Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists

by Benjamin Wiker

Book Overview

Ben Wiker traces the story that explains our present perplexing moral culture, showing how it was Darwinism that provided the ancient teaching of Epicurus with the seemingly modern and scientific basis that captured twentieth-century minds.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0830826661
• ISBN13: 9780830826667
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Length: 329 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

This is it, Baby!!

I've read many books that have made similar points as this one, but the difference is that this book IS the point. Benjamin Wiker clearly and logically boils the culture wars down to the two primary foes: Christianity and Materialism. Once the reader understands this perspective, the reasons why we have experienced such disastrous upheavals in our culture become crystal clear. For several hundred years, the Materialists thought that they had all of science to back them up. This is why the very word "science" has become synonymous with Materialism. But more recently, science is beginning to undue some of the most cherished and foundational assumptions of Materialist philosophy. For example: Materialists thought science had proved the universe was eternal and infinite. (...wrong). Materialists thought science had proved that atoms and cells were very simplistic building blocks of life. (...wrong). Materialists thought science would very soon discover that the universe was teeming with life. (...wrong). Materialists thought science would very soon discover an over abundant fossil record to fill in the gaps between species. (...wrong). Materialists thought science would very soon discover a fossil record to explain away the Cambrian explosion of life. (...wrong). The list goes on, but my point is this: Science, the very tool which Materialists claimed exclusively for themselves, and with which they bludgeoned Christianity for centuries, has now turned against them. It seems like almost every day, the closer we look in our microscopes, and the further we look in our telescopes, the more evidence we find showing that the Materialists philosophical world view is not accurate. But these guys aren't going to give up without a fight. You don't think they're going to let a little thing like scientific discovery get in the way of their agenda, do you? To give you an idea of the ridiculous lengths these guys will go to in order to avoid the truth, I'd like to relate the following true story: You all remember Jane Goodall, the woman who discovered and filmed chimps in the jungle sticking sticks into an ant hill. This, as we were all told in grade school and on PBS, was "proof" that chimps were almost exactly like humans because, after all, they were making tools. Wow. Well, not too long ago, it was discovered that crows (who have bird brains and no thumbs) could actually fashion fish hooks out of metal wire and catch worms in a long, thin beaker. In one fell swoop, the crows out did the chimps, making even more sophisticated tools, and utterly destroyed Jane Goodall's old assumptions. So what was the Materialists' reaction to this new, earth shattering, scientific discovery? They gave Jane Goodall yet another award for her outdated work (...I kid you not). Take heart, these guys can't keep up this charade forever.

Epicurus set in motion an intellectual movement that Charles Darwin brought to completion

According to John Maynard Keynes, great intellectual and cultural movements frequently trace back to thinkers who worked in obscurity and are now long forgotten. But some thinkers are both famous and influential. This book focuses on two such thinkers, one largely forgotten, the other a household name. The largely forgotten thinker is Epicurus. The household name is Charles Darwin. The two are related: Epicurus set in motion an intellectual movement that Charles Darwin brought to completion. Believers in God often scratch their heads about Western culture's continual moral decline. What was unacceptable just a few years ago is today's alternative lifestyle and tomorrow's preferred lifestyle. Abortion, euthanasia, divorce, sexual preferences and drug abuse are just a few of the moral issues that have undergone massive changes in public perception. Too often believers in God take a reactive approach to the culture war and throw their energy into combating what they perceive as the most compelling evil of the moment. In the back of their minds, however, is an awareness that something deeper and more fundamental is amiss and that the evils they are combating are but symptoms of a more underlying and pervasive evil. Benjamin Wiker has done a brilliant job of tracing the roots of that evil in this book. Insofar as traditional theists sense an underlying cause for the moral decline of Western culture, all roads lead to Epicurus and the train of thought he set in motion. For Epicurus, pleasure consisted in freedom from disturbance. For Epicurus, to allow that God might intervene in the natural world and to take seriously the possibility of an afterlife, (with the moral accountability and judgment it implies) were incompatible with the good life. To short circuit belief in such a God, Epicurus proposed a mechanistic understanding of nature. Accordingly, Epicurus conceived of nature as an aggregate of material entities operating by blind, unbroken, natural laws. God or the gods might exist, but they took no interest in the world, played no role in human affairs and indeed could play no role in human affairs, since a material world operating according to mechanistic principles leaves no place for meaningful divine action. Moreover, since humans belonged to nature and consisted entirely of material entities, death amounted to a dissolution of a material state and thus precluded any sort of ongoing conscious existence. Epicurus' most prominent disciple is without question Charles Darwin. Darwinism is not only the most recent incarnation of Epicurean philosophy but also the most potent formulation of that philosophy to date. Darwinism's significance consists in the purported scientific justification it brings to the Epicurean philosophy. But the science itself is weak and ad hoc. As Wiker shows, Darwinism is essentially a moral and metaphysical crusade that fuels our contemporary moral debates. Further, Wiker argues that the motivation be

