The chaos spreading up the West Coast, among many other symptoms of the current madness, didn’t come out of nowhere. Writing at the magazine Chronicles, our friend John Zmirak has an apt metaphor — from personal finance — for the impact of Darwinism on culture:
Imagine your banker installed a new accounting system. It has all sorts of bells and whistles, syncs up with a handy app on your phone, and makes financial transactions much more transparent and convenient. There’s just one tiny glitch written into the code: However much you deposit or transfer, whatever your previous balance may be, the program always manages to multiply your funds by a single number: zero. And that’s how much you now have in savings. Nothing you or the banker can devise will ever correct this error — which may outweigh all the new system’s other advantages.
Imagine the banker is stubborn. He explains to you that he did extensive research to find the very best system. It comes highly recommended, with gold stars and industry awards. It’s the same system which other, more prestigious bankers are employing, and he feels professional pressure to install and maintain it. If he tries to go back to the old “obsolete” system which doesn’t delete all your money, he would put his own job in danger. Given these problems, he implies your complaints about this new progressive system seem to reflect a narrow, self-serving perspective.
How long would you listen to this banker’s arguments, before finding a new bank and contacting federal regulators?
Before you answer, remember that the Western world has been listening to Charles Darwin and his followers for more than 160 years. And Darwinist materialism exerts the same effect as that progressive banking software’s pertinacious zero: It negates all that came before in terms of meaning and morals.
Zeroing out all ultimate meaning — that’s exactly right. The results include the mayhem we see unfolding daily now in Los Angeles. As I’m writing this, some potential rioters have gathered (literally) across the street from our Seattle office, on their way to a “protest” at City Hall. These folks are not going to want their compatriots in LA to hog all the attention. That will be a story to follow.
We watch it on the news, but the madness has millennia-long roots. Zmirak cites my new book, Plato’s Revenge, to remind us that “Darwinist materialism” really only designates one modern phase in a longstanding debate, extending backward to antiquity: “A fascinating new book by my old friend David Klinghoffer, Plato’s Revenge, explains that Darwinism is simply the most rhetorically successful incarnation of the Materialist (or Atomist) worldview that goes back to Democritus, and which has emerged then receded repeatedly over many centuries.”
“Nothing Comes from Nothing”
That materialist view of reality is challenged at its source by the subject of the book, the thinking of biologist Richard Sternberg: “Nothing comes from nothing, science really does teach us. So what is the source of the vast, unthinkably elaborate information required to build even single-celled organisms, much less to innovate thousands of ever more rococo creatures, culminating with man? Klinghoffer’s book addresses such questions, popularizing the work of biologist and mathematician Richard Sternberg, who points to an immaterial, theist, Platonist source: the Logos.”
Read the rest at “Why We Must Deal with Darwinism.” Many thanks to John Zmirak, who discusses his article, Plato’s Revenge, and “our current insanity” with Eric Metaxas here: