CHAPTER 39
“Powell’s Utopian outlook had echoes going back into the past, to eighteenth-century visionaries who called for a new order of the ages and even to Christian millennialists who awaited the coming redemption”… “Although he had outgrown the need for theology, Powell still admired the moral side of Christianity, particularly ‘the doctrines that were uttered by the voice on the Mount.’ Religion as sorcery and fetishism he had no use for, but religion as ‘the yearning for something better, something purer’ still fired his mind."322
“Powell’s life is also the story of the rising influence of the natural sciences, of rationalism contesting the faith of traditional religion, and of a new nationalism and secularism taking its place. As he was coming of age, science was rising to influence the study of nature and culture and even the making of laws. In his day science meant, above all, geology, evolution, and Darwinism. The contest of those ideas with what is now called religious fundamentalism for supremacy in the American mind is mirrored in Powell as nowhere else.”323
The glaring difference between Powell and his Christian forebears was the extraordinary confidence he placed in science as a redeeming agent. More than a means to knowledge, science, he believed, was the greatest moral force in history. In an address given at the inauguration of the Corcoran School of Science and Arts of the Columbian University, he put science at the very core of education. The highest mental training ‘means a training in modern scientific culture.’ Law, history, and the fine arts, literature must all look to that ‘culture’ for inspiration. From science they might draw a sense of the glory and beauty in the natural world. By immersing themselves in the culture of science students might also learn industry, integrity, modesty, and charity.324
“But the most severe shock to traditional Christian orthodoxy was yet to come- from Joseph Powell’s former Shrewsbury townsman, Charles Darwin. While the Powell’s were arriving in Palmyra [N.Y.], Darwin was boarding the HMS Beagle as ship’s naturalist. Returning home from Latin America and the South Pacific after nearly five years, he settled in the village of Down, not far from London, and began cogitating over his experiences, particularly the strange finches and tortoises of the islands named Galapagos.”325
He (Darwin) did not believe…that the flora and fauna of the earth, humans included, were the direct artifacts of God; they had evolved under the pressure of competition for resources. The next year, he went public, presenting before the Linnaean Society, along with his co-discoverer Alfred Russell Wallace, a theory of evolution through natural selection. And the year after that event Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared in print, arguably the most important book of the century. Religious leaders on both sides of the Atlantic immediately denounced it as promoting ‘atheism,’ but within a decade or two most scientists accepted the theory as true.
Step by step, natural science had been growing assertive about its ability to explain things. Wes Powell could not have been deaf to those claims or the tumult they raised. When in 1860 just months after Darwin’s book was published- he announced that he had joined the ranks of naturalists, he had to know that he was, in some measure, defying not only his parents’ wishes for his future but also their entire way of thinking. He risked being regarded as religiously unsound. Still, he has chosen his future, his mode of thinking, his deepest intellectual loyalties. From that point on Methodism, Christianity, or any other religion did not play an important role in defining his outlook on life.
On the death of Darwin in 1882, Wes [Powell] delivered a memorial address that may help explain the abrupt shift in his youthful beliefs. ‘It remained for Darwin,’ he said, ‘to demonstrate the laws of biologic evolution, and the course of the progress of life upon the globe.’ Every generation in the long history of life, from the earliest era to the modern, shows ‘progress to a higher and fuller life; science has discovered hope.’ The new picture of the world that geology and evolutionary biology had drawn had appealed to a young man looking for a positive future, not in Heaven but in the here and now. ‘Darwin,’ he explained, ‘gave hope to philosophy.’326
“Those words came more than two decades after his youthful announcement of a profession, but it was indeed in a spirit of hopefulness that he undertook to fit himself to a career.”327 Contained in Powell’s speeches and writings is a social vision and philosophy that he would advance in the sciences as his legacy to society. Powell wrote in his tribute to Charles Darwin: "Let us not gird science to our loins as the warrior buckles on his sword…Let us raise science aloft as the olive branch of peace and the emblem of hope.”328
Powell and Morgan would be quick to raise their sword aloft and to lead the charge in the defense of science and of their newfound evolutionary theories. Under their guidance “the secular religion of American nationalism, revived and reunited, had replaced that of the church. Science had replaced divine inspiration. The conquest of nature through cooperation had replaced an inner moral redemption. Such was Powell's mature faith. It was what he worked for in his clubs and societies. It was why he stayed in Washington.”329
For himself, Darwin preferred a morality independent of religion and untainted by the moral defects of Christianity. In an addendum to his autobiography, he spelled out the derivation and implication of a naturalistic ethic:
‘A man who has no assured and no present belief in the existence of a personal God or a future existence with retribution and rewards, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones. A dog acts in this manner, but he does so blindly. A man, on the other hand, looks forwards and backwards, and compares his various feelings, desires, and recollections. He then finds, in accordance with the verdict of the wisest men, that the highest satisfaction is derived from following certain impulses, namely the social instincts. If he acts for the good of others he will receive the approbation of his fellowmen and gain the love of those with whom he lives; and this latter gain undoubtedly is the highest pleasure on this earth. By degrees it will be more intolerable to him to obey his sensuous passions rather than his highest impulses, which when rendered habitual may be almost called instincts. His reason may occasionally tell him to act in opposition to the opinion of others, whose approbation he will then not receive; but he will still have the solid satisfaction of knowing that he has followed his innermost judge or conscience.’330
The evolutionary views of Darwin, Spencer, Morgan and Powell would shake the pillars of faith-based institutions in America and would alter the course which was laid down by the declarations of America’s Founding Fathers, as many believed that the foundational laws of America were immutable rights given by Deity.
