Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: That reasonable people, I think, have always known in their heart is true, that all men are created equal, and that we are endowed by or created with certain unalienable rights. And so, really, the good news here is that science is pointing back to the truths that the American founders knew 250 years ago. The truths, actually, I would argue who you find in the Bible, too.
ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: The Declaration of Independence is our nation's founding creed, reminding us time and again that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights.
But for too long now, science has been misused to overturn the ideas found in our nation's founding creed. Well, is there hope for recovering these truths anew? Welcome to Idea the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott, and I am back again with Dr. John west to conclude our discussion about his latest book, Endowed by Our Creator, the Bible, Science and the Battle for America's soul. Dr. West is Vice president and a Senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, where he serves as Managing Director of the Institute's center for Science and Culture. His current research examines the impact of science and scientism on public policy and culture. He has written or edited 12 other books, including this one, that is Darwin Day in America. How Our Politics and Culture have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science, the magician's twin, C.S. lewis on science, Scientism, and Society, and even a book on Walt Disney and live action.
So Dr. West has also directed and written several documentaries exploring intelligent design and the debate over evolution. So a filmmaker as well. Dr. West, thanks for joining us again.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: Andrew, thanks for having me back.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: Well, in part one, we explored how the words of the Declaration were inspired and informed by the philosophy, theology, and the science of the Founders era. And we remembered why America is the only nation in the world built on a creed and why that creed is so important.
Now, today we're going to turn to a very different story, how these ideas came under attack, often in the name of science.
Now, before Darwinian ideas directly challenged the Declaration, you argue that there was already a deeper shift, a radically new conception of science brewing. You call this in your book a Second American Revolution. What changed in how people understood knowledge and truth?
[00:02:31] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I think what I was talking about primarily there is that sort of the first wave was scientists claiming that all men are not created equal, that we actually are radically unequal, and that we are. The facts of science are showing this. And this was even pre Darwin. Darwin had a very important contribution to this argument. But we're talking about before the Civil War. So Darwin published his first book in 1859.
But in the early part of. Well, let me just step back.
Let's deal a little bit with the elephant in the room, which is slavery. And many people think, well, the founders, yeah, they said all men are created equal, but they were big hypocrites because they own slaves now. Certainly true, some of the founders did own slaves. And I think that was incompatible with their principles. And so, you know, you could call them hypocrites if you want.
Having said that, for anyone who claims that they really didn't realize that there was a contradiction here or that many of them didn't actually change their behavior because once they articulated this principle, they realized we can't continue to live in contradiction to this. Those people who make those claims really haven't studied American history. And so I go through some of this. I mean, most people don't know that before the Civil War, but after the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, a number of states now most of them were in the north, but they abolished slavery. And in fact, some of them, like New York, when it abolished slavery, it abolished slavery as of July 4th of a certain year. And so they were making the connection between the Declaration and their abolition of slavery. Others like John Jay, first chief justice of the Supreme Court, and Benjamin Franklin, they emancipated their slaves. They became anti slavery. And then even in the south, people like Madison and Jefferson, you know, Jefferson was torn. Jefferson wrote in his notes on the state of Virginia that he trembled when he thought that God is just.
Why? Because of slavery. He knew it was against the natural rights of man. And so he and Madison, even they proposed a emancipation measure that after a certain time, those who had been born in slavery would then be freed. It didn't pass, unfortunately. Here's the tragedy of the American founding was that it had this window. In fact, let me say one other thing that many people don't know. It'll blow their minds that free black men were able to vote and were active citizens in many states after the founding.
So this idea that they didn't understand that this didn't apply to black people is not true. And if you don't think what I'm saying is true, read my book and go through the notes. It's an amazing story that most people don't know about. But here's what happened. As in most cases with sinful human beings, you sometimes are given an option, an opportunity to make things right and to live consistently. And sometimes we're well, we're procrastinators.
And so we say, oh, yeah, we can't do it right now, but we'll do it eventually. And that's really a lot of the Southerners who say we're part of the Founding, the Constitution, or writing the Declaration of Independence.
They thought, you know, even they, at the time of the Founding, conceded that they thought, slavery needs to go away, but let's just push it off. It'll. It'll go away. Well, by. By pushing it off. Then Eli Whitney invented his cotton gin, made cotton plantations a whole lot more economically feasible and profitable.
And then suddenly it was this really economically prosperous thing of slavery. People didn't want to get rid of it. And then they started to come up with pretext to argue why. And part of that was this argument in the name of science that was particularly pernicious. I'm not saying it was just because of this, but when you have people claiming that science is now showing that human beings, so white, black, Asian, actually don't descend from the same ancestral couple, which was the standard Christian biblical teaching, that we all come from the same parents, they say, nope, actually, you had something that was polygynism. You came from different parentages. Well, then suddenly human beings aren't unified. We're not all created in God's image necessarily, because we're created with different parentage and we have different histories. And this was the argument made by people like Samuel Morton and many others, prior to Darwin even, and Louis Agassiz, who was at Harvard University, made this argument. And so this frontal argument for scientific racism really was overturning the most fundamental proposition of the American Founding, which is all men are created equal. And so, yeah, that's what I call a second American Revolution, this effort, and it culminated in the revolt in the Civil War where you have the Confederacy. And I talk about this, and many people don't know about this, but they should.
It should be one of the most infamous speeches in American history where the.
Where the Vice President of the Confederacy basically lays out a speech that's now known as the Cornerstone speech, where he says, unlike the American Founding, where it was based on an absolute falsehood, which is the claim that all men are created equal. The new Southern Confederacy is based on the new teaching of science. And he actually identifies this is the teaching of science, that races are fundamentally unequal. And the reason the Confederacy is going to last forever is because it's the first nation, modern nation, founded on this new scientific truth of fundamental human inequality. Well, the guy who Said that was, his name was Alexander Stevens. And fortunately he was wrong.
But that's what I call the second American Revolution was this effort that culminated in the Civil War where something like 5 million Americans were in states that basically pulled away from the United States largely. Ultimately, there are a lot of debates over the cause of the Civil War, but they really all drive back to this debate over slavery. If slavery hadn't existed, the Civil War wouldn't have existed. And so yes, there were economic causes, but those economic causes were tied into slavery. So that's the second American revolution was how do you get 5 million people in the nation seceding to defend a principle that, that really to defend the repudiation of the Declaration of Independence.
[00:09:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And you call this act one of this new American Revolution, this rise of scientific racism. And it really didn't take long. I think you pointed out what, 80 something years between the Declaration and this full frontal attack.
[00:09:47] Speaker A: Yeah, no it didn't. So we think of today in 247 social media, how quickly things spread. But back then, just a few decades, that was not a lot of time. And that was without X or Facebook or Instagram.
[00:10:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
Makes the words a republic, if you can keep it, even more significant.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: Yeah, no, that really was what was at stake.
[00:10:15] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, you describe Act 2 of this Second American Revolution as the effect of the publication of Mr. Darwin's on the Origin of Species. And it wasn't the only challenge to the principles of the Declaration, but it certainly was a powerful one because it did so in the name of science. So let's look at how Darwinism and scientific materialism continue to attack our nation's founding principles. First, you explain the denial of a creator. Tell us about that.
[00:10:44] Speaker A: Yeah. So I don't think believing in Darwin forces you to not believe in God. But if you actually think, as Darwin did, that nature shows we're the product of an unguided process, it becomes easy to understand why even modern Darwinists like Richard Dawkins, you know, retired from Oxford, says that Darwin helped you become an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Because if you think we're, you and I are the product of this unguided blind process, well then what need is there of God? I mean, really, Darwin subverted all the things about natural theology where that nature points to God to say, no, it doesn't.
Nature doesn't really show any real evidence of a guiding God, especially when it comes to the development of human beings. And so that I think people can see, although it doesn't force you not to believe in God, if you believe that nature shows that we're the product of an unguided process that certainly does go together just like this, a very close fit. And why that would lead you to not believe in God. And it's interesting to point out by the early 1900s in America, so the beliefs of scientists, many people think today. Oh, the atheistic scientists. That's the thing of today. Well, it is.
