Alan Keyes
Evolution: science or elitist ideology?
The theory 'is not so much empirical as poetic'
By Alan Keyes
This week, I read a story about Ben Carson's response to a question about "creationism" that led me to ponder the quisling GOP's abandonment of the elegant words and logic with which the American Declaration of Independence establishes the political relevance of the authority of the Creator God. Though the GOP's quisling leaders pay lip-service to God, they act as if they embrace the notion that respect for God's authority over His creation can play no part in America's political judgments and decisions. This despite the fact that the republican form of government ordained, established, and required by the American people in their Constitution for the United States derives its legitimate character from the premises of Creator-endowed rights and liberty laid out in the American Declaration of Independence.
The alleged pragmatism that leads to the rejection of the Creator's authority with respect to human activities is perhaps the most definitive behavioral trait of those aligned with the elitist faction. It manifests itself in their reflexive presumption that the dogma of evolution actually has an empirical scientific basis. This despite the fact that the theory's conclusions rely on the imaginative reconstruction of what they claim are random events, which constitute a history that cannot be verified by actual scientifically rigorous observation. In support of their account of these events, they cannot even cite the first or second hand accounts of intelligent and informed human witnesses, such as those on which human historians rely.
As a species of history, the dogma of evolution relies exclusively on the testimony of natural objects. Yet those pointing to this evidence insist that the multi-dimensional pictographs in which this history is recorded (fossils and the environments in which they are found) are entirely random expressions. Nonetheless, the dogmatists demand that their imaginatively coherent translation of this otherwise incoherent gibberish be accepted as a "scientific" account of something, instead of being seen for what it is – a wonderfully inventive fiction for which the natural objects are the occasion (like the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea, which inspired Proust's literary masterpiece). In any reasonable court of law, this would be peremptorily rejected as leading the witness, or giving testimony instead of inquiring after it.
Though obscured by its false claim to be "empirical science," the theory of evolution actually relies on a habit of mind that is characteristic of the common sense in light of which sane human beings interpret the world. From what we actually experience, we imaginatively infer a train of consequences that suggest the events most likely to account for our experience. This makes perfect sense when we do so based on our own firsthand encounters with the world in our own neighborhood. But it also makes sense in light of the direct experience we have with our own way of being, in which our thinking is more likely to produce accurate predictions about the history and future of events when we follow the "rules" that offer to constrain and order our mental perceptions. Therefore, we become increasingly inclined to follow the rules even though their source cannot be directly observed, only the desirable effects of its constraining power.
This habit of predictive inference has normally led people to infer the existence of a purposive being acting intelligently to produce the rules that order and constrain our thought in accord with the rules that order and constrain events as we experience them. The conclusion that the orderly being at work in our thinking is also at work in the world perceived by our understanding is a prerequisite of all rational thought about the world. Even the poetic process by which the dogmatists of evolution construct their histories presents itself in terms that reflect this conclusion.
Despite their surrender to common sense in this respect, the evolutionary dogmatists insist on denying the assumption their rational thought process obviously requires. They pretend that this assumption is merely scaffolding, and that discarding it in no way affects the scientific integrity of their conclusions. But if the scaffolding does not conform to the construct, how can the construction correspond to the object it is supposed to convey? For if the mason has no place to stand, can he put the wall where it belongs?
Why does evolution so take to heart the assumption that there is no purposeful, intelligent Creator? The sciences that more rigorously correspond to the requirements of the empirical method do not make this demand. They find their way where it sheds light, restricting their claims of proven theory to such conclusions as their method has verified. By comparison, there is something unnecessarily tendentious about the ideological demands of the evolutionary dogmatists, something that betrays their apprehension of the fact that their so-called science is not so much empirical as poetic, drawing conclusions where there can be no experiment, and claiming actual proof where there has, at best, been nothing better than the elegant exposition of a possible conception.
True empirical scientists serve the human ambition to know. They humbly accept the rule that disciplines this ambition without pretending to affirm or refute the truth about the ultimate source of that rule. Dogmatic evolutionists serve the ambition to rule, an ambition hardly characteristic of all humanity, even if it predominates among a few. For most of human history, this ambitious few have mostly achieved their ambition. To do so, they have exploited the intellectual humility that impels most human beings to acknowledge some uncertainty about their common-sense acknowledgment of God's existence.
This humility makes people vulnerable to the imaginative fictions with which ingenious poets have devised engaging stories of the world beyond human observation from which arise the rules by which our thinking systematically explains and anticipates the ways of the world of our experience. But in their poetry, they also explained the fickle reality of human fortune and misfortune that defies such rational anticipation. These stories of divine ways of being, at once orderly and utterly discordant, have had one thing in common – they have fed the notion that, whether by superior knowledge or superior fortune, a few human beings were everywhere and always endowed and entitled to rule the rest.
The United States of America was founded on an understanding that resolved the many and mercurial ways of paganism's divine beings into a single ruler, one whose mastery of creation as a whole ultimately dooms discordancy in realms both human and divine. It also provides for human freedom in a way that at once explains and regulates the discord that may arise from it. This resolution of discordant divinity took a form that reveals premises of right and justice that overturn the notion that exclusionary elitist rule reflects some divine mandate. Is it merely a coincidence that the elitist few now doggedly assert a view of the world primarily intended to disparage the acknowledgment of this benevolent rule? I think not.