The Declaration of Independence clearly implies that there are immutable rights that are granted not by man, but by our Creator. These are referred to in America’s founding declarations as “the Laws of Nature from Nature’s God.” The honored legal scholar Sir William Blackstone, clarified this further by saying: “Man, considered as a creature, must necessarily be subject to the laws of this Creator, for he is entirely a dependent being…And, consequently, as man depends absolutely upon his maker for everything, it is necessary that he should in all points conform to his Maker’s will…[T]his will of his Master is called the law of Nature.” President John Adams framed the issue beautifully when in a letter to Thomas Jefferson on the 20th of June 1815 he wrote: “The question for the human race is whether the God of nature shall govern the world by His own Laws.”331
In place of these immutable laws we now have a secular humanistic philosophy that pervades and influences many, if not all-philosophical, economic, governmental, and science-based aspects of western culture. Particularly, it is noted that,
…all of the anti-Christian systems of modern times have found their quasi-scientific basis in the supposed scientific fact of evolution. This has been true of communism and for various varieties of socialism, for modern militarism, and even for the anti-Christian aspects of modern capitalism and colonialism. In fact, it seems that the advocates of any doctrine or system overtly or covertly espousing covetousness or selfishness, in any form have appealed to evolutionary science as warrant for their opinions… The racism and militarism of Hitler and Mussolini were in large measure built upon the philosophical base established in the 19th Century by Friedrich Nietzsche and Ernest Haechel, both of whom were…promulgators of Darwinism among human societies.”332
One of the most articulate spokesmen for secular humanism is Corliss Lamont. In a lucid textbook entitled "The Philosophy of Humanism," he outlines the ten tenets on which modern secular humanism rests. Paraphrased, they are…
1) All reality is what we perceive there is no super natural.
2) Man is a product of evolution and has no soul after death.
3) Humanity must solve its own problems using only reason and the scientific method.
4) Human beings are, within certain scientifically defined limits, masters of their own destiny.
5) All ethics and morality are derived from the experiences of the human race.
6) The "good life" is obtained by working for self-development and the welfare of the community.
7) The works of nature are to receive the adoration of mankind.
8) Only through a global democracy will mankind obtain peace and prosperity.
9) Reason and the scientific method should pervade all aspects of the human life.
10) Humanism is still a developing philosophy.333
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322 Worster, 464.
323 Ibid., xii.
324 John Wesley Powell “The Larger Import of Scientific Education,” 452-456
325 Worster, 65.
326 Ibid. 66: John Wesley Powell: Darwin’s Contributions to Philosophy, 65-66
327 Ibid 66.: John Wesley Powell: Darwin’s Contributions to Philosophy, 70
328 Ibid., 464.
329 Ibid., 464-466.
330 Himmelfarb, 385-386
331 See: William J. Federer, America’s God and Country: Fame Publishing 13: LaVar Christensen, Stone Tablets, A Golden Calf and “What God Hath Joined Together” Sutherland Institute
332 Morris, Henry M., The Twilight of Evolution, Baker Pub Group, 1963
333 Skousen, Eric N., The power People, The Freeman Institute, 1980