Moral Darwinism By Benjamin Wiker
Book Review by K.G. Powderly Jr.
Book Review by K.G. Powderly Jr.
Benjamin Wiker’s Moral Darwinism explores how Western Civilization began to sink into hedonism even as it reached the height of its power. Every system of morality (even amorality) requires its own cosmology and worldview. Wiker shows how the 17 th through 18 th century forefathers of today’s academia resurrected the philosophy of the ancient Greek thinker Epicurus, which was designed to eliminate human interaction with the gods as a real-world possibility. Men like Thomas Hobbes, Spinoza, Voltaire, and David Hume then retooled Epicurus’ “method of knowing” to make the Judeo-Christian view of God and reality seem unthinkable. It was this ideological progression that demanded some kind of evolutionary explanation for reality well over a century before Darwin, and which defined Darwin’s “search.”
Romans 1:18-33 tells us that when a society “suppresses the truth in unrighteousness”—that is, “redefines God on a systematic scale” that certain consequences become inevitable. Wiker shows how the Deists and philosophic Materialists of the 17th and 18 th century tried to undermine the Judeo-Christian view of God by advancing in the intellectual community a series of assumptions that were designed to exclude the work and relevance of the Biblical God as a real-world factor in natural and human affairs.
Deists believed that God existed because the evident design observable in nature was too clear. But because the Roman and Reformed churches had too much of a hand in the 17 th century Religious Wars, many felt that Christianity had to be chucked as a viable option. Succeeding generations in the intellectual community, and since the 20 th century, at the grassroots level, jumped on board this bandwagon because of the alluring license promised by Man being able to define his own morality apart from God and the church. Because Materialistic Naturalism was assumed to be true, all examination of evidence, artifacts, texts, and experience was adjusted to fit this grid. A way of knowing things was created to force-march scientific, legal, and theological disciplines to that end, and to exclude the Biblical worldview from serious consideration. Commentator Alan Bloom, in his book The Closing of the American Mind, said:
The most effective tyranny is not that which achieves uniformity by brute force, but that which removes the awareness that other ways are possible… that removes the sense that there really is an outside.
Nevertheless, Moral Darwinism is not a conspiracy theory-based explanation for the history of ideas. Though some small-scale conspiracies in the 18 th and 19 th century academic community clearly occurred (not to mention John Dewey’s cabal around the 1933 Humanist Manifesto) in selling Darwinism to Christian churches, most of the shift away from a Bible-based view of reality came by the steady—if not always conscious—repetition of humanistic bromides. Never under-estimate the power of “group-think” even on the most intelligent layer of our society. Most people will believe something is true if they hear it repeated often enough, in a variety of ways, and the alternatives are defined as “unsophisticated” without serious examination.
While some may be tempted to see Wiker’s book as a “high brow read,” I would strongly recommend resisting that perception. Understanding the basic mechanics of how we know what we know (and of how the world knows what it thinks it knows) is a basic survival skill for the 21 st century student and parent in the Information Age. Ironically, neither the Greek philosopher Epicurus, nor most of the 17 th and 18 th century Materialists were hedonistic lovers of pleasure. It was their followers, both modern and ancient, that took things that direction, simply because ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have bad consequences that the sometimes well-intentioned spinners of those ideas rarely intend or foresee.
This book comes highly recommended for a generation that must now watch the raggedy-ended conclusions of bad worldview assumptions play out to their painful and logical conclusion.
Deists believed that God existed because the evident design observable in nature was too clear. But because the Roman and Reformed churches had too much of a hand in the 17 th century Religious Wars, many felt that Christianity had to be chucked as a viable option. Succeeding generations in the intellectual community, and since the 20 th century, at the grassroots level, jumped on board this bandwagon because of the alluring license promised by Man being able to define his own morality apart from God and the church. Because Materialistic Naturalism was assumed to be true, all examination of evidence, artifacts, texts, and experience was adjusted to fit this grid. A way of knowing things was created to force-march scientific, legal, and theological disciplines to that end, and to exclude the Biblical worldview from serious consideration. Commentator Alan Bloom, in his book The Closing of the American Mind, said:
The most effective tyranny is not that which achieves uniformity by brute force, but that which removes the awareness that other ways are possible… that removes the sense that there really is an outside.
Nevertheless, Moral Darwinism is not a conspiracy theory-based explanation for the history of ideas. Though some small-scale conspiracies in the 18 th and 19 th century academic community clearly occurred (not to mention John Dewey’s cabal around the 1933 Humanist Manifesto) in selling Darwinism to Christian churches, most of the shift away from a Bible-based view of reality came by the steady—if not always conscious—repetition of humanistic bromides. Never under-estimate the power of “group-think” even on the most intelligent layer of our society. Most people will believe something is true if they hear it repeated often enough, in a variety of ways, and the alternatives are defined as “unsophisticated” without serious examination.
While some may be tempted to see Wiker’s book as a “high brow read,” I would strongly recommend resisting that perception. Understanding the basic mechanics of how we know what we know (and of how the world knows what it thinks it knows) is a basic survival skill for the 21 st century student and parent in the Information Age. Ironically, neither the Greek philosopher Epicurus, nor most of the 17 th and 18 th century Materialists were hedonistic lovers of pleasure. It was their followers, both modern and ancient, that took things that direction, simply because ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have bad consequences that the sometimes well-intentioned spinners of those ideas rarely intend or foresee.
This book comes highly recommended for a generation that must now watch the raggedy-ended conclusions of bad worldview assumptions play out to their painful and logical conclusion.
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