by Paul Carline
2009 is a special 'Darwin Year', marking the 150th
anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species; and
coincidentally also the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. An international campaign
is under way to declare February 12th Darwin Day. According to many of his
modern followers, Darwin is the world's greatest scientist, and his theory is
the cornerstone of modern biology - if not of the whole of modern science.
In reality, no objective, unbiased assessment of his
work could possibly come to that conclusion. Darwin was at times a good
scientist, but certainly not a great one, and his 'great' work is riddled with
speculation, unfounded assertion and argument from assumed authority. He did not
- as popularly believed (and heavily
promoted by various establishments) — either discover or invent evolution as
such. Nor did he discover how evolution actually occurs - the 'mechanism' of
adaption and structural change - he merely put forward a theory as to how it
might occur: a superficially plausible theory, to be sure, but one which cannot
be shown to be true and which depends utterly on materialistic assumptions.
There is no 'mechanism' because Nature is not a machine. We have to look beyond
physics and chemistry for the forces which mould and transform living things. A
'biology' (the study of life) which fundamentally denies that there is anything
special about life is not worthy of he name. He did not, as biologist Douglas
Futuyma claimed (in his book Evolutionary Biology), show that "material
causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as
Descartes and Newton had shown [even this can be challenged], but also for
biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and
purpose", or: "by coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the
blind, uncaring process of natural selection [make] theological or spiritual
explanations of the life processes superfluous".
He did not (and it is important to make the point that
none of his followers has done so either) explain the origin of new species -
as the title of his most famous work claims. It is vital to distinguish between
micro evolution (relatively small, adaptive changes) and macroevolution (the
emergence of radically new body plans, for example). Darwin assumed and
asserted that small changes must have accumulated to produce macroevolutionary
change. He had no evidence to support this claim, but without it his theory
amounted to nothing.
Because the scientific establishment since Darwin's
time (and especially in the last half-century) has been very successful in
misleading the public as to the scientific basis of Darwin's theory, most
people have come to accept without question the 'truth' of Darwinism. In his
introduction to an edition of the Origin, entomologist W.R.Thompson pointed to
the wider concerns about this phenomenon: "This situation, where
scientific men rally to the defence of a doctrine they are unable to define
scientifically, much less demonstrate with scientific rigour, attempting to
maintain its credibility with the public by the suppression of criticism and
the elimination of difficulties, is abnormal and undesirable in science".
In respect of evolution theory in particular, science has resorted to lies in
pursuit of a very clear agenda - the promotion of a philosophical materialism
which cannot otherwise be sustained (cf. the quote from Ricard Lewontin below).
Despite the attempts at suppression, there are many
examples of scientists who have dared to openly challenge the orthodoxy. A
collection of their writings would make a valuable contribution to redressing
the balance of fact and mere assertion in this Darwin year. Here are just a few
of those I have collected:
"And the salient fact is this: if by evolution we
mean macroevolution ...then it can be said with the utmost rigour that the
doctrine is totally bereft of scientific sanction.[...] .. the fact
remains that there exists to this day not a shred of bona fide scientific
evidence in support of the thesis that macroevolutionary transformations have
ever occurred". (W. Smith, lecturer at MIT and UCLA).
"The central question at the Chicago conference
was whether mechanisms underlying micro evolution can be extrapolated to
explain the phenomena of macroevolution ... the answer can be given as a clear
"No" ..." (Roger Lewin, Science, 1980).
"In the debate on evolution there has been no
more concern with proof than in the operation of a Tibetan prayer wheel".
(Ludwig van Bertalanffy).
"The Darwinian theory of descent has not one
single fact to confirm it in the realm of nature. It is not the result of
scientific research, but purely the product of imagination .. No-one can
demonstrate that the limits of a species have ever been passed.." (A.
Fleischmann, zoologist, University of Erlangen).
"The large-scale aspects of evolution remain
unexplained, including the origin of species. [...] Some other process is
responsible for the emergent properties of life ... Clearly something is
missing from biology". (Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed its Spots).
Geologist Kenneth Hsu went much further: "We have all heard of The Origin
of Species, although few of us have had time to read it; I did not secure a
copy until two years ago. A casual perusal of the classic made me understand
the rage of Paul Feyerabend ... I agree with him that Darwinism contains
"wicked lies"; it is not a "natural law" formulated on the
basis of factual evidence, but a dogma reflecting the dominating social
philosophy of the last century". (K. Hsu, Journal of Sedimentary
Petrology, 1986).
