The Regeneration of Science & Culture
The Cultural Implications of Scientific Materialism Versus Intelligent Design
by John G. West, Jr.
To appreciate fully the cultural implications of intelligent design, one first must understand the cultural damage inflicted by scientific materialism, the paradigm it seeks to replace.
Scientific materialism claims that human beings can be wholly explained as the material products of biology, chemistry, and environment. While the roots of materialism reach back to ancient Greece, materialism became enshrined as the reigning philosophy of Western culture largely due to the work of Charles Darwin. Darwin made materialism credible by explaining how man and his moral beliefs could have developed through an unplanned process of natural selection. Scientists and thinkers in other fields soon drew out the implications of Darwin’s biology. In Germany, Karl Marx contended that one’s ideas are the product of economic conditions and that the class struggle was the manifestation of Darwin’s theory in human society. In America, behavioral psychologists like John Watson argued that the soul was a myth and reason was merely the physical processes of the brain.
Scientific materialism was dubious science and even shakier philosophy, but it had far-reaching consequences for Western society. By claiming that all human thoughts and actions are dictated by either biology or environment, scientific materialists undermined traditional theories of human freedom and responsibility. By asserting that our moral beliefs were merely the products of heredity or environment, scientific materialists laid the groundwork for moral relativism. By arguing that man should take control of the material processes that produced him to remake society, scientific materialists promoted a virulently coercive strain of utopianism.
The ideology of scientific materialism infected nearly every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and the arts, and many of its ideas still exert a powerful influence in the public square. Indeed, the extent of the impact of scientific materialism on modern culture is hard to overstate.
The Cultural Impact of Scientific Materialism
In economics and welfare, scientific materialism spawned the twin legacies of social Darwinism and socialism. Most people are somewhat familiar with the former philosophy. Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, and other theorists applied the doctrine of “survival of the fittest” to human society, and in the process justified even the worst excesses of nineteenth-century capitalism. Fewer people recognize the link between scientific materialism and various strands of socialism. Marx wrote to Engels that Darwin’s Origin of Species “contains the basis in natural history for our view,” and socialist thought drew heavily on modern science to support its theory of economic determinism. Ambivalent socialist Jack London, author of such works as The Call of the Wild, aptly summarized the socialist creed as being founded on
that forbidding doctrine, the materialistic conception of history. Men are not the masters of their souls. They are the puppets of great, blind forces. The lives they live and the deaths they die are compulsory. All social codes are but the reflexes of existing economic conditions, plus certain survivals of past economic conditions. The institutions men build they are compelled to build. Economic laws determine at any given time what these institutions shall be, how long they shall operate, and by what they shall be replaced.
Although such purebred socialism never had a wide following in America, the economic determinism underlying it helped create the modern welfare state. For much of American history, welfare programs had focused on ministering to a person’s whole being. Rather than assuming that all poverty was caused by impersonal economic forces over which individuals had no control, these earlier programs recognized that the choices people made could increase the likelihood of their being in poverty. As a result, these early welfare programs stressed the duty welfare recipients had to help solve their own problems. Rather than viewing the poor as the passive victims of heredity and environment, early welfare workers regarded them as responsible individuals who were capable of facilitating their own economic success. In the words of Washington Gladden, a pioneering minister of the social gospel movement:
Heredity is no excuse. . . . Your heredity is from God. He is your Father. Deeper than all other strains of ancestral tendency is this fact that your nature comes from God. . . . Environment is no excuse for you. . . . God is the great first fact in all our environment, no matter where you may be. There is no place of temptation in which he is not nearer to you than any human influence can be.
John G. West is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and author of Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science (ISI Books) and Darwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest (DI Press).
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