Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Muggeridge on Darwinism, 1980
I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.--Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), 59.
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5 comments:
It is interesting that Muggeridge and C.S. Lewis and other intellectuals who become Christians in their adult years still have the tendency to hold on to the idea that human intelligence will eventually drive out wrong thinking. But wrong thinking is the nature of the curse (Rom 1). Even among supposedly right-minded Christians, the tendency for self-interest still pops up so prevalently in our twists to doctrines (e.g., eternal subordination of the Son).
On a related note to the comment above, C.S. Lewis was a theistic evolutionist, though he had some doubts, evident in his somewhat sarcastic poem, "Evolutionary Hymn," originally published under the pseudonym Nat Whilk (30 November 1957, The Cambridge Review). Here's a brief excerpt:
"Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future's endless stair;
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us.
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where."
Though I never wrote anything like that, nor could I have beat Muggeridge to that quote (I was born 2 years later), I have actually been thinking the same thing. Spencer applied Darwinism to philosophy, evolution has been added to psychology and sometimes Christians have used evolution to describe the Christian walk.
Dan,
If I understand Aquinas right, he thought that men could know the truth and from that drive out wrong ideas. However, from that it does not follow that men will DO what is right.
Are there still fundamentalists that reject the theory of evolution?
Adam and Eve, a snake, some fruit, and the impending apocolypse of this world. Kaboom! Wow--talk about a grave misunderstanding of science! I should have done my PhD in street-preaching rather than organic chemistry.
And how many of those ID people have PhD's in science from good schools, 2. No wait, good schools? Zero. 2 (or rather 0) out of a million.
Oh no, but naturalism is a philosophy and 99.999999999999999999999998 of scientists have bought into it. It is a conspiracy that I've bought into with utter mindlessness. Perhaps as Dan writes, we are all decieved because of rattle snake, a banana, and one nude hottie who went to Bloomingdales to buy a leaf-thong. Or maybe it's because we're too stupid too understand philosophy: a bird is alive, this blog "lives" in cyberspace, therefore this blog is a bird. Since the blog partially represents Dr. Groothuis, Dr. Groothuis is a bird and I might just eat him for dinner before expelling him. See we understand logic.
Are right-wing fundamentalists are overtaking the intellectual climate? Yes, absolutely. They have a philosophy program at a few Bible colleges and seminaries, 2 out of a million books published in real publishing houses, and they capture a mind-boggling .001% of esteemed journal articles. Preacher JP Moreland tells us so in his IVP tome.
Bring on the predictable answers promulagated by non-scientists.
Hi Dr.Groothuis,
Congratulations for your blog.
In my country (Spain), biologist Maximo Sandin is working in a new scientific theory to explain evolution. He isn't an intelligent design supporter; but he's very critic of current synthetic theory.
He's working in a new naturalistic model to evolutionary biology.
Maybe you'd like to read two papers of him:
http://www.uam.es/personal_pdi/ciencias/msandin/synthetic_theory.html
http://www.uam.es/personal_pdi/ciencias/msandin/biology.html
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