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Zmirak: “Darwin Addles the Mind”

Photo credit: Asa Rodger, via Unsplash.

John Zmirak is a treasure as a journalist for The Stream. Of course, I can’t claim objectivity as he’s also a most eloquent fan of Discovery Institute and intelligent design:

I’d like to invite all my readers to follow me, and read the thousands of pages that led me to that conclusion. For the past three years, since solid arguments won me over to the truth of Intelligent Design, I’ve devoured scientific books and papers on the discipline. Most of them came from Discovery Institute, which I’ve come to see as one of the most important institutions in the West. That’s because it attacks the very taproot from which most of our contemporary madness flows, as if a vast, radioactive river poured out of Chernobyl all through Europe.

The taproot in question is Darwinism, which “addles the mind” of the Woke elite, the “Ivy-schooled primitives,” whom Zmirak compares with cargo cults:

Here’s where Darwinism comes in. It insists that the existence of the universe itself is a meaningless cosmic accident. No purpose or mind lies behind it. Likewise the emergence of life, which Darwinists believe by some secular miracle leapt fully-armored from the mud like Athena from Zeus’s head. Mere chance somehow engineered not just the baroque complexities of the humblest bacterium, but the vast, elaborate rococo of higher mammals, then primates. Natural selection can explain the survival of the fittest, but not their arrival. But somehow this combination of infinitesimally unlikely genetic mutations, and ruthless natural selection red in tooth and claw produced … human beings with brains perceptive and reliable enough to generate Modern Science.

Even though this Science tells us that we’re meaningless epiphenomena of random cosmic burps and vicious competition, somehow we also have dignity and rights, including the right to Equity. (Insert stolen premises from the biblical worldview here.) But the science that teaches us about that dignity and those rights, theology, should curl up and die once we’ve taken what we wanted, the gold fillings out of its teeth. The Woke folk will decide what “Equality,” “Equity” and “Justice” mean. And they’ll do so with all the arbitrary, random, irrational whimsy that the universe showed in mutating us into existence. They’ll enforce their capricious verdicts with all the ruthlessness of Natural Selection, throwing their failed competitors onto the fossil heap of history.

Does it all make sense to you now? It’s as if you’d convinced yourself that the 97% of DNA that chimps apparently share with humans entitled them to pilot our passenger aircraft … just 3% less often than we do. And then you sat back in Business Class and prayed to the Universe as a chimp tried to land in an airport built out of palm fronds. By Yale grads with degrees in Queer Theory.

Read the rest at The Stream, “Is the Woke Cult Just a Spastic Reaction to Darwinism?