I’ve often had occasion in these articles to speak of the evolutionist fallacy—the materialist intellectual poison that holds such imperious sway in these latter days of the Kali-Yuga.
Obviously, as a man of Traditionalist bent, it is incumbent upon me to possess an especial loathing for this philosophy, this aberrant Darwinist error that is one of the signal manifestations of the modern disorder, and perhaps even lies at the root of the evils of our age.
But why this animus? Why this unconcealed hatred for an ideology that, the partisans and hierophants of scientism assure us, is no real ideology at all—is, instead, merely a true and exact accounting of the progression of life from simplest sugars and long-chain molecules through a bewildering profusion of living forms most wonderful?
Is this not, after all, the beautifully simple and elegant explanation for the origin and subsequent story of life, an age-long striving from insensate forms of matter through to the crowning glory of man himself—the thinking creature, the civilization-builder—and all through an unaided, self-actuating series of natural laws; no more remarkable, in fact, than the laws of electromagnetism or gravitation, and all without the assistance or connivance of a supernatural Being that imposes unwanted moral judgments and obligations?
Yes, that is what we are told. But the Traditionalist knows that there is much more to this idea than a merely intellectualized and abstracted desire to con the secrets of the earth’s deep past, and a harmless—if admittedly idle—wish to know whence we came and, mayhap, whither we are going.
Make no mistake: you may associate evolutionism with fossils and museums, and clever dioramas and illustrations of the progression of past life, but the thrust of evolutionism has nothing to do with history…nothing to do with the past.
It is entirely about the future, and I shall explain why this is the case.
Forget everything you have learned. Evolutionism hasn’t a whit to do with the past, nor with elucidating the story of man nor tracing the origins and subsequent development of life. Whoever tells you this is either lying to you, or is a fool. Now, there are of course those who sincerely devote themselves to understanding the “evolutionary” history of man and of life; these are the archaeologists, palaeontologists, geneticists, the dirt-diggers and fossil-hunters and trash-sifters. They have their place, I suppose, and genuinely believe that they are contributing to man’s knowledge of his role in the world; some of them, I suspect, are even doing precisely that.
But they are not important.
It is only those who understand the true purpose of evolutionism that really matter—these men don’t give a damn about the origins of the species, nor about the story of life and civilization. They know that evolutionism is about the future; it’s about controlling, shaping, and deciding the future, the future they want, and that means spreading endless propaganda about man’s material origins, and weaving a myth therefrom about his entirely material future.
These are the leftists, the Marxists, the tedious economists, and the proselytizing materialists. But for those who are of the Counter-Tradition, witting or otherwise, evolutionism is a handy tool to persuade men to reject God, to reject his true estate, and seduce him into the false and anti-metaphysical belief that it is his destiny to one day become a god himself.
Evolutionism—for all you may have heard to the contrary—is not at all about ejecting God from His throne in Heaven, and removing the supernatural from the long and perplexing story of natural history.
No…it is not about that at all.
Rather, it is about situating God in a new dimension and in a new relationship to man—one that is decidedly more congenial to the materialists and, if we will be honest, to the partisans of the Counter-Tradition and the Counter-Initiation. That is to say, it is about placing God in the future, as a goal to be striven for, not a lord to be obeyed in the present; in other words, God is situated at the end-point of the human story, at the end of the long road of man’s arduous becoming.
For God, in this blasphemous accounting, is something that man is meant to evolve into.
This is, of course, no great insight on my part. It is the fruit of the wisdom of the great Tradition, passed down through the ages, and which has always cautioned man against this conceit. It is most famously known in the opening chapters of the Bible, and the deceitful words of the Serpent unto Eve: “And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”1
It is the act that begat the Fall, and we who live in the age that is the most fallen have shown ourselves to be peculiarly susceptible to its evil message. Man is an impossible sort of creature, suspended between the world of Becoming—the material world of scientism, of ceaseless flux and change and perishableness, and the world than which the committed evolutionists recognize nothing else—and the world of Being, the Eternal, the Unchanging, which is not created and cannot be destroyed, nor is subject to increase nor subtraction.
The goal of progress, of evolutionism, of scientism in all its forms, is as I said for man to become God. God is not absent from the hearts of these materialists, as many believe; He is instead envied, emulated, and is envisioned as a Tyrant to be dethroned and usurped. The parallels with the story of Zeus and his rebellion against his father, Kronos, or between Kronos and his rebellion against his father, Ouranos, or even Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, with its story of Thetis’ son Demogorgon, who does unto Zeus as he had done to Kronos—yes, the parallels between these stories and the plight of modernity, of modern man, are quite striking.
