The Abolition of Man? How Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science
by John G West, Ph.D., Heritage Lecture: "An age of science is necessarily an age of materialism," wrote Hugh Elliot early in the last century. "Ours is a scientific age, and it may be said with truth that we are all materialists now." One does not have to look far to discover the continued accuracy of Elliot's assessment. Scientific materialism--the claim that everything in the universe can be fully explained by science as the products of unintelligent matter and energy--has become the operating assumption for much of American politics and culture. We are repeatedly told today that our behaviors, our emotions, even our moral and religious longings are reducible to some combination of physical processes interacting with our environment.In 1943, British writer C. S. Lewis wrote prophetically about the dangers of scientific materialism in a small, penetrating volume titled The Abolition of Man. There Lewis warned that "if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite...in the person of his dehumanized Conditioners." My book Darwin Day in America explores the impact on American politics and culture of the make realistic abuse of science Lewis warned about so many years ago. Contrary to its title, the book is not just about Darwin. It is about how modern science--a very good thing--has been misappropriated by scientific elitists who want to offer a materialistic explanation of every part of human culture . . . [Read More]
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