There has been a frenetic controversy swirling around the legitimacy or otherwise of teaching Intelligent Design as an alternative to Darwinian Evolution in schools. Christians have argued that Darwinian Evolution is only a cosmogenic theory; there are other theories, equally plausible, equally able to marshal supporting evidence. Intelligent Design is one. Christians have argued for “equal time.”
Now this has a ring of reasonableness attached to it. Scientific inquiry is supposed to be open, rational, reasoned, objective, non-prejudiced, and neutral. Therefore, nothing could or should be excluded from the outset. Open minded inquiry would argue that one should follow the facts wherever they lead. Refusing to give “air time” to Intelligent Design in schools seems to smack more of prejudice and propaganda than honestly objective self-critical scholarship. The resistance seems downright unscientific.
The other side, however, will have none of it. Intelligent Design is unscientific by definition. In their telling of it, Intelligent Design means that one has to deny the evidence, give up on the scientific method, lay rationality aside. To incorporate Intelligent Design theories in schools would be like going back to the ignorance of the Dark Ages where superstitious prejudice suppressed reason.
This debate is one great big hoot. But it does betray two fundamental weaknesses in the Christian camp. Firstly, it shows a regrettable naivety on the part of Christians over what the state school system is all about. The state school system is essentially an extended secular humanistic propaganda machine. It represents the received wisdom of Athens—a City which is deadly opposed to Christians and the Christian faith. We will use the term The Academy to represent the entire academic—instructional complex of secular humanism. It is completely unrealistic and naïve to expect the Academy to give any air time to Intelligent Design or similar theories.
Secondly, it demonstrates a fundamental compromise, by Christians, of the Christian faith itself. Jerusalem is being untrue to itself if it looks to The Academy to grant it even a modicum of credence. Both world-views, while being at root respectively fundamentally very simple, are diametrical contra-polar opposites. Jerusalem asserts that all truth, knowledge, and rationality turns around and depends upon the Living and Eternal God. Truth is what God says it is. The Academy asserts that all truth, knowledge, and rationality turns around man. Truth is what man says it is.
In going to The Academy and asking for an audience, Christians are wanting the Christian world view to be assessed, judged, and determined by man. In do doing, they are accepting the world-view of The Academy. If The Academy could authoritatively determine the truth of Jerusalem, if it were to be countenanced for a moment, then it clearly proves that Christianity is false and a lie. If all truth is subject to man, and determined by him, then clearly the Christian world-view cannot possibly be true; truth cannot be what God says it is.
Thus, we must regrettably conclude that Intelligent Design theories, and the campaign to have them accepted within The Academy, while well-meant, are both naïve and an implicit, denial, at root, of the Christian faith itself. Intelligent Design theories, as constructed and pitched to The Academy, are indeed sub-rational and inconsistent, a kind of Unbelief itself. Insofar as they look for the mind of man to be the canon and measure of all truth, they fundamentally agree with The Academy's world-view. It is indeed a return to Unbelieving dark ages. To this extent, The Academy is being true to itself, it is being consistent, in its lampooning of Intelligent Design and in its refusal to even consider for one moment Intelligent Design within its halls.
But this is not to say that Unbelief and The Academy has any credibility whatsoever. It is utterly and hopelessly bankrupt—intellectually, philosophically, and ethically. The Academy is one gigantic crock. The ignorance and contradictory blind prejudice of The Academy is far greater than any so-called medieval Dark Ages.
The Academy insists that the universe does not reflect Intelligent Design, but rather it is a brute (that is, unintelligent) chaos. At the same time, in the same breath, and with a straight face, The Academy not only wants to talk about rationality, order, structures, categories, laws, it uses these constructs to propound and describe its assumptions of a universe of brute chance. Breathtaking irrationality, inconsistency, and blindness.
What The Academy relentlessly suppresses—and it has to, for it is a truth most inconvenient—is that if it were actually true that there is somewhere in the vastness of the universe just one molecule or one particle or one entity that is truly random, then everything in the universe must be truly random and utterly chaotic in principle. All order is a mythical illusion. This has to be the case because order cannot withstand true chaos or brute chance. The least amount of true chaos breaks order apart and makes it meaningless, unpredictable and, therefore, ultimately unintelligible. This is what Chaos Theory, in part, has argued and demonstrated successfully.
But, The Academy has done far worse than that: it does not accept that somewhere in the universe is one a single particle of chaos—rather The Academy insists, from the outset, that the entire universe is grounded in brute chaotic chance. Yet it still insists upon its science, and its order, and its study, and its research—and insists still further that these things alone define and determine truth. And it wants to be taken seriously and have its self-claimed gravitas honoured and respected! Truly, The Academy represents the foolish babblers of our time.
The remarkable Mircea Eliade has given us reason to suspect that all Unbelief has been characterised by similar foolishness. This ignorance and intellectual bankruptcy of The Academy is not new. The bankruptcy of The Academy reflects the same motifs as the oldest primitive traditions of mankind.
Eliade has shown that one recurring motif of primitive religions is to believe in an all governing, all creating god, then over time gradually to banish that god out of frame, replacing it with contradictory deities because those constructs enable them to deal with the phenomenon of the world as it was actually experienced, and offer the promise of controlling the world. He writes:
. . . neither the religions called “primitive” nor those classed as polytheistic are ignorant of the idea of a god who is the creator, omniscient and all powerful. Yet we have only to look at things a little more closely to realise that such supreme deities enjoy hardly any religious worship. . . . These are not objects of worship: they are regarded as deities so remote as to be inactive, indifferent . . . in fact. . . .
There is no need to multiply examples. Everywhere, in these “primitive” religions, the highest heavenly being has declined in practical religious importance; he has withdrawn from human beings. He is remembered, however, and prayed to as a last resort, when all the petitions put up to other gods and goddesses, demons and ancestors, have been ineffectual. . . . .
(T)he divinities , who among the “primitives” are substituted for the Supreme Beings, are . . . divinities of fecundity, riches and the fullness of life; in short the deities who exalt and amplify life, the life of the cosmos—its vegetation, agriculture, herds and flocks—no less than the life of man. Their religious importance was due precisely to their strength, their illimitable reserves of vitality, their fecundity.
Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Reality (Glasgow: William Collins, 1957), pp 135—137
This spiritual and intellectual legerdemain, so characteristic of primitives, the motif of positing a supreme entity responsible for all things yet only to banish it in favour of narrowing down and focusing upon mastery of man over the natural world, is precisely evident in The Academy.
In so doing it has taken up this age-old, primitive, deceit. It has posited chance as the supreme and most fundamental force of the cosmos, responsible for all things—then, banished it from consideration, while it focuses upon man and his mastering of nature, in complete contradiction of the supposed fundamental cosmic force. The radical disconnection of these two things, even while both are held to be true, is the mark of the superstitious primitive mind. It is why irrationality and ignorance lies embedded in all that The Academy does and represents. It is why The Academy can be so credulous and manipulated and easily led. Superstitions lie at its roots; its trees of knowledge draw deeply from them.
What, then, has Jerusalem to do with The Academy of Athens? Precisely nothing. You cannot test truth while lying upon an irrational bed of self-imposed, self-contradictory deceit.
Athens remains seduced and transfixed by the myths and contradictions of ancient, pagan primitivism. Its Academy is a crock.
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