Eddie Burke Show on WBYR, “the best news and talk in Alaska,” to debate the “freelance journalist” and anti-Semite Alison Weir.  Because Weir made known her displeasure at the appearance of Geller known, Geller’s appearance was cancelled.  Weir appeared on the show alone.

• On October 12  David Horowitz,  President of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, was scheduled to speak at St. Louis University  but because of the title of his speech,  “Islamo-Fascism Awareness and Civil Rights., he too was cancelled.  Horowitz commented: “I have spoken at 400 universities. This is the first time my speech has been censored and stopped by an administration. And they are supposed to be the guardians of intellectual discourse.” Cary Nelson, the president of the American Association of University Professors, said that with this cancellation, St. Louis University “joins the small group of campuses that are universities in name only…. The free exchange of ideas is not just a comforting offshoot of higher education; it defines the fundamental nature of the enterprise.”

All of this follows hot on the heels of another outrage, this time perpetrated at Yale University.   Just two weeks ago, on October 1,  the University hosted both Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist who had penned the notorious “Bomber turban cartoon,”  as well as Brandeis Prof. Jytte Klausen , author of  The Cartoons that Shook the World.   The latter had been subject in August to a last minute decision by Yale University Press to remove not only the reprinted 12 cartoons but also all representations of Muhammad.   What was the reaction of the Yale Faculty to the appearances?  As Peter Berkowitz recounts in Saturday’s weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, while Westergaard’s appearance prompted a small faculty-led panel, the same faculty remained entirely silent and unmoved by Yale’s censorship of Ms. Klausen’s book.  Not one word of support was spoken on her behalf.

These acts of censorship, which smack of  the violation of free speech in its most egregious form, may be endemic to the kind of  intolerance we  now see metastizing  unchecked throughout our elite institutions.

This week the American Freedom Alliance learned of the spread of this disease through first hand experience.  A  premiere screening of the documentary  Darwin’s Dilemma,  at the Californa Science Center’s IMAX Theater, which was to be the kick off to our October Darwin Debates series, was cancelled by CSC on the claim that we had issued unapproved publicity for the event.   Nothing of the sort had occured.  The alleged publicity had been distributed by a third party, and, as we soon gleaned from emails and other sources, was a mere pretext for  the cancellation of a film whose message on intelligent design neither the California Science Center nor its national afilliate, the Smithsonian Institute, approves.  

The California Science Center,  I should remind my readers, is a public institution, paid by and for with tax payer dollars.  Its mission statement claims that the Center  “aspire(s) to ……inspire science learning in everyone….. because we value science as an indispensable tool for understanding our world, accessibility and inclusiveness….”

One would that such ‘inclusiveness’ would incorporate views it does not, as an institution, necessarily embrace.

Stated baldly, this public institution had a responsibility to  a California organization to allow free and open discussion of contoversial subjects of a scientifc nature, and no more so at an event that is actually labeled ‘a debate’, with both sides of the issue represented.

Needless to say, a law suit is pending.

AFA has found an alternative venue to replace the IMAX Theater, albeit at great expense and with a tinge of bitterness at being treated in such a reprehensible manner.

But the story is not over.

Those who live in the Los Angeles area now have an opportunity now to express their outrage, not just toward  the California Sceince Center, but to the entire throng of elite institutions who demonstrate consistent denial of First Amendment rights.   Join us in attending the new location for the screening on Sunday night, October 25 at the Davidson Conference Center at USC.   Make clear your disgust with the way an elite and high profile institution handled a freedom one might have thought it was pledged to protect.

Who knows,  if we cheer those films loudly enough maybe our voices will heard over the din of traffic at the California Science Center, just a quarter of a mile away.

CALIFORNIA ROOTS OF THE EUGENICS MOVEMENT

Every now and then you stumble across one of those odd historical facts that is so outrageous and beyond belief that it forces you to hold your breath in sheer incomprehension.

Such an event happened to me in April this year when interviewing a group of scientists for a Western Word Radio program focused on the debate over intelligent design.   I discovered then, courtesy of Dr. John West, that over a 50 year period, beginning in 1905, over 60,000 people, deemed unfit for reproduction, had been forcefully sterilized in the United States. 

Although the State of Indiana was the first U.S. state to enact sterilization legislation, the hub of activity soon moved to the west coast, where California’s first sterilization law was enacted in 1909- exactly one hundred years ago this week. Like many Midwestern transplants, this practice found less  restrictions in the Golden State, and by 1921 more eugenic sterilizations had been performed in California than in the rest of the United States combined.   Unlike other states, the practice suffered no legal challenge or hindrance until the Supreme Court validated forced sterilization practices in the landmark case of Buck vs Bell.

The movement behind the forced sterilization laws was known as Eugenics.   Eugenics stressed the application of science to human heredity and breeding in order to improve the human species both mentally and physically. Some Progressives referred to eugenics as “the science and the art of being well born.” Human sterilization was carried out for many reasons. It might be implemented as punishment, perhaps in the form of castration for repeat sex offenders. It might be used for social reasons, to restrain individuals from having children because they are completely unable to care for them, either physically, emotionally or financially.  But when the state sterilizes an individual because he is seen to be genetically defective and therefore likely to pass his defects on to offspring, this is eugenic sterilization. And this was the type of sterilization that many California policymakers sought to carry out.

The United States was the first country to concertedly undertake compulsory sterilization programs for the purposes of eugenics but the movement thereafter took off like wild fire in the rest of the world.   In Japan, in the first part of the Showa era, Japanese governments promoted increasing the number of healthy Japanese, while simultaneously decreasing the number of people suffering mental retardation, disability, genetic disease and other conditions that led to them being viewed as “inferior” contributions to the Japanese gene pool. Their Leprosy Prevention laws of 1907, 1931 and 1953, permitted the segregation of patients in sanitariums where forced abortions and sterilization were common and authorized punishment of patients for “disturbing the peace.” Under the colonial Korean Leprosy Prevention Ordinance, Korean patients were also subjected to hard labor.

Eugenics programs, including forced sterilization, existed in most Northern European countries, as well as other more or less Protestant countries. Some programs, such as Canada’s and Sweden’s, lasted well into the 1970s. Other countries that had notably active sterilization programs include Australia, Norway, Finland, Estonia and Switzerland.

Organizations in support of eugenics were established around the world. For instance, one year after Buck vs Bell,  The Human Betterment Foundation came into existence in Pasadena, California with the aim “of fostering and aiding constructive and educational forces for the protection and betterment of the human family in body, mind, character, and citizenship.”  It primarily served to compile and distribute information about compulsory sterilization legislation in the United States, for the purposes of eugenics.

An understanding of the widespread support forced strerilization enjoyed in California can be gleaned with the reading of a list of the group’s inaugural Board of Trustees.  They included Henry M. Robinson (a Los Angeles banker), George Dock (a Pasadena physician), David Starr Jordan (chancellor of Stanford University), Charles Goethe (a Sacramento philanthropist), Justin Miller (dean of the college of law at the University of Southern California), Otis Castle (a Los Angeles attorney), Joe G. Crick (a Pasadena horticulturist), and biologist/eugenicist Paul Popenoe.  Later members included Lewis Terman (a Stanford psychologist best known for creating the Stanford-Binet test of IQ), William B. Munro (a Harvard professor of political science), and UC. Berkeley professors Herbert M. Evans (anatomy) and Samuel J. Holmes (zoology).

In other words, some of the top members of the political, business and scientific elites in the United States were among eugenics’ most enthusiastic benefactors and moral supporters.

In England, about the same time, a widespread national eugenics movement was being established.   In 1908 the Eugenics Education Society was founded with the hearty endorsement of  some of the leading intellectuals of the day including H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Web, among other leading politicians, scientists and society patrons. 

The most infamous sterilization program of of the 20th century took place, of course, under the Third Reich. One of the first acts of Adolf Hitler after achieving control over the German state was to pass the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses) in July,1933.  The bill was signed into law by Hitler himself, and over 200 eugenic courts were created specifically as a result.  Under the German law, all doctors in the Reich were required to report patients of theirs who were mentally retarded, mentally ill (including schizophrenia and manic depression), epileptic, blind, deaf, or physically deformed, and a steep monetary penalty was imposed for any patients who were not properly reported.

The individual’s case was then presented to a court of Nazi officials and public health officers who would review a patient’s medical records, take testimony from friends and colleagues, and eventually decide whether or not to order a sterilization operation performed on the individual – using force if necessary.  By the end of World War II, over 400,000 individuals were sterilized under the German law, most within its first four years of enactment.

When the issue of compulsory sterilization was brought up at the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War, many Nazi leders defended their actions by indicating that it was the United States itself from whom they had taken their inspiration.

They were right on target. 

