Monthly Archives: March 2013

Historical Christ, New Testament Reliability

Did the New Testament Writers Merely Copy Pagan Myths?

2 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

If it could be conclusively shown that the gospel accounts of Jesus were literally cribbed from pre-existing pagan sources, it would be quite damaging to the credibility of the gospels. As I was re-reading Geisler and Turek’s I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist the other day, I was impressed by their succinct treatment of this issue, so I will share it with you.

First they summarize the skeptic’s charge:

This theory asserts that the New Testament is not historical because New Testament writers merely copied pagan resurrection myths. Skeptics are quick to cite supposed resurrections of mythical characters like Marduk, Adonis, and Osiris. Is the New Testament just another myth? Could this theory be true?

They answer this question in the negative and start to present several reasons why this skeptical theory fails:

First, as we have seen, the New Testament is anything but mythological. Unlike pagan myths, the New Testament is loaded with eyewitness evidence and real historical figures, and it is corroborated by several outside sources. . . .

Second, the pagan-myth theory can’t explain the empty tomb, the martyrdom of the eyewitnesses, or the testimony of the non-Christian writings. . . .

Third, ancient non-Christian sources knew that the New Testament writers were not offering mythical accounts. As Craig Blomberg observes, “The earliest Jewish and pagan critics of the resurrection understood the Gospel writers to be making historical claims, not writing myth or legend. They merely disputed the plausibility of those claims.”

Fourth, no Greek or Roman myth spoke of the literal incarnation of a monotheistic God into human form (cf. John 1:1-3, 14), by way of a literal virgin birth (Matt. 1:18-25), followed by his death and physical resurrection. The Greeks were polytheists, not monotheists as New Testament Christians were. Moreover, the Greeks believed in reincarnation into a different mortal body; New Testament Christians believed in resurrection into the same physical body made immortal (cf. Luke 24:37; John 9:2; Heb. 9:27).

Fifth, the first real parallel of a dying and rising god does not appear until A.D. 150, more than 100 years after the origin of Christianity. So if there was any influence of one on the other, it was the influence of the historical event of the New Testament on mythology, not the reverse.

Were there any accounts of a god surviving death that existed before Jesus lived? According to Geisler and Turek,

the only known account of a god surviving death that predates Christianity is the Egyptian cult god Osiris. In this myth, Osiris is cut into fourteen pieces, scattered around Egypt, then reassembled and brought back to life by the goddess Isis. However, Osiris does not actually come back to physical life but becomes a member of a shadowy underworld. As Habermas and Licona observe, “This is far different than Jesus’ resurrection account where he was the gloriously risen Prince of life who was seen by others on earth before his ascension into heaven.”

But what if there were myths about dying and rising gods that existed before Jesus lived? What follows from that?

Finally, even if there are myths about dying and rising gods prior to Christianity, that doesn’t mean the New Testament writers copied from them. The fictional TV show Star Trek preceded the U.S. Space Shuttle program, but that doesn’t mean that newspaper reports of space shuttle missions are influenced by Star Trek episodes!

One has to look at the evidence of each account to see whether it is historical or mythical. There’s no eyewitness or corroborating evidence for the historicity of Osiris’s resurrection or for that of any other pagan god. No one believes they are true historical figures. But, as we have seen, there is strong eyewitness and corroborating evidence to support the historicity of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This final point is important. Numerous skeptics have come on my blog and pointed to mythical stories from antiquity and made the following argument: “We know that ancient people wrote mythical stories, so the stories about Jesus must also be mythical.” But how does that follow?

Numerous people today make up stories, and numerous people have made up stories throughout human history! But, on the other hand, the opposite is also true. Numerous people today give accurate accounts, and numerous people have given accurate accounts throughout human history. The only way to distinguish an accurate account from a fictional account is to look at the evidence for each account.

When we look at the New Testament accounts of Jesus’s life, we find more than enough evidence that they were attempting to accurately record real historical events. The evidence that the New Testament accounts are purely fictional just isn’t there.

Philosophy

Why Do Science and Reason Transcend the Material World?

Leave a comment

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

We live in an era where science and reason are highly valued, but at the same time many intellectuals doubt the existence of anything but matter and energy. Philosophers, such as Thomas Nagel, have pointed out the  built-in contradiction of the worldview that says only physical matter exists, and that reason and science tell us that.

