The new atheists of Darwin's day

If we want to understand the phenomenal success of the 'Origins' by Charles Darwin we need to take a look at the intellectual background of the time. As we have our popular atheists now, so did they in Darwin's time. Their work paved the way for the rapid and devastating success of Evolutionary theory.

Quotes and comments;
The following quotes are all from an article by Greg Bahnsen, that I encourage everyone to read.

A. 'A further insightful preparation for the destructive work of evolutionary speculation is found in Feuerbach's making "Anthropology the mystery of Christian Theology." With the undermining of biblical anthropology, then, evolutionary thought would critically affect the whole of Christian theology. The Essence Of Christianitylater appeared in English translation, being published in London five years prior to the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species.' [1.]

- The 'new atheists' of Darwin's day were men like Feuerbach, Kant, Hegel, Marx and the so called higher critics. It was their ideas that provoked the fever in Darwin's brain; that fueled all his anti-biblical speculation.

B. 'Marx and Engels, following Feuerbach, transformed the dialectical process discussed by Hegel, regarding it as the movement of matter. Engels said that with one blow Feuerbach "placed materialism on the throne again."[42] For Engels the dialectical movement in nature was seen "as an historical process;"[43] thus, "the real unity of the world consists in its materiality, and this is proved not by a few juggling phrases but by a long and protracted development of philosophy and natural science."

- From Kant to Hegel to Feuerbach to Marx and Darwin... Secularizing the 'sacred' lead to deism and pantheism and then to materialism. Replacing transcendent metaphysics with an immanent one led to all the secular heresies of our day.

C. 'Karl Marx received a doctorate from Jena in the year that Feuerbach's above-mentioned work appeared in German publication; his thesis had been written on the early materialistic atomists, Epicurus and Democritus. As an atheistic Hegelian, Marx viewed history as a dialectical process of development, and he took criticism of religion as foundational to all true thinking. In 1848 he produced, with Engels, the influential Communist Manifesto, an expression of dialectical materialism. Marx was living in London and studying at the British Museum when Darwin's Origin of Species appeared. Forthrightly acknowledging affinities between Darwin's biological evolutionism and his own dialectical materialism, Marx proposed that Das Kapital(1867) be dedicated to Darwin, an "honor" Darwin prudently declined.

- Epicurus and Democritus were evolutionists (Darwin was well aware of them). No one discovered evolution; it's as old as atheism, as old as the Fall in Genesis, as old as Cain, as old as Lamech. To reject God creates a void; a void that gets replaced with an invention called evolution.

D. 'During the eighteenth century, materialism came to exercise a significant philosophical influence. The French encyclopedist, Denis Diderot, adopted the Heraclitean theory of flux, viewing the universe as a single, dynamic, physical system obeying immutable laws. He denied that any solution was reached in accounting for material phenomena by postulating a supernatural Creator. Instead, the transformation of the universe from chaos to ordered complexity was to be explained by the interaction of elementary particles. The historical development of life, consciousness, and thought from inert matter "overthrows all the schools of theology," said Diderot.

- All Darwin did was supply an imagined mechanism to make this common (in intellectual circles) notion work. Natural selection is hopeless inadequate to do the work it's required to do, but that didn't matter at the time. The idea was sold and the people bought it; the way the poor buy lottery tickets and the rich gamble. (It's a great irony, but a fallacious idea is often extremely hard to argue against; and natural selection was more of an analogy than a theory in any event.)

E. 'By 1754 Diderot had devised a theory of natural selection (in "Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature"); he hypothesized the sensitivity of matter to adaption, denied inexplicable gulfs between the natural orders (inorganic, organic, plant, animal, man), discussed the importance of inheritance of acquired characteristics in organic evolution, and (in "D'Alembert's Dream," composed in 1769) asserted that d'Alembert differed from a cow in terms of his peculiar evolution from parental germs. This monistic, energized, mechanized materialism was a clear foreshadowing of Darwin. "D'Alembert's Dream" was posthumously published one year before Darwin stepped on board H.M.S. Beagle...

- Why Darwin should get so much credit for more or less repeating what earlier french thinkers had written I don't know. (I suppose it's because France was in decline and the English were the world power.)

F. 'Four years prior to Darwin's publication of Origin of Species, the German materialist, Ludwig Buchner, wrote his famous Kraft and Stoff, wherein he maintained that all theories of supernatural creation must be rejected, that natural law is inviolable, and that motion is the eternal, inseparable property of matter. His hard determinism forced him to reduce mind to brain and to advocate the release of criminals from punishment. Buchner viewed Darwin's later publication as a striking confirmation of his naturalistic monism and atheism...'

- Why release the criminals? The idea that since man was just matter in motion, his behavior and even his thoughts were all a matter of rigid cause and effect (working in terms of chemical reactions) and thus man (as a machine as it were) could not be held responsible for what it did. (Man was, in this view, no more responsible than one of Darwin's pigeons.)

G. Buchner went on to say of Darwin's system;
[it] "is the most thoroughly naturalistic that can be imagined, and far more atheistic than that of his despised predecessor Lamarck, who admitted at least a general law of progress and development; whereas, according to Darwin, the whole development is due to the gradual summation of innumerable minute and accidental natural operations." [46]
- And yet we have christian liberals telling us Charles Darwin was a christian. (I guess people like Buchner were mistaken.)

H. 'Comte de Buffon, who in the mid-eighteenth century challenged the classification method of Linnaeus, held that there was no radicald is continuity between species or between animal and vegetable kingdoms; he denied divine teleology in nature and in his main work , Histoire Naturelle, promoted the concept of a struggle for existence.

- Darwin didn't 'invent' the idea of a struggle for existence, neither did he come up with the idea of natural selection. (I'm sure some many politicians would kill for the kind of pr Darwin got; and still gets.)

I. 'In 1830 Friedrich Schleiermacher was accusing the Mosaic account of creation of being a primitive, mythological notion and saying that the old record must not be treated as historical.' [50]

- When liberals call Darwin a christian, they mean a 'christian' of the sort Schleiermacher was. It was 'liberals' like S. who gave the boot to Genesis and the account of creation.

J. 'This capitulation of the authority of the revealed Scriptures to autonomous thought is made explicit by Schleiermacher:
''The further elaboration of the doctrine of Creation in Dogmatics comes down to us from times when material even for natural science was taken from the Scriptures and when the elements of all higher knowledge lay hidden in Theology. Hence the complete separation of these two involves our handing over this subject to natural science, which, carrying its researches backward into time, may lead us back to the forces and masses that formed the world, or even further still.'
Bahnsen adds;
'He concedes to naturalistic science the sole right to answer the question of origins, and if science tells us that the Bible and orthodox creeds are mistaken, then so be it.

Summary;
'The acceptance of the theory of evolution stemmed from the milieu created by philosophic opinion-speculation fostered by men like Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Goethe, Krause, Hegel, Feuerbach, Engels, Diderot, LaMettrie, d'Holbach, Buchner, and Schleiermacher; Darwin's scientific surmises had been anticipated by men like Buffon, Lamarck, Saint-Hilaire, Chambers, Spencer, and his own grandfather. Men were living in the age of Darwinism prior to the publication of Darwin's book. And the philosophic developments which appeared subsequent to the acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution had already been manifested by 1859. [1.]

Notes;
1. On Worshipping the Creature Rather Than the Creator - Dr. Greg Bahnsen
- An extremely important article. (It really should have been expanded into a book; but maybe someone will take up the project one day.)