LAST WEDNESDAY was the fourth anniversary of the death of traditionalist writer Lawrence Auster. A few friends of his and I met at his grave that day to remember him and pray for his eternal happiness. We enjoyed some counter-cultural conversation afterward in fitting memory of our departed friend, whose wit and wisdom are missed by many.

Here in belated recognition of this anniversary is an excerpt from one of the many excellent entries, this one from February 11, 2009, that Mr. Auster posted at View from the Right on one of his all-time favorite subjects — Darwinism. The philosophical errors of the Darwinian theory, he believed, could never be exhausted:

As they work themselves into a proper celebratory frenzy over the bicentennial of the birth of the man who, they fondly imagine, successfully murdered God and who is thus himself the ultimate god of modernity, the priesthood of the Darwinian cult are engaging in the same doublethink that I have frequently noted before in their periodic boasts of triumph. The doublethink consists in the fact that right in the middle of their assured, oh-so-confident, sweeping-aside-all-doubts declarations of the absolute, unquestionable truth of Darwinism, that truth that is “the bedrock of modern biology,” and indeed of modern civilization itself and of all that is good and decent, that truth that no one but low IQ backwoodsmen and Christian bigots dares deny, the Darwinists quietly but clearly let on that the core and essence of Darwinism—the evolution of new species by means of random genetic mutations and natural selection—has not been proved. Repeat: the Darwinians openly admit that Darwinism has not been proved. Yet such is the hypnotic power of the Darwinian ascendancy over men’s minds that even as the emperor strips himself naked before the populace, no one notices that he is doing this.

The latest instance of this remarkable phenomenon is found in the February 10 New York Times, which has a special section on Charles Darwin as part of its build-up to his birthday on February 12. There is an embarrassing piece of Darwin hero worship by Nicholas Wade, a worthwhile writer who has turned himself into a court flatterer for the nonce. Then there is an article by Carl Safina in which he argues that what we call Darwinism is largely the result of discoveries that came after Darwin, and therefore we should stop calling evolutionary science “Darwinism.” The point is misleading, even mischievous, because, notwithstanding the many refinements in the theory since Darwin’s time, the fundamental assertion of Darwinism, or “evolutionary biology” as the Darwinists now prefer to call it, has not changed: that new life forms have come into being by random variations (later understood as random genetic mutations) plus natural selection. As I argued last year in response to a similar proposal by evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson of the Times, the reason the evolutionary biologists want to get rid of the name “Darwin” is that it is ineluctably associated with, and thus reminds people of, the troublesome and still unproved core of, uh, evolutionary biology.

Has anyone but me noticed the irony that the house organ of liberalism worships Darwin as its god even as it tries to shuffle the old fellow off stage? Of course, liberals have lots of practice in this, since shuffling God offstage—meaning the real God, the God who created the heaven and the earth—is the central project of liberalism. But what is passing strange, and a sure indicator of the actual turmoil hidden within the confident-seeming Darwinian edifice, is that now they are shuffling off stage their own god, the man who they believe overthrew the God of the Bible.

Finally, in the Times’ Darwin section, there is the jackpot for the discerning: Carol Yoon’s somewhat obfuscatory yet unmistakable and stunning admission that the Darwinian theory of evolution remains unproved.

Below is Yoon’s article in its entirety. Of main interest here are the first several paragraphs, where she plainly states that, according to the Darwinians themselves, the Darwinian theory of the origin of species is unproved. In the rest of the article, Yoon discusses at length what she suggests is the cutting edge of current attempts by evolutionary researchers to prove the origin of species by Darwinian processes (they’re still attempting to prove it, they haven’t proved it yet, even as they sneer that anyone who doubts that it has been proved is a religious idiot): the search for a special type of gene that separates closely related species from each other by making their mutual offspring infertile. Whatever the importance of this research, it would seem to be far removed from any kind of decisive demonstration that entirely new organs and new life forms evolved through random genetic mutations and natural selection.

Thus, like Safina’s and Judson’s attempts to get rid of the name “Darwinism,” Yoon’s article seems directed at distracting readers’ attention from the fact that the evolutionary enterprise has not proved what it purports in loud and dictatorial tones to have proved. Yet in doublethink fashion, as you will see in the bolded text in Yoon’s article and my interspersed comments, the Darwinians openly admit the very failure that they simultaneously try to cover up.

Read more here and find Mr. Auster’s full Anti-Darwin collection here.

— Comments —

Tim writes:

In E. F. Schumacher/s excellent 140 page book A Guide for the Perplexed (1977) (which could be a college level course in philosophy all on its own,) he makes a startling observation on the devastation caused by what he calls the Evolutionist Doctrine.

He quotes Martin Lings in Studies in Comparative Religion (1970.)

“There can be little doubt that in the modern world more cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution as their immediate cause than to anything else. It is true, surprising as it may seem, that many people still continue to live out their lives in a tepid and precarious combination of religion and evolutionism. But for the more logically minded, there is no option but to choose between the two, that is, between the doctrine of the fall of man and the “doctrine” of the rise of man, and to reject altogether the one not chosen…

“Millions of our contemporaries have chosen evolutionism on the grounds that evolution is a “scientifically proven truth,” as many of them were taught at school; the gulf between them and religion is widened still further by the fact that the religious man, unless he happens to be a scientist, is unable to make a bridge between himself and them to producing the right initial argument, which must be on the scientific plane.

Schumacher continues:

If it is not on the “scientific plane,” he will be shouted down “and reduced to silence by all sorts of scientific jargon.” The truth of the matter, however, is that the initial argument must not be on the scientific plane; it must be on the philosophical. It amounts simply to this: that descriptive science becomes unscientific and illegitimate when it indulges in comprehensive explanatory theories which can be neither verified nor disproved by experiment. Such theories are not “science” but “faith.”

Schumacher, of course, is best known for his international best seller Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (1973) which was translated into 16 languages. As Fritz (as he was known to family and fiends) was researching this book, he had the intellectual honesty to search all sources, including the work of Catholic saints and popes. In their works he found the truths for which he had been searching. The Church, as he discovered, had the answers all along. This discovery lead to his conversion to the Catholic Church.

As a result of this research, he wrote his smaller Guide for the Perplexed, which he considered his more important work. But being a practical man, he realized that Small is Beautiful would be the more popular, and thus had it published first. He died four years later, in 1977, and Guide for the Perplexed was published posthumously in that same year as promised to him by his daughter, Barbara.

As the Chicago Tribune wrote, “A Guide for the Perplexed is really a statement of the philosophical underpinnings that inform Small is Beautiful“.

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