There is little doubt that many other scientists would
agree with the views quoted here, but do not dare to express them for fear of
losing their jobs. Of course, there remains the question as to why virtually a
whole scientific establishment (worldwide) would fall under the spell of a
theory which has no scientific basis. The reasons are both practical and
philosophical. When a theory has been adopted - for good or bad reasons - by
the scientific and educational establishments and is simply taught as fact;
when, moreover, educators know that even to question the theory is tabu - and
thus fail to encourage their students to examine it critically - it becomes in
effect an article of faith.
This is not speculation. Last year the Royal Society's
director of education, Professor Michael Reiss - a biologist and ordained
Church of England clergyman - dared
to suggest that science teachers should treat any 'creationist' belief
"not as a misconception, but as a world view". As reported by Times Online,
British Nobel Prize winner Sir Richard Roberts described this cautious appeal
for moderation as "outrageous" and organised a letter to the
Society's president demanding that Reiss be sacked. Reiss unfortunately caved
in to this suppression of dissent (the real 'outrage') and resigned. When all the
phenomena of nature are 'explained' in terms of the theory - almost no matter
how specious the explanations are (and they are often typically ludicrous) - it becomes difficult to 'think out of the
box'. If you are a young and ambitious biologist, for example, you are forced
to describe and interpret phenomena purely in terms of the dogma. The jargon
becomes second-nature. Another major factor is the historical context of the Origin.
It appeared at a time when the established church's (Church of England)
stranglehold on society and belief was being vigorously challenged by the
emergence of a new generation of scientists, many of whom espoused
philosophical materialism. The book then itself became a core element in the
straggle for power between the old and new forces in society. The declaration
of war was publicly stated by William Tyndall in 1874: "We claim and we
shall wrest from theology the entire domain of cosmological theory. All schemes
and systems which thus infringe upon the domain of science must... submit to
its control".
Though 'science' effectively won the power struggle
(if not the intellectual argument) a long time ago, the phoney war between two
false dogmas (literal 7-day creationism and neo-Darwinism: purposeless,
undirected, chance evolution) still blocks an open and honest debate on
evolution. The philosophical agenda of Darwinism is not concealed. It was
admitted openly by Futuyma in the book quoted from earlier, where he states:
"Together with Marx's materialist theory of history and society, and
Freud's attribution of human behaviour to influences over which we have little
control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of
mechanism and materialism - of much of science, in short - that has since been
the stage of most Western thought".
Geneticist Richard Lewontin left no possible doubt as
to the agenda: "We take the side of science in spite of the patent
absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of
its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the
scientific community for unsubstantiated "Just-So" stories [Darwinism
is riddled with them], because we have a prior
commitment, a commitment to materialism. [...] Moreover, that materialism is
absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door".
The "Divine Foot" means, of course, anything
which might be thought to point beyond "purely naturalistic
explanations". Yet one of the supreme ironies is that it was science
itself - as Rudolf Steiner had predicted decades earlier - which demolished its
own purely naturalistic, simplistic cause-and-effect, explanations in the
Quantum Revolution of the 1930s and later. Consider what Richard Feynman said
in one of his lectures (referring to the 'double-slit' experiments which
demonstrated the role of consciousness in 'creating' reality): "We choose
to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain
in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In
reality, it contains the only mystery".2
In reviewing the book Quantum Evolution, by John Joe
McFadden (HarperCollins, 2000), I wrote: "McFadden
describes Bohr's fascinating debate with Einstein, who was reluctant to accept
Bohr's radical conclusions [in short, that 'matter' exists in a state of
'potentiality' until 'collapsed' into 'materiality' by
consciousness the so-called 'observer effect']. According to
McFadden: "Bohr won the debate, but the price of his victory was
extraordinary - nothing less than an abandonment of our notion of objective
reality - that there is a world out there independent of our experiences".
