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Concluding Thoughts on R. L. Dabney: The Sensualistic Philosophy

from my blog

The philosophy of the nineteenth-century sensualists and positivists–particularly Comte, Hobbes, and Mill–assaulted God and science with the same club. Thus, in deconstructing the premises of this philosophical strain, Robert L. Dabney upheld the causes both of God and science.

Evolution theory is not simply unprovable and wrong. The theory attacked the foundations of Christianity: God creating Man in his own image, placing him at the head of an ordered Creation, with a foreknown Fall and Redemption, all for his glory.

Evolution theory turned man into a soulless beast. Its proponents claimed solid, observable facts which were neither. The theory offered nothing to account for man’s God-directed spirit; and so, it attempted to gainsay the existence of both man’s spirit and God. The theory enthusiastically embraced random forces in lieu of God’s infinite wisdom and personal nature.

Dabney refuted evolution theory’s adjunct, the evolution of civilizations, with historical examples. He denied that man progressed in development from savage to high civilization over time, but rather, that

“All the advancements made have been under the operation of moral causes: and these have always come by conquest, colonization, or in some other way, from some higher race without.” (R. L. Dabney: The Sensualistic Philosophy, Naphtali Press, 2003, p. 272.)

Dabney vehemently denied that the human mind is an organism, as evolutionists posit, but defended its structural unity as a “spiritual monad.” Dabney defended the human spirit as the center of consciousness against evolution theory’s relegation of consciousness to nerve bundles and organic processes. Evolution attributes the works of the mind to experience and environment; Dabney defended the mind as the efficient cause of perception. This is extremely important, because if the mind’s operations are subject to the vicissitudes of experience and environment, it can hardly be rational, reliable, or useful toward one’s advancement.

Hedonism is the logical outcome of evolution. If all perfecting of consciousness comes through experience, and pleasurable experience is the most adaptive and likely to be repeated, then clearly hedonism is most conducive to jumpstarting the species. However, this is not observed in nature, and thus is problematic for evolutionists.

No conflict exists between God and true science. “Nature implies the supernatural” is axiomatic to Dabney. God’s work manifests only absolute logic, reason, perfection, and virtue.

Evolution is a theory that denies God and proper science because it posits in their place unconscious forces spinning off randomly occurring organisms. These, in turn, compete for survival in randomly assigned environments in a somehow self-existent world in which virtue is relative because it is defined solely by experience. The only good news evolution really offers is that you have no immortal soul that must endure this travesty of fatalistic flukes forever.

Without God-given reason, man has no ethical worries. Brutes have little faculty or use for moral responsibility, merit, or rational motives above instinctive impulses. But the sensualists whose philosophy underlies evolution do assign man ethical and moral responsibility. Therefore, their own arguments fail for want of acceptable conclusions.

Dabney enumerates some of the products of man’s consciousness we’d be missing if we were brutes who’d made it through Evolution 101:

“The spiritual love of Christian mothers, the heavenly charity which delights to bless an enemy, the aspirations of faith for the lofty sanctity of the skies, and even the redeeming love and divine holiness of Jesus of Nazareth are generically but enlargements of animal appetites in apes!” (p. 284).

Further,
“The spirit which looked out through a Newton’s eye and read through the riddles of the phenomenal world the secrets of eternal truth and the glories of an infinite God, went out as utterly in everlasting night as the gleam in the eye of the owl or the bat which could only blink at the sunlight” (p. 284).

Evolution theory is maddening to a Christian. It affronts God; it denies his work and perfect intelligence, and it cancels man’s promised destiny of glorious liberty with him.

Nevertheless, Dabney counsels that we “be angry and sin not,” and refrain from “the gall of personal spite” (p. 248). Dabney does, however, raise his own indignation to a fair level, asserting, “Man’s soul is formed by its Maker not only to see moral truth, but to love it upon seeing it. It is an unnatural soul, a psychological monstrosity, which does not” (p. 249).

It is sad indeed that an evolutionist might apprehend little more of the Gospel than one of his elevated simian prototypes, or “anthropoid higher apes.” Dabney presaged our own postmodern era, one in which Godless philosophy would drag science down with it and declare Man the lucky winner in a battle of dexterous digits. Postmodern man is still searching the ravines for those transitional thumb bones.

Dr. Dabney ends this particular book without optimism.

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Further Reading in Dabney and Some Thoughts on Creation, Its Laws, and the Irrationality of Evolution

From my blog


Once more, quotations are taken from Robert L. Dabney: The Sensualistic Philosophy, Naphtali Press, 2003.

Robert L. Dabney’s philosophical observations of science are not stale; on the contrary, his observations are still crisp and refreshingly prescient after more than 125 years.

The permeation of scientific thought with Sensualistic philosophy displaced religion with Materialism; creation with force, motion, and chance; God with unknowable, impersonal forces; the soul with nerve bundles; and consciousness with organically advantageous neural impulses. As Dabney notes, we are compelled to look beyond science and philosophy to Biblical revelation “to learn that a man goeth upward and a beast downward” (p. 125).

“That a fortuitous conjunction of atoms should account for all the marvels of design in the universe, and that material mass should be endowed with consciousness, reason, and conscience, are difficulties common to this and all the other phases of this philosophy” (p. 128).

Anyone who studies modern science, or has children studying modern science, is exposed to the difficulty of which Dabney speaks.

Bad science shares eye space with celebrity affairs in grocery store aisles. It is inescapable but not irrefutable. Refutation requires background, and Dabney, a contemporary of Charles Darwin, provides background.

Noting the teleological arguments (we’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here) evolutionists use to refute Christianity, Dabney remarks that the evolutionist “requires us to go back, discarding all the acquisitions of human civilization in this department, and immerse ourselves in the stupidity of barbarism” (p. 147).

Further, he asserts:

“These speculations are to be deplored, in that they present to minds already degraded a pretext for materialism, sensuality, and godlessness. The doctrine can never prevail permanently among mankind. The self-respect, the conscience, and the consciousness of men will usually present a sufficient protest and refutation. The world will not permanently tolerate the libel and absurdity that this, wondrous creature, man, “˜so noble in reason, so infinite in faculties, in form and moving so express and admirable, in action so like an angel, in apprehension so like a God,’ [quoting from Shakespeare: Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2] is but the descendant, at long removes, of a mollusk or a tadpole” (p. 141).

I pray Dabney is not overly optimistic.

Evolution is based on compact records; its star theory is also its undoing. If lifeforms evolved to the fortunate fittest, where are the intermediates representing the unfit? Um…well, they haven’t exactly been discovered yet. Dabney published this book in 1875 and we’re still waiting for the fossils to vindicate the theories of their existence.

Evolution is a theory that has to fabricate missing links from whole cloth because its hypotheses are untestable and unsupported by evidence–and yet its conclusions remain on the books as facts. Perhaps this is why evolution theory has had to resort to the force of law in the courts: It has no recourse in the laws of science.

I happen to agree with Dabney, and not with some other Christians, in that I do not subscribe to the idea of “creation by law.” I believe in creation by fiat of the spoken Word of a particular Creator, the triune God who calls himself Jehovah in the Bible. I perceive the existence of laws as evident in creation, not causal of creation. I think this is more consistent with the Christian world view.

I see the existence of laws evident in, and not causal of creation, because I perceive a Who behind the act of creation, as opposed to a “how.” God created the heavens and the earth. The “how” God employed is given as: moving, speaking, dividing, making, creating, blessing, forming, breathing, and planting. None of these initial acts of creation originated in natural law. There was no natural law before there was a creation–there could be no such thing as preexistent laws waiting for something to act upon. Natural law originated in the template of God’s creation and is expressed in that creation. God is the First Cause and the Lawgiver. Creation by law implies secondary causes on which God was reliant. Creation is reliant; God is not.

The same God who created us and this world for us gave us the ability to know something of himself. By grace he gave to some more ability than others. This truth impelled Pharisees to pick up stones to hurl at Christ. It still does today.

Evolution is a pragmatic theory that violates the very carbon and silicon of pragmatism: It doesn’t work.

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Book Reviews

Ayn Rand: The Failure of Mind as God

From my blog

Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was the great white hope of atheists determined to commandeer rationality. Her philosophy, “Objectivism,” was unique in its separation from the sensualists and its rejection of relativism. She did, nevertheless, hold man’s “own happiness as the moral purpose of his life,” and thus hearkens to John Stuart Mill.

