Image: Voltaire reads the Orphan of China, by Anicet Charles Gabriel Lemonnier, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In two articles so far (hereandhere), I have been exploringhow justified thenew atheistsappropriation of Darwinian ideas is. This is the third and final post. As weve seen,Erasmus Darwin was a quintessential legatee of Enlightenment prepossessions. As its somewhat virtue-signaling name implies, the thinkers of the Enlightenment wished to distance themselves from anything that smacked of religious superstition. This led to the determination to declare a unilateral declaration of independence from the metaphysical sphere in favor of purely scientific modes of explanation. Yetin the face of the last century of scientific discoveries we have come to realize thathubristic expectations stemming fromthe Enlightenment dream of encompassing the whole of reality in some grand material theory of everything have been forced into a reluctant retreat.1

As a plethora of popular books, articles, and TV programs have recently intoned, our almost complete ignorance of the nature of ultimate reality has been laid bare by the work of Planck, Einstein, Heisenberg, Carlo Rovelli, and a host of microbiology specialists. Taken together, these scientific advances have united to challenge the Newtonian/Enlightenment paradigm. Scientists can no longer deliver certainty and predictability in the aftermath of such disconcerting advances in physics or in microbiology, which represent an unsuspected level of ultra-diminutive reality that has only revealed its bareexistencein the last seven decades or so thanks to the invention of the electron microscope in 1944. Indeterminacy and probabalism have emerged to subvert the Enlightenment conception of a predictable clockwork universe. We have been forced to acknowledge that the dimension of reality we know of is merely the observable, superficial part and that this rests on and is sustained by invisible trestles of substrate reality of which we have little inkling and to which our Cartesian notions of predictability and comprehensibility do not, alas, apply.

In short, the bright new dawn of Erasmus Darwins Enlightenment world has been replaced by the hauntingly surreal specter of what is now routinely referred to as quantum weirdness. Like it or not, Erasmuss simple and predictable world is no more, and we now find ourselves confronted by the truly vertigo-inducing predicament of being subject to an unpredictable cosmos we simply do not understand. It appears to me that the only intellectually defensible position to adopt in the light of such unanticipated scientific advances is to keep an open mind.The new atheists on the other hand continue to cling anachronistically to the same would-be omniscient paradigm of reality as that in which Erasmus Darwin reposed his faith. But whereas Erasmus had the extenuation of knowing nothing of the profounder reaches of reality into which modern scientific advances have given us at least some fleeting glimpses, the same excuse cannot be pleaded for the new atheists whose stance, either tacitly or wittingly, turns a blind eye to those hidden dimensions of existence.

Under the illusion of being the bright (their term) or enlightened ones, they appear, on the contrary, to have become the doctrinaire victims of a peculiarly modern form of obscurantism. It is as if they are doggedly clinging to an obsolete worldview which denies the relevance of much cutting-edge science. Their outlook has little in common with that of Charles Darwin whose later years were marked by what Peter Vorzimmer once termed frustrated confusion.2In that respect Darwin might be posthumously welcomed as an avatar of postmodern man in that he anticipated the decidedly non-omniscient spirit of our modern age. Such, needless to say, is not the mental universe inhabited by the new atheists whose philosophic stance seems more akin to that of Charless grandfather than to that of the grandson.

Continue reading here:
Darwin and the Loss of the Enlightenment Paradigm - Discovery Institute