I wrote this as a comment below but it just might qualify as essay material so I have included it here as well.
Darwinian evolution (a process of linear development) would not have been conceptually possible in the pagan world because the notion of linear time and thus progress, require Christian philosophical presuppositions. This notion entered the world through Genesis, the narrative that portrays time and space as created, rather than eternal entities. This radical break from paganism, to which the entire world was subject until Christ entered the world, was difficult even for Christians to fully comprehend at first (Origen for example, despite his brilliance, could never shake the notion of circular time), and it would be many centuries later before the full power (freedom really) of these concepts would bear fruit. The scientific system in other words, could not have developed anywhere except in a Christian culture.
Darwin was a philosophical materialist. His theory (randomness in particular) is wholly dependent on philosophical materialism. I approach the Christian – atheist debate in terms of the history of ideas (I have to leave the science to others). Freud fell, Marx fell, and I believe that the Darwinian collapse is inevitable as well. Taking a long view it might be that Dawkins, Hitchens, and the other radical atheists represent little more than the last gasps of a dying philosophy.
My theory doesn’t speak to the ardency of the atheist of course. Their unquestioned faith in the power of their own logical processes leaves little room for any challenge from the outside. Nevertheless, atheism as we understand it today is wholly dependent on Christian presuppositions. Atheism can only arise in a Christian culture. It’s a conceptual impossibility anywhere else. Atheism presumes monotheism. Christianity is the source of both the logical concepts the atheist uses to deny it and the moral concepts and vocabulary he uses to discredit it.
Furthermore, a rejection of God, of the transcendent, does not portend a return to paganism. That, I think, is a historical impossibility because the light that came into the world by Christ, is real light. Christ in not a concept, an organizing principle, the unmoved mover of Aristotle or the great designer of Plato (as prescient as some of those concepts were), but the one through whom Creation is reconstituted in space and time. The birth, death, resurrection of Christ is an incontrovertible brute fact the ramifications of which are evident if one has eyes to see. Further, the denial or rejection of this thesis doesn’t change negate the fact; it merely leaves nihilism as the last remaining option.
The atheist disputes this. He sees atheism as a road to enlightenment. But here too we see the notion of moral and material progress, albeit temporalized. The atheist moves forward thinking that eschewing all things non-material is progress; that the process of reason alone is sufficient to find the meaning and purpose of all things. Again, it’s a conceptual framework wholly dependent on the Christianity it denies. Lacking sufficiency to fulfill this hope of enlightenment however, it will in the end either be abandoned or directed into a will to power. Those are the only two possibilities. We have seen the horror of the latter in the last century and discussed this before.
I would not be surprised to see some of the atheists embrace Islam in the end if, God forbid, the West collapses and we are forced to choose between slavery or Muhammad. There is congruency between the Muslim notion of a static god (processes and actions are a direct reflection of Allah’s will, no mediating and thus personal agent exists) and the atheist notion of an impersonal universe. Sometimes I wonder, using the biblical imagery (I believe the Jewish/Christian scriptures are the foundational and primordial narrative), if Islam is not the Assyria of the North to us Westerners. Assyria found no favor with God but yet was an instrument of His will; necessary to clarify Israel’s vision and bring them back to the one thing needful. Israel went into bondage. I hope we can avoid that fate.
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