Rand was influenced by Aristotle, Aquinas, and Nietzsche; from Aristotle she took the rational premise, “A is A.” She vehemently attacked every type of gnosticism and every form of empiricism, refuting the notion of what she called “the primacy of consciousness.” The primacy of consciousness is the cornerstone of postmodern thought: the notion that man’s conscious perception defines reality. Thus in this arena, Rand and Dabney were allies.

Unfortunately, Rand’s Objectivism is an atheistic system. While appearing rational in its propounding of an objective reality independent of consciousness, Objectivism also advocates that no divine consciousness underlies reality. Perception does not define reality, but neither is there a creator, nor a soul. The human mind is the moving force behind man’s potential, and man’s potential as a fully self-actuated individual is the only object of interest to the Objectivist. Nothing that came before is of any interest at all.

Rand rejected religion, as she did postmodern philosophy, as “evil” and “irrational.” She dismissed religion categorically as irrational because its premise is altruistic. Rand likened the alliance she perceived between church and state to “Attila and the Witch Doctor”–perhaps one of her more compelling insights.

The mind of man, according to Objectivism, is simply here, a priori, the most important thing in the universe, and not to be hindered. There is nothing higher and nothing more potentially rational. “Potentially” is the operative term here; Rand considered virtually everyone outside of her small coterie of followers to be irrational.

Rand was untroubled by any considerations of “where it all came from.” In an interview with Bill Moyers, Moyers asked Rand whether she was not impressed with all the things of creation around her. Her candid response: “Not really, no.” That which did not originate within her mind was unworthy of the further exercise of her mind.

Although Rand faulted Hobbes, her philosophy, as did his, held self-interest to be the bonding force of civilization. Self-interest was the greatest virtue in the Objectivist scheme, and altruism the greatest evil. She differed from Hobbes largely because of her “Benevolent Universe” world view. By what algorithm she reconciled benevolence with a contempt for altruism is unclear. As for the “why” behind the benevolent universe, she would not be accountable. It simply was. Self-existence implies self-existent properties.

Rand’s novels depict heroic humans with godlike brilliance of achievement; they are, in fact, creators. Titanic battles take place between creators and destroyers. Meekness was not the key to the Objectivist kingdom.

Rand, who emigrated from Bolshevik Russia, held strong anti-Communist convictions. The prevailing theme in her novels, as well her nonfiction, is the individual pitted against the collective. While rightly vilifying the unthinking and parasitic collective, Rand wrongly deified the mind. Sadly, she failed to apprehend atheism as the fatal essence of Communism.

Unfortunately, Rand’s scenarios are stage-set after a staunch Calvinist work ethic; but rather than accountability to God for one’s moral parameters, there is accountability only to the “rational self-interest” of her creator-heroes. Nor do her heroes lean toward a Calvinist chastity ethic. And they occasionally find it justifiable to kill someone who gets in their way.

An affair with her protégé undid Rand’s moral credibility, and with it, the credibility of Objectivism as a moral system sustained in self-will. Atheism lost a paragon in which to billet its cause.

Rand was right: Reality is objective. It is not subject to change according to men’s whims or perceptions. But Rand was wrong: Rational self-interest is unavailable to the perception of the natural man. The natural man’s self-interest cannot be rational because the natural man is not rational. He does not seek God because he believes he can live by his own reasoned righteousness. Man’s only true rational self-interest lies in his salvation from sin through belief in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Ultimately, Objectivism is a philosophy of self-will, self-interest, and self-undoing.

Ayn Rand was buried, at her own request, wearing her wedding ring, a photograph of her husband placed in her hands.

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Book Reviews

Upward Descent and Other Amazing Deviations: Dabney Dissects Darwin

From my blog

Mid-nineteenth-century evolution theory was a fission bomb forever sundering two ways of understanding life: Either we are related through Adam and unrelated to cantaloupe; or, we are related through protoplasm to both.

Dabney’s chapter, “Evolution Theory” is the Cat’s favorite thus far. He resents any implication that he is descended from inferior wild cats. If left to the wild habitats of his so-called ancestors, the Cat would most probably make his way to the nearest doorstep and yowl for cat food. Notwithstanding the Cat’s defective (though sensorially impeccable) epistemology, he understands that he is a discrete creation made to be a companion to man. This places the Cat far ahead of evolutionary theorists.

Dabney was a contemporary of Charles Darwin (1809″“1882), and thus the beneficiary of the same classical intellectual heritage from which Darwin drew. He penetrated the flaws in Darwin’s scheme, and deftly deconstructed them.

Darwin’s contribution (The Origin of Species, 1859; The Descent of Man, 1871) to evolution theory was his systematizing of classical atomic (as in atoms as components of matter) theory, using laws inferable from nature: multiplication, limitation, heredity, variation, and equilibrium. Behavior, too, would be an operative variable effecting survival. Ultimately, success is determined by chance, because these laws are driven by blind atomic causation. The ultimate victor in this animalistic struggle is he who accumulates the most brain convolutions and mechanistic impulses to survive. This happened to be man, but in a chance system, it could just as easily have been a speck of mold. An evolutionist perhaps would not put it this way, because he would likely fail to perceive the logical outcome of his theory.

Dr. Thomas Huxley and Professor John Tyndall took up the creatorless cause after Darwin. Nothing happens by chance, according to Tyndall; every occurrence is caused, and therefore necessary. Tyndall’s definition of the soul (yes, he acknowledged its existence) is well worth quoting: “The soul consists of fine, smooth, round atoms, like those of fire. These are the most mobile of all [atoms]. They interpenetrate the whole body, and in their motions the phenomena of life arise” (R. L. Dabney: The Sensualistic Philosophy Naphtali Press, 2003, p. 91).

One readily sees why humanists are still forum-shopping.

Compare and contrast: And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. Ge 2:7

Do you feel the Force? Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) did. He refined evolutionary science to theoretical linear perfection. “Force” moved matter from protoplasm to mollusk to the mind of Isaac Newton in so many increments over so much time. In Spencer’s model, “Force” equals motion, and is the single causative agency in the universe. Spencer’s reason for calling his material cause “Force,” according to Dabney, was simple distaste for the Christian notion of God and his own soul.

Spencer’s Force is infinite, impersonal and unknowable, but it gets things done. Problematically, Spencer attributes a multitude of properties and doctrines to this “unknowable” Force. Dissecting probe in hand, Dabney exposes this inconsistency. He further notes that Spencer attempts to place an epistemological embargo on knowledge of the “unknowable” God. Apparently, it is possible to know things about some unknowable things, but not about others.

Spencer’s Force is unknowable but at the same time, Spencer insists, it is inferable–through, of course, the usual sensualistic means: our senses. Since the Force is impersonal as well as unknowable, we cannot know whether it is benevolent or malevolent.

God, on the other hand, is infinite, personal, and truly unknowable, but because of his personal benevolence toward us, he makes himself knowable to us, albeit in a finite way due to our finite consciousness.

How can we trust an unknowable Force? Dabney points out that we cannot presume it is intelligent, rational, logical, interested, or possessed of any other properties, benevolent or otherwise, if it is truly unknowable. We do know that God is all-intelligent and capable of manifesting himself to us. Once a scientist signs on with the unknowable, doctrine and reason are defenestrated.

One point on which I admit confusion is Spencer’s concept of time, which “is but experienced succession” (Dabney, p. 100). Does Spencer mean that before man, the only creature capable of experiencing time, there was no time? Then when did all these things occur–protoplasm to mollusk to Newton–that required so much time?

Spencer inspires further wonder when he says that “material motion is simply the consciousness of matter in successive positions in time” (Dabney, p. 100). Now, this is priceless. Matter is conscious, but the Force propelling it might not be conscious–we don’t know, because it is unknowable. If this doesn’t convince you to take your fish for a walk, nothing will.

I suspect that Spencer and Comte (see my “The Pontiff of Humanity” post below) might have been drinking buddies.

At some point, our atomic clock ceases ticking; the little flame of atoms is extinguished, and we die. Or, as Spencer really said, the “absorption of motion and diffusion of matter” take place (Dabney, p. 102). There could not possibly be a provision in his materialist scheme for resurrection once matter is thus debased. The impersonal Force makes no claims, no promise of eternal life.

Spencer’s gods–matter, motion, and force–“symbols of the Unknown Reality”–in the end, are subject to death.

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Ps 14:1; Ps 53:1

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Book Reviews

Thomas Hobbes, R. L. Dabney, and the Sensualist Cat

I posted this to my blog, Board Housewife & The Cat this morning.

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. Pr 3:5

As I begin to read about the history of ideas, two things happen: First, the more I am called to repent my condonation of bad philosophy by reason of willful ignorance; and, second, the more I learn about the way the Cat thinks.

I am reading The Sensualistic Philosophy by Robert L. Dabney, a 19th-century conservative Southern Presbyterian theologian and philosopher, in an attempt to fill the philosophy gap I left open in my education. I avoided philosophy as much as I could in college, taking only a survey course.

After a two-decade gap, I began law school and was made to choke down something called “logical positivism” in a jurisprudence course. I figured I had to be stupid, because I could have sworn that logical positivism was illogical and nihilistic.

Fortunately, the course was such a joke that I could say virtually anything on the exam and it would bring about a decent grade. Relativists are flexible graders, not only because they allege that there is no right or wrong, but they tend to see what they want to see in someone else’s argument. One student actually failed this class; I have no idea why, but it sticks in my mind like the Sword of Damocles: the Logical Positivist Threat.

Logical positivism is a 1920s revival of same-old-same-old empiricism, aka sensualistic philosophy: If a tree falls and no one hears it, did it make a sound, and other Zen reminiscences. Logical positivism inches from the notion that all knowledge must come from the experience of the senses–though that notion remains foundational–and adds the proviso that, well, we can have some knowledge prior to, or even without, actual sensory experience. I suppose the some marks a new era in human thought.

John Owen (1616-1683) and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) lived within the same sphere of time and absolutely disparate spheres of thought. When I consider the news and politics of our day, I become persuaded that most people now think fairly similarly. As Christians, we are necessarily outliers. But opposing political parties, for instance, show little substantive difference. Seventeenth-century thinkers, on the other hand, show more diversity of thought– perhaps because they thought more. Mercifully, we have no substantial record of what dull people from that era thought, because they could not write, whereas now they can.

I am getting around to the thought that the more I read about ideas and their history, the more I am persuaded that there is more convergence of thought now than there was during the Reformation, perhaps the last age of illuminated thought. Even people with bad ideas thought; they just didn’t think well.

Thomas Hobbes, a scion of the sensualist philosophical camp, was such a philosopher. Hobbes is famous for developing the idea of the “social contract,” the mechanism by which depraved (he had that part right) men are able to coexist in civilized societies.

I can only suppose that Hobbes felt the need to come up with a model that did not presuppose a Christian covenant like Calvin’s Geneva. But I think his world view was simply so different from Calvin’s that he required a model that did not rely on God in order to keep people in line.

I have not read more than excerpts written by Hobbes himself; only about him. At one point, life was too long to read his magnum opus, Leviathan. At this point, life is too short.

According to Dabney, Hobbes did believe in the concepts of good and evil; however, he believed that good and evil were relative concepts and that every man freely elects what is good and evil according to what pleases or displeases him. Therefore, the civil magistrate restrains citizens, who concede all rights to the magistrate in exchange for an order under which men allow one another to live. Self-interest is the tie that binds, restrained by the magistrate. It is a “war of all against all” out there, and it is to be resolved only in an absolute ruler in whom “irresistible force” is delegated. It isn’t about good and evil; it is about a conqueror and the conquered. And the conquered, if they owe any duties to God, must subordinate them to their duties to the ruler. Hobbes is not considered an atheist by other philosophers, and he was vindicated of a charge of atheism brought by Parliament, but clearly he was in the dark zone as to who God is, and so was an atheist in fact.

An aspect of logical positivism that I was taught in law school, is “widely and warmly shared values.” I recall my professor fairly rhapsodizing over this. And it is quite odd, because Hobbes holds that men’s values are neither widely nor warmly shared; in fact, they are concessions to the realities of force.

Hobbes, along with John Locke, was one of the leading influences behind the United States Constitution, the preamble of which begins, “We the people.” Our oft-called “God-fearing republic” is about people, and not too many of our people these days fear God. Many people, however, do believe they experience God. People love experience–they want it in their leaders, their teachers, their employees, their religion–but so much experience is really an imprinted pattern of doing something wrong.

The Cat, the Cat…the reason that I understand better about the way the Cat thinks as I read Dabney is because the Cat is a Sensualist. Everything he knows comes through his senses, and he remembers things that imprint on his senses, like tasty food and kitty litter, and his people and not-his people. But the Cat is decidedly not a Hobbesian. He would not even consider submission to any authority in order better to enhance the peace, and he is oblivious to any threat to his self-interest. I would advise against entering into any sort of contract with him.