These materialists are, after all, nothing but a lot of latter-day pagans, striving to be the ones to dethrone the Lord of Heaven.
It is one of the most basic observations of Traditional metaphysics, understood by even the most trite and unlettered Traditionalists (such as myself), that evolutionism is nothing more than the “horizontalization” of the so-called “Great Chain of Being,” or Scala Naturae, of Classical and Medieval philosophy and theology. This was the great spiritual hierarchy in which every living thing—natural or supranatural—was situated; man resided at the midpoint, with God far above him, mediated by an ascensional “ladder” occupied by a progression of angelic beings of the Heavenly Host. Below him were the beasts, the animals, the creatures that ranked lesser than man:
“According to traditional metaphysics…Being is arranged hierarchically, in discrete ontological level. This is the ‘Great Chain of Being’ of the eighteenth century, which, when it ‘collapsed’—when, that is, we started to see the hierarchy of Being horizontally in terms of time instead of vertically in terms of eternity—was transformed into the myth of progress. When we no longer recognized the Absolute as the eternal crown of the hierarchy of Being, we were forced to imagine that something bigger and better—or at least weirder and more powerful—lay in the Future. ‘God above’ was replaced by ‘whatever is going to happen up ahead.’”2
The cult of scientism, then, the cult of materialism and evolutionism, merely flipped this hierarchy, situating that which was below man in his past, and introducing the seeming innovation that he had himself passed through all the stages from mineral, to plant, to animal, and finally to man.3 Most importantly, however, is the re-situation of the supranatural hierarchy—the angelic beings unto God—in the future, ahead of man, in the dimension of time and succession. This also implies—though no evolutionist would ever admit to it in these terms—that man will also evolve into “angelic” beings in the future, and ultimately perhaps into a God himself.
This is the dream that underpins all those utopian notions, stretching back to Eve’s temptation to partake of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, to the hubristic construction of the Tower of Babel, to more recent innovations such as the conceit of Liberal-Democratic civilization, Marxism, and whatever else the evolutionists, materialists, and utopianists shall next present us with. The Counter-Tradition, it goes without saying, promulgates these ideas with a unique fervor; some adherents to Theosophy, which is already infected with the evolutionist poison, explicitly affirm their belief that man will someday evolve into a “God,” what they call a “Logos of a Solar System.” It is also essentially the message of Père Teilhard de Chardin’s idiosyncratic conception of “theistic evolution,” which is very expertly dissected by Wolfgang Smith in his book of that name. Teilhard de Chardin has transformed God into a “Point Omega,” a mathematical vector at the end of time, toward which all life in the universe is striving; in reality, he has done little more than “say the quiet part out loud,” as the kids say, of the evolutionist fallacy:
“[The dimension of verticality] has evidently disappeared in Teilhard’s so-called theology. At the same time a rotation of axes has taken place—as we have noted before—which in effect transforms ‘the above’ into ‘the ahead.’ The time-axis of space-time has thus replaced the dimension of verticality: that is the trick which has apparently befuddled and misled millions.”4
The outcome of this “rotation of axes,” and the dethronement of God and the blasphemous horizontalization of the Scala Naturae, is perhaps inevitable:
“Once Heaven was closed and man had become reduced in effect to an earthbound creature, a substitute had to be found, an Ersatz that could somehow take the place of the spiritual Eschaton. Progress then—the specifically modern notion of a collective utopia to be achieved by human industry—replaces by stages and degrees the quest for God, and ultimately becomes confounded with that quest. Whereas the idea of progress is initially conceived in secular terms, the veneration of Progress blossoms eventually into a mysticism of sorts, a futuristic religion which claims to fulfill and supersede all the religions of the past.
“And this is manifestly the point at which Teilhard de Chardin enters upon the scene…once the world has become flattened in the collective imagination—once an effective loss of verticality has taken place—a futuristic cult of progress becomes inevitable.”5
Progressism, scientism, evolutionism, materialism—these are all the cults of Becoming, under different names but with identical tenets, that proliferate in the modern world, in the age of the Counter-Tradition, in the Kali-Yuga. They ignore the essentials superiority and ontological primacy of Being; in fact, they reject it altogether.