Thomist Joseph Owens provides a useful explanation, from metaphysics, of why science and reason require more than the existence of matter. Owens first recalls the amazing progress of human science and reason:

The freedom from limitations to a particular space and a particular time makes possible the astounding progress of human knowledge through the arts and sciences. Knowledge gained in one piece of research or one experiment is communicated to thousands of other minds and is handed down to succeeding generations. The scientific reasoning of one man becomes the common property of all who pursue the science from one generation to the other. The enormous body of knowledge is not lost with the death of the individuals who so far have been bringing it into being. It is not limited to the conditions of individuation and change, conditions inevitably imposed by matter.

What Owens is saying is that matter is necessarily characterized by individuation and change. If this is the case, then how are the universal and fixed truths of science and reason discovered or communicated?

Scientific progress, accordingly, requires that the intellects through which it takes place function in a way that is independent of the strictly material principle in the knowing subjects. Even the very process of reasoning itself could not take place without this independence from material limitation.

In deductive reasoning, the argument features a major term, minor term, and middle term. How does this process work if everything is material?

The universality that allows the major notion to include the middle one, and the middle to include the minor, would be impossible for any operation that was determined to individual conditions. The inclusion of one term in the other, moreover, is an inclusion in being; for instance “A man is an animal.” If the object “animal” were individuated, it could not share the one being any more than Khrushchev could be Kennedy.

Likewise, in passing from one judgment to another in the process of reasoning, the notions have to remain the same. If they were liable to change, demonstration would be impossible. What was established in the predicate of one judgment could be changed when carried over to function as subject in the next combination.

But it’s not just deductive reasoning that requires the transcendence of the material. Owens claims something much more basic is at stake: communication itself.

Communication in speech, further, is based upon this same immunity to change and transcendence of individuating dimensions in the intelligible objects. Culture and civilization, accordingly, provide ample evidence of the human intellects functioning in ways that break through the limitations of matter.

If you are a materialist, someone who believes that all that exists is matter, then your worldview completely undercuts science, reason, and even communication. You need to add some beef to your ontologically thin soup.

Philosophy

Does Everyone Exercise Faith?

12 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

If you claim to know anything that you haven’t personally experienced or seen with your own eyes, then you exercise faith. Faith, a concept badly misunderstood by so many people, is the primary way that we know most things about the world. If you were to say, “I will stop claiming to know anything by faith,” then you would, in effect, know very little.

Thomistic philosopher Joseph Owens, in his book An Elementary Christian Metaphysics, explains how faith actually works:

If the mechanic who services your car tells you the valves need grinding, you assent to that judgment even though you yourself know nothing about the needs of valves. In this case there is nothing in the object to move you to assent, even to the probable assent of opinion. The assent is all the more caused by your will.

When you agree with the mechanic that your valves need grinding, what is going on? Why would you assent to something that you personally have not observed?

You give the assent, because you have concluded that the mechanic understands valves and wants you to know the truth about the ones in your car and that it is to your own advantage to accept his information. Assenting to a judgment on the word of another is called faith or belief. It requires acquaintance with the reliability of your informant, that is, that he has the requisite knowledge and that he is not intending to deceive you. Both these points are conclusions of your own. In accepting his capacity to give the information reliably, you accept his authority.

Is it crazy to trust the authority of another person?

In human authority there is always the possibility that your informant is mistaken or that he is deceiving you. Faith in human authority, therefore, can never be absolute. There is always the possibility that a judgment accepted solely on human authority may be wrong. In events immediately perceived by the informants, the reliability can be very high. It is on such testimony of witnesses that the gravest issues are decided in the lawcourts.

Again we ask, “Can we live without faith?” No. Living without faith would make life unlivable. We rely on other people’s authority all the time. It is the truly naive and foolish person who claims that everything they know they have experienced themselves or reasoned to themselves. Owens reminds us:

In everyday life, however, much of one’s information comes from authority. The news that you get from the daily telecast and daily paper, your knowledge of countries and cities that you have not visited, your knowledge of history, all that you know from reading of books, constitute a sizable portion of your cognition. Yet it is all accepted on faith. Faith, accordingly, is an important means of widening human cognition.

