The Atheist Creation Story

Darwinism is not a Scientific Theory. It is a Creation Story.

“Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

-Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1986)

Dear Nevermorons,

Until sometime last year, I was under the impression that Darwinism was a scientific theory. It is nothing of the sort. It is an atheist creation story.

Imagine, if you will, what it would have been like to be an atheist before the invention of Darwin’s theory. I’m guessing most of those conversations would have gone something like this:

Atheist: There’s no proof for the existence of God.

Skeptic: So who created the universe then?

Atheist: What makes it think that was created?

Skeptic: Okay, well why does it exist then?

Atheist: Well, because of the laws of nature, of course!

Skeptic: The laws of nature? Well, doesn’t everything in nature come from something else? How can the laws of nature make something out of nothing?

Atheist: Well, science is really still in its infancy because mankind has so long been hampered by supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. In time, science will discover the answers to what now appear insoluble riddles.

Skeptic: Okay, maybe, but how can you be so sure that those answers won’t include supernatural elements? How could nature come into being without having been created by something that wasn’t subject to the laws of nature?

Atheist: Well, time will tell. But the world has too long been limited by irrational beliefs about the supernatural, so we must proceed without resorting to superstitious beliefs about some kind of supernatural being creating the universe.

Skeptic: So you’re saying that we should just assume that the universe sprang into existence out of nowhere for no reason? How? Why? And how can you be so sure?

Atheist: Let me get back to you on that…

It must have been very tricky indeed to make a convincing case for atheism prior to the widespread adoption of Darwinism as the official story for how life began.

Personally, I still find the “life began accidentally for no reason” line a little hard to take seriously, but clearly, atheism has been much more palatable now that atheists have their own creation story.

From The Origin of Species to today, the most ardent Darwinists has always been atheists.

Today I want to take a look at one of the most historically important original proponents of Darwinism, T.H. Huxley.

First things first. Let’s talk about his family name, which is both notorious and prestigious. T.H. Huxley was the grandfather of Julian Huxley, the influential eugenicist who served as the President of the British Eugenics Society before going on to found UNESCO.

To get a taste of what Julian Huxley was all about, one need look no further than this choice cut:

“The lowest strata are reproducing too fast. Therefore... they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment, lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive.”

— Julian Huxley, 1947, "UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy"

What a charmer. His granddaddy must have been proud.

Anyway, T.H. Huxley is known to history as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his aggressive proselytizing on behalf of Darwin’s theory.

Here it must be mentioned that Darwin was a reclusive, sickly, and socially awkward person who preferred to stay out of the limelight. He rarely made public appearances and did not engage in public debates.

The success of his theory owes a great deal to certain people who enthusiastically embraced it. Chief among them was Mr. Huxley.

It is important to note, at this point, that Mr. Bulldog never actually believed in Darwin’s theory. He accepted evolution as a fact that accounted for differences within species (as do I), but did not think that the accretion of small, gradual changes due to natural selection could account for the emergence of species in the first place.

You read that right - Darwin’s most vociferous proponent never actually believed in its validity as a scientific theory. Rather, he enthusiastically embraced it because it provided an alternative to the Biblical literalism that he so stridently opposed.

Nevertheless, Huxley publicly defended Darwin’s theory and was partly responsible for it coming into favour with Britain’s intellectual elite. In 1860, he debated a prominent Anglican bishop named Samuel Wilberforce. Although no transcript of this debate exists, Huxley must have performed exceedingly well, because this debate has gone down in history as the moment when public opinion began to turn in favour of Darwinism.

Following his success in this debate, Huxley founded a group called the X Club, one of the most influential cabals in the history of science.

According to Wikipedia:

The X Club was a dining club of nine men who supported the theories of natural selection and academic liberalism in late 19th-century England. Thomas Henry Huxley was the initiator; he called the first meeting for 3 November 1864.^[1] The club met in London once a month—except in July, August and September—from November 1864 until March 1893, and its members are believed to have wielded much influence over scientific thought. The members of the club were George Busk, Edward Frankland, Thomas Archer Hirst, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Thomas Henry Huxley, John Lubbock, Herbert Spencer, William Spottiswoode, and John Tyndall, united by a "devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas."^[2]

The X Club went on to stack university science faculties with Darwinists. They also founded Nature, which remains Britain’s most prestigious scientific journal to this day.

In short, their evangelism was successful in establishing Darwinism as the dominant paradigm. Today, the belief that human beings came into being by accident is considered well-established. The belief that the universe was created through supernatural means is viewed as quaint sentimentality by many of the world’s most educated people.

Tom Wolfe, in his dazzlingly devastating takedown of Darwinism, identifies the adoption of this belief system as nothing less than the death of God…

In The Kingdom of Speech, he writes:

By 1874, Nietzsche had paid Darwin and his theory the highest praise with the most famous declaration in modern philosophy: “God is dead.”

