Science or Philosophy?

The sun sets, the moon rises, and all that is familiar feels suddenly strange. In an age before street lights, link-boys carry torches to see city-dwellers home, while in the countryside starlight and moonlight are the only guides. The footpads are out, a darker blackness against shadow, so for safety’s sake men walk together when they roll back from the coffee-house, the tavern and the club. And in the eighteenth century clubs are everywhere: clubs for singing, clubs for drinking . . . clubs of poets and pudding-makers and politicians. One such gathering of like-minded men is the Lunar Society of Birmingham. They are a small, informal bunch who simply try to meet at each other’s houses on the Monday nearest the full moon, to have light to ride home (hence the name) and like other clubs they drink and laugh and argue into the night. But the Lunar men are different – together they nudge their whole society and culture over the threshold of the modern, tilting it irrevocably away from old patterns of life towards the world we know today.1

So begins the prologue to author Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men, an exploration of five key members of what was known as the Lunar Society of Birmingham, an extremely influential group of progressive-minded thinkers that did indeed “nudge their whole society” quite radically (sometimes for good and sometimes not), whose origins began way back in the 1760s. But why am I mentioning what some might consider some stodgy group of old guys from England?

Western Society Was Once Based on Biblical Principles

Well, in Parts 1 and 2 of this series, we discovered that Western society was founded on not just certain principles or ideals contained within the Holy Bible but rather the belief in the historical accuracy of the entire biblical narrative, beginning in Genesis as its foundation.

This, of course, commences with the notion of an initial very good creation that was marred by sin when the first man God created (Adam) rebelled against his creator, resulting in a fallen world from which all sinful mankind needed redemption, with the blessed hope of a fully restored new heavens and new earth coming in the future.

This was made available by faith because of the birth, sinless life, willing death of our Savior Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary, and his subsequent resurrection three days later, which proved his credentials as the perfect, sinless Son of God.

Man was considered special, created in the image of God—therefore, worthy of dignity, rights, freedoms, and the pursuit of happiness regardless of social stature. And the family unit where biblical morality was taught and practiced was considered the most basic and vitally important unit in society.

Evolutionary Effects

However, we also demonstrated that the story of evolution (taught in the state-run education centers throughout the West as “fact and science”) has undermined the average person’s trust not only in the plain reading of the Bible (thus rendering it unauthoritative in many people’s minds) but in the very belief in the existence of God in many whatsoever.

And the resultant rejection of biblical authority and moral dictates in culture has opened the floodgates for progressive activists to impose all manner of ideologies and institutions that operate in direct opposition to what would be considered traditional Western law, morality, and ethical standards and practices.

Now, many people have a rather naïve understanding of how the modern story of evolution came to be so firmly established in academia. It’s often explained as the result of a certain Charles Darwin having gone on a five-year journey around the world and simply “discovering” the undeniable evidence for it that was apparently just lying around for someone to find.

For example, if you were to look up Charles Darwin’s bio on the Brittanica website, you’d read,

Charles Darwin . . . was an English naturalist whose scientific theory of evolution by natural selection became the foundation of modern evolutionary studies. An affable country gentleman, Darwin at first shocked religious Victorian society by suggesting that animals and humans shared a common ancestry.

However, his nonreligious biology appealed to the rising class of professional scientists, and by the time of his death evolutionary imagery had spread through all of science, literature, and politics.

Darwin formulated his bold theory in private in 1837–39, after returning from a voyage around the world aboard HMS Beagle, but it was not until two decades later that he finally gave it full public expression in On the Origin of Species (1859), a book that has deeply influenced modern Western society and thought.2

Notice how they emphasize that Darwin formulated his “bold theory” in private, almost as if they are implying it was he alone who came up with this marvelous idea that nature itself somehow had the ability to create different life-forms over millions of years of deep time.

We’ll challenge that notion shortly, but we should recognize the truth of what was stated in the final sentence here. His story of evolution did indeed “deeply influence modern Western society and thought,” as the logical conclusion for those who accepted this new narrative was that if “nature” could create, there was now no need for a supernatural creator.

This also meant that even if you wanted to believe in God, the biblical account of creation had been falsified. Eventually—over time—it was promoted and became understood by many that if the Bible could no longer be taken as plainly read in one area, then it was no longer authoritative or to be trusted as an absolute standard of truth in any respect whatsoever—whether historic, scientific, spiritual, or moral for that matter.