Evolution

Was Darwinism Connected to National Socialism and Marxism? Part 3

13 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

In parts 1 and 2, we looked at philosopher David Stove’s claims that Darwinism was coopted by both the National Socialists and the Marxists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, both of whom brought mass murder to a scale the world had never before seen. But what of these ties? Could they not be merely accidental? In his book Darwinian Fairytales, Stove answers those questions:

It will perhaps be said, in defense of Darwinism, that many and enormous crimes have been committed in the name of every large and influential body of ideas bearing on human life. Whether that is true or not, I do not know. But even if it is, there are great and obvious differences, among such bodies of ideas, in how easily and naturally they amount to incitement to the commission of crimes.

Confucianism, for example, or Buddhism does not appear to incite their adherents to crime easily or often. National Socialism, by contrast, and likewise Marxism, do easily and naturally hold out such incitements to their adherents, and indeed (as is obvious) owe a good deal of their attractiveness to this very fact. It is impossible to deny that, in this respect, Darwinism has a closer affinity with National Socialism or Marxism than with Confucianism or Buddhism.

But why does Darwinism have a connection at all with Marxism and National Socialism? Stove explains:

Darwin told the world that a “struggle for life,” a “struggle for existence,” a “battle for life”” is always going on among the members of every species. Although this proposition was at the time novel and surprising, an immense number of people accepted it. Now, will any rational person believe that accepting this proposition would have no effect, or only randomly varying effects, on people’s attitudes towards their own conspecifics? No.

Will any rational person believe that accepting this novel proposition would tend to improve people’s attitudes to their conspecifics – for example, would tend to make them less selfish, or less inclined to domineering behavior, than they had been before they accepted it? No.

Quite the contrary, it is perfectly obvious that accepting Darwin’s theory of a universal struggle for life must tend to strengthen whatever tendencies people had beforehand to selfishness and domineering behavior towards their fellow humans. Hence it must tend to make them worse than they were before, and more likely to commit crimes: especially crimes of rapacity, or of cruelty, or of dominance for the sake of dominance. These considerations are exceedingly obvious.

But Darwin defenders routinely express frustration at Darwinism being tied to these kinds of crimes. Do they have a leg to stand on?

There was therefore never any excuse for the indignation and surprise which Darwinians and neo-Darwinians have nearly always expressed, whenever their theory is accused of being a morally subversive one. For the same reason there is, and always was, every justification for the people, beginning with Darwin’s contemporaries, who made that accusation against the theory.

Darwin had done his best . . . to separate the theory of evolution from the matrix of murderous ideas in which previously it had always been set. But in fact, since the theory says what it does, there is a limit, and a limit easily reached, to how much can be done in the way of such a separation. The Darwinian theory of evolution is an incitement to crime: that is simply a fact.

Evolution

Was Darwinism Connected to National Socialism and Marxism? Part 2

14 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

In part 1 philosopher David Stove reminded us what countless other historians have already noted, that the National Socialists drew justification of their policies from Darwin’s ideas. Stove then reminded us that Marxist writers also drew inspiration from Darwin. Not content to merely state the connection, Stove presents evidence:

The reader can easily verify this statement, by opening any Marxist book, pamphlet, or newspaper of that period, whether written by an American Marxist, a Russian one, a German, or whatever. For example, an American book which borrowed its title from Darwin and Wallace, The Struggle for Existence, and which, despite being a very large volume, had reached its seventh edition by about 1904: what sort of book would that have been? Hardly anyone nowadays could guess the right answer to this question. But to anyone familiar with the Marxist literature of this period, the right answer will he obvious: it was a manual of Marxism.

Stove continues:

In Russia in the 1880s, numerous small groups contended with one another for the leadership of the entire communist-terrorist movement. Sergius Stepniak was the leader of one of these groups, and he published a collection of his pamphlets, Nihilism As It Is, in about 1893. In this book he rests his own group’s claim to the leadership on its having arisen, from other “incomplete organizations, by virtue of natural selection” under Czarist pressure.

Of course Stepniak and W. T. Mills (who wrote The Struggle for Existence) are authors now forgotten. But not all the authors who combined Marxism with Darwinism have been forgotten. Jack London is one who has not. Another is Upton Sinclair, whose powerful Marxist novel The Jungle (1906) portrays life in Chicago under capitalism as life in a Darwinian Jungle.

Yet another is August Behel, the leader of Marxist Social Democracy in Germany in the late nineteenth century. His main book – and a good book too – was Woman Under Socialism (1879), which is a perfect example of the blending of Darwinism with Marxism, especially in Chapter V of its longest section, “Woman in the present.” The 1904 English translation of this book, I may add, was from the thirty-third German edition: a fact which will indicate how far from being idiosyncratic was Bebel’s combination of Darwinism with Marxism.

