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.
As the ideology of scientific materialism spread, however, the belief in the poor’s ability to surmount their material conditions was gradually lost. As Marvin Olasky points out in The Tragedy of American Compassion, by the 1930s and 1940s, most social scientists viewed social problems as almost wholly the function of material causes. Thereafter government and private welfare programs increasingly treated poverty as a purely material question to be solved by purely material mechanisms. If someone lacked material goods, the comprehensive solution was to supply him with more material goods. The spiritual and moral aspects of poverty were ignored.
In the criminal justice system, scientific materialism likewise undermined theories of personal responsibility. In the traditional model of criminal justice, criminals were regarded as morally accountable for their actions, and their punishment reflected the just deserts for their crimes. In the new view, accountability and punishment were replaced with a model that regarded criminals as the helpless victims of environment and heredity. An early proponent of the new view was German Darwinist Ludwig Buchner, one of the nineteenth century’s most popular evangelists of scientific materialism. Writing in his book Force and Matter, Buchner claimed that modern science had proven that many criminals were “doomed or predestined to crime by a faulty or imperfect organization of mind and body.” As a result, wrote Buchner, “many criminals are simply unfortunates, afflicted with insanity, partly in an incipient and partly in an acute state of development. ‘Hence,’ says G. Forster, ‘we should do best in neither judging nor condemning anyone.’”
By the 1930s Buchner’s view had turned into the conventional wisdom. In one criminal justice text from the period, an American criminologist baldly declared that “the grotesque notion of a private entity, spirit, soul, will, conscience or consciousness, interfering with the orderly processes of body mechanisms is invalidated by physiological and neurological science. . . . Man is no more ‘responsible’ for becoming wilful and committing a crime than the flower for becoming red and fragrant. In both instances the end products are predetermined by the nature of protoplasm and the chance of circumstances.” Legal movements arising in the 1960s to expand the insanity defense, to decrease imprisonment even for violent offenders, and to decriminalize such behaviors as public drunkenness all had their roots in the ideology of scientific materialism.
Scientific materialism also reshaped the field of medicine, producing a vigorous eugenics movement designed to cleanse American society of persons regarded as somehow unfit, from the blind and deaf to prostitutes and alcoholics. By the early 1930s, thirty states had enacted forced sterilization laws—laws that ultimately served as models for the sterilization laws enacted by Nazi Germany. At the legal level, the American eugenics crusade culminated in the infamous Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell, where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that compulsory sterilization for the mentally handicapped was constitutional because “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
While the Nazi Holocaust eventually dampened American enthusiasm for eugenics, the underlying rationale has been resurrected in recent decades in abortions for sex selection, infanticide for children with disabilities, and the growing practice of assisted suicide. If humans are purely material beings, then their worth inevitably degrades as their physical capacities deteriorate. Evolutionary psychologist Peter Singer, now a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, has gone so far as to argue that human beings with severe physical disabilities should no longer be viewed as worthy of life. In his words, “if we compare a severely defective human infant with a nonhuman animal, a dog or a pig . . . we will often find the nonhuman to have superior capacities. . . . Only the fact that the defective infant is a members of the species Homo sapiens leads it to be treated differently from the dog or pig. Species membership alone, however, is not morally relevant. . . .”
Traditional beliefs about family life and marriage have also suffered under the materialist onslaught. In such books as The Moral Animal by Robert Wright, evolutionary psychologists have argued that adultery is programmed into men by natural selection for reproductive success. The corrosive effect on public discourse of this sort of reductionism could be seen in the discussions of President Clinton’s extramarital escapades. Numerous articles in the popular press presented the evolutionary argument for adultery as a way of explaining away the President’s flouting of traditional norms.
But adultery isn’t the only behavior that evolutionary psychologists have sought to explain away. Steven Pinker of MIT claims that infanticide is programmed by evolution into mothers who kill their newborns. Because of this, he thinks that society should treat such mothers with compassion. While evolutionary psychologists explain with apparent ease the functionality of some of the most horrendous behaviors known to civilized man, they become much less convincing when they try to account for the existence of positive traits such as altruism. As biologist Jeffery Schloss has pointed out, most evolutionary psychologists cannot accept the idea that truly self-denying behavior could be produced by natural selection. So they must interpret what appears to be altruism as merely another form of selfishness. In this scheme of things, even the behavior of Mother Teresa becomes an expression of self-centeredness.