And because the seedbed of all Christian doctrines is found in the book of Genesis, this attack on the historicity of the Bible gradually eroded people’s trust in the very bedrock of Western society.

Indeed, Bible skeptic Ernst Mayr (one of the twentieth century’s leading evolutionary biologists) summed up how belief in the Bible’s trustworthiness was overturned by the story of evolution (and its required “millions of years” timeline) in an article titled “The Nature of the Darwinian Revolution”:

The revolution began when it became obvious that the earth was very ancient rather than having been created only 6000 years ago. This finding was the snowball that started the whole avalanche.3

Did Darwin “Discover” Evolution?

OK, so we can clearly see the “how” in answer to the question as to what happened to Western culture. And many might think we also have the “who” and “why” figured out as well, by thinking Charles Darwin just happened upon the “facts of science” that proved the story of evolution was true and things just worked themselves out from there.

However, that would be historically false on a multitude of levels. For example, many people aren’t aware there was literally a version of Darwinian evolution produced and published in a book called Zoonomia a full 65 years before Origin of Species ever appeared. It was written by Charles Darwin’s own grandfather—Erasmus Darwin.

And Erasmus was a founding member of the Lunar Society, the small—but highly influential—group of progressive thinkers I mentioned earlier, who met into the evening on the Sunday nearest the full moon, to discuss, debate, and strategize ways and means to influence their society.4

Confirmation that the whole concept of the story of evolution was something that had been explored and promoted prior to Charles Darwin’s ponderings is well established. Here’s just one example found in the works of Ernst Krause in his book Life of Erasmus Darwin, published in 1879.

Almost every single work of the younger Darwin may be paralleled by at least a chapter in the works of his ancestor; the mystery of heredity, adaptation, the protective arrangements of animals and plants, sexual selection, insectivorous plants, and the analysis of the emotions and sociological impulses; nay, even the studies on infants are to be found already discussed in the writing of the elder Darwin.5

And here we must in the first place admit that he [Erasmus] was the first who proposed and consistently carried out, a well-rounded theory with regard to the development of the living world. . . . It is the idea of a power working from within the organisms to improve their natural position. . . . In contrast to the old theory that all adaptation to purpose in the arrangements of the world was fore-calculated and fore-ordained.6

This is true Darwinism of the last [seventeenth] century—Darwinism of the old school.7

Darwinian Evolution Before Charles Darwin

Indeed, the whole concept of some cosmic explosion resulting in a vast and ancient universe where on our primeval planet life somehow arose in ancient waters through naturalistic processes had already been conceptualized, collated, and captured in print in the writings of Erasmus long before his grandson was even in existence.

Just look at select portions of a poem he wrote titled “The Temple of Nature.”

Ere Time began, from flaming Chaos hurl’d
Rose the bright spheres, which form the circling world;
Earths from each sun with quick explosions burst,
And second planets issued from the first.
Then, whilst the sea at their coeval birth,
Surge over surge, involv’d the shoreless earth;
Nurs’d by warm sun-beams in primeval caves
Organic Life began beneath the waves. . . .
Hence without parent by spontaneous birth
Rise the first specks of animated earth;
From Nature’s womb the plant or insect swims,
And buds or breathes, with microscopic limbs.
Organic life beneath the shoreless waves,
Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves;
First, forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.
Thus the tall Oak, the giant of the wood,
Which bears Britannia’s thunders on the flood;
The Whale, unmeasured monster of the main,
The lordly Lion, monarch of the plain,
The Eagle soaring in the realms of air,
Whose eye undazzled drinks the solar glare,
Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,
Of language, reason, and reflection proud,
With brow erect, who scorns this earthy sod,
And styles himself the image of his God;
Arose from rudiments of form and sense,
An embryon point, or microscopic ens!8

Here we can clearly see the basic tenets of “pond scum to people” evolution laid out in his rather lengthy prose. As an interesting side note, this poem (published posthumously in 1803) was originally titled “The Origin of Society.” Of course, shaping and guiding society was what the Lunar Society was all about.

Science or Philosophy?