McFadden then notes that the physicist John Wheeler has taken the 'consciousness-dependent
reality' view "to its logical conclusion, proposing that we live in a
'participatory universe', wherein the universe depends for its existence on
conscious observers to make it real, not only today, but retrospectively right
back to the Big Bang". [It is of course necessary to point out here that
'Big Bang' is as much an unproven theory as 'Natural Selection']. McFadden then
revealed the real sticking-point for a modern science committed absolutely to
philosophical materialism: "The consciousness-participation interpretation
of quantum mechanics seems to allow the human psyche to play a pivotal role in
defining the external world.... Most scientists are very reluctant to reverse
the triumphs of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton and place man, once again, in
the centre of the universe". In fact, it is doubtful if the blame for
'knocking man off his pedestal' can be placed at the feet of these three - but
in the case of Darwin(ism) there is little doubt: Man was no longer to be
regarded as "little lower than the angels ... crowned with glory and
honour" (Psalms), but was now an animal among animals, a mere "naked
ape", the result of chance. In an earlier article in New View I quoted
Steiner as saying that our time would be characterised by immense deception and
great evil, and that mankind would have to acquire considerable skills of
discernment - of separating truth from half-truth and lies. In that article I
placed Steiner's warning in the context of the fiction of an Islamic
fundamentalist terrorist threat to "our way of life", and of the
whole phoney 'war on terror', based on egregious lies. But we are in reality
facing an entirely unprecedented and massive assault on our as yet
weakly-developed sense of discrimination - one might also call it a sense for
the truth. This is so in relation to many of the major areas of our lives -
politics, economics, science and religion. All the areas are characterised by
establishments with considerable vested interests in concealing truth from us.
Perhaps there is in reality only one main agenda - which the separate
establishments carry out in their different ways. Steiner was very clear about
the agenda - it was nothing less than to 'derail' the human project, as it
were; to divert human beings from their intended path - the discovery and
practice of real freedom, which is inseparable from both love and
responsibility. Darwinism made a great truth available to large numbers of
people (as noted above, he did not 'discover' it or 'invent' it - but he
presented it in a way which was superficially plausible) - but it was only a
half-truth (and therefore also a half-lie). The great truth was the/ас? of
evolution - what Rudolf Steiner described as "the greatest cultural deed
of the 19th century". That the world and everything in it has evolved is
not in doubt. What is in doubt - indeed it can be comprehensively dismissed -
is the claim that Darwin discovered how things had evolved. The truth of
evolution was deliberately confounded with the lie of Darwinism — as a core component
of the materialist agenda. The assertion is that evolution is and always has
been purely material explicable solely in terms of the known laws of physics
and chemistry - and is both purposeless and directionless. Some try to maintain
that Darwin himself never went so far, that he even retained his belief in a
deity. He did, to be sure, claim that he had never written
"atheistically" and under pressure - stated that he preferred to
think that God had set everything in motion, but that the world had then
evolved in accordance with 'natural law' i.e. with the 'laws' Darwin claimed to
have discovered. Darwin was a great compromiser and he had his social position
- and the strongly held religious views of his wife - to consider. I remain
convinced that Darwin had utterly rejected the idea of a benevolent deity -
indeed, that this was precisely the reason why the great 'Being' which in his
essay of 1844 he had believed to be indispensable for evolution had – only 15
years later, in the Origin - been discarded in favour of a wholly impersonal
'natural selection'. I believe the key lies in the premature death of his
favourite daughter Annie at the age of 11 in 1850, about which Adrian Desmond
and James Moore wrote: "This was the end of the road, the crucifixion of
his hopes. He could not believe the way Emma [Darwin's wife] believed - nor
what she believed. There was no straw to clutch, no promised resurrection.
Christian faith was futile." Another fateful part of the He was the
assertion that the fundamental law of the living world was competition - that evolution, as the subtitle of
the Origin states, was about "the preservation of favoured races in the
struggle for existence" - the "survival of the fittest".
Applied, as it has been, to economics, it has produced the chaos of the
so-called "free" market (i.e. the 'freedom' to exploit and maximise
profit without conscience), the insanity and immorality of the derivatives
market, and the inevitability of the financial crisis which now threatens to
throw the world into turmoil.
Competition is not the law of nature. 'Nature red in
tooth and claw' - that mysterious world of the carnivore - is the exception
rather than the rule. It represents only a tiny fraction of the relationships
between organisms. The natural world is overwhelmingly based on symbiosis and
mutualism, and recent research appears to show convincingly that this has
always been the case - that evolution depended on symbiosis from the very
start. In the world of economics it should by now be abundantly clear that
human interaction needs to be based on cooperation and solidarity, not
competition. As Mahatma Ghandi put it: "The earth provides enough to
satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed". The current
financial crisis is an opportunity for a radical change in the way we relate to
each other and to the natural world, but that would require an awakening to the
falsity of Darwinism and to the pernicious agenda of materialism. There is not
much sign of that happening; on the contrary, resistance to Darwinism among the
Christian churches (with the exception of those who believe in a literal
reading of Genesis — whose position actually helps to sustain Darwinism)3 has
almost entirely crumbled. Catholic spokesmen have recently stated that they see
no incompatibility between Darwinism and Catholic belief.
