Darwinism and Social Engineering and Seedless Watermelons

An addendum to yesterday's post

Richard Dawkins pulls a seedless watermelon out of a magician’s hat …

This is an addendum to yesterday’s post about Darwinism and its role in the overarching social engineering project of the 20th and 21 centuries, and about Vox Day’s new book Probability Zero, which demonstrates the impossibility of what Darwinists claim, and a response to those who say I have misrepresented Darwinism. The focus of my post was the social engineering that Darwinism has been used to underwrite. I didn’t ever address the substance of Darwinism, because the substance of Darwinism is orthogonal to my point. If you’re interested in reading an argument that addresses the substance of evolution by natural selection, Vox Day has an entire book you can read.

Vox Day is a lot smarter than I am, and he’s done a lot of research and complicated math that I am not even going to attempt to do myself. The math is over my head. I don’t understand Vox’s arguments. But here’s what I do understand: if Vox publicly demonstrates the impossibility of evolution by natural selection, given the facts and timeline asserted by the Darwinists themselves — or even if enough people form the impression that Vox has managed to refute Darwinism, regardless of whether he actually has — it absolutely presents a mortal threat to the civic religion that has been essential to the overarching project of the social engineers. That’s the point I was making in yesterday’s post. Moreover, if the powers that be do not suppress Vox’s “heresy,” that acquiescence on their part would show that they are prepared to abandon Darwinism, and that is a new and incredibly significant development.

In order to promote their antichristian civic religion, the social engineers had to first untether Western Man from belief in God, and specifically from belief in the Christian God. And to do that, the social engineers needed something (a false “god” to stand in the gap) to answer the fundamentally religious questions, Who are we? and How did we come to be? Without Darwinism, their antichristian civic religion would have never become the de facto faith of Western civilization. If Darwinism falls, their antichristian civic religion will fall. It may not happen overnight (just like it took decades for their civic religion to replace Christianity as the dominant religion in the West), but it absolutely will happen.

Someone criticized my post in Notes because I conflated Darwinism with the physicalist interpretation of Darwinism that people like Richard Dawkins promote. Yes, that’s what I did. Again, the point I was making had to do with the way Darwinism has been used to advance a social engineering agenda, and the physicalist version of Darwinism is what’s relevant to that point.

There’s a parallel here to the philosophy of Existentialism. Yes, you can be like Kierkegaard and be both a Christian and an Existentialist, but the fact remains that this is not the version of Existentialism that has been such a destructive influence in our culture. The version of Existentialism at the heart of the West’s decay has been the idea (expressed by those like Sarte) that existence precedes essence, that we have no human “function” to fulfill and no telos to use as a standard for making moral judgments about ourselves or others, and that there exists no higher moral authority to judge our characters or actions. This kind of Existentialism is just a fancy way of saying, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” It’s inverted and demonic. And if the social engineers can sell it as a moral philosophy (however much they have to dumb it down or wrap it up in Hollywood narrative magic), they can morally disarm a nation. And if you point this out, it’s really a red herring for someone to object by saying, “Yeah, but you didn’t debunk Kierkegaard.”

Here’s a parable about Darwinism and its role in our culture. Imagine that a man named Darles Charwin wrote a book called “The Origin of Watermelons.” In it, he discusses how prehistoric vines developed fruits as an adaptation to spread their seeds by getting animals to eat their fruits and then deposit the seeds in their dung, which then served as a fertilizer; thus, plants with sweeter fruits would get eaten more often and be more likely to pass on their genes to future generations. Now, imagine that a social engineer is telling people that they can eliminate modern agriculture and still enjoy watermelons year-round. Why? Well, watermelons just sort of happened all on their own, without any involvement from human farmers, says the social engineer. In fact, a botanist named Dichard Rawkins even wrote a book called “The Blind Melon Farmer” that explains how the watermelons that you can buy at a supermarket just exist on their own, without any involvement from human farmers or genetic engineers. Haven’t you read it? So the social engineer manages to convince a lot of people to stop farming and to vote for politicians who support programs for confiscating farmland and using it to build Section Eight housing for Somalian immigrants. Why? Well, the farmers had nothing to do with all those watermelons that you’ve been eating, so who needs farmers? Then, Vox Day picks up a seedless watermelon, cuts it open, and points out that there is no way that any theory of evolution by natural selection can account for the existence of seedless watermelons. For those opposed to the social engineer who is trying to destroy farming, this would be an important development in the cultural conversation about watermelons, since it would clearly show that the social engineer’s agenda was premised on a lie. Obviously, this metaphor is inexact, but it maps onto the larger patterns of this cultural dialectic well enough. The metaphor is absurd, but so is the cultural dialectic around evolution by natural selection.

If you want to believe in a synthesis of Creationism and Darwinism (where Life came to be through a process directed by some higher conscious power), and if you believe that consciousness is fundamental and not merely an emergent property of non-conscious matter, then nothing that I said in yesterday’s post is an argument against your position. I don’t address your position, because it’s not relevant to the point I was making about the social engineers and their antichristian civic religion.