Without mentioning Darwin by name, Nietzsche said the “doctrine that there is no cardinal distinction between man and animal” would demoralize humanity throughout the West. It would lead to the rise of “barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods”—he all but called them by name: Nazism, Communism, and Fascism—and result within one generation in “wars such as never have been fought before.”

If we take one generation to be thirty years, that would have meant by 1904. In fact, the First World War broke out in 1914.

This latter-day barbarism, Nietzsche went on to say, would in the twenty-first century lead to something worse than the great wars: the total eclipse of all values.

In other words:

Today, I am sharing a selection from Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech.

If you think that Darwinism is well-established scientific fact, I dare you to read this book. Tom Wolfe makes short work of 150 years of Darwinist delusion in 300 pages packed with wit, colourful anecdotes, and impeccable logic.

Enjoy!

Crow Qu’appelle

Darwin and his Bulldog

by Tom Wolfe, excerpted from The Kingdom of Speech

Late September of 1859... and Darwin was going over the last details for publication, set to take place in two months, which would be late November…

He hadn’t dared push his theory all the way to its shocking conclusion—which would be the news, the revelation—that man did not come into this world in the image of God but out of the loins of an orangutan or some other big ape. Man was an animal and nothing but an animal.

If he took it that far, all the way at once... he shuddered to think of how violent the reaction would be—the rage! the fury!—from the Church and the clueless Christian middle classes. He could see all his honors and medals and elite memberships crashing to earth amid the ruins of the reputation he had so single-mindedly aspired to ever since the Beagle returned home twenty-two years ago.

So in The Origin of Species he drove the Theory of Evolution right up to Homo sapiens’s front door but not one inch closer... unless you counted a single, soft, one-knuckle tap two pages from the end of the book, offering a cryptic hint as to where he might be heading in a sequel, if he should ever write one:

“In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”

One faint cryptic hint too many, old chap!

On November 19, five days before publication, an anonymous reviewer in the prestigious journal Athenaeum eviscerated the book and fried the entrails. A single sentence in the piece leaped out at Darwin:

“If a monkey has become a man—what may not a man become?”

A man! says his nameless assailant!

At the time, virtually all book reviews were unsigned—the theory being that anonymity gave the reviewer the freedom to be frank. But it wasn’t supposed to give him carte blanche to make vicious distortions! This one had gone straight to that short obiter dictum two pages from the end and made it seem like the whole book was about man thrashing and splashing and gibbering away in some primordial muddy puddle somewhere.

The message was: Don’t risk your sanity trying to read it! Leave that to the philosophers and divines who enjoy dog-paddling around in such slop.

“If a monkey has become a man”... And Darwin thought he had so cleverly kept man hidden in the wings... So much for that delusion. Right away this bastard spots man peeking out from behind a curtain.

This bastard—Darwin was never one to resort to off-color language, but then no one had ever hurt and humiliated him and dashed his hopes this thoroughly, either. The first review!

The Athenaeum blast so tenderized Darwin that he failed to understand what was happening when a regular storm of reviews and commentaries erupted during December and the first six months of 1860. Even mildly negative reviews hit him like body blows. The fierce ones cut him clear through to the gizzard.

[…]

By then he was in such a wary, defensive state of mind that even the positive reviews struck him as tepid or tentative—with one exception: an absolute rave in the very voice of the British upper orders, The London Times. The Times ran only one or two book reviews per month. Like the others, this review was published anonymously. But Darwin soon learned it was written by one of his younger adherents, the anatomist Thomas Huxley.

In a piece of dumb luck, Huxley had happened to run into the writer The Times had assigned to do the review. The man was moaning that he wasn’t even remotely familiar with the subject. Huxley came up with the bright idea of writing the piece for him—anonymously, needless to say. Darwin wound up with an astounding boost in the mighty Times. Huxley became the best public relations wizard any scientist had ever had.

Huxley’s background was similar to Alfred Wallace’s, although their personalities could scarcely have been more different. Huxley’s father was an up-against-it mathematics teacher who couldn’t pay for his son’s education beyond two years of grade school. The boy became a scientific prodigy all the same—a largely self-taught anatomist.

At nineteen, he discovered an internal component of hair no biologist had ever dreamed existed. By age twenty he had the pleasure of seeing it referred to in scientific journals as “Huxley’s sheath.” It was the first of a series of anatomical discoveries he would make. He was only twenty-five when he was elected a member of the Royal Society.

The boy wonder was such a hot number in scientific circles that Darwin courted him as an acolyte, and the boy came through for him in a big way. He wrote five long, enthusiastic reviews of The Origin of Species in major journals in the space of four months—the two longest conveniently anonymous—and that was the least of it.

In person, he was a good-enough-looking man, but with a bulldog’s build, a bulldog’s neck, and a bulldog’s prognathous jaw when he was angry—which was often, since he loved a good fight. He was aware of all that and enjoyed being called “Darwin’s bulldog.”