Now let’s ask a question here, namely, where did Erasmus get all these ideas? Did he have the benefit of all the scientific facts observed in geology, biology, microbiology, the study of the fossil record, DNA analysis, etc. that modern-day evolutionists cite as support for the story of evolution?

No, statistically, he would have barely had any significant percentage whatsoever of the sorts of so-called proofs and evidence for the story of evolution that is currently touted. All these ideas came from the imagination of Erasmus Darwin, and all without the benefit of any scientific confirmation from so-called ape-men fossils, radioisotope dating, etc.

In fact, Kraus (quoted earlier) actually mentions that

Dr. Erasmus Darwin could not satisfy his contemporaries with his physio-philosophical ideas; he was a century ahead of them, and was in consequence obliged to put up with seeing people shrug their shoulders when they spoke of his wild and eccentric fancies, and the expression “Darwinising” . . . was accepted in England nearly as the antithesis of sober biological investigation.9

So what Erasmus was promoting was a philosophy—or story or perhaps we should say a narrative—of naturalism, certainly not observational science.

Again, the question is what was the root of Erasmus’ imagining a chaotic origin of the world where life began as filaments in the sea and gradually morphed and grew fins and feet and eventually turned into philosophers such as himself—going about “Darwinising” about such things—in contrast to “sober biological investigation” (i.e., real observational science)?

What Erasmus was promoting was a philosophy—or story or perhaps we should say a narrative—of naturalism, certainly not observational science.

Well, it began with a philosophical presupposition. And that presupposition was that the Creator God of the Bible did not exist, that the Bible was not the Word of God, and that naturalistic explanations were the only true way to understand the world. As Uglow’s exploration of The Lunar Men regarding Erasmus’ education and how it shaped his worldview outlook explains,

Everything he learned at Edinburgh concentrated his mind on the physical and the material. Inevitably he rejected conventional religion, with its mystical Trinity, its promise of salvation and store of miracles. . . . And as to life after death, no one could know: ‘The light of Nature affords us not a single argument for a future state.’10

Erasmus would have been “what one might call a Deist . . . he was still ready to accept the notion of some controlling force”11:

He refused to believe that this remote God had much to do with everyday life.12

That he influences things by a particular providence, is not so evident. The probability, according to my notion, is against it, since general laws seem sufficient for that end.13

Indeed, Erasmus’ commitment to materialistic explanations and his rejection of the God of the Bible is why he found himself on the receiving end of the accusation of being an atheist more than once, which was something quite distasteful at that time in England.

So, although one can find nods to “the notion of some controlling force – a First Cause, a Being of Beings or ‘Ens Entium’”14 being considered possible in his publications (likely to blunt these accusations), a careful perusal of his work seems to indicate his accusers were correct. To paraphrase Erasmus—“general laws were quite enough to ‘roll this planet round the sun.’”15 That is, God isn’t required to explain our existence. The fact is, there have always been atheistic-minded people in the world who have doubted the existence of God and then applied those doubts to their explanations of the facts we observe in nature, interpreting all that they see through a naturalistic lens regardless.

Evolutionary Ideas Have Been Around for a Long Time

So let’s not be foolish enough to think that it was Erasmus Darwin who was the first one to propose concepts like some kind of cosmic explosion leading to spontaneous generation of life followed by biological evolution over millions of years of earth history—far from it!

Many of the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Hindus, and Romans all had such ideas—again, all without the benefit of what modern evolutionists have today, such as the ability to travel the world to study the geologic column, to use technology that measures the half-lives of radioisotopes as dating methods, or to use microscopes to study DNA, etc.

Chaos theory, transmutation, Darwinian evolution, neo-Darwinian evolution, punctuated equilibrium—it doesn’t matter what label you slap on or what cute little bow you use to decorate whatever version of the concept you believe in, because stripped down, it always begins with an ideology that is rooted in a commitment to a naturalistic view of the world and a rejection of the Creator God and his revealed Word. Far from simply facts observed in scientific study, all one needs to come up with a story of evolution is a commitment to naturalism that is then applied to whatever you observe.

Join us for Part 4 as we continue to demonstrate that the story of evolution is less than sturdy scientific support and reveal how it was several key atheistic and naturalistically minded thinkers that drove it to prominence, changing the landscape of Western society forever.