The ID Report

The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.
--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Materialist thinking is to life as a microscope is to music. Regardless the precision, no amount of peering through the cold lens of materialism can hear the orchestrated mystery of life. Even in view of miraculous molecular machinery, the dead-matter orthodoxy of materialists has no category of thought for understanding the non-material essence of life, a fatal handicap for both thinker and thought. Like trying to weigh beauty or smell colors, a life science wed to the no-God-exists faith of matter-only materialism is a tool not fit for its object. How odd that the object would select such a tool.

Materialist thinkers, those for whom matter is all and all that matters, find their greatest challenge in the life sciences because life as they know it defies explanation by science as they define it. For materialists the terms "life" and "science" together create something of an oxymoron; the breadth of the latter being insufficient and contrary to the breath of the former. Life in all its dimensions eludes all categories of thought in the brains of Flatlanders for whom thought itself is an illusion of matter accidentally formed just so. But life, if it matters, must be more than matter. Otherwise, Nietzsche is right--life is nothing more than a subset of meaningless material agglomerations, just another "species of the dead" cluttering up a purposeless universe.

Not surprisingly, then, life does not fare well in the hands of materialists. For starters (all irony aside), materialists have absolutely no explanation for how life may have originated in the first place. Darwin's theory assumes an already living "starter" organism being in place to kick off the amazing unguided, purposeless specified complexity machine. As for the origin of that first lucky life Darwin left his faithful with a gaping hole to be filled, a hole plugged for now with an old and faded IOU, one of materialism's many "promise of the gaps" answers to a plethora of evidentiary problems. To date, materialist mavens have succeeded only in showing endless tolerance for strange, unprovable ideas about alien space travel, "multi-verses" and other theories for which there is absolutely no evidence.

"Chance, luck, coincidence, miracle." With these words hotshot materialist Richard Dawkins opens Chapter 6 of The Blind Watchmaker entitled, "Origins and Miracles." Dawkins, the atheist and Darwinist who never met an evolutionary impasse from which he couldn't imagine an escape, struggles to imagine a life-less origin of life short of a miracle. Others such as Francis Crick, materialist rock star and the co-discoverer of DNA's double helix, speculated (seriously) that life on earth may have been spread from intelligent life forms in other areas of the universe using space travel technology. Still others, like materialist physist Paul Davies, more realistic but no more entlightened, admit that known laws of physics are not sufficient for origin of life, and states: "Real progress with the mystery of biogenesis will be made, I believe, not through exotic chemistry, but from something conceptually new."

Conceptually new and materialistic? Don't hold your breath. But speaking of conception, once life is whispered into day materialists show themselves willing to reduce the clutter of the universe by removing the most unwanted when the most unable to object. Consider Margaret Sanger, atheist (as materialists must be), humanist (as most materialists choose to be), and founder of Planned Parenthood (despite which today's materialists came to be). Honored by atheists in 1957 as Humanist of the Year, Sanger was an ardent, self-confessed eugenicist, with a goal of turning birth control organizations into a tool for eugenics, including advocating mass sterilization of so-called defectives. Sanger called for the elimination of "human weeds" by extermination, for the segregation of "morons, misfits, and the maladjusted", and for the sterilization of the "genetically inferior races". Eliminating races without faces proved to be her lasting legacy, and today Planned Parenthood stands as the materialist's premiere cultural achievement against life, an organization more accurately called Un-planned, Un-parenthood.

Once out of the womb, life continues the day at risk in the hands of materialists. Consider the present tense version of past tense Sanger: Peter Singer. Also honored by atheists as 2004 Australian Humanist of the Year, Princeton University's professor of bioethic's views are so extreme that even some timid humanists reject his ideas as inhumane. Singer's published ideas include his opinion that the natural world has no intrinsic value, and that "killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living." Not a fetus, mind you, but a newborn baby. Inhumane? Yes. Extreme? No. Materialism's anchorless ethic knows no extremes. (What might "extreme" be compared to, and who says?) Peter Singer is simply consistent in applying his materialist philosophy of life to utilitarian ends. His applied philosophy, however, is rightly criticized as utilitarian for whom? When life holds no intrinsic value, of two "whoms" only the one with the greater power "to go on living" decides.

Because deciding who gets to "go on living" whether in the womb or out makes for a hard day, materialists of the past hit on a better way: stop entire lines of life before the womb. With the formation of the American Breeders Association in the early 20th century, the American eugenics movement was born (not to be confused with the German version of the time) and materialists set out to implement selective breeding of superior human life-stock. What could be more wonderful than the combination of modern Darwinian science blended with ancient human tendencies to eliminate the biological threat of "inferior types"? Using state fair displays and classroom fare essays, scientists sought to warn all that "some Americans are born to be a burden to the rest." Clearly the breeding of inferior persons must be controlled, and forced sterilizations seemed not only logical, but necessary. Such thinking helped make everything black and white.

Life also ends the day perilously with materialists. Euthanasia lurks like a tempting mistress to those who find the old, the ill, or the simply annoying an inconvenient burden. No doubt there exist situations in which "mercy" might be linked with "killing", but when life is emptied of any non-material special status, what reason is there not to substitute "convenience" for "mercy"? Indeed, Richard Dawkins recently linked the actions of Hitler, Mussilini, and others to materialist thinking, admitting in an interview, "No decent person wants to live in a society that works according to Darwinian laws . . . . A Darwinian society would be a fascist state." Indeed. Which is why Darwinism must be challenged; fascism is nothing less than Darwinism taken seriously.

True materialists have little patience for the hedging of atheistic ideologues behind the Hippocritic Oath of the Humanist Manifesto--that atheists will "affirm life rather than deny it." "Affirming life" can have no more meaning for materialists than "affirming wind" or "affirming fire". "Life" is just a term we use to describe one form of ultimately meaningless matter, and affirming it when it suits us or extinguishing it when convenient is only natural. Reality forces the baseless ideals of humanists to yield to the base ideas of humans when one life wants to live more than another, or when one life becomes inconvenient for another, or when one life simply believes itself to be superior to another. For materialists with ungrounded ethics, no amount of noble niceties can displace the ignoble vices of selfish desire inherent in human beings. Selfishness is an intellectual pursuit, not the stuff of mindless genes, and selfish desire in mindful people is behind each of materialisms bright ideas: abortion, eugenic racism, and euthanasia.

Life is special, but materialists have no explanation as to why. As materialist Paul Davies says: "To be sure, molecular biology has scored some dazzling successes, but scientists still can't quite put their finger on exactly what it is that separates a living organism from other types of physical objects." Exactly. And they never will. Because life is not another "type of physical object" any more than big band music is "another type" of still life. Until materialists decide to overcome their self-imposed deafness, they may see the band, but they will surely miss the dance.

Roddy Bullock, JD, BSME, is the Executive Director of the Intelligent Design Network of Ohio (www.idnetohio.com) and is the author of The Cave Painting: A Parable of Science, published by Access Research Network. Send comments to: roddybullock@idnetohio.com.

Copyright (C) 2007 Roddy M. Bullock, all rights reserved. Quotes and links permitted with attribution.

References:

Nietzsche quote: http://www.philosophersnet.com/quotations/keyword_search.php?keyword=life&num=10

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), p. 139.

Information on Margaret Sanger: http://www.christianworldviewnetwork.com/article.php/939/David_Noebel

Some quotes on Margaret Sanger from: George Grant, Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood (Franklin, TN: Adroit Press, 1992).

Some quotes on Margaret Sanger from: Edwin Black, War Against The Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign To Create A Master Race (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2004), 127.

Jenny Teichman, "The False Philosophy of Peter Singer", The New Criterion Online http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:l8mCuB1GcQQJ:newcriterion.com:81/archive/11/apr93/jenny.htm+peter+singer+humanist&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6&gl=us

On Peter Singer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer#Abortion.2C_euthanasia_and_infanticide

From Peter Singer's website (note logical inconsistencies due to moral relativism):

Q. What about a normal baby? Doesn't your theory of personhood imply that parents can kill a healthy, normal baby that they do not want, because it has no sense of the future?

A. Most parents, fortunately, love their children and would be horrified by the idea of killing it. And that's a good thing, of course. We want to encourage parents to care for their children, and help them to do so. Moreover, although a normal newborn baby has no sense of the future, and therefore is not a person, that does not mean that it is all right to kill such a baby. It only means that the wrong done to the infant is not as great as the wrong that would be done to a person who was killed. But in our society there are many couples who would be very happy to love and care for that child. Hence even if the parents do not want their own child, it would be wrong to kill it.

From the Dolan DNA Learning Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory: http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/list3.pl

Dawkins interview quote: Austrian newspaper, Die Presse (July 30, 2005).

Paul Davies quotes from Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle, The Search for the Origin of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).