The goal is to consume, greedily and hungrily, the fruits both of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and of the Tree of Life; to become not merely as gods, but to become God Himself.6
We see this reflected in the great masterpieces and classics of the science fiction field; the books and films that truly speak to the spirit of science fiction—which is nothing more than the mythologizing or myth-making enterprise of scientism and the Cult of Progress—are those that lay out the ultimate, eschatological vistas of man’s future evolution.7
Take, for instance, the classic future history Last and First Men (1930), by Olaf Stapledon; in this book, the entire future evolution of mankind is envisioned, across two billion years and through eighteen different species, finally ending with a human type of almost godlike powers residing upon Neptune in the remote future (the previous habitations of mankind—earth and Venus—having been successively destroyed through various natural catastrophes). These creatures have telepathic abilities, the power to explore the past and transmit thought across time, as well as the nigh miraculous biological science to devise new forms of life to seed the galaxy with man’s successors in an even remoter futurity.
Or look at Stapledon’s other book, Star Maker (1937), which even more explicitly conveys themes of scientistic religiosity, exploring the evolution of all life in the universe, finally arriving at a pseudo-scientific “Star Maker” as a God-substitute at the book’s conclusion.
Stapledon, it probably goes without saying, was a man of undoubted Leftist and Marxist sympathies and philosophical leanings.
A better, and perhaps more familiar, example may be cited in the works of Stapledon’s intellectual successor, the famed science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. The theme of man evolving into something godlike is explored in his novel Childhood’s End (1953), but it is most famously depicted in his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, in the seminal film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
It’s all there in this movie, the perfect anthem for utopianist Space Age hopes—the panorama of human evolution, from savage African apes raised to a tool-making Homo faber by a deus ex machina (literally), which is represented by the arrival of the mysterious and vaguely sinister monolith. The film then proceeds to depict man on the cusp of achieving a spacefaring, interplanetary civilization, whereupon another monolith is discovered, deliberately buried beneath the surface of the moon; this artifact, upon its unearthing, sends a signal to another monolith, the Monolith, in orbit about Jupiter, which leads to the next act of the film—an expedition to the largest planet, to ascertain the mystery of this inexplicable extraterrestrial technology.
The enigmatic Monolith Beings—which are never seen, and whose nature and motives forever remain a total mystery—are in many ways a scientistic stand-in for God; their powers are unlimited, they apparently dwell in an Eternity that is not subject to time and becoming, they have the ability to manipulate human evolution and history, as well as to annihilate at will the seemingly insuperable gulfs of space and time. They are Clarke’s proverbial civilization that is sufficiently advanced so as to be indistinguishable from magic—or God, as the case may be.
Contrast that with man, who—puny though he may be—strives to ape God by creating in HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence that controls the Discovery spacecraft dispatched to Jupiter, a new kind of life and mind. It is a remarkable achievement…although the results end up being rather, shall we say, mixed.
But the message is clear: the godlike Monolith Beings intend to one day raise man to their level, as the film’s conclusion—with the transformation of the astronaut into the cryptic Star Child at the end of his strange journey through space and time to meet what are in essence man’s “Creators”—makes fairly evident.
Even Christopher Nolan’s extraordinary Interstellar (2014), a kind of modern successor to 2001: A Space Odyssey, implies much the same thing; near the end of the film, the astronaut—marooned at the center of a black hole—has the intuition that the godlike, fifth-dimensional “Bulk Beings” that created the wormhole that allows man to escape his dying world are in fact human beings of the distant future, who have evolved into something that we may as well consider supernatural.
It is nothing more than the old human dream—first expressed, perhaps, in Genesis, but recurring endlessly in the stories we tell ourselves, and never more so than in this age of Counter-Tradition and ceaseless rebellion. Man shall someday evolve into god: that is the promise and hope of evolutionism, of scientism, of materialism and the Cult of Progress. I can see it in lesser works, as well, such as in the books of a Counter-Traditionalist author whom I know, and whom I have mentioned before—in his The Newer Atlantis (2012), for instance, or in his future history In a Time Unborn (unpublished manuscript), a Stapledonian pastiche and unabashed Darwinian fantasy that traces the evolution of humankind into the far future, to the Eschaton itself, when man is apotheosized as a Being that is at once his Creator and his evolutionary Fulfillment.
It is a dream that will never be more than that, and it is one that leads man into a deadly trap of delusion and self-adoration. Evolutionism, Transformism, Darwinism, or whatever you wish to call it, is little more than a beautiful but ultimately sterile work of art; a piece of artifice, glorious to contemplate, but one that proceeds entirely from the brain of man, and has no real place in the natural order of things.