So Darwinism, in addition to National Socialism, was also tied to Marxism in the late 19th and early 20th century. In part 3, we will look at the implications for Darwin’s theory. Why has it been put to use by the worst mass murderers of the 20th century? Stay tuned.

Evolution

Was Darwinism Connected to National Socialism and Marxism? Part 1

4 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

National Socialism (Nazism) and Marxism are, for the most part, dead and buried as movements. However, it is incumbent on us, the caretakers of the cemetery, to remind everyone of the past so that it won’t be repeated.

Perhaps you believe that we are just beating a dead horse by mentioning the profound effects that Darwin’s ideas had on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I disagree. Darwin’s ideas, although certainly blunted and modified over time, are still an important foundation for our culture.

The theme of “survival of the fittest” can be found everywhere in the entertainment industry. Just take a look at the recent TV series Revolution. This post-apocalyptic narrative of life on earth after electrical power ceases repeatedly trades on the idea that civilized men revert back to savages when food and shelter become more scarce. As a culture, we continue to be fascinated by Darwin’s ideas.

So what movements found allies in Darwin in the beginning of the 20th century? Philosopher David Stove, in his book Darwinian Fairytales, first briefly recounts the connection between Darwin’s ideas and National Socialism.

It is less well known, but still is fairly well known, that Adolf Hitler found or thought he found an authorization for his policies in the Darwinian theory of evolution. He said, for example, that “if we did not respect the law of nature, imposing our will by the right of the stronger, a day would come when the wild animals would again devour us-then the insects would eat the wild animals, and finally nothing would exist except the microbes. By means of the struggle the elites are continually renewed. The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle by allowing the survival of the fittest. Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature.”

Hitler justified his policies because he was merely acting on the “law of selection” that demands that only the fit survive. Stove continues with a description of the link between Darwinism and Marxism.

What deserves to be well known, but has in fact been virtually forgotten, is this: that if Darwinism once furnished a justification, retrospective or prospective, for the crimes of . . . National Socialists, it performed the same office to an even greater extent, between about 1880 and 192o, for the crimes, already committed or still to be committed, of Marxists.

It is in fact scarcely possible to exaggerate the extent to which Marxist thought in this period incorporated Darwinism as an essential component. Marxists do not believe, of course, that there will be any struggle for life among human beings in the future classless society. But it was that Darwinian conception which Marxists at this time adopted as their description of human life under capitalism.

In part 2, we will look at some examples of period Marxist literature which lean on Darwin’s ideas for their justification.

Jesus as God, Jesus Christ

Was Jesus Just a Good Moral Teacher?

4 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

There are people who take the Gospels to be more or less reporting history, but who claim, nevertheless, that Jesus was merely a good man, and nothing more. I am not here talking about skeptics who question virtually everything in the Gospels, who believe that almost all of the material is legendary.

The people I am referring to generally have a cursory knowledge of the New Testament and are turned off by traditional religion. They are fans of Jesus in a shallow way. If you stopped them on the street and asked them what they thought about Jesus, they would say he was a great teacher of peace and love, an exemplary moral figure. Jesus is still popular, even nowadays.

What is frustrating about these shallow-Jesus-fans is that they have completely missed what Jesus stood for. The only group that would be more frustrating would be the Jesus-is-a-great-carpenter club. C. S. Lewis gives voice to this frustration in Mere Christianity by pointing out the absurdity of the shallow-Jesus-fans:

Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world Who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.

Norm Geisler and Frank Turek, in I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, ask us to imagine our neighbor making these kinds of claims:

“I am the first and the last—the self-existing One. Do you need your sins forgiven? I can do it. Do you want to know how to live? I am the light of the world—whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. Do you want to know whom you can trust? All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Do you have any worries or requests? Pray in my name. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. Do you need access to God the Father? No one comes to the Father except through me. The Father and I are one.”

What would you think about your neighbor if he seriously said those things? You certainly wouldn’t say, “Gee, I think he’s a great moral teacher!” No, you’d say this guy is nuts, because he’s definitely claiming to be God.

Shallow-Jesus-fans, don’t be ridiculous. Jesus did not come to teach moral platitudes in a long line of religious moralizers. No, he came to demand your allegiance to him, for he is King.

Jesus Christ, Sin

Was Jesus Sinless and Does It Matter?