October 20, 2015
This week, I read a story about Ben Carson's response to a question about "creationism" that led me to ponder the quisling GOP's abandonment of the elegant words and logic with which the American Declaration of Independence establishes the political relevance of the authority of the Creator God. Though the GOP's quisling leaders pay lip-service to God, they act as if they embrace the notion that respect for God's authority over His creation can play no part in America's political judgments and decisions. This despite the fact that the republican form of government ordained, established, and required by the American people in their Constitution for the United States derives its legitimate character from the premises of Creator-endowed rights and liberty laid out in the American Declaration of Independence.
The alleged pragmatism that leads to the rejection of the Creator's authority with respect to human activities is perhaps the most definitive behavioral trait of those aligned with the elitist faction. It manifests itself in their reflexive presumption that the dogma of evolution actually has an empirical scientific basis. This despite the fact that the theory's conclusions rely on the imaginative reconstruction of what they claim are random events, which constitute a history that cannot be verified by actual scientifically rigorous observation. In support of their account of these events, they cannot even cite the first or second hand accounts of intelligent and informed human witnesses, such as those on which human historians rely.
As a species of history, the dogma of evolution relies exclusively on the testimony of natural objects. Yet those pointing to this evidence insist that the multi-dimensional pictographs in which this history is recorded (fossils and the environments in which they are found) are entirely random expressions. Nonetheless, the dogmatists demand that their imaginatively coherent translation of this otherwise incoherent gibberish be accepted as a "scientific" account of something, instead of being seen for what it is – a wonderfully inventive fiction for which the natural objects are the occasion (like the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea, which inspired Proust's literary masterpiece). In any reasonable court of law, this would be peremptorily rejected as leading the witness, or giving testimony instead of inquiring after it.
Though obscured by its false claim to be "empirical science," the theory of evolution actually relies on a habit of mind that is characteristic of the common sense in light of which sane human beings interpret the world. From what we actually experience, we imaginatively infer a train of consequences that suggest the events most likely to account for our experience. This makes perfect sense when we do so based on our own firsthand encounters with the world in our own neighborhood. But it also makes sense in light of the direct experience we have with our own way of being, in which our thinking is more likely to produce accurate predictions about the history and future of events when we follow the "rules" that offer to constrain and order our mental perceptions. Therefore, we become increasingly inclined to follow the rules even though their source cannot be directly observed, only the desirable effects of its constraining power.
This habit of predictive inference has normally led people to infer the existence of a purposive being acting intelligently to produce the rules that order and constrain our thought in accord with the rules that order and constrain events as we experience them. The conclusion that the orderly being at work in our thinking is also at work in the world perceived by our understanding is a prerequisite of all rational thought about the world. Even the poetic process by which the dogmatists of evolution construct their histories presents itself in terms that reflect this conclusion.
Despite their surrender to common sense in this respect, the evolutionary dogmatists insist on denying the assumption their rational thought process obviously requires. They pretend that this assumption is merely scaffolding, and that discarding it in no way affects the scientific integrity of their conclusions. But if the scaffolding does not conform to the construct, how can the construction correspond to the object it is supposed to convey? For if the mason has no place to stand, can he put the wall where it belongs?
Why does evolution so take to heart the assumption that there is no purposeful, intelligent Creator? The sciences that more rigorously correspond to the requirements of the empirical method do not make this demand. They find their way where it sheds light, restricting their claims of proven theory to such conclusions as their method has verified. By comparison, there is something unnecessarily tendentious about the ideological demands of the evolutionary dogmatists, something that betrays their apprehension of the fact that their so-called science is not so much empirical as poetic, drawing conclusions where there can be no experiment, and claiming actual proof where there has, at best, been nothing better than the elegant exposition of a possible conception.
True empirical scientists serve the human ambition to know. They humbly accept the rule that disciplines this ambition without pretending to affirm or refute the truth about the ultimate source of that rule. Dogmatic evolutionists serve the ambition to rule, an ambition hardly characteristic of all humanity, even if it predominates among a few. For most of human history, this ambitious few have mostly achieved their ambition. To do so, they have exploited the intellectual humility that impels most human beings to acknowledge some uncertainty about their common-sense acknowledgment of God's existence.
This humility makes people vulnerable to the imaginative fictions with which ingenious poets have devised engaging stories of the world beyond human observation from which arise the rules by which our thinking systematically explains and anticipates the ways of the world of our experience. But in their poetry, they also explained the fickle reality of human fortune and misfortune that defies such rational anticipation. These stories of divine ways of being, at once orderly and utterly discordant, have had one thing in common – they have fed the notion that, whether by superior knowledge or superior fortune, a few human beings were everywhere and always endowed and entitled to rule the rest.
The United States of America was founded on an understanding that resolved the many and mercurial ways of paganism's divine beings into a single ruler, one whose mastery of creation as a whole ultimately dooms discordancy in realms both human and divine. It also provides for human freedom in a way that at once explains and regulates the discord that may arise from it. This resolution of discordant divinity took a form that reveals premises of right and justice that overturn the notion that exclusionary elitist rule reflects some divine mandate. Is it merely a coincidence that the elitist few now doggedly assert a view of the world primarily intended to disparage the acknowledgment of this benevolent rule? I think not.
To see more articles by Dr. Keyes, visit his blog at LoyalToLiberty.com and his commentary at WND.com and BarbWire.com.
© Alan KeyesThe views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
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