Western Civilization in a Nutshell

Anyone seeking to understand the moral plight of the Western world should drop everything and read this book. The author presents a sweeping history of materialist moral philosophy from ancient Greece to current day. For Wiker, Western morality is split crisply and catastrophically into two utterly irreconcilable camps: the Epicurean, in which man is the measure of all things, and the Judeo-Christian, in which God is the measure of all things. Epicurus believed the goal of man is to reduce his personal pain and discomfort. Starting with this conclusion, he backed into a cosmology to support it, one which excludes the possibilities of (a) an afterlife and (b) divine interference with human affairs, both of which constrain our actions and leave us in a continual state of apprehension. It follows in the Epicurean view that nature is random and therefore without purpose. If nature is random, then there are no values or behaviors we humans are required to embrace. This conception of morality and its supporting cosmology, dormant from roughly Constantine to the Renaissance, revived when scientific discovery seemed to support Epicurean cosmic theories. It gained momentum as science advanced and eventually overwhelmed Judeo-Christian cosmology and morality, at least in terms of our social practices and laws. Wiker does an absolutely magnificent job of critiquing a host of enormously influential materialist figures including Newton, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Darwin himself, elegantly and convincingly tracing their ideas back to their Epicurean sources, and revealing the true essence and implications of their ideas. Unfortunately, in a world where one person's idea of right and wrong is as good as another's, where the only true definition of right and wrong is how it makes us feel, abuses, miseries, and horrors are bound to ensue. As Wiker reviews the thought of such modern day monsters as Ernst Haeckel, Margaret Sanger, and Alfred Kinsey, we begin to get an idea of how awful the materialist's reality can be. And yet, Wiker points out that although scientific advances in our day undermine the random view of nature and strongly support a designer universe, the materialist habit of thought is so deeply ingrained that we cling to relativistic moral positions required by random nature anyway. There are so many fascinating ideas in this book it is almost impossible to summarize. But, I think it can help anyone put his/her ideas in perspective and offer some refreshingly sensible insight about our culture, which seems so irreconcilably split over issues like abortion, euthanasia, recreational drugs, etc., etc.

From Epicurus to Darwin

Although I have written six books about Darwinism, I learned much from Ben Wiker's book. Wiker tells the engrossing story of the centuries-long contest between Epicureanism and Christianity, with the Epicureans finally winning their long battle to impose their philosophy on science and the cultural definition of "knowledge." Exploiting the authority of science, Epicureans were able to seize the high moral and intellectual ground for agosticism and materialism,thereby demoting Christianity from its prior intellectual prominence into the marginalized status it now occupies in the intellectual and university world. The Epicurean objective always has been and remains to achieve a moral objective by effectively banning the supernatural from reality, and with it any fear of judgment after death. Attaining this objective prepared the way for all the events we associate with the 1960s. Ben Wiker's intellectual history tells us far more than any scientific book could of the purpose and effect of the long campaign to establish matrialism as the governing philosophy of the world. I highly recommend it. by Phillip Johnson (author of "Darwin on Trial)< Berkeley, CA USA

All seriousness aside...

I would like to share my personal knowledge of the author. I have had the pleasure of studying under Dr. Wiker's guidance in three classes at my college. He is intelligent and humourous. He can take a complex subject, break it down, and help you come to understand it and appreciate it, similar to that great writer, C.S. Lewis. I have read a number of other articles that he has written on various subjects, and I have yet to be disappointed by his ability to convey an important and valid idea with simplicity and and a sense of the practical applications of the theoretical. If you have any interest in philosophy, or evolution, or theology: this is a book that is sure to offer a new perspective on all three. You will enjoy it, and come away with new knowledge and new thoughts that you might need to mull over, and consider, before you come back for a second read.