The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy

The prevailing mentality of the United States—and this applies to Europe—undermines its ability to survive its relentless foes—the same foes of Israel.

This mentality has been diagnosed by Phillip E. Johnson, graduate of Harvard University and the University of Chicago Law School. Johnson is regarded as the most formidable critic of Darwinism by such notable atheists as Nobel Laureate physicist Steven Weinberg. I refer to Johnson’s Darwin on Trial (2nd edition, 1993) and Reason in the Balance (1995).

America’s mentality is dominated by Darwinian naturalism—an atheistic conception of man and the universe. Johnson quotes the famous paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, who, in speaking of Darwinian evolution, said: “man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”

The high priest of Darwinian atheism is biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. Dawkins contends that anyone who holds a religious as opposed to a Darwinian view of man is either a fool or a charlatan. That 40 percent of the scientists polled believe in a personal God does not deter Dawkins: he dismisses them as intellectually dishonest. A Darwinian fundamentalist, Dawkins deems religion not only as irrational but also conducive to war—an evil that should be extirpated. Never mind that Hitler and Stalin were atheists. Indeed, they could well have been Darwinian naturalists!

Modernist naturalism is propagated as equivalent to rationality because it excludes any supernatural source of natural events. This naturalism is liberating: it frees people from the illusions of the Bible and its commandments. Modernist naturalism also provides a foundation for democracy: it relies on empirical knowledge available to everyone. Modernists portray anyone who wishes to base public policy on divine revelation as inherently undemocratic.

Darwin’s evolutionary naturalism dominates the intellectual world. The United States may be a democracy, but the voters get their information from what the media tells them, and the media propagate evolutionary naturalism. It begins in academia. The judges who make legal decisions and the journalists who report the news get their education from the universities, where they are spoon fed evolutionary naturalism couched in the unassailable name of science. But science is the exclusive domain of scientists. Naturalism may be democratic in theory but it’s elitist in practice.

Ordinary people have no alternative but to accept what the experts tell them about man.

And so, as Johnson puts it, the old creation story that man was created in the image of God has been replaced by a new creation story, that man and all living creatures evolved by an unguided, purposeless material process of random genetic mutations and natural selection.

The new creation story thus makes God a delusion. But if scientific naturalism alone is objectively real, then moral values are purely subjective. To say “X is good” simply means “You like X.” Modernist naturalism leads to the university-bred doctrine of moral relativism, which permeates the democratic world.

But what if naturalism is not true? Perhaps modernity is based on a false assumption? Perhaps the prevailing intellectual culture is based on a delusion? Perhaps all the media of education in the West are simply propagating a new religion in the name of science?

This God-is-dead school of scientific naturalism has profound consequences. It reduces values to subrational forces. It explains the higher—man’s ideas of what is good—in terms of the lower—man’s desires. This goes back to the 17th century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

Hobbes wrote: “Whatever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good; and the object of his hate or aversion, evil . . .” This is perhaps the most lucid statement of moral relativism. For Hobbes, man is simply a democratic ensemble of desires—which Freud will call the id. The purpose of man’s reason, says Hobbes, is to determine how to obtain the object of his desires. As Hobbes puts it: “The thoughts are to the desires, as scouts and spies, to range abroad, and find the way to the things desired.” Freud will call this instrumental reason the ego. Man will call the object of his desires “good”—which Freud will call the super-ego.

Both Hobbes and Freud were naturalists or materialists. By eliminating God, scientific naturalists liberate man from any supernatural restraints. Today democracy liberates man from moral restraints. But suppose democracy—at least the kind of democracy we have today—is based on false grounds? People in the West regard democracy as the standard of what is good. But according to naturalism and relativism, there are no objective standards of what is good. Perhaps democracy is based on a delusion?

But if the mentality of the United States is rooted in scientific naturalism—a doctrine that has no place for God—perhaps this is why Americans cannot take Islam seriously or evil—the evil of global jihad—seriously? Perhaps this is why Senator Barack Obama may become America’s next president?

I intend to enlarge on this topic in the May 26 Arutz-7 Eidelberg Report.