Mainstream Christian belief is in fact part of the
problem -because it has no real conception of the spiritual world or of the
spiritual evolution of humanity. Evolution has always been in essence spiritual
evolution and human evolution. A degraded Christian theology no longer knows
why we are here and how our spiritual evolution relates to - and was made
possible by - the evolution of our planet and solar system. Mainstream
Christian theology is schizophrenic: on the one hand it proclaims Christ's
message of self-sacrifice and brotherly and sisterly love; on the other it sets
as a goal only an essentially egotistic personal salvation. Just as
destructively, it has no understanding of - or real interest in - the natural
world; if anything, it is irredeemably 'fallen', the haunt of Satan. A 'new
view' of evolution is essential - but a great mountain of falsity must first be
cleared away. Darwinism - and the undeserved veneration of Darwin, amounting to
hagiography - must be exposed for the lie that it is. I say 'lie' because I
believe that Darwin knew exactly what he was doing. In part, of course, he was
merely a man of his time living in a 'clockwork' universe at the high-point of
philosophical materialism. But he faced choices - and he chose to deny the
working of spirit in the world and to argue for an evolution without meaning or
purpose. He was honest enough to admit that his chosen interpretation of the
facts was not the only one - but he could not admit why he had made that
particular choice. In the Introduction to the Origin he had written: "For
I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on
which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusion directly
opposite to those at which I have arrived. A fair result can be obtained only
by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each
question; and this is here impossible".
Why was it impossible for him to attempt a "fair
result"? I believe it was because he knew how tenuous his theory was, that
it was fundamentally based on speculation and mere inference; but that his
vanity, his possible need to 'prove himself to his father (in her excellent
biography Getrude Himmelfarb notes:" .. the words that rankled so that
Darwin never forgot them were those of his father: "You care for nothing
but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and
all your family"), and his eventual hatred of God would not allow him to
admit this. His bad example continues to be followed by evolutionary biologists
today. The facts do not support the theory - but the theory has to be defended
because it is the central pillar of materialism. We do indeed have a
"situation .. [which] is undesirable in science" (W.R.Thompson) - but
sadly one which has become 'normal'.
I agree with Kenneth Hsu that Darwinism contains
"wicked lies". I also agree with Soren Lovtrup who wrote: "I
believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked as the greatest deceit
in the history of science" (Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth). I see
Darwin not as a giant but as a sort of shadowy 'Judas' figure (it is simply a
fact that Darwin never defended his theory in public, withdrawing to the
seclusion of Down4 and leaving that (distasteful? shameful?) job to the likes
of T.H.Huxley and Ernst Haeckel). I do not believe he did this simply out of
modesty; the later photographs of Darwin seem to me to reveal a man
(black-cloaked and haggard-looking) who appears haunted by the awful knowledge
of what he has done. I see him as a man who knowingly betrayed the truth for
his equivalent of the "thirty pieces of silver": worldly fame.
A kinder - and quite possibly more accurate
-interpretation would be that it fell to Darwin's destiny to be the one to
bring the truth of evolution to the world - but in a distorted, corrupt form.
Why would that be? I can only speculate that the spiritual world - from where
such impulses come - understood that it would be a mistake to, as it were, hand
humanity the full truth 'on a plate'. Truths of such an important nature have
to be worked for. The half-truth left humans free - painfully free - to
discover the full truth for themselves. Perhaps Goethe also left us a clue in
the Prologue to his monumental drama Faust, where he has Mephistopheles
'chatting' to God and complaining of his lack of success in leading mankind
astray. "I am", he says, "the spirit that always wishes evil,
but which always ends up creating good". It could in any case hardly have
been expected of someone such as Darwin to discover and reveal the spiritual
reality of evolution in the 1850s. I would take even such a man as A. R.
Wallace - co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection and, in my view, a
far greater man than Darwin - another half-century to come to the realisation
that, as he put it in his 1911 book A World of Life, the process of evolution
was unimaginable unless one assumed the active involvement of "countless
thousands of spiritual beings".
Why does all this matter? Because philosophical
materialism has real and potentially disastrous consequences when it is applied
to life. The Biblical story of 'the Fall' - the temptation of Adam and Eve and
their expulsion from the 'Garden of Eden' - mentions two trees: the "tree
of the knowledge of good and evil"; and the "tree of life",
which was "in the middle of the garden" (i.e. of central importance).
