By Rick Plasterer, Juicy Ecumenism.
John West, Vice President of the Discovery Institute, whose discussion of the impact of the sexual revolution on Christian leadership in America was reviewed in an earlier article, also discussed the impact of Darwinism and its materialistic psychology on sexual mores in the West in a separate lecture at the Southern Evangelical Seminary Apologetics Conference on October 12.
Darwin and a Scientific Explanation of Morality
West said he hoped that people would “gain insight as to why anti-Biblical claims in science can’t just be ignored in culture.” The sexual revolution was originally justified in the name of science. Darwin radically re-defined morality in general by claiming that understandings of right and wrong are based entirely on their survival value over time. Just as “the survival of the fittest” in an “unguided process” accounts for the condition of current life, so it accounts for current morality. It is the “existing circumstances,” and changes in them which develop human morality. Even such behaviors as pedophilia and rape must “have some sort of biological basis.” If a particular behavior is persistent in the human population, it has just as much the sanction of nature as any other behavior, so that both “the maternal instinct and infanticide” or “pedophilia and rape” are found in nature, and all these things are justified by nature insofar as nature justifies anything. If environmental conditions change, “so too do the dictates of morality.”