The question then is why?  Why did forced sterilization gain such traction in the United States?  What could have compelled Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the country’s leading jurist and otherwise a redoubtable liberal champion of free speech and human rights, to declare in the majority opinion in Buck vs Bell that:  “ It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manfiestly unfit from continuing their kind. Three generations of imbeciles is enough!”?

It has often been argued that you can’t judge one generation’s moral viewpoint from the vantage of the future.  But in this case, that argument appears tendentious.  There were numerous legal challenges to the eugenics laws of  state governments – by both individuals and by organizations and there was a fairly vigorous editorial campaign launched against the practice.  In addition, the argument that these were not regarded as moral issues at all by early U.S. 20th Century citizens, but practical utilitarian measures, designed to save society from the added expense of caring for those who could not care for themselves, also falls flat.  Multiple asssociations and welfare organizations had begun to sprout by the beginning of the century which were equipped to give assistance to the mentally and physically disabled, making the United States the most prodigious locus for charitable voluteerism in the world.

The answer to this imponderable question is more likely to be found in the “progressive” thinking which had gripped the intellectual, political and social elites of the West since the mid-19th Century.   The advent of Darwinist thought and the coining of the expression “survival of the fittest” ( which is accredited to the English philospher Herbert Spencer and not Darwin himself, who never mentions it in any of his works) led many to invest  in the idea of racial purity in order to protect the future of their progeny in an increasingly competitve world.  In the 1880s and 90s, as England, France, Russia, Germany and the Johnny-come-lately United States tussled with oneanother in carving spheres of influence into the world map, national greatness seemed to hinge on the ability of a civilization to produce a race of men worthy of empire and capable of holding on to it.

In the mad rush to secure their places on the totem pole of national grandeur, it was then commonly accepted, throughout all of these societies, that only the fit would survive.  This meant that the “unfit” – blind, deaf, mute, spastic, leprous, incurably diseased and  even chronically poor individuals, had to be quietly and efficiently neutered so that they would not contaminate the remainder of the national stock.

Leading progressive intellectuals of the early 20th Century had, in other words, interpreted Darwinian theory as a writ to “interfere” with human natural selection.  The crass inhumanity of it all was besides the point, since such beings were in fact only half or quarter human anyway. 

Looking back at this dark history we all must feel that twinge of deep embarassment when we realize that our vaunted civilization is not quite as lily-white as we once might have considered it.    But that kind of regret is wasted if we learn nothing from this stain on our national reputation.  Totalitarianism in Europe did not begin with brownshirts breaking bones on the streets of Rome, but with ideas that would brook no opposition.    Today, there are many other commonly accepted ideas – from anthropogenic global warming to the social utility of gay marriage to scientific certainties about the origins of life and the universe – that turn viciously against those who either question or deny them. The casualties in these culture wars might not  be the incomparable unfortunates of the 20th Century who had suffered physical deformation.  Nonetheless they are still innocents who suffer sterilization of another sort – the stigma of isolation and the pain of non-inclusion in the national debate.

The inevitable truth is that totalitarian thinking, sporting ideologies that can turn against peaceable citizens – can sprout in any country, even one with as proud a record in protecting human liberty as the United States.

Social Darwinism, the ideology which gave life to the eugenics movement, is still very much with us today.  It often reappears in the abortion debates, in the writings of such elite and highly respected philosophers as Harvard’s Peter Singer and among animal rights advocates who elevate animal life above that of human.   In this hallmark month, we should remember its repercussions and vow that never again should it be allowed to overrride mens’ better moral instincts in the name of a nebulous and ultimately soul destroying sense of progress.

CHARLES DARWIN’S UNHAPPY LEGACY

Many years ago I learned how thoroughly evolutionary theory had penetrated our culture. While watching the first installment of the Disney movie The Land Before Time with my sons I gazed with some amusement as colorful one celled organisms struggled through the soupy blue-green sludge to evolve, though several mutations and incarnations, into the adorable little dinos who would populate the movie and then, one day, the Earth.

Of course the nexus between that opaque little cell and the extraordinary creatures who would relentlessly pound the earth billions of years later is never clearly established. But then again, how the dinosaurs emerge speaking idiomatic English with outbursts of American slang is never made too clear either.   It all makes good television.

The question today is whether it all makes good science.

The 200^th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth will be celebrated this week, as will be his most famous work On The Origins of Species which was published in November, 1859 almost exactly 150 years ago. Back then the book hit Victorian England with the power of a full force gale, lifting the sheeting right off the rooftops of the Anglican Church and exposing the narrowness and impossibility of the Biblical narrative of Creation.

