Discoveroids: Darwinism and Your Private Life

A week ago we wrote Discoveroids Say Science Is Inherently Inhuman. The Discovery Institute had posted about the first half of a talk given by John West (whom we affectionately call “Westie”). Wikipedia describes him as: “a Senior Fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute (DI), and Associate Director and Vice President for Public Policy and Legal Affairs of its Center for Science and Culture (CSC), which serves as the main hub of the Intelligent design movement.”

We weren’t expecting it, but today at their creationist blog the Discoveroids have posted about the rest of Westie’s talk. Their new post is titled Listen: Darwinism and Private Life. Here are some excerpts, with bold font added by us for emphasis, and occasional Curmudgeonly interjections that look [like this]:

On a new episode of ID the Future [Ooooooooooooh! A Discoveroid podcast!], hear the second half of Discovery Institute’s John West’s talk given at the 2020 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith. Dr. West discusses how Darwinism has corroded Western culture [Egad!], including the most private aspects of our lives. [Gasp!] Download the podcast or listen to it here. [Link omitted.]

You’ve probably noticed that your private life is corroded. Now you know why. Darwinism has done this to you! Then they say:

West examines the morally poisoning effects of Darwinism on marriage, sexual ethics, and religion, such that virtually anything can be defended as OK, and no particular culture’s ethic is to be preferred over another.

Darwinism is the most horrible thing that could happen to you, so it must be avoided as strenuously as possible. But wait — there’s even more to Westie’s catalog of Darwinist horrors. The Discoveroids tell us:

Humankind’s spiritual purpose has likewise been eroded.

Aha! That explains why you have no spiritual purpose

There’s only a little bit more to the Discoveroids’ post. It ends with this:

Yet West closes with hope [Ooooooooooooh! There’s hope!]: science in our generation is discovering more and more signs of intelligent design and purpose in nature [How wonderful!], and young researchers are learning that materialism shouldn’t be the foregone conclusion of contemporary science.

Science doesn’t have to be materialistic. With the great work the Discoveroids are doing, spiritualism will be the future of science. Isn’t that wonderful?

Copyright © 2020. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.


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20 responses to “Discoveroids: Darwinism and Your Private Life

  1. Michael Fugate

    Can we send the DI back to the early 19th c? Wouldn’t it be fun? Who would they blame for all the sin without Darwin? Hume? Voltaire?

  2. If science has corrupted western culture, what about the rest of the world? Is Russia part of western culture? Are Saudi Arabia, China, Central Asia, Korea, better off?

  3. @Michael Fugate
    Voltaire was proud of his argument from from the watch to the existence of God.

  4. Theodore Lawry

    Discoveroids were saying the same stuff back in 1998 in their Wedge document. They also had a road map to destroy materialism with their 5 and 20 year plans. Total failure! But hey, they get to pay themselves salaries of up to $250K/year with their dumb donor’s dough! God helps those who help themselves, especially to large sums of other people’s money.

  5. chris schilling

    Erode again
    Corrode again
    A simpering, whimpering toad again
    Bewitched, bothered and be-Darwined, am I

    I’ve sinned a lot
    Original, I’ve got
    Lucifer, save me a spot
    Bewitched, bothered and be-Darwined, am I

  6. Michael Fugate

    West seems to have his knickers in a twist over the Kinsey Reports and a more recent book Sex at Dawn. Humans would never have considered any type of sex or marriage other than heterosexual monogamy without Darwin’s influence. Has he read the Old Testament?

  7. Scientist

    “West examines the morally poisoning effects of Darwinism on marriage, sexual ethics, and religion, such that virtually anything can be defended as OK, and no particular culture’s ethic is to be preferred over another.” No, I think the reverse has more merit. Just look at all those “christian” preachers who’ve committed adultery, had gay affairs, or been caught with an underaged partner. Darwin had nothing to do with it.

  8. It IS curious that fundamentalist creationists focus on Darwin’s work when really all they HAVE to be is anti science in general. After all, so many of the physical and historical sciences have to be completely and totally flawed beyond comprehension for the creation/inteligunt dezine and/or 6,000 year old magical story to be plausible. Why Darwin ? Is it fear of being somehow descended from earlier hominids ? Or is it because it seems easy to attack for a discovered or a creationoid as a body of science that extends into biology, geology, paleontology and on and on ? Does this inability to comprehend what creationists are trying to refute without evidence speak to a level of education, religious background or intelligence in the creationist ?
    Just wondering. Why Darwin ??

  9. @och will
    When Darwin wrote Origin of Species, he made a point of not dwelling on the history of humans. Yet the immediate reaction was Man came from monkeys.
    I think that that is The Problem. It is that because it is so obvious.

  10. Dave Luckett

    Why Darwin? Indeed, och will. West’s dispute would seem to be more with Jefferson or Mill or Locke or Voltaire than Darwin. Or rather, with a strawman effigy of their actual thought, and the same for “no particular culture is to be preferred over another”. Preferred for what? Cookery? Civil order? Architecture? Family values?

    That principle is sometimes said to be one of the tenets of postmodernism, but I doubt that even Derrida would have said that he would not prefer the culture of the mid-twentieth century French intellectual left to that of, say, The Empire of Mali. Or the antebellum South, for that matter. I will do even Derrida the courtesy of believing that he would have noticed slavery. As, of course, did Darwin – and that both of them hated it.

  11. Any actual evidence of these dire effects? Last I heard, there was no evidence that secular (and thus more likely to be Evolution-accepting) people had higher rates of social ills than religious (and thus more likely to be Evolution-rejecting). This all seems like wild and unsubstantiated speculation.

  12. @TomS: indeed, “I ain’t no kin of no monkey” is the foundation of all creacrap. The funny aspect is that thus creacrappers commit the sin of vanity.

    @DaveL: precious few “darwinists” are postmodernists. Derrida btw didn’t consider himself a postmodernist either. Not that any creacrapper will care.
    Ironically the creacrap movement owes a few things to postmodernism. From Wikipedia:

    “Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or a mode of discourse that rejects the possibility of reliable knowledge, denies the existence of a universal, stable reality, and frames aesthetics and beauty as arbitrary and subjective. It can be described as a reaction against scientific attempts to explain reality with objective certainty by recognizing that reality is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own personal circumstances.”

    It’s especially the second part that helps to understand creacrap. Ol’Hambo’s Biblical lens is one of the clearest example. The IDiots from Seattle also excel at “constructing reality as their minds try to understand their own personal circumstances”. Westie’s blabla is a fine example.

  13. @Hrafn: “This all seems like wild and unsubstantiated speculation.”
    What did you expect? All IDiocy is nothing but wild and unsubstantiated speculation. That’s what you get when you take a postmodern approach to the natural sciences (and I’d add all the other sciences too).

    Right now I’m reading Bruno Latour’s

    Like the postmodernists he rejects the artificial and limiting distinction between culture and nature. His takedown of the postmodernist “it’s all nothing but stories and they all have equal value because you can’t figure out which one is correct (do you recognize Teach the Controversy?)” is highly amusing. In some parts I think the book too dry and abstract.
    Recently I read that some or many scientists (no idea who) criticized Latour for being anti-scientific. That’s something I have to look up yet, but if it’s correct (I’m not ready to accept that yet) I think they’ve misunderstood Latour. Indeed in the 21st Century he sides with science against for instance the antivaccination loonies.

  14. @FrankB
    “Animals of the MONKEY class are furnished with hands instead of paws; their ears, eyes, eye-lids, lips, and breasts, are like those of mankind; their internal conformation also bears some distant likeness; and the whole offers a picture that may mortify the pride of such as make their persons the principal objects of their admiration.”
    John Wesley
    A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation; Or A Compendium of Natural Philosophy

  15. docbill1351

    @chris shilling really knows how to put the SIN into Sinatra!

  16. @Dave
    I agree with your paragraph 1 . I think the “I ain’t no monkey” appeals to the basest of human instincts including fear of those who are different, territorial
    and tribal clannishness and other.
    Thank you for the postmodernism reference. It helped.
    I am out of my depth with regards to your second paragraph entirely other than that I now have the basest of understandings of the term postmodernism and how it applies to creationists. I’ll just say it seems the most infantile way one could examine the world. It would seem pretty silly. Which actually explains a lot about West’s “paper”, which is really just an example of fear of those who are different, fear of change, fear of death, tribal and territorial instincts. Little to no actual logic involved. Or science.

  17. @TomS. I agree with you sir.
    @doc Sinatra ?? who knew !

  18. Does Westie or any discoveroid know what the “purpose” of SARS-CoV-2 is? If yes, I think there’s an opening on the dwindling Covid-19 Task Force, led by the VP preacher man or is it Jarad?

  19. @abeastwood
    What is the purpose of The Eye?
    Are we right in saying that it depends on what kind of animal? If it is a carnivore, then the eye is part of the way of finding prey. If it is a herbivore, then it is part of the way of escaping predation.
    But as far as this novel coronavirus, it seems to be complicated. From the point of view of the virus, killing people is not to its advantage. If it were smart, it would better for it to be asymptomatic. That way it could happily live on and propagate throughout humanity and never have to contend with all of the poisons that people would throw at it. What is the purpose of causing disease – it is a lose-lose situation.

  20. Michael Fugate

    I thought the eye was created so humans would have something to close during prayer, no?