God is reported as saying: "You may freely eat of every tree of the
garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat,
for in the day that you eat of it you shall die". Perhaps surprisingly,
the 'tree of life' is not even mentioned here. In the Temptation, 'the serpent'
contradicts God's warning of the consequences of eating from the Tree of the
Knowledge of good and evil: "You will not die. For God knows that when you
eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and
evil" - later confirmed by God's words: "Behold, the man has become
like one of us, knowing good and evil". Only here is the 'tree of life'
mentioned again; the expulsion from 'the garden' is done "lest he put
forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for
ever". At the 'east of Eden' God places a Cherubim with a "flaming
sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life".
Implicit in the logic (and the agenda) of materialism
is the assertion that we are essentially only sophisticated machines: that
ageing and 'death' are only the result of 'design flaws' (where the current
'flawed design' is, of course, the chance outcome of millions of years of
undirected random variation and natural selection) - that it should be
possible, therefore, to 're-engineer' the human machine so as to remove its
'flaws' and allow us to 'eat of the tree of life and live forever'. The
scientific programme to achieve this is already well underway, the preliminary
objective being to remove - by genetic engineering - the 'flaws' (diseases,
conditions) presumed to be the result of the imperfect process of natural
selection. The film Gattaca (1997) portrays a future civilisation which has
achieved this to an almost perfect extent.
But death is not a 'design flaw'. Essential to an
understanding of a purposeful, meaningful, and essentially spiritual evolutionary
process is the acceptance of the reality of repeated earth lives i.e. of
re-incarnation in different bodies, in differing cultural and geographical
contexts. 'Living for ever' in the same physical body in the same cultural
environment would be spiritual death - but that is exactly what the agenda of
materialism is about, and it is an agenda which cannot be defeated without the
recognition that evolution is true, but Darwinism is false (the same is true
for all purely 'naturalistic' explanations of life).
What difference does it make whether I accept
Darwinism or believe in some form of spiritually-guided evolution? It makes a
great deal of difference. The way we think about the world directly influences
our individual actions - and collectively the form of society we create. It is
clear from the present state of affairs that a different way of thinking is
needed — but we should not imagine that merely in terms of better economic
policies, or fairer trade, though these are also important. Understanding the
world in terms of spirit rather than matter, and accepting that there is a
purpose to our existence beyond mere personal, egotistical 'salvation' has
profound consequences. It means that we can have trust that we are not alone in
this enterprise and that we will receive help and guidance if we seek it.
Materialism (and thus Darwinism) offers nothing but
temporary satisfactions — pleasure, money, power — and provides no basis for
morality. As Jacques Monod observed: "It is perfectly true that science
[i.e. current science based on philosophical materialism] attacks values ...
man must at last wake out of his millenary dream and discover his total
solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realise that he lives on the
boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music and as
indifferent to his hopes as it is to his sufferings or his crimes".
(Chance and Necessity).
Changing our way of thinking about the world (which
must include coming to terms with the fact that we live in two realities: the
formless world of quantum mechanics, and the 'normal' world of
sense-perceptible objects which we somehow mysteriously create) means that
Nature becomes alive in a different, much richer way. Wonder and mystery return
to a world which an arrogantly ignorant science has 'explained away' as 'mere
stuff'. The world becomes once again 'ensouled' - not as Lovelock's Gaia, which
is still only a machine — but filled with the beings whose sacrifice makes
'matter' possible and who deserve our profound gratitude. That this is not some
kind of 'romantic' delusion is proven by the work of Masaru Emoto and others,
who have shown that when humans express gratitude and love towards Nature, even
grossly polluted rivers and lakes can be 'healed'.
The Earth is crying out to be healed. If we are deaf
to its cries, what then ....? Paul Carline lives in Carlops, Scotland. Endnotes
2 The 'mystery' is the nature of human consciousness,
which a materialistic science is incapable of explaining. The mystery
includes the experimentally proven role of consciousness in creating the
'normal' sense-perceptible world - which quantum mechanics tells us does not
'really' exist. By far the best introduction to this conundrum is Owen
Barfield's Saving the Appearances (Wesleyan University Press, 1988).
3 Darwinism is
sustained because it is not difficult to disprove a literal reading of
the Genesis account of creation and the latter can be falsely presented as the
only alternative to the supposedly scientific neo-Darwinian account. In
reality, both accounts are faith-based and the spurious battle between
creationism and Darwinism provides a means of preventing a rational debate and
of blocking the exploration of genuine alternatives to both.
4 Down House, near Farnborough in Kent, where Darwin spent the last 40 years of his life.
“Truths”