Book Review
The Aura of Science
Flight from the Absolute: Cynical Observations on the Postmodern West, Volume II
by Paul Gosselin
reviewed by Louis Markos
Over two and a half decades have passed since Phillip E. Johnson kick-started the intelligent design (ID) movement in America with the publication of his path-breaking book,
Darwin on Trial (1991). In this book, he exposed the numerous flaws in Darwinian evolution and the near irrationality of those who continued to defend it in the face of mounting evidence against it. In the intervening years, two seemingly contradictory things have happened: the evidence against macro-evolution has continued to mount up; and the defenders of macro-evolution have gotten increasingly shrill and censorious, asserting more and more loudly the false claim that the evidence for Darwinism is overwhelming and
indisputable.
Thankfully, the Darwinian backlash has been skillfully countered, not only by such Christian ID theorists as Michael Behe, William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, and Stephen Meyer, but also by popular apologists like Lee Strobel and Nancy Pearcey, and by passionate secular critics like Ben Stein and David Berlinski. As an avid reader of all things ID, I thought I had educated myself in all the basic arguments, examples, and perspectives—that is, until I read Paul Gosselin's Flight from the Absolute: Cynical Observations on the Postmodern West, Volume II (fluidly translated by the author from his Fuite de l'Absolu: Observations cyniques sur l'Occident postmoderne, Volume II [2006]).
The Religion of Darwin
Though Gosselin's English translations of both volumes have been available for five years, they remain relatively unknown in America. Given the subtle, often invisible power that Darwinism and postmodernism continue to exert on the modern mind and imagination, I believe it is essential for American Christians to acquaint themselves with as many books as possible that rip away the veil, revealing the often insidious worldviews that lurk beneath the theoretical and ideological systems of Darwin and Derrida. Gosselin's Flight from the Absolute is a good place to start.
In Volume I, as Gosselin explains in his preface to Volume II, he "examined the assertion that postmodernism is actually an invisible religion, a religion in fundamental denial of its own religious nature" (iv). Several times in his first volume, Gosselin notes in passing that postmodernism, despite its deconstruction of modernism's materialistic creeds and dogmas, left untouched one of its central, non-negotiable tenets: Darwinian evolution. Even when postmoderns critique the monolithic hegemony of Western science, they avoid questioning the "fact" of natural selection acting on genetic modification.
In Volume II, a stand-alone book that can be profitably read on its own, Gosselin zeroes in on the subject of evolution, presenting it as the origin myth of both modern and postmodern man and tracing its history and function as both an "ideologico-religious system" (118) and a "total and integrated scientific answer . . . for all aspects of reality" (217). By marshalling a vast yet carefully selected array of quotes from key writers on all sides of the evolution debate, Gosselin makes it clear that "the Darwinian revolution was more cultural and ideological than scientific" (84).
Darwin's Sacred Aura
"[B]efore the Enlightenment," Gosselin reminds us, "the idea of a Creator responsible for the existence of all the cosmos around us was accepted not only by the illiterate masses, but also by the greatest scientific minds of the time" (81). As the Age of Reason slowly shifted the center of authority from Christianity to science, however, the active, involved God of the Bible was replaced by a deistic God who had little to do but start the universe in motion. Why not abandon God altogether? "Until a satisfying materialistic explanation of origins was to be had, the First Cause still had his uses" (82).
Not so after Darwin. Once On the Origin of Species established itself as a scientific "fact," God was demoted from an eternal watchmaker to an unnecessary hypothesis, allowing science to seize for itself the "epistemological authority" of the Bible, to equate itself with truth, and to "achieve the status of absolute knowledge" (201–202). And it obtained something more, something that Gosselin calls a "sacred aura" (190).
Central to that sacred aura is the myth of the objective scientist, the superstition-free priest who dispenses the truth about ourselves and our world and who protects us from all those heretics and ignoramuses who would doubt the all-sufficiency of macro-evolution to explain the origin and multifariousness of life on earth. Like the priest of the Middle Ages, Gosselin explains, the Darwinian scientist subscribes to dogmas from which he will not budge (genetic mutation + natural selection + time can account for all that we see) and invites his initiates to visit his cathedral (natural science museum) and view his holy relics (fossils of dinosaurs and so-called missing links between apes and man). Indeed, the goal of the "multimedia presentations" offered at such museums is not so much to substantiate Darwinism with hard facts as to immerse "visitors in mythical time, allowing them to participate in a persuasive cosmological experience" (177).
Louis Markos , Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His 19 books include Lewis Agonistes; Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis; On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis; and From A to Z to Narnia with C. S. Lewis.
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more on evolution from the online archives
23.6—November/December 2010
Darwin, Design & Thomas Aquinas
The Mythical Conflict Between Thomism & Intelligent Design by Logan Paul Gage
22.6—July/August 2009
on a Noble Defense Doomed by Darwinian Materialism by John G. West
22.8—November/December 2009
Looking for Beauty & Justice 150 Years After Darwin’s Classic by Charles Taliaferro
more from the online archives
31.5—September/October 2018
on the Congregation as a Wilderness by Paul Gregory Alms
33.2—March/April 2020
Encounters with Faith & Forgiveness in Communities of Faith by Nicole M. King
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