1 Comment

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Yes, he was, and this is an essential doctrine of Christianity. I was quite surprised several years ago when I was talking to a friend of mine at work about Jesus, and he asserted that obviously Jesus was not sinless because he became angry.

My response to him was that anger, in and of itself, is not sinful. It is good to be angry about sin. There is such a thing as righteous anger.

But what disturbed me even more was his further claim that Jesus’s sinlessness, as far as he knew, was not taught in Scripture, and that it really didn’t matter anyway. Is that the case? Does it matter whether or not Jesus was declared sinless in Scripture?

First, we need to establish whether the Bible claims that Jesus was sinless. That is pretty easy to do, as there are several passages:

  • In 1 Pet 1:19 Jesus is referred to as a “a lamb without blemish or defect.”
  • In 1 Pet 2:22 Peter applies the prophet Isaiah’s words to Jesus: “He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.”
  • In 1 John 3:5 John proclaims about Jesus that “in him is no sin.”
  • In 2 Cor 5:21 Paul reminds us, about Jesus, that “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us.”
  • In Heb 4:15 the writer explains that in Jesus “we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.”

So it seems clear that the New Testament writers stated unequivocally that Jesus was sinless. However, it wasn’t just Jesus’s followers who claimed he was sinless. His enemies, likewise, found no fault in him.

  • In Mark 14:55 we read, “The chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were looking for evidence against Jesus so that they could put him to death, but they did not find any.”
  • In Mark 12:14 the Pharisees and Herodians said to Jesus, “Teacher, we know that you are a man of integrity. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are; but you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth.”
  • In Luke 23:22 Pilate asked, “What crime has this man committed? I have found in him no grounds for the death penalty.”

But why is it so important that Jesus is sinless? Why is this an essential doctrine of the Christian faith? Theologian R. C. Sproul explains in his book Essential Truths of the Christian Faith:

The sinlessness of Christ does not merely serve as an example to us. It is fundamental and necessary for our salvation. Had Christ not been the “lamb without blemish” He not only could not have secured anyone’s salvation, but would have needed a savior Himself. The multiple sins Christ bore on the cross required a perfect sacrifice. That sacrifice had to be made by one who was sinless.

Sproul adds:

It was by His sinlessness that Jesus qualified Himself as the perfect sacrifice for our sins. However, our salvation requires two aspects of redemption. It was not only necessary for Jesus to be our substitute and receive the punishment due for our sins; He also had to fulfill the law of God perfectly to secure the merit necessary for us to receive the blessings of God’s covenant. Jesus not only died as the perfect for the imperfect, the sinless for the sinful, but He lived the life of perfect obedience required for our salvation.

In summary, only the sinless God-man could bridge the gulf between God and man.

Church History, Resurrection

What Explains the Massive Changes in Jewish Social Structures Among Early Christians?

Leave a comment

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Lest anyone forget, Christianity was born out of Judaism. Jesus was a Jew and his disciples were Jews. Immediately after Jesus died, and his teachings were carried forward by his disciples, they continued to attract mostly Jewish followers. The Book of Acts even reports Jewish priests and Pharisees joining the movement in the early years (see Acts 6:7; 15:5). The Christian movement would eventually become dominated by Gentiles, but only years later.

Something that is usually forgotten is that these early Jewish believers left behind several foundational social structures of Judaism. Philosopher J. P. Moreland explains how important these key structures were in his book Scaling the Secular City:

In New Testament times and earlier, at least five religious and social beliefs formed the very core of Jewish corporate and individual identity. Centuries of dispersion and captivity by Gentile nations reinforced the social importance of these beliefs which were already valued for their religious content. These structures defined the Jews as a people and kept them from falling apart as a nation.

They were major elements in education of the young, and the early converts to Christianity, including the disciples (most of the early church was composed of Jews for the first few years of its existence), would have been taught to cherish these structures from their youth.

What are these social structures?

First, there was the importance of the sacrifices. While obedience to the law was slowly eroding the centrality of the sacrificial system, nevertheless the importance of sacrificing animals for various sins was a major value in first-century Judaism.

Second, emphasis was placed on keeping the law. Regardless of whether one was a Sadducee or a Pharisee, respect for the law of Moses and its role in keeping people in right standing with God was a major value.

Third, keeping the Sabbath was important; several laws were formulated to help define Sabbath-keeping and to maintain its prominence.

