The Usurption of Christian Philosophy (See Mod Note Before Posting)

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It has been said of Freud, Marx & Einstein:

Christopher Hitchens wrote:

Behind him, I could see one or two of his brighter staff officers looking at
me with stark hostility as they realized that the general - El Presidente
- had made a mistake by speaking so candidly. (I was later to find that
I was being followed around the city, which caused me many a fearful
moment.) In response to a follow-up question, Videla crassly denied -
“rotondamente”: “roundly” denied - holding Jacobo Timerman
“as either a journalist or a Jew.” While we were having this surreal
exchange, here is what Timerman was being told by his taunting
tormentors:

Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he
tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund
Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of
the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy
the Christian concept of time and space.

- Hitch 22

One wonders why the tormentor forgot to mention Darwin. My main
motivation for posting this thread comes from the introductory chapter
of a fantastic book on Evolutionary Biology in which the origins of
evolutionary thought are discussed & it is shown, with some detail,
how the theory of evolution so radically contravened the basic tenets
of Christian philosophy as it was known at that time.

In essence what you could boil this thread down to is a question of how
scientific thinking has historically nullified the dogmatism of Christian
philosophy by means of examining first the Christian tenets on which
much of Western civilization were constructed upon & then illustrating
how such scaffolding was weakened, if not destroyed, for so many in
Western society. I personally think the best way to do this would be to
discuss how & why Freud, Marx, Einstein & Darwin are so often
referenced as justifying a materialistic outlook by virtue of the fact that
they used science as a means to further their philosophy (as opposed to
the many philosophical arguments made in the past):

Futuyma wrote:

Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not
only for physical phenomena, as Descartes & Newton had shown, but
also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design
and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind,
uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual
explanations of the life process superfluous. Together with Marx's
materialistic theory of history & society and Freud's attribution of human
behaviour to influences over which we have little control, Darwin's theory
of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism &
materialism - of much of science, in short - that has been the stage of
most of Western thought.

- Evolutionary Biology

First off I'd like to request that this not become a thread in which
religious believers argue the premises of the thread. If you disagree
you can just close the page. If you disagree with everything said the
most constructive thing you can do is to correct the discussions of the
tenets of Christian philosophy that will be discussed. As some justification
for this request I only need point to the secularization of Europe as
compared with earlier centuries as well as discussions in countably
many scientific books (though never in enough detail) on how radically
scientific thinking goes against Christian thinking (I've already linked to
one such book) for so many people (whether right or wrong, from your
perspective).

With that said I can give an example of how I hope the thread will pan
out by mentioning the Christian tenets that Futuyma views as the
essential features of Christianity that evolutionary theory would so
radically contradict.

His discussion begins with Platonic philosophy, discussing the εἶδος Plato
expands upon in the Republic's Allegory of the Cave, also known as the
theory of forms in the philosophy of Essentialism. This is discussed
because of the fact that Christian philosophy incorporated such Platonic
essentialism in the Neoplatonist principle of plenitude sitting on top of the
Aristotelian scala naturae that writers such as Augustine pay due
deference to. The consequences of these concepts, mixed with an
almost literal interpretation of the bible as well as a hefty dose of special
creation, was for a worldview such as the following to form:

The eternal, unchanging essences of all things exist in the mind of God,
but it would be an imperfection in God to deny material existence to
something of which He conceived. Since God is perfect, He must have
bestowed existence of everything that existed as His idea. Because to
deny existence to anything at any time would introduce imperfection into
His creation, all things must have been created in the beginning & nothing
God saw fit to create could have become extinct. Moreover, because
order is clearly superior to disorder, God's creations must fit a pattern:
the Scala Naturae, or Great Chain of Being. This "ladder of life", ..., must
be perfect and have no gaps; it must be permanent an unchanging, and
every being must have its fixed place according to God's plan. Since this
natural order was created by a perfect God, that which is natural is good,
and this must be the best of possible worlds. This natural heirarchy
extended to higher and lower social classes in human societies. To aspire
to change the social order must be immoral, and biological evolution is
unthinkable.

- Futuyma, p. 3

In this view, natural science was nothing but a means to categorize the
links of the great chain of being to discover & appreciate god's wisdom.
From the above I think, even with a hazy understanding of evolution,
one can see how clearly evolution opposes it.

In any case I hope people will add some remarks on the other essential
features & concepts of Christianity that the theory of evolution
diametrically opposes, offer some justification &/or clarification on what
has thus far been mentioned while, hopefully, others still will add
discussions on how Marx, Freud, Darwin etc... contributed to what is
commonly referred to as the 'moral decay' :cool:

MOD NOTE:
So long as this thread remains a rigorous philosophical discussion, with well articulated positions (often including citations for support), will it remain open. Mere statements of belief or non-belief will not be accepted; i.e., we have other forums dedicated for those kinds of statements.

recedite

Nowadays there are many Christians who profess to believe in evolution; the "Christian Philosophies" above are archaic philosophies. Science is of course far quicker to change and update itself when proved wrong than religion, but the religious can and will downgrade former tenets to mere metaphors when all else fails.

The Argentina story illustrates the known correlation between being "Conservative" and being "Christian" ( or whatever the local religion is), and also the propensity of any religion to claim ownership over any values that are seen universally as good (apple pie). Nevertheless Christian Philosophy does change over time, although it is forced increasingly into the realm of the unknowable and the unproveable.