But basically the scientific elites in America had already been taken over by this ideology by the early 1900s. And so compare that to the time of Newton or Boyle or all the people of the scientific revolution who thought that nature proclaimed evidence of God. By the early 1900s, the vast majority of elite scientists at places like Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, members of the National Academy of Sciences, there was sort of an infamous survey that was done of top American academics in the early 1900s, which I cite, that showed overwhelmingly they didn't believe in God anymore and they didn't even believe in an afterlife. They basically thought we were just material creatures and we die at death and nothing survives death. And what was the impact of that? Well, that is a straight line from Darwin to that.
[00:12:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, secondly, you say scientific materialism encouraged a denial of human equality. How so?
[00:13:01] Speaker A: Yeah, so without getting in too much here, you know, some people point out, well, Darwin himself was anti slavery. That's true, because he lived post William Wilberforce and was post the abolition movement in Great Britain. So it's not particularly an astounding thing that Darwin wasn't pro slavery by the time he wrote in England, having said that, and he wasn't a polygynist. So he did argue that we all come from the same root. And so people say, well, see, Darwin believed in equality. No, he didn't. In fact, he was more pernicious because the traditional idea of monogenism, which is that we all come from the same parent, was used to promote the unity and equality of human beings.
Darwin's radical reinterpretation of that was basically to split the difference between polygenism and monogenism, because in his version of monogenism, well, we all come up from the slime. And so some humans are lower on the evolutionary ladder than others, and so we're still fundamentally unequal.
So he said he wasn't a polygynist, and he had arguments with those. But his form of monogenism was just as bad. And as Stephen Jay Gould, the famous Darwinian biologist of our own lifetimes, who's now dead. But he basically said that after 1859, which is when Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species arguments basically for scientific racism became exponentially more.
And that's just a fact. So Darwin was not the only scientific racist. There were those that preceded him. But his argument that we're on this evolutionary scale and that some human beings he basically pointed out to blacks. Blacks he thought were the lowest humans to apes.
He says that in the Descent of Man that blacks, both African blacks and then Australian aborigines are the lowest, the closest on the scale to apes of any other humans and then other races and things are above that. And so Darwin definitely went against human equality with that. But it was even worse than that because Darwin was against any sort of human exceptionalism. And so I want to say that the basis for human equality actually starts with the notion that humans are fundamentally different in our capacities from other animals. We're fundamentally different. Yes, there are some similarities, but we're still. There's a fundamental, qualitative, fundamental difference between you and I and a monkey or a dog, I love dogs, had dogs growing up or a flea. I mean we're fundamentally different. But what did Darwin try to show in the Descent of Man? He argued that he was actually trying to show that there is no fundamental difference between us and other mammals.
Well then that gets you. So from the get go, you know Darwin, it was scientific racism, but even in a deeper sense he basically devalued all humans.
So anyway, and that, that has some more implications which we'll probably tease out.
[00:16:11] Speaker B: But yeah, now you say this denial of human exceptionalism had far reaching effects on America and you lay out some of them. Let's just briefly touch on it. No, how did it impact crime and punishment?
[00:16:25] Speaker A: Well, Darwin's disciples, someone actually in Italy named Cesare Lombroso was one of his, a follower of Darwin and he came up with the idea, well, crime is simply ingrained into us by natural selection and it's an evolutionary throwback. So in other words, when people steal or beat people up today, they're actually reflecting behaviors that their ancestors learned in the Stone Age. And so they're sort of what he called atavist. And so they're not really responsible for their actions. So this is part of it. But it's also evolution helps explain why they do what they do and they're not responsible for their actions. And so you could think of how that. And I wrote a whole another book that gets into some of this Darwin Day in America about how this worked out in the criminal justice process with the abuse excuse and the idea that we're not responsible for our actions. And so that is a way that many Darwinian biologists and Darwinian criminologists, they apply Darwinian theory to really attack the idea that we were personally responsible for the things we did.
