[Alamo-Girl]

Darwin, on the other hand, lived in a world of agnosticism bordering on atheism, a world that believed above all in the infallibility of human reason, a world that eclipsed God by putting the figure of Man and his seemingly limitless "potential" in the forefront, as the only true object worthy of devotion.

So very true, dearest sister in Christ!

To this day man seems to shake his fist at God and declare that he knows better which child should live and which should die - thinking himself brilliant to conclude that a person with Down's Syndrome for instance wouldn't have a life worth living. In making such a decision and acting on it, he declares himself "god" and denies God Who IS.

[narses]

Darwin was a nominalist, iirc.

The Nominalist Heresy

The doctrine of nominalism, often also called empiricism, positivism, or materialism, holds that only the individual is real. The universal is seen as a mental fiction useful in organizing the disparate aspects of reality so that they may be more easily studied or categorized. Nominalism explicitly denies any such reality as human nature being grounded outside the knowing mind. In fact, it denies the knowing mind in favor of sense perception alone. Reality is not intelligible, it is sensible only.

The implications of this doctrine are fearful. There is no order of truth in the traditional sense, there are only facts; there are no universally valid moral principles, but only relative moral standards; there is no hierarchy of meaning within reality to serve as a basis for judging which human attainments are higher than others; the denial of the intelligibility of the universe entails the denial of understanding and wisdom as the basis of authority and law, and substitutes wealth and power; the purpose of each individual human life within the created order loses its meaning, and the purpose of human life is not discovered by analysis of the real, but chosen by each individual to be whatever he wants it to be; and finally, the arts follow this downward spiral from dealing with the grand themes of medieval and renaissance art, through the sentimentalism of the romantic era, to the prevailing desire for immediacy.

Weaver traces the rise of nominalism in the fourteenth century from William of Ockham, through its further development by the British Empiricists in the eighteenth century, to its popular acceptance in the twentieth century. For its rapid spread from the end of World War I until the time of his writing of Ideas, Weaver credits what he calls “the great stereopticon.” That is, the movies, the press and the radio. Television had not achieved the status that it has today, but if Weaver had revised Ideas he certainly would have included television as even a greater force for cultural and social dissolution.

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