It is drummed into modern society that Darwin’s Origin represented a watershed in the biological sciences. But this understanding is incorrect. The Darwinian link to the ancient Greeks and Romans is highly significant. Darwinism is, in fact, a modern incarnation of pagan origins. Note that one would not describe Newtonian physics as pagan physics, even though Newton’s science was linked to the ancient Greeks via Euclidean mathematics. Newton was operating in the field of descriptive and causal model science, which are conducted without reference to religion. Further, Newton accepted the Genesis creation account. Darwin, on the other hand, was operating in the origins science domain, which, as we saw in Chapter 4, is inextricably linked to religious or philosophical presuppositions. Clearly, some of the presuppositions behind Darwinism—that there is no transcendent monotheistic God, that life can emerge spontaneously, that mankind is descended from lower life forms, that mankind is unfallen, that death is not a result of sin—are consistent with the pagan worldview. (Other ideas associated with the Darwinian worldview—that man is made in the image of animals; that the flesh is preeminent; that the fittest shall be first—are notably anti-Christian.) Darwinism therefore represents the recrudescence of ancient pagan origins in our time—sold to the public as neutral, secular science.
If Darwinism as a holistic origins explanation ought to be on the way out, we need to account for its popularity. Gertrude Himmelfarb, a historian of the Victorian era, observed that Origin was approved by intelligent non-scientists of the time because it appealed to their philosophical prejudices, rather than because of the scientific knowledge or argument it contained.[1] (Of course, Darwinism represented a significant surge in an enormous wave of anti–Christian discourse which had been swelling for several centuries—a wave which has continued down to our own time).
Our view is similar to Himmelfarb‘s: the success of Darwinism in the origins science realm is largely rhetorical, but this success is sufficient to mask, for now, its theoretical non-success. In the next chapter we review parts of the history of science and changes in its presuppositional basis which eroded societal belief in the Genesis account in favor of naturalism and acceptance of Darwinism.
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[1] Himmelfarb, 1996, p. 296.