Scientific materialism has also become pervasive in the field of education. Here one of the major impacts has been the narrowing of the acceptable range of debate in the natural and social sciences. It has to be one of the great ironies of modernity that in an age when free inquiry is trumpeted as one of our culture’s few remaining universals, the freedom to pursue fundamental questions in the scientific realm is routinely denied or even ridiculed. Richard Dawkins, for example, asserts that anyone who does not believe in Darwinian evolution is “ignorant, stupid, or insane.” With views like these among the academic elites, is it any wonder that ideas challenging Darwin and his progeny are often ruled out from the start?
Extreme forms of multiculturalism and feminism endemic on college campuses represent further variations of scientific materialism. Proponents of these ideologies take their materialism wholesale, asserting that human beings are so dominated by their race or gender that their political views, their morality, and their religious beliefs are merely mechanical by-products.
Scientific materialism even has links to intellectual movements within academia that might at first seem opposed to it, such as postmodernism. While on the surface postmodernism seems to reject the artificially truncated rationalism embodied by scientific materialism, it actually adopts the materialist account of man as its starting point. Richard Rorty, dean of American postmodernists, even argues for the importance of “keeping faith with Darwin.” It is precisely because the materialist account of man is so bleak that it creates fertile ground for postmodernism to grow. In Nietzsche’s insightful phrase, Darwin’s teaching is “true but deadly.” If human beings (and their beliefs) really are the mindless products of their material existence, then everything that gives meaning to human life—religion, morality, beauty—is revealed to be without objective basis. To avoid sliding into nihilism as a result of this revelation, postmodernists take a page from Nietzsche and reject reason altogether, urging people to fashion their own reality through an act of the will. In this way, the narrow “rationalism” of scientific materialism begets utter irrationalism.
The Cultural Implications of Intelligent Design
Thus have the ideas of scientific materialism influenced virtually every area of modern culture. Ideas have consequences, and in the modern era scientific ideas have had particularly momentous consequences for society. That is one reason the emerging debate over Intelligent Design is so intriguing. If scientists can be persuaded to change fundamentally how they view man and the universe, their conversion will likely have consequences far beyond the sciences themselves. Just as scientific materialism had implications for the furthest reaches of our culture, so too Intelligent Design will raise an array of implications for all the disciplines that took their founding assumptions from scientific materialism. Because Intelligent Design is a movement in its infancy, the precise contours of its implications for culture are still emerging. But five general implications seem clear.
First, Intelligent Design can help reinvigorate the case for free will and personal responsibility. Modern science has reduced human action to a product of genes and environment by insisting that only material causes are relevant. In the words of a recent psychology text: “What is left besides genetics and environment?” Intelligent Design, however, suggests that mind precedes matter and that intelligence is an irreducible property just like matter. This opens the door to an effective alternative to materialistic reductionism. If intelligence itself is an irreducible property, then it is improper to try to reduce mind to matter. Mind can only be explained in terms of itself—like matter is explained in terms of itself. In short, Intelligent Design opens the door to a theory of a nonmaterial soul that can be defended within the bounds of science. At the very least, if intelligence is understood as an irreducible property of human beings, the grounds on which science can undercut free will and personal responsibility will be significantly diminished.
What effects might this have for public policy? Consider the possibilities in just one area—welfare policy. As long as human beings are regarded as the helpless victims of material forces, it is understandable why welfare policies would focus narrowly on changing material inputs rather than also on looking at issues of character and accountability. Once men and women are regarded again as accountable beings who make real choices, however, this model becomes untenable. Welfare programs could no longer simply assume that supplying material benefits to someone will solve his problems. Instead, welfare programs would have to examine the role of a person’s own choices and could hold him responsible for making good choices. Driven by the failures of a welfare system based on materialist premises, recent efforts at welfare reform have tried to do precisely this. Unfortunately, the underlying social science framework does not yet support the renewed push toward personal responsibility in the welfare system, and because of this it remains to be seen whether the current reforms can be sustained. The long-term role of personal responsibility in welfare policy remains precarious until the scientific critique of free will has been answered convincingly. Intelligent Design can help do this.
