Aub's World

In Isaac Asimov’s 1958 futuristic short story “The Feeling of Power,” Myron Aub is a technician who rediscovers arithmetic. Aub’s future world is one dominated by computers which do all the number crunching and people who not only are mathematically-challenged but, more importantly, don’t see the point. What good is math anyway? Today evolution has had a similar effect on our thinking. Just as computers can dull our mathematical skills, evolution dulls our critical thinking skills.

According to evolutionists everything from the quasars and galaxies in the cosmos to the millions of biological marvels on earth are a fluke. They all just happened to happen. And though evolutionists don’t know how all this happened, they know for certain that it happened. And their certainty justifies oppression of skepticism. They suppress any intellectual curiosity that doubts their dogma with lawsuits and black lists.

Modern evolutionary thought traces back to the early days of science in the seventeenth century. Over the centuries it gained strength and today it dominates the sciences and beyond. As the evolutionist Teilhard de Chardin proclaimed, evolution is much more than merely a theory, system or hypothesis:

It is much more—it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow—this is what evolution is.

That sort of dogma is frightening. But with evolutionists, there can be no alternative. The world must have evolved naturally. Particular hypotheses may come and go, but naturalism cannot be false.

In a word evolution has created an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism. And as de Chardin forecast, evolutionary dogma has spread far beyond science. Not only does evolutionary thought pervade academia in general, but the culture at large as well. From journalism and education to public policy and law, evolution is the gatekeeper. Deep thoughts that doubt evolution’s dogma are not allowed.

This is nowhere more evident than in the various court rulings on the teaching of origins in our public schools. The most recent significant ruling was in 2005 when federal judge John Jones ruled that Intelligent Design could not be taught in Dover, Pennsylvania public schools. As with the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, the particular ruling in Dover was less important than the underlying message. In the Scopes Monkey Trial John Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution, and in the Dover trial the School Board was instructed not to teach ID.

These rulings were not controversial or of lasting importance. Of course Scopes was guilty of teaching evolution, and of course the School Board was guilty of “breathtaking inanity” as Judge Jones concluded.

What was important about the Dover trial, like the Scopes Monkey Trial, was the underlying anti intellectualism that each advanced. Both trials were specifically targeted and used by the ACLU and evolutionists to promote their naturalistic agenda. As Judge Jones wrote, science limits itself to “natural explanations about the natural world.” [66-7] What Jones apparently failed to realize is no one disagrees with that limitation. Of course science must limit itself to natural explanations about the natural world. But what is the “natural world?”

Judge Jones apparently never asked himself that question and instead was swayed by the ACLU’s reasoning. ID, wrote Jones, “takes a natural phenomenon and, instead of accepting or seeking a natural explanation, argues that the explanation is supernatural.” [66-7]

It is astonishing that such a silly canard could be seriously set forth as a characterization of ID. It does, of course, no such thing. Indeed, Jones and the ACLU not only mischaracterize ID, but they evade the crucial issue. The Dover opinion makes the circular assertion that phenomena are natural and so therefore ought to be explained by naturalistic causes. Of course natural phenomena ought to be explained by naturalistic causes, but how do we know if a phenomenon is natural? How do we know that human consciousness arose by strictly natural causes? We don’t, of course.

There are different ways to handle this conundrum. ID is only one approach and certainly can be criticized. But evolutionists have not even begun to reckon with the problem seriously. Instead they evade the deep issue altogether and when asked simply lay the blame with ID.

Unfortunately, rather than transcend evolution’s low-brow critiques, the Dover decision joins right in. Yes, ID should not have been taught as Jones rightly ruled, but that was inconsequential. I was not in favor of teaching ID long before the Dover trial, and I knew no one who was. But the message from Dover was about much more than just teaching ID. Evolution’s religious dogma took another step further into our constitutional jurisprudence.

The Dover trial’s anti intellectualism will breed more of the same, just as did the Scopes Monkey Trial. Indeed, when asked about his education for the Dover case, Jones explained that “I understood the general theme. I'd seen Inherit the Wind.” That is as astonishing as it is frightening. How could a federal judge be so profoundly naïve? It would be like saying I understand the general theme of lung cancer because I’ve seen a Phillip Morris video. Like a trojan horse, evolution’s anti intellectualism has gone viral. It is now widely accepted and even federal judges take it as normative. Like Myron Aub rediscovering basic arithmetic, we need to rediscover basic critical thinking skills.