For the Church itself it was a call to arms since the evolutionary theory articulated by Darwin suggested that life could never have sprung into existence ab initio but required a slow process of mutation and transformation which probably took billions of years. In light of Darwin’s theory, it was then preposterous to declare the world only 5,000 years old and that man had entered it at more or less the same time as all other living creatures.

But the Darwinist revolution had an even more significant cosmological impact. If the Biblical narrative of Creation was demonstrably untrue, then perhaps the existence of a Deity, masterminding that Creation could also be dealt a death blow. Extrapolating further, order in the universe, and indeed its very purpose and meaning, could be questioned. Life, if one followed Darwin’s irreducible logic, actually had very little direction or purpose without the guiding hand of a Creator. Consistent Darwinism meant no life after death, no foundation for ethics, no free will, no ultimate meaning in life.

It is not an exaggeration then to state that the advent of Darwinism heralded the reign of secular humanism in British life and the eventual ennoblement of atheism throughout the western hemisphere. It was the midwife to Nietzcheian existentialism and the foster mother of 20^th Century nihilism. Today, evolutionary theory and the concept of scientific materialism that it enshrines has become an ideological fortress that one assaults at his own peril. You can barely whisper a word of doubt about evolutionary theory without being immediately shelled with lethal amounts of outrage and scorn by our intellectual elites. For them, evolutionary theory has not just become a building block of modern science, but an unassailable truth, as accurate as a mathematical formula and as empirically proven as the earth’s orbit of the sun.

That, of course, would be fine if evolutionary theory had been proven unassailable. But the fact is that the theory, over the past 150 years, has been repeatedly punctured, leaving gaping holes that have been extraordinary difficult to fill. Missing is the fossil evidence which would reveal how one species changed and adapted over several billion years to produce the final product. Or as physicist Gerald Schroeder puts it:

“ In the entire fossil record, with its millions of specimens, there has been found no midway transitional fossil at the basic levels of phylum….. no trace of an animal that was half the predecessor and half the successor of its parent group.”

In other words, no missing link.

On the contrary, the fossil record portrays the continuity of the same morphology of plant and animal forms for billions of years, only to be upset by a sudden transformation which began in the Cambrian period. Therefore evolutionary theory’s linear, gradual transformations of plant and animal life has not been proven, not enough at least to justify the Darwinists’ claim that the theory is incontrovertible. That proof may still be waiting, buried thousands of feet under the earth’s surface; or perhaps lying embedded on an ocean floor. But until it is revealed, the jury is still out on evolution.

I will leave to others, such as the molecular biologist Michael Behe in Darwin’s Black Box, the philosopher David Stove in Darwinian Fairy Tales ( an AFA recommended book of the month) or the mathematician William Dembski’s The Design of Life to amplify the claim that the proofs adduced by both Darwin and his successors have presented far more questions than they have ever answered. Suffice to say they show the Darwinian mechanism of chance variation and natural selection to be inadequate in accounting for the full diversity of life in the universe.

But I wouldn’t tell that to Richard Dawkins. The best selling author who has made millions debunking religious faith has declared that “ it is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane.” The naturalist Edmund O. Wilson has stated that “ evolutionary theory is so ingrained in our intellectual approach to the world that anyone who disavows it should be regarded as mentally incompetent.” The Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg has stated that from all his research into the substance and mechanics of the universe he finds the universe to be pointless and “only a little above the level of farce – and only a fool would think otherwise.” These guardians of evolutionary theory, together with the late professors Stephen J. Gould and Carl Sagan have become the celebrity high priests of a movement that they regard – and demand that society regard – as inviolable.

But be warned. The dogmatism that has attached to the defense of evolutionary theory since its beginnings, can also stand accused as the progenitor of some of the most malign practices and political movements of the 20th century. The pervasive Darwinian notion of the survival of the fittest (a term coined not by Darwin but by the 19^th Century philologist Herbert Spencer) gave Nazi propaganda regarding Jewish unfitness for life most of its intellectual heft. Marxism ( and Leninism for that matter) built on the notion of static inherent social conditions, a sociological variant of Darwinism and relied heavily on the necessity for violent confrontation rather than dialogue and cooperation in seeking to redress social wrongs. The eugenics movement of the 1930s, which sought to isolate, quarantine and ultimately eradicate defective human genes, led 30 U.S. states by 1935 to enact forced sterilization laws. At the legal level, the American eugenics crusade culminated in the infamous Supreme Court decision in Buck vs Bell, where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. declared that compulsory sterilization for the mentally handicapped was constitutional because, afterall, “ three generations of imbeciles is enough.”

Extreme shades of multiculturalism, feminism and environmentalism today further represent forms of the same scientific materialism. Proponents of these ideologies often assert that human beings are so programmed by their race, gender or class that their political views, morality and religious beliefs are mere mechanical by-products of their social condition and that nothing can change them. This, of course, leads to the refusal to debate or discuss with seriousness the basis for their complaints against our society and often leads to violent confrontation.

And yet the wonder of how life began stubbornly persists. You don’t need to be a Nobel Prize winning scientist or a Sorbonne educated philosopher to understand the issue. One view of the night sky with the understanding that the light of any star you see may have been traveling towards you for a million years or the examination through a microscope of the infinite complexity of a cell – a galaxy unto itself - should be enough to make even a child ask powerful questions about ultimate cause. Science, of course, has helped us along in capturing this awe and wonder. We know, for instance, that almost four billion years ago, an exquisite, efficient system for encoding and transmitting the information necessary to guide an organism’s development from seed to adult, appeared. That same system, the double helix of our genetic DNA, guides the growth and characteristics of all living organisms. We also know that the development of a cell requires a perfect configuration of approximately 250 proteins and that the odds of this arrangement occurring by random chance from nothing, is several trillion to one.

The question then that any astronomer, molecular biologist and philosopher worth his salt must ask, is where did it all begin? Where did that first extraordinary cell which became the progenitor for all life derive its origins? Why did it develop and what, in the end, was its purpose?

Evolutionary biologists have no convincing answers for any of these questions.

Given this huge inadequacy, one is entitled to ask how is it possible to have such an intricately structured universe of such deep complexity, largely beyond human understanding or comprehension, and not be impressed by the hand of design? Curiously it is the scientific evidence – the significant discoveries of gravity, relativity, DNA, quantum mechanics and molecular biology and their irreducible complexity ( to borrow a term from Michael Behe) that points to the reality of intelligence in the origins and development of life.

The Intelligent Design theory, advanced by the authors I identify above, highlighted in Ben Stein’s excellent documentary Expelled and supported by hundreds of other scientists, philosophers and commentators throughout the world, does not demand to be the only theory advanced to explain the origins of life. But it demands and deserves to be heard.

But it is not heard, at least not audibly enough. Professors on our college campuses who even hint at the possibility of intelligent design suffer the threat of censure, research grant cuts and even termination. Books on intelligent design cannot be found in many college or community libraries or even in many book stores, as I found to my surprise in conducting research for this article. Scientists who espouse intelligent design are ridiculed on talk shows and news programs as simplistic born-again Christians, with a religious agenda, even if they practice no religion. A virtual witch hunt ensues in our society for those who wish to pursue alternative theories to evolutionary theory.

Oddly enough, it is science itself which has opened up the questions about intelligent design by leaving unanswered fundamental questions. Shouldn’t science then be the vehicle to examine it more fully? Do not the demands of free inquiry, one of the hallmarks of academic freedom and one of the absolute necessities for human progress, require our universities to take countervailing theories which seek to plug the gaping holes in old ideas with a level of seriousness?

Since the late 1850s we have seen where fanatical adherence to a philosophy and theory which brooks no opposition can lead. In the ontological approach it propounds, evolutionary theory has not led to the discovery of universal truths. On the contrary, the atheism of which evolutionary theory is a natural corollary has failed us, leading us to doubt, despair, ennui and societal breakdown. In its political incarnation it did not engender tolerance, cooperation and understanding as the scientific community might have once promised us, but instead led to competition, struggle and violence. The perniciousness of the theory as it has developed, unintended by its author, would probably shock him today.

What is at stake in all of this? Why should the debate over ultimate cause, evolution and intelligent design matter to any non-scientist? It is fairly simply stated. If life on earth is a product of blind, purposeless natural causes, brought into existence by random associations, then our lives are a mere cosmic accident. There is no source for overarching moral imperatives, no unique dignity for human life and no sense of purpose at all. Why should we fight to preserve human life or battle for a culture or a civilization when none of it has any transcendental meaning?

On the other hand, if life is the product of foresight and design, then human beings are not merely randomly associated chunks of matter, whose atoms will be spewed back into the ether to be reformed into space dust, but organisms whose existence have a direction and a purpose. With such assurance we can firmly fix our place in the universe and discern meaning in our daily lives. We have reason to defend our families, our values and our civilization.

At stake, ultimately, is which world view will shape our culture and our future.

At stake, may be our very survival.