[00:17:31] Speaker B: Right.
Yeah. And it's also influenced life and death, at least how Americans view those things.
And of course whole books have been written and we could talk all day about that. But what would you say in a nutshell, as far as Darwin's impact on that?
[00:17:46] Speaker A: Well, interestingly so Darwin was a subset of thinkers who were really promoting a materialist view of reality. So that we're just blind matter in motion. There is no. And so if that's true, one of the things that goes out the door is the soul. Certainly a soul that goes, you know, that continues to exist after our bodies die, our physical bodies.
And Darwood actually in his notebooks, publicly, he was a little bit cagey, but in his notebooks he actually makes clear that he doesn't really believe that there's a soul and that it's all, I think, let's see, what was it he said that brain secretes thought like bile comes from the liver. So it's just a chemical secretion.
And again, scientists who looked up to Darwin, and I quote some of them in the book, they thought that this whole idea that justified the idea that there is no soul that transcends death because we're just material creatures. And as Richard Dawkins I think put it when he was on with Piers Morgan, that when he dies, he dies, he goes into the earth, in the plot, in the ground, there's nothing more. Well, that was the view that many Darwinist adopted because Darwin had a very materialist view of human beings. No souls.
Yeah.
[00:19:08] Speaker B: And of course with all this out the window goes natural moral law too. The more you, you dig down to Darwinian materialism, comment on that, how would you see that being changed?
[00:19:21] Speaker A: Again, in Darwin's book the Descent of Man, he gives his account of morality.
Morality is not something written in the laws of nature as a nature's God. It's something that is based on what our ancestors needed in particular situations for physical survival.
So it's not so much that Darwin is immoral as he's amoral. So yes, the maternal instinct because it's created by nature comes from natural selection. So that's a good thing in Darwin's sense. But so is infanticide. So is killing your parents. So is there anything else that you find in nature or in human society must have been programmed ultimately by Darwinian natural selection. So you can't, on Darwinian ground, you can't say one is better than the other. And this really leads to a raging moral relativism. And this is one of the most pernicious impacts of Darwinism of there's really a pretty straight line from Darwin's theory of morality to moral relativism.
Yeah.
[00:20:23] Speaker B: And the further you get from a natural moral law, the closer you also get to socialism and totalitarian rule. How has materialism promoted a denial of limited government?
[00:20:35] Speaker A: Yeah, so there are a couple ways. So, so one is the idea that, you know, if you have a moral relativism, people start actually promoting moral anarchy. And so the less self controlled people are then the more you need the government.
But, but the other way, the way that the actual Darwinian politicians, the Darwinian political theorists argued and many people, this is a story they don't know that I tell, citing the actual founders of American political science is they rejected the idea the founders thought government was based on human nature and fundamental rights. And those are always and everywhere true. And they don't change over time.
And so the purpose of government shouldn't change over time. Yes, individual things that government does, but the fundamental purposes of government shouldn't change over time. Well, if you have a Darwinian view, there are no fundamental rights. Everything is in flux. Our morality is in flux, our right to life is in flux, depending on what we need to survive. Physically, everything is in flux. And so it makes no sense to say that even the purposes and objects of government aren't also in flux or that our rights can't be remolded and evolve over time. And so basically people like the most famous political scientist in America, he became famous because he became our president. Woodrow Wilson argued for a Darwinian view of the Constitution and of the government, that our rights and the needs and the powers of the government should evolve according to the needs of.
Basically it's what the elite say, we can get into that, but it should evolve. It's not static. And so this evolutionary view played into the idea that the purposes of government. Well, the founders may have been good for their own time, but things evolve, things change. As Woodrow Wilson says, we now follow the views of Mr. Darwin, not Mr. Newton, Sir Isaac Newton, who we talked about actually in our previous conversation, who believed in the intelligent design of nature, that there's something really real and that nature reflects God's careful design. Human beings reflect God's careful design.
Well, as Woodrow Wilson said, we don't live in Newton's world. Anymore. We live in Darwin's world.
