Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars' hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. Acts 17:22
When the superstition of pagan philosophers crept into "science" ...
"With the acceptance of Darwinism ....
Western civilization took the final step back to the atomism,
materialism, and many-worlds doctrine of Democritus and other
pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece.
As the Darwinian paradigm
tightened its grip on science, all vestiges of
the old teleological-organismic universe, all notions which placed
humankind or life on Earth in any special or privileged place in the
order of things, were banished from mainstream academic debate.
The implications of the final Darwinian unraveling for mainstream
evolutionary biologists was memorably captured by French biochemist
Jacques Monod in his materialist manifesto Chance and Necessity.
“The thesis I shall present in this book is that the biosphere does not
contain a predictable class of objects or of events,” he wrote, “but
constitutes a particular occurrence, compatible indeed with first
principles, but not deducible from those principles and therefore
essentially unpredictable… unpredictable for the same reason — neither
more nor less — that the particular configuration of atoms constituting
this pebble I have in my hand is unpredictable.”
According to Monod the human race was adrift in an uncaring cosmos
which knew nothing of its becoming or fate, an infinite universe said to
manifest not the slightest evidence of anthropocentric bias.
Instead,
as Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould put it, we are merely “the
embodiment of contingency,” our species but “a tiny twig on an
improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree… we are a
detail, not a purpose… in a vast universe, a wildly improbable
evolutionary event.”
Or as astronomer Carl Sagan framed the matter, “one
voice in the cosmic fugue.”
But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century.
Even as the scientific vision of humankind as an accidental
by-product of the cosmos consolidated its position of ascendancy in
Western thought, the first seeds of a new scientific anthropocentricism
were sprouting, in the Bridgewater Treatises of the 1830s. The
multivolume work included such contributions as William Whewell’s
discussion of the striking fitness of water for life and William Prout’s
discussion of the special properties of the carbon atom for life,
revealed by the development of organic chemistry in the first quarter of
the 19th century. Wallace showed that the natural environment gave various compelling
indications of having been pre-arranged for carbon-based life as it
occurs on Earth.
Two years later, in 1913, Lawrence Henderson published his classic The Fitness of the Environment, whichpresented basically the same argument but in much more scholarly detail. Henderson
not only argued that the natural environment was peculiarly fit for
carbon-based life but also in certain intriguing ways for beings of our
physiological design. He refers to two of the thermal properties of
water, its specific heat and the cooling effect of evaporation, as well
as the gaseous nature of CO2 as special elements of environmental fitness in nature for beings of our biological design." EN&V