Tag: Naphtali Press

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Book Reviews

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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Book Reviews

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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Devotion

The House of Mill: All Mirrors, No Windows

This is from my blog, Board Housewife & The Cat

I am still reading Dabney to the Cat. He takes it in through his senses. James and son John Stuart Mill would posit that I, if I formulate any ideas about their work, am experiencing “copies of single sensations.”

The Cat, whose ideation begins and ends with his own sensory learning, disbelieves Mill. The Cat learns everything in one take and finds insulting the idea of copies of his own uniquely perfect sensations.

The Cat does not think that I am as capable a learner as he. According to Mill, the Cat would be right. But the Cat would still be a lower animal in Mill’s scheme, because he cannot name his sensations, and I can. I will not read that part to the Cat.

According to Mill, my cumulative learning and experience, from hot stovetops to jurisprudence, is a bundle of habits. (But how would he account for my bad habits of not learning from experience? I have burned myself more than once.) I have received no a priori input, not even language. I have learned nothing but that to which my senses have had the happy or unhappy occasion to be exposed. I am a perfectly revelation-proof being.

So that is how Mill proposes to escape God! God will never make it past those nerve bundles. Mill has devised a scheme to enable man to make himself inaccessible to revelation.

Once man acquires an idea through his senses, he will “mark,” or “name” it, so that he can remember it, so that he may repeat it or not, depending on whether it was enjoyable or not. So man can define reality by naming what he likes. The logical corollary is, he may elect not to name anything he doesn’t like. Poof. All gone. No more unhappy thing.

I have encountered children who were unable to extrapolate because of brain damage. You could set up a simple arithmetic problem: put five oranges on a table, remove three, and show them that two were left. Then, if you put five apples on the table, you would have to start all over again. They had no idea what would happen if you removed three apples. Mill’s reasoning, notwithstanding his creditable intelligence, is similar. His scheme simply does not permit extrapolation. Each idea must be built on an identical chain of experiences. Since apprehension of God’s revelation of himself requires abstract thought, Mill’s refusal to abstract is another God-proofing mechanism.

Objective reality is necessarily elusive in Mill’s scheme. A rock, for instance, is a “permanent possibility of sensations.” We might as well vote on the meaning of that one.

Educators study John Stuart Mill today. (His work, according to Dabney, differed from his father’s by accentuating it at its most torqued.) They learn that the end of education is the individual’s happiness. Dabney notes this in his chapter on Mill: “Hence, it follows that moral education consists simply in establishing desirable associations between acts and consequences, by the frequent repetition of the right acts” (Robert L. Dabney, The Sensualistic Philosophy, Naphtali Press, 2003, p. 58.) But with no a priori information as to what “right” is, who can know what should be repeated? The senses, of course. Happy sensations are worth repeating.

Mill should not be accused of saying that men disregard the welfare of fellow men in favor of their own happiness. The bludgeoner does not have the right to bludgeon repeatedly because it makes him happy. Mill provides for moral categories of prudence and fortitude (duties to ourselves), and justice and benevolence (duties to our neighbors). However, some sort of unrevealed natural desire comes into play–there is, once again, no a priori revelation of what constitutes prudence or justice or benevolence. Men simply learn from experience what is pleasurable and what is painful. In a world without sin and sociopathy, this might even be thinkable. But we do not live in a world without sin and sociopathy. Nor, contrary to Mill’s premise, do we live in a world without revealed law.

Once again, the sensualist is lost in his own quagmire, attempting to God-proof himself. He has built a house of mirrors–surrounding himself with his own perceptions of the consequences of his own experiences–with no windows admitting the light of revelation.

…every man did that which was right in his own eyes. Ju 17:6; 21:25

For being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God. Ro 10:3