And that means that the functions and powers of government get to change over time. And of course they usually change in the direction of more power to the
[00:23:05] Speaker B: government, which also affects something else. The Declaration protected and that is the consent of the governed. How does materialism, you know, encroach on that?
[00:23:17] Speaker A: Yeah, so the founders and this really went back even to Puritan political theory in America, which I was just reading this week for some other reasons of that human beings, if they're fundamentally equal, you know, you're not born a natural born dictator or a natural born slave. You're, you're fundamentally equal in your basic rights and your basic capacities, then just government should be based on the consent of the governed and at least in some sense that obviously in a representative republic, no one can get their way all the time, but you at least agree to the form of government and the rules of it and its basic rights that protect everyone.
Well, if we're radically unequal, which is what Darwin and his scientists argued, then why does it make sense to say that government should be based on consent? If we're radically unequal, we should be back to Plato's philosopher kings to choose people who are the experts, who are the best people to rule us without our consent because they're smarter than we are. Now, I'm not saying I want to be clear. I think expert, I have a PhD, so I don't dismiss expert knowledge, even though I'd say if you get a Ph.D. you'd actually learn how little, how foolish many people who are in graduate programs actually are. So you would be actually more skeptical than you might otherwise be. But, so I'm gonna get, you know, if, if I have to have brain surgery done on me, I don't want it to be someone who has a medical degree from a mail order school in, you know, the Caribbean. I want, you know, a world class brain surgeon.
Having said that, I fully agree with the founders that no one is so superior to other people that they have the right to rule others or dictate to them without their some sort of basic consent or check and balance on their power.
But again, if you think that people are fundamentally unequal, then well, no, we should be ruled by neutral experts. And I quote, people think that whether they call it the deep state today or whatever they call it, this is not a recent invention. This was come up during the Progressive era by largely Darwinian influenced political theorists and political scientists and politicians like Woodrow Wilson, who knew what they were doing. It was out of they weren't just making it up.
They thought people were fundamentally unequal. And so we wanted to move from a nation of elected representatives. We'd still have elected representatives, but they would be increasingly doing less. We wanted to move to objective experts who were permanently installed in federal agencies to make decisions for everyone else.
Yeah, we've seen how that's turned out. We've seen how that's turned out.
[00:26:00] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah. And of course there's, there's a difference between, you know, pretending neutrality and striving to objectivity. And it's usually the former that, that makes the appearance.
Well, in Chapter five, you turn the corner from this bleak picture of how the Declaration has been attacked to showing how the same domain behind a lot of those attacks, science is now reinforcing the core claims of the Declaration about human nature, purpose and design.
First, you make the point that the battle has never been declaration versus science, but actually declaration versus an interpretation of science, materialism or scientism. And next you point to developments in modern biology, cosmology and physics that are challenging Darwinian and materialist assumptions.
We've got tons of videos, books and articles covering all of this. This is what we do for a living here at Discovery Institute and the center for Science and Culture. But can you just briefly outline just a few of the developments?
[00:27:03] Speaker A: I mean, obviously, you know, and I sort of summarize, like Steve Meyer's great book, Return of the God Hypothesis. I mean, now science believes that there is a beginning to the universe, which points to a need for a creator. The laws of physics are fine tuned for us to exist, which points toward a creator. The very codes within us, like DNA and epigenetic codes, codes require a coder. So that at the big sense, and I unpack some of that and some of it, there may be some new things that people haven't known before.
I don't want to give away the whole, but I hope people will buy it. But I do have a section that I'm just going to tease here that there's a lot of debate today, even among self identified Christians and on the conservative side for, I would say genuinely racist beliefs. Now there's fake racist beliefs on the left that say that everyone conservative must be a racist. But there are some really scary people out there on the Internet, including some self identified Christians, for example, who praise Hitler now. And I just think this is like toxic, awful.
But the good news is that although it's true that the Darwinian science from the 19th century actually tried to argue for fundamental human inequality, Especially between different races and ethnicities.
