The Crown of Cause

Habitable Worlds has created a nifty chart, visualizing the reacto-sphere.  In his most recent piece he asserts:

The Cathedral does not preach evolution; the Cathedral doesn’t believe in evolution, except as a tool for shaming fundamentalists and beating them into submission about other issues.

The change in inherited characteristics of biological populations over successive generations is both observable and how wiki defines evolution.  The Cathedral does preach evolution; these days, the shaming is the preaching.

The term evolution, having been cloaked in the false garb of science, is now subject to belief.  Daniel Dennett explains how this happened:

The Darwinian Revolution is both a scientific and a philosophical revolution, and neither revolution could have occurred without the other.  As we shall see, it was the philosophical prejudices of the scientists, more than their lack of scientific evidence, that prevented them from seeing how the theory could actually work, but those philosophical prejudices that had to be overthrown were too deeply entrenched to be dislodged by mere philosophical brilliance.  It took an irresistible parade of hard-won scientific facts to force thinkers to take seriously the weird new outlook that Darwin proposed.

Philosophical prejudices! Wondering aloud how discriminating these philosophers could have been given that mere facts cured them of their prejudices would probably be mean.  But do note, tender reader, that scientific facts are supported by science!

Perhaps Francis Bacon can shed light upon the birth of this science:

Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced.  Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.

If only ignorance of cause shielded us from the effects of the wretched ideas Francis produced!

Throw a ball in the air and it will drop to the ground.  Man observes the law of gravity, but he proves no law by observation or any action whatsoever.

In boasting that the throwing of the ball in the air and the watching of the ball fall to the ground somehow proved gravity, Enlightenment thinkers claimed for man the power to bestow the crown of cause by his mere knowledge. Scientists are the priests of this religion, which explains why a fact is hopelessly inferior to a scientific one.

All man observes is effect.  All the natural world is an endless interplay of effects across space and time.  Every material force is a cause only insofar as it is already an effect.  Bestowing the crown of cause on anything attributable to man’s material observation is a false frame.

The progressive thinker, in calling his religion anything but, implies that reason, not faith, is the basis of his beliefs.  And yet, it’s almost as if belief in science is demonstrated to the Cathedral by ascribing to scientists the divine ability to uncover causes of material forces within the material world.  But I digress.

Shall we cut to the chase?

Evolution causes nothing.  Evolution refers to a set of observed phenomena in the material world.  The processes by which evolution occurs – mutuation, natural selection, and genetic drift – cause nothing.  The processes by which it occurs refer to sets of material observations.  Our knowledge of these material phenomena does not alter theirs effects.

Furthermore, the so-called evidence of evolution can be no such thing.  Evolution can be tested by no controlled experiment.  In fact, evolution is a self-fulfilling prophecy that cannot be falsified.

Habitable Worlds continues:

The great divide between, say, John Derbyshire and Dalrock is that the former is a reactionary because he realizes society is ordered against natural reality; the latter is a reactionary because he realizes society is ordered against an old-school understanding of God—a God who doesn’t care all that much about earthly equality, who told the Israelites not to race-mix, who said the poor are always with us, who proclaimed the husband head of the wife, who ordained Original Sin, who doesn’t want mankind trying to bring Heaven to Earth.

[...]

So, must you accept evolution to be a neoreactionary? Yes. Whether you call evolution “evolution” or “God’s ordained existence” is really a philosophical argument that, I hope, will not divide the Derbyshires and the Dalrocks.

But there is nothing to accept!  Accepting that one can accept evolution continues to grant the frame to the Left.  Why should we play by their rules?

Let us relearn the philosophical prejudices Dennett mocked and call belief in evolution the lie that it is.

Belief in evolution is neither science nor true faith; it is deranged thought symptomatic of the demonic progressive religion that has ruled the Western world by sowing disunity with deceit for centuries.

By uniting Derbyshires and Dalrocks in recognizing evolution for what it is – a set of observed material phenomena - we see that there is no divide to be bridged.

When it comes to bestowing crowns of cause, reason is a bridge to nowhere; revelation is the bridge to everywhere.