Liberty Is an Anti-Darwinian Concept

The Darwinian worldview that allegedly freed people from ‘religion’ actually enslaves them to the worst kind of tyranny.

In the United States today, Americans will celebrate Independence Day with parties, barbecues, and fireworks. Hopefully mixed in with the fun is some appreciation for the founding principles of America:

• All men are created equal
• Human rights
• Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
• Liberty and justice for all
• E pluribus unum (out of many, one)
• In God we trust
• The American dream

All of these ideals are profoundly anti-Darwinian. The secular worldview in vogue today, resting on Darwin’s advocacy of nature run by unguided natural processes, cannot derive any of these. In fact, the opposite is true: secularism undermines every one of these, and historically, has fought against them.

Darwin and his successors limited all scientific explanation to chance and natural law. The natural law Darwin is famous for was natural selection, which is simply a restatement of the Stuff Happens Law. Natural selection, therefore, gets subsumed within the ‘chance’ category. Chance, we know is not a scientific explanation at all. It means, “The unknown and unpredictable element in any event that has no assignable cause or guidance from a natural law or intelligent category.” As such, it represents the “other” category when natural law is exhausted. It is not a cause. It is not an explanation. It is empty of meaning.

Credit: Illustra Media

What natural laws are left? Well, there are Newton’s laws of motion. There is universal gravitation. There are the laws of thermodynamics. Toss in Einstein’s relativity and quantum mechanics. You can add any other so-called ‘laws of nature’ into the mix, and you will not find liberty. Or justice. Or equality. None of these physical laws can produce any of the American ideals, because the ideals involved concepts, not particles subject to mathematically-describable forces. To the extent they are mathematically describable, they are not free. Particles must act the way the laws say they will. (For radical empiricists, who describe laws as patterns in experience, they would say particles “do” act the way the laws say, not that they “must” act that way.)

There is no liberty in physics. Physicists speak of “free parameters” but those are merely starting conditions. They do not change the deterministic outcomes (except for some quantum effects, which typically operate at the nanometer scale, as in radioactive decay). There is no justice in physics. The laws are as they are. No human is at liberty to change them, or to choose a different universe with different laws to live in.

Many Darwinians deny free will. The late William Provine stressed this point. So much for liberty. According to Richard Dawkins, we are pawns of our selfish genes. But do genes have liberty to mold us according to their selfish desires? Of course not; they are particles that ultimately obey the laws of physics, or chance. Liberty is not chance; it is a choice against alternatives—one option, to the exclusion of another. Information can be described that way: a choice to put together certain letters—to the exclusion of others—to convey meaning that an intelligent agent chooses to communicate.

Hall of Liberty, Forest Lawn, Hollywood, California (DFC)

Because natural selection was often twisted into Social Darwinism, assuming that “survival of the fittest” implied a “struggle for existence,” Darwinian evolution bore much anti-liberty fruit. The genocides of the 20th century, extending into the 19th century, were motivated by Darwin’s “law of nature” (law of the jungle) where, since only the “fittest” survive, it was necessary to prove oneself the fittest by putting down everyone else. Dr. Jerry Bergman has documented outrageous atrocities that Darwinians committed in his books The Darwin Effect and How Darwin Corrodes Morality. There were actually Darwinians (beginning with Darwin himself) who believed that charity to the weak and the poor was against nature, because it undermined survival of the fittest. Some took it upon themselves to exterminate the weak and sick as a duty to nature. Certainly Hitler felt this way, but he was not alone; the communist dictators used the same justification.

The Cold War pitted two opposite worldviews against each other: the “free world” led by the Americans who believed in liberty, and the “communist bloc” (or “evil empire” as Reagan called it) who followed Darwinism to its logical conclusions: the view that nature favors the powerful, whether individual or collective. Bergman shows how the Japanese had fallen for Darwinism before World War II. Their belief in “emperor worship” was not religious, but Darwinian. Needless to say, the worst totalitarian dictatorships the world has ever seen relied on Darwinian views.

Some will argue that America’s founding fathers were not Biblical creationists, but deists. Some were; some were not. But even the deists like Thomas Jefferson believed in intelligent design and divine providence (see John West argue this at Evolution News). Their deity was not distant and uninvolved. Jefferson penned the consensus of the fathers in the Declaration of Independence drafted July 2, 1776, but proclaimed on July 4: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Those who are attracted to socialism ignore history at their peril. With Darwinian dictators, you only get one vote, one time.

The Liberty Bell in Philadelphia is inscribed with the words of Leviticus 25:10, “Proclaim LIBERTY Throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants Thereof.” If you desire liberty, follow Jesus Christ. He quoted Isaiah 61 in the synagogue in Nazareth, expressing his heart for man’s welfare, while identifying with God—thereby claiming deity and expressing the heart of God the Father as well: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed” (Luke 4:18).

Detail of mosaic, Liberty Hall, Forest Lawn, California (DFC)