In June of 1860, he starred in a much-written-about British Association for the Advancement of Science debate over evolution against the Church of England’s most renowned public speaker, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce.

He went on to create the X Club, a group of nine prominent naturalists, including Hooker, who met every month at some restaurant or club and set about—very successfully—stacking influential university science faculties with Darwinists. The X Clubbers had a big hand in creating the pro-Darwinist journal Nature (which thrives to this day). They attacked every Darwin doubter the moment he dared raise his voice.

That mode of intimidation only intensified over time, leading to what is still known today as “the Neo-Darwinist Inquisition.”

Huxley became such an ardent Darwinist not because he believed in Darwin’s theory of natural selection—he never did—but because Darwin was obviously an atheist, just as he was. No one dared flaunt such a loaded term, of course. Huxley said he was not an atheist but an agnostic. He made up the word.

An agnostic, he said, was the opposite of a gnostic. Gnostics held an early Christian and even pre-Christian belief that people should separate knowledge of the material world from the only true knowledge: the spiritual. An agnostic like him wasn’t even sure there was a God.

This newest Huxleyism entered the language the way “Huxley’s sheath” had.

Huxley’s great PR campaign happened to coincide with two sweeping mid-nineteenth-century developments in Western Europe—Britain especially—creating, as the phrase goes, a perfect storm.

One was the sudden proliferation of magazines and newspapers, whipping up a competition not only for hard news but also for stories of every sort of social and intellectual trend… such as the Theory of Evolution.

The second was what the German sociologist Max Weber called “the disenchantment of the world.” Well-educated, would-be-sophisticated people all over Europe had begun to reject the magical, miraculous, superstitious, logically implausible doctrines of religion—such as the Virgin Birth of Christ, the Creation of the world in seven days, Christ’s Resurrection, the power of prayer, the omnipotence of God, and a thousand other notions that were irrational by their very nature.

Three decades earlier, Samuel Taylor Coleridge had concluded that the influence of the clergy was fading so rapidly that he revived the by-now-obsolete term “clerisy.” The clerisy, he said, were the secular thinkers who had replaced the clergy in the nineteenth century—in matters spiritual as well as philosophical.

Near the end of the century, while the Dreyfus case raged in France, the country’s off-and-on president, Georges Clemenceau, would call them— with a nod toward Anatole France and Émile Zola—“the intellectuals,” and that was the name that stuck, in England as well as France.

The Theory of Evolution eliminated all such mystification. At the higher altitudes of society, as well as in academia, people began to judge one another socially according to their belief—or lack thereof—in Darwin’s great discovery.

Practically all Church of England clergymen were well educated and well connected socially, and by 1859 the demystification of the world had extinguished whatever fire and brimstone they might have had left. The sheerly social lure of the theory—the status urge to be fashionable—was too much for them. Subscribing to Darwinism showed that one was part of a bright, enlightened minority who shone far above the “mooing herd” down below.

There were plenty of clerical attacks on The Origin of Species, but they were so civil and rhetorically well-mannered that the new agnostics didn’t cringe in fear of an angry God, much less a vengeful one. The theory—and the atheistic bias that came with it—spread quickly to Germany, Italy, Spain, and to self-professed intellectual elites in the United States, even though the great mass of the population kept on mooing and made sure America remained the most religious country on Earth outside of the nations of Islam (and it remains so today).

Only in France was Darwin written off as just another little man with a big theory. It took three years for The Origin of Species to find a French publisher.

France had gone through its own evolution debate—the French term was transformism—thirty years earlier, mainly thanks to Lamarck’s influence. But the leading French spokesman for transformism, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, made the mistake of taking on Georges Cuvier in debate.

Cuvier—a zoologist, paleontologist, anatomist, politician, and aristocrat—was like Huxley in his aggressiveness. But he was classier, so to speak. Baron Cuvier was a fashion plate and a speaker who could switch from soft-voiced, lacerating wit to overpowering thunder in a blink. He found the transformist concept of gradual evolution ludicrous. The much simpler truth, he argued, was that species were constantly dying out and new ones were taking their place.

French naturalists so feared Cuvier’s brilliant fury that the Theory of Evolution—like the name Charles Darwin and the ism-magnifying term “Darwinism”—seldom saw print in France… and seldom does to this day.

In Germany, on the other hand, The Origin of Species was an immediate sensation. By 1874, Nietzsche had paid Darwin and his theory the highest praise with the most famous declaration in modern philosophy: “God is dead.”

Without mentioning Darwin by name, Nietzsche said the “doctrine that there is no cardinal distinction between man and animal” would demoralize humanity throughout the West. It would lead to the rise of “barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods”—he all but called them by name: Nazism, Communism, and Fascism—and result within one generation in “wars such as never have been fought before.”

If we take one generation to be thirty years, that would have meant by 1904. In fact, the First World War broke out in 1914.

This latter-day barbarism, Nietzsche went on to say, would in the twenty-first century lead to something worse than the great wars: the total eclipse of all values.