Is it possible for the world to go crazy? If you don’t think so, look at history. Look at what some ancient civilizations thought about the world, the universe, and life. Despite great achievements in architecture and technology, they held beliefs that strike us as absurd – yet in their day, those beliefs were intuitively obvious. Sometimes they were enforced by the state with severe punishment, even the ultimate punishment. Darwin today serves as a kind of prophet of Marduk who brings enlightenment and explains the world. You’re not entitled to have opinions about him. Failure to honor the Marduk of the age, or his prophet, is not only insane, it is a capital crime.
One method for detecting absurdity is to find self-refuting arguments. These can never be overturned by more evidence, because they are self-refuting – they are false by definition. Evolutionary theory is full of them. Darwin built a law of nature on chance, which is the contradiction to law. Darwin reasoned that the mind is an evolved artifact of blind accident, undermining the very basis of reason. And Darwin rendered design an illusion, using design to say so about his own brain. In these and other ways, Darwin tricked the world into thinking he had come up with a stunningly elegant unification of biology in alleged “natural” terms, when those very ideas refute themselves. How could this happen? One reason is that tautologies are always intuitively obvious. To say, “Life evolved because natural selection brought them into existence,” sounds perfectly fine, till you realize the sentence conveys no information. It begs the question it is supposed to answer. Darwin’s adventure tales, his admittedly detailed observations, his Mosaic visage, and his gift of eloquent rhetoric were all dandy things, but they cannot rescue his doctrines from collapse. They are self-refuting. Hullabaloo and hoopla can be fun. Fantasyland has good fireworks, too. But no amount of celebration can save a self-refuting belief system.
Can self-refuting doctrines really fool a world of scientists and smart people? It happens. Absurdities have fooled the elite of many a civilization. We’re only human. We don’t know everything. We’re gullible. For certainty, we need a revelation from the One who knows all things. Having an anchor in eternal, immutable things is a prerequisite for consistency. You cannot build a progressive system from the ground up without assuming the very thing you need to prove: that there are absolutes against which one can measure progress. Even if one could pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps, the effort would be vain without ground to stand on. Darwinism is anchored in the quicksand of contingency. Its aspiration to provide understanding, the opposite of contingency, is doomed. Lacking an absolute, the hullabaloo and hoopla around Darwin is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Belle réflexion.