Fourth, clear-cut non-Trinitarian monotheism was a defining trait of the Jew. The Shema asserts that God is one, and this doctrine was nonnegotiable. Specifically, there was no belief that God could ever become a man.

Fifth, the Messiah was pictured as a human figure (perhaps super-human, but not God himself), a political king who would liberate the Jews from Gentile oppression and establish the Davidic kingdom.  No conception of a crucified messiah who established a church by raising from the dead was known.

Moreland reminds us that “the early church was a community of Jews who had significantly altered or given up these five major structures” and he asks, “What could possibly cause this to happen in so short a time?”

Keep in mind that

society did not change rapidly in those days. Jews would risk becoming social outcasts if they tampered with these five major beliefs, not to mention that they would risk the damnation of their own souls to hell. Why was such a change made in so short a time after the death of a carpenter from Nazareth – of all places – who had suffered the death of a criminal on the cross, a death expressly detested among the Jews in their belief that “cursed is he who dies on a tree”?  How could such a thing ever take place? The resurrection offers the only rational explanation. (emphasis added)

What could cause these Jews to abandon their beliefs, their social institutions that had survived for centuries? Something dramatic, something never before seen, something amazing – Jesus rising from the dead. That is what the New Testament historical documents report, and there has never been a better explanation offered.

Evolution

Were Cave Men (Our Ancestors) All Trying to Kill Each Other? Part 5

10 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

In part 4, Darwin’s bulldog, T. H. Huxley, offered a couple of examples of natural selection at work in England. Philosopher David Stove, in his book Darwinian Fairytales, provides yet another example of Huxley’s attempt to show that men are competing  to survive.

A third attempt is this. Huxley implies that there have been “one or two short intervals” of the Darwinian “struggle for existence between man and man” in England in quite recent centuries: for example, the civil war of the seventeenth century! You probably think, and you certainly ought to think, that I am making this up; but I am not. He actually writes that, since “the reign of Elizabeth . . . , the struggle for existence between man and man has been so largely restrained among the great mass of the population (except for one or two short intervals of civil war), that it can have little, or no selective operation.”

You probably also think that the English civil war of the seventeenth century grew out of tensions between parliament and the court, dissent and the established church, republic and the monarchy. Nothing of the sort, you see: it was a resumption of “the struggle for existence between man and man.” Cromwell and King Charles were competing with each other, and each of them with everyone else too, a la Darwin and Malthus, for means of subsistence. So no doubt Cromwell, when he had the king’s head cut off, ate it. Uncooked, I shouldn’t wonder, the beast. And probably selfishly refused to let his secretary John Milton have even one little nibble.

So where do all of Huxley’s failed attempts leave us?

Huxley should not have needed Darwinism to tell him-since any intelligent child of about eight could have told him-that in a “continual free fight of each other against all” there would soon be no children, no women and hence, no men. In other words, that the human race could not possibly exist now, unless cooperation had always been stronger than competition, both between women and their children, and between men and the children and women whom they protect and provide for.

And why was it that Huxley himself swallowed, and expected the rest of us to swallow, this ocean of biological absurdity and historical illiteracy? Why, just because he could not imagine Darwinism’s being false, while if it is true then a struggle for life must always be going on in every species. Indeed, the kind of examples for which Huxley searched would have to be as common as air among us, surrounding us everywhere at all times. But anyone who tries to point out such an example will find himself obliged to reenact T. H. Huxley’s ludicrous performance.

There is (as I said earlier) a contradiction at the very heart of the Cave Man way out of Darwinism’s dilemma: the contradiction between holding that Darwinism is true and admitting that it is not true of our species now. But I should perhaps emphasize that the absurdities which we have just witnessed in Huxley, though they no doubt were generated by that initial contradiction, are additional to it.

And there it is. “Ocean of biological absurdity and historical illiteracy” indeed. Huxley and the Cave Man way out fail to resolve the dilemma. Stove’s key point is that Darwin’s theory of “survival of the fittest” just does not reflect what we actually see among human beings, and surely this is a massive problem for the theory.

Instead of stretching the limits of ridiculousness by re-casting human behavior in terms of nature red in tooth and claw, why can’t we admit what is obvious? Natural selection, taken as the primary mechanism, cannot explain much of what we see today in the human species. In fact, much of what human beings do every day in helping the genetically weaker goes directly against natural selection. It’s time we let this mechanism for human evolution go.