The science today points in the other direction. And if you want to know about that, read my book. Because the studies that show that we're so much more similar at the genetic level between races than people thought, the arguments that people say that certain, say ethnic groups are biologically programmed for crime, moral more than others, no, that's not true.
And if any of this, that you've heard any of these claims, please read my book, if only for that section in chapter five where I sort of disentangle that and point to some of the research that is actually out there that's pointing back to the truths that we have always, that reasonable people, I think have always known in their heart is true, that all men are created equal and that we are endowed by or created with certain unalienable rights. And so really the good news here is that science is pointing back to the truths that the American founders knew 250 years ago. The truths, actually, I would argue who you find in the Bible too.
[00:29:23] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And that is good news indeed. And my final question sort of brings it to a practical level for our audience today. What does it look like for people today to remember and restore America's founding creed? What can we do personally as well as corporately and community wise?
[00:29:42] Speaker A: The practical question, never ask a recovering academic a practical question.
I think the basic thing is that so many people today don't know this, or they don't even know, or they may know the glittering generality like all men are created equal, but the first attack on it, they collapse because they don't really know what it means.
And so you can't sustain a government, a limited government that protects our basic rights, protects our religious freedom, protects our political freedom, that leaves us alone to have our own careers that we want and to support our families as we want. We can't have that if people don't understand why it's good.
And so I think the number one thing that I hope coming out of this book, and my book is not long, the text is only about like 150 pages. Then there are additional notes and there is a resources for digging deeper at the end for people who want resources for how do they communicate this with their kids or how do they go deeper on some of these things? But I think the number one thing is actually teaching ourselves and understanding what these principles really are, why they matter, and then communicating them to our kids.
And I think that's so important. And I end the book with a very small chapter that refers to a speech that Abraham Lincoln gave. Very insightful, because we could talk about the American founding, the great American founders, which I think they were. But Lincoln pointed out that founding is one thing and that's an important thing, but sometimes an even harder thing is perpetuating.
How do you perpetuate well founded institutions? And he thought that that was the perennial thing that America was facing in his time. And I would say in our time we have a good founding, even though not all of us seem to know that anymore.
But how do we perpetuate that? How do we hand that down? How do we apply that? And so I'm hoping my book might have a little bit of a role in at least spurring people on, trying to do what Lincoln called people to do, to try to perpetuate our institutions.
[00:31:41] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's coming at just the right moment as we celebrate 250 years this year.
[00:31:46] Speaker A: That's right, July 4th. So this is a time to make sure that you yourself know what these principles are, how they're really underlying true things. And also that your kids know and that the kids in your church know and that your friends know.
[00:32:03] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, let's talk resources here as we wrap it up.
How can folks get a hold of your book as well as some related resources? There's a couple of websites we can point them to.
[00:32:14] Speaker A: Yeah. So I would say that if they want to find out more about the book and other resources, they could go to endowedby, our creator.com which highlights some of those resources.
If you get my book, at the end of the book there is a resources for digging deeper that includes videos, it includes some curriculum for high school students. We have actually a curriculum called Never before in History that teaches the principles of the American founding and the influence of Christianity on it. And so another reason to get my book is that for that little ending section that goes through a variety of video curricular and book resources on various areas.
[00:32:52] Speaker B: Okay.
Well, Dr. West John, thank you for your time today. It's been a nice two part series just unpacking, you know, just, just what you've taken time to put into your book. And I hope we can pass that along to our audience today. So thanks. Thanks for joining us.
[00:33:08] Speaker A: Thank you. This is a great opportunity.
[00:33:10] Speaker B: Well, audience, if you missed the first half of the discussion, be sure to go back to that. We spent some time exploring what the founders really meant by phrases like the laws of nature and of nature's God and all men are created equal and how these ideas were inspired by the science, philosophy and the theology of the era and how it all comes together as well, and it doesn't contradict itself. And that's, that's great to see for these first principles that we hold dear in our founding creed. Well, for ID the future, I meant Jamie Dermot, thanks for joining us.
[00:33:46] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture. Com and intelligentdesign. Org. This program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