A second cultural implication of Intelligent Design concerns the defense of traditional morality. Modern biology seeks to understand morality primarily in terms of reproductive success, but Intelligent Design opens the door to understanding how morality can serve a variety of other ends. Rather than assume that all human behaviors (no matter how apparently destructive) must have been produced by natural selection and therefore promote reproductive success, Intelligent Design would promote honest questioning of whether certain behaviors—such as adultery—really do serve a biological function. Because Intelligent Design does not assume that every behavior must be tied to reproductive success, it is free to consider a range of other explanations. In the process, it may provide a powerful way to check the moral relativism spawned by scientific materialism, especially in family life and sexual behavior.
A third area where Intelligent Design has cultural implications is the sanctity of human life. As noted previously, the argument over eugenic abortions and assisted suicide is premised largely on the notion that human beings are the sum of their material parts. If human beings are more than this, then the cogency of this argument disintegrates. Once the idea of a nonmaterial soul gains new currency, the ethical context in which issues such as abortion and euthanasia are debated will considerably expand.
A fourth cultural implication of Intelligent Design is the defense of science itself. Many in the natural sciences today are disturbed at the growing backlash against scientific rationality that can be seen in both the New Age and postmodernist movements. In Unweaving the Rainbow, outspoken materialist Richard Dawkins attacks postmodernism in particular for its rejection of scientific rationality. What materialists often fail to appreciate is that it is their truncated view of the scientific enterprise that in part is responsible for the rise of irrationalism. Human beings know intuitively that they are more than a bundle of cells and synapses. When science in the name of reason debunks this truth, is it any wonder that some people choose irrationalism? By supplying a framework for science that can account for the full richness of who human beings really are, Intelligent Design can remove one of the chief inspirations for the postmodern impulse and help restore the integrity of science.
A fifth cultural implication of Intelligent Design is its support of free inquiry. Intelligent Design is more consistent with unhindered scientific exploration than scientific materialism because it admits a far wider range of possible explanations in scientific discussions. Unlike scientific materialism, which seeks to explain everything in terms of material causes, Intelligent Design is not monocausal. It does not deny the validity of material causation; it only denies the assertion that material causation is exhaustive. Because of this, Intelligent Design opens the door to the discussion of many different kinds of questions in the natural and social sciences. Instead of closing off debate, it opens it. Instead of limiting inquiry, it expands it. For many disciplines suffering under the stale hegemony of scientific materialism, Intelligent Design will provide a welcome invitation to rethink some of their most fundamental assumptions.
A Regenerated Science
Cultural change is not inevitable, and for Intelligent Design ultimately to make a difference to the rest of culture, cultural leaders must become acquainted with the emerging debate and be encouraged to apply the new paradigm to their own fields. That is one of the goals of the Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (see sidebar), which not only supports primary research by those in the natural sciences, but also seeks to brief policymakers on the implications of the emerging design paradigm for their own areas. Unfortunately, many cultural leaders remain well behind the curve when it comes to recent developments in the sciences. This is just as true among conservatives as it is among liberals.
A year after the publication of Michael Behe’s ground-breaking Darwin’s Black Box, the influential conservative journal National Review published an essay by law professor John McGinnis urging conservatives to jump on the bandwagon of modern evolutionary biology. According to McGinnis, recent discoveries during the last two decades have led to a convincing revival of Darwinism and “any political movement that hopes to be successful must come to terms with the second rise of Darwinism.”
McGinnis is not alone among conservative intellectuals in championing a rapprochement between conservatism and modern Darwinism. More nuanced versions of this view can be found in the books of James Q. Wilson and in political theorist Larry Arnhart’s closely argued book , Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Both Wilson and Arnhart offer intriguing insights into the relationship between biology and morality, but it could be argued that they must redefine Darwinian biology in order to make room for traditional morality. Another approach is possible: Articulating a new theory of biology that can better account for the full range of human moral behavior. That is precisely what is being attempted by those advocating Intelligent Design.