It is like a great sculpture of the Greek or Renaissance cultural noontides; it is a thing of undoubted beauty and technical perfection, but it is cold, and unyielding, and un-lifelike. It is a simulacrum of reality, but it is not reality itself. It is altogether too perfect, too beautiful; it is hard to the touch, and though it imitates life almost to the point of surpassing its original, its perfection is alien and in many ways terrifying. It is easy to become enamored of the simulacrum, for its beauty is unchanging and never decays, and this is the trap into which the evolutionists have fallen—their theory imitates life, though it does not reproduce it, and heedlessly they have fallen in love with their beautiful, elegant, and masterful imitation.
It is but another manifestation of man’s endless capacity for self-love. Anyhow, evolutionism remains just that—an unsubstantiated hypothesis, a cold and rigid yet masterfully executed copy of life, an error (one of many these days) that continues to lead men spiritually and intellectually astray.
And as far as the conceit of men evolving into God is concerned, we can do no better than turn to René Guénon himself for the answers we seek:
“…the evolutionists place all reality within becoming; this is why their understanding is the complete negation of metaphysics, which essentially has as its sphere whatever is permanent and immutable, that is to say that of which the affirmation is incompatible with evolutionism. In these conditions, the very idea of God must be subject to becoming, as is all else; and this is the more or less avowed position of all evolutionists, or at least of those who wish to be consistent with themselves. This idea of a God who evolves (and who, having begun in the world, or at least with the world, cannot be the world’s principle and thus represents a perfectly useless hypothesis) is not exceptional in our time.”8
But what is most important to remember, even more so than the absurdity of an “evolving God,” is that the Infinite cannot be attained by evolutionary stages:
“If one wishes at any cost to speak of evolution, one can see thereby how narrow are the limits within which this idea will apply. In second place, the hypothesis in question is useless as regards the final end which the being must attain, however this is conceived. And we think it necessary to explain ourselves here as regards the word ‘perfection,’ which is so misused by the spiritists. Obviously, for them it cannot be a question of metaphysical Perfection, which alone merits the name, and which is identical with the Infinite, that is to say with universal Possibility in its total plenitude. This is vastly beyond them and they have no notion of it. But let us admit that in a relative sense one can speak analogically of perfection for any being whatever. For such a being this relative perfection will be the full realization of all its possibilities. Now it suffices that these possibilities be indefinite, in whatever degree, for perfection not to be attainable ‘gradually’ and ‘progressively’…The being which would have passed one by one through particular possibilities in succession, whatever their number, would not have advanced for all that. A mathematical comparison can aid in understanding what we wish to convey: if an indefinite number of elements were to be added together, the final sum would never be attained by adding these elements one by one. It can be obtained only by a unique operation, that is to say an integration; and thus it is necessary that all these elements be taken simultaneously…These things can be further presented in this way: if there is an indefinite series of elements, the final term, or the totalization of the series, is not any one of these elements and cannot be found in the series, so that one could never reach it by passing through the series analytically. On the contrary, the end can be attained in a single operation by integration, but in that case, whether one has gone through the series up to this or that one of its elements is of no importance…It serves no purpose to interpose ‘an immense time,’ for even if conceived successively, this development will never be fully accomplished. But once simultaneity is admitted, there is no longer any difficulty—except that this means the negation of evolutionism.”9
In other words—if I may be so bold as to attempt to epitomize the great Traditionalist’s thinking—there is no amount of gradualism, there are no amount of evolutionary stages, that man may ever undergo that will allow him to arrive at the Infinite…at the state of being God. Only an integration—what we might call a supernatural “change of state”—will allow the human individual to experience the Absolute, and that is not something that requires or even countenances the evolution of a species across vast abysms of time.
I can do no more than encourage you to read Guénon’s The Spiritist Fallacy for yourself, and especially the ninth chapter of the second part, called “Spiritist Evolution.” It is truly a bravura refutation, not merely of the spiritist fallacy, but of the evolutionist fallacy as well. Needless to say, the analysis of the problem, and the explication of its solution, is far more deftly handled in that book by the “Hermit of Dokki” than I could ever hope to manage.