More than a half-century ago, C. S. Lewis critiqued the consequences of scientific materialism for society in his penetrating manifesto The Abolition of Man. At the end of the book, Lewis called for a new kind of natural science that “[w]hen it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. While studying the It it would not lose what Martin Buber calls the Thou.” Lewis wondered whether such a “regenerate science” was even possible, almost despairing that it was not. Those making the case for Intelligent Design today believe that such a science is indeed possible, and that they are helping to forge it. If they succeed, the benefits will spread far beyond the domain of science and will create a potent force for cultural renewal in the twenty-first century.
In Their Own Words...The Cultural Agenda of the Scientific Materialists “We civilised men . . . build asylums for
the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our
medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to
the last moment. . . . Thus the weak members of civilised
societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding
of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the
race of man.” “For good genetic reasons . . . it would be
an unhealthy biological situation [to have unregulated childbearing].
Some group of people should decide that some people should have more children
and some should have fewer. . . .” “Once the religious mumbo jumbo surrounding the term ‘human’
has been stripped away . . . we will not regard as sacrosanct
the life of each and every member of our species, no matter how limited
its capacity for intelligent or even conscious life may be.” “Morality . . . is merely an adaptation put
in place to further our reproductive ends. . . . In an
important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off
on us by our genes to get us to cooperate.” “Opponents of determinism defend a position called free will,
a difficult view to describe. To some extent it is merely a rejection
of determinism, claiming that people sometimes make decisions not controlled
by their genetics, their past experiences, or their environment. But what
is left besides genetics and environment?” “For a woman to destroy the fruit of her womb would seem like
an ultimate violation of the natural order. But every year, hundreds of
women commit neonaticide: they kill their newborns or let them die. . . .
How could they do it? . . . The emotional circuitry of
mothers has evolved to cope with th[e] uncertain process [of raising children],
so the baby killers turn out to be not moral monsters but nice, normal
(and sometimes religious) young women.” |
The Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and CultureThe principal organization promoting scientific research in Intelligent Design and the application of the theory to culture and public policy is the Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. Headquartered in Seattle, the Center sponsors several initiatives that seek to create a science that is consistent with human dignity. These include: Funding original research by scientists and other scholars. The Center supports research and writing by more than 15 Fellows. Books by Center Fellows have been published by such publishers as Cambridge University Press, University of Chicago Press, and The Free Press. Articles by Center Fellows regularly appear in a variety of scientific journals, including Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The American Biology Teacher, The Scientist, Biochemistry, Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, and Zygon. In addition, Center Fellows edit a quarterly peer-reviewed journal, Origins and Design, published by Access Research Network. Bringing together leaders in government, business, the media, religion, and academia to hear about Intelligent Design. Center Fellows regularly brief cultural leaders around the country on Intelligent Design and its implications. The Center challenges these leaders to think through the ramifications of Intelligent Design for their own fields. Spreading the message of Intelligent Design to the wider culture. Center Fellows provide commentary and analysis for publications at the national and local levels, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Christianity Today, National Review, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Detroit News. In addition they appear on such television programs as Firing Line, Technopolitics, and Freedom Speaks on PBS and Hardball with Chris Matthews on CNBC. The Center also makes available hundreds of pages of material about Intelligent Design through its website. The following contributors to this issue of Touchstone are Center Fellows: Michael J. Behe, Walter L. Bradley, William A. Dembski, Phillip E. Johnson, Stephen C. Meyer, Paul A. Nelson, Nancy Pearcey, John Mark Reynonds, Jay Wesley Richards, Jonathan Wells, and John G. West, Jr. More information about the Discovery Institute and its Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture can be obtained by visiting its website or by contacting Jay Richards, Discovery Institute, 1402 Third Ave., Suite 400, Seattle, WA 98101, 206-292-0401, ext. 112. John G. West, Jr., Ph.D. (Government, The Claremont Graduate School), is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Seattle Pacific University, Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute, and Associate Director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. He is the author of The Politics of Revelation and Reason and coeditor of The Encyclopedia of Religion in American Politics. In 1996, he edited a symposium on “The Death of Materialism” for The Intercollegiate Review. |
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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