Anyhow, I have already run overlong with this post; you might call the topic something of an obsession of mine, as this diatribe clearly demonstrates. There are friends of mine, at the College of Seth and elsewhere, who would be greatly distressed (not to say appalled) to see these arguments, and learn that I had authored them; materialism and evolutionism are the hallmarks of our age, after all, and they are not lightly to be put aside.
But whether this essay convinces or converts anyone is utterly beside the point; it only matters to speak the truth in an age of manifest untruth…
Gen. 3: 4-5.
Charles Upton, Cracks in the Great Wall: The UFO Phenomenon and Traditional Metaphysics (Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2005), pg. 13.
The notion that man must have evolved, in the past, through all the “modalities” of life in order to attain his present high state, is ably dismissed by the great Traditionalist metaphysicist René Guénon in his essay “Gnosis and the Spiritist School”:
“…since, as we have explained on various occasions, the entire physical world, with the deployment of all the possibilities it contains, is only the domain of manifestation of a single state of the individual being, this same state of the being contains in itself a fortiori, the potentialities for all the modalities of terrestrial life, which represents only a very restricted portion of the physical world. Thus, if the complete development of the actual individuality, which extends indefinitely beyond the corporeal modality, includes all the potentialities whose manifestation constitutes the sum of the physical world, it includes in particular all those corresponding to the different modalities of terrestrial life. This therefore renders useless the supposition of a multiplicity of existences through which the being must progressively raise itself from the lowest modality of life, the mineral, to the human modality considered as the highest, passing successively through plant and animal modalities, with all the multiplicity of degrees contained in each of these kingdoms. In his integral extension the individual simultaneously contains the possibilities that correspond to all these degrees; this simultaneity is not expressed in temporal succession except in the development of his corporeal modality, during which, as embryology shows, he passes through all the corresponding stages from the unicellular form of the most elementary organized beings, and, going back still further, even from the crystal (which presents more than one analogy with these rudimentary beings), to the terrestrial human form. But for us these considerations are in no way a proof of the ‘transformist’ theory, for we regard the so-called law that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ as a pure hypothesis; for if the development of the individual, or ontogeny, can be proved by direct observation, no one would dare to claim that the same goes for the development of the species, or phylogeny. Moreover, even in the restricted sense just noted, the point of view of succession loses almost all its interest by the simple observation that the seed, before any development, already contains in potency the complete being; and this point of view must always remain subordinate to that of simultaneity, to which the metaphysical theory of the multiple states of the being necessarily leads us” (Mélanges (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976) [Miscellanea (Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001) pp. 159-60]).
Wolfgang Smith, Theistic Evolution: The Teilhardian Heresy, (Tacoma WA: Angelico Press/Sophia Perennis, 2012), pp. 112-3.
Ibid., pg. 168
Cf. the epilogue to the Fifth Edition of Fr. Seraphim Rose’s Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, which speaks of the evolutionistic tendencies of the New Age movements of recent decades:
“Chiliastic at its core, the New Age movement is commonly associated with what popular author Joseph Campbell has called a ‘new planetary mythology’: a mythology which maintains that man is not fallen, that he is ultimately perfectible through the process of ‘evolution,’ and that through leaps of consciousness he can realize that he is God and thus actualize the Kingdom of God on earth.
[…]
“…evolution is a key element in the New Age utopian dream…Man, having evolved from a primordial soup, now evolves toward total God-consciousness, and in this way even God is in the process of becoming. According to New Age thought, with Darwin’s ‘discovery’ of physical evolution, and even more so with the ‘discovery’ of spiritual evolution, evolution has become conscious of itself, and this new paradigm shift will accelerate the process of cosmic evolution” (Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future [Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1975 (2021)], pp. 202, 232).
The Orthodox monk Fr. Seraphim Rose was perhaps the best explicator of the Counter-Traditional nature of science-fiction literature, which is inextricably linked with the modern spirit:
“Religion, in the traditional sense, is absent, or else present in a very incidental or artificial way. The literary form itself is obviously a product of the ‘post-Christian age’…The science-fiction universe is a totally secular one, although often with ‘mystical’ overtones of an occult or Eastern kind. ‘God,’ if mentioned at all, is a vague and impersonal power, not a personal being…The center of the science-fiction universe (in place of the absent God) is man—not usually man as he is now, but man as he will ‘become’ in the future, in accordance with the modern mythology of evolution” (Op. cit., pg. 73).
L’Erreur spirite (Les Éditions Traditionelles, 1923) [The Spiritist Fallacy (Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001) pp. 250-1].
Ibid., pp. 246-7.