Nancy Pearcey, offers an article based on Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes, her most recent book.
The public has responded swiftly and strongly against the Obama administration’s demand that public schools admit transgender students into the showers, locker rooms, and sports teams of their choice. But to be successful, the response must also be informed. Where did transgender ideology come from, and how can we respond more effectively?
The answer may surprise you. If we dig deeply, we discover that the turning point, historically, was Darwin’s theory of evolution. It had a lasting impact in at least three ways.
Matter Does Not Matter
Let’s tease out its impact through the language of the transgender movement. California set the tone in 2007 when it changed its education code to define gender as “a person’s gender identity and gender related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth.”
What’s the key word here? “Assigned.” As though a person’s sex at birth were purely arbitrary instead of a scientific, biological fact.
What such language implies is that biological facts do not matter. The law is being used to impose a worldview that denigrates the physical body as inconsequential, insignificant, and irrelevant to gender identity. It is a worldview that alienates people from their own bodies. As Anglican theologian Oliver O’Donovan writes, transgender ideology implies that “the body is an accident that has befallen the real me; the real me has a true sex” apart from my body.
Where did such a negative view of the body come from? From Darwin’s rejection of purpose and design in nature. Both classical Greek and Christian philosophy regarded the natural world as teleological – from the Greek telos, meaning purpose or goal. It is evident that eyes are for seeing and ears for hearing; fins are for swimming and wings for flying. The only reason molecules are arranged in those particular configurations is to achieve a purpose.
Because the human body is part of nature, it too was recognized as having a purpose. The sexual differentiation of male and female was not some cosmic accident. It showed that the human body is oriented toward opposite-sex pair-bonding for emotional attachment and procreation. Teleology is the basis for naturallaw ethics: It tells us how to fulfill our true nature, how to become fully human.
Darwin did not deny that nature appears to be designed for a purpose. But he wanted to reduce that appearance to an illusion, the result of a purposeless material process. The two elements of his theory, random variations sifted by the blind automatic forces of natural selection, were proposed expressly to eliminate plan or purpose.
As historian Jacques Barzun writes, “This denial of purpose is Darwin’s distinctive contention.”
The implication of the Darwinian worldview is that the biological differentiation of male and female is a cosmic accident. The body was reduced to raw material that can be manipulated and controlled to serve human needs and preferences – like any other natural resource. Gender identity is strictly in the mind, even to the point of overriding biological identity. Matter does not matter.
This was “Darwin’s dangerous idea,” says philosopher Daniel Dennett in a book by that title. He describes Darwinism as a “universal acid; it eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view.”
Darwin and Foucault
The second way Darwinism feeds into the transgender movement is the elevation of evolution into an overarching philosophy – evolutionism or historicism. The philosophy itself preceded Darwin, but he gave it the scientific credibility needed for its widespread acceptance.
The source of the philosophy was Hegel, who taught a form of spiritual evolutionism. Hegel said that all ideas – law, morality, religion, art, philosophy, political ideals – are products of the gradual “actualization of the Universal Mind” over the course of history. All are partial truths in the upward progression of Mind, the evolution of consciousness.
Long before Darwin, then, Hegel was teaching people to interpret history in an evolutionary paradigm. Nietzsche even said that “without Hegel, there would have been no Darwin.”
How does evolutionism or historicism play into transgender ideology? It implies that there is no stable, enduring, universal human nature – and therefore no stable, universal sexual morality. As the existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre put it, “There is no human nature because there is no God to have a conception of it.” Just as species are constantly changing and evolving, so individuals must leave behind all stable standards of behavior and immerse themselves in the ceaseless flux of life, constantly creating and re-creating themselves.
As postmodernists put it, the self is fluid. There is no blueprint for what it means to be human. Morality is reduced to a social convention, the product of a constantly evolving history.
Sexual theorists like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler vigorously deny that the claim that any moral ideal – say, heterosexual marriage – is built into our nature because they deny there is any human nature. Any such claim, they say, commits the fallacy of “naturalizing,” defined as treating a behavior as natural when they know it is merely a social construction.
Sex as Identity
Finally, how did sex come to be seen as the core of human identity? Foucault points to biology. In the past, he explains, biologists treated sex and reproduction as just one among the many functions of an organism. But today they treat it as central to life itself. In Foucault’s words, “geneticists ceased to conceive of life as an organization strangely equipped with an additional capacity to reproduce itself”’; now “they see in the reproductive mechanism that very element which introduces the biological dimension: the matrix not only of the living, but of life itself.”
Foucault does not name names, but this shift, too, was a product of Darwinism. The theory made reproduction the linchpin of evolutionary progress. Because there is no independent criterion of success, Darwin’s theory boils down to “differential reproduction” – whoever has the most offspring wins.
Consequently, Foucault writes, in the space of a few centuries, sex has gone from being regarded as one activity of life to being our core identity. Sex is treated as the “master key” to knowing who we are: “Sex, the explanation for everything.”
Giving Dignity to the Body
If we draw these strands together, they form the philosophical underpinnings for transgender ideology: Sex is the core of our identity, but there is no stable human nature, so all concepts of gender are social constructions. We cannot derive our gender identity from our physical makeup because the body is just a piece of matter with no purpose or meaning in itself. It is a hunk of raw material whose meaning is imposed on it by the autonomous self.
We must help people to see that this is a very negative view of the human body. It grants no dignity to our physical, anatomical, biological identity. It drives a wedge between the body and the authentic self. And therefore it alienates people from their own bodies.
We would do well to retrieve the ancient wisdom that nature is teleological, just as people have long recognized. A teleological worldview leads to a positive view of the body. It acknowledges that there is purpose and dignity in being male and female. It leads to harmony between biological identity and gender identity. And it leads to respect for the body/person as an integrated unity.
Matter does matter.
It is important to protest the latest government overreach. But this positive message has the best chance of winning people’s hearts and minds.
Bio: Nancy Pearcey is a professor and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University, editor at large of the Pearcey Report, and author most recently of Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism & Other God Substitutes.
Is there anything that Darwin’s theory of evolution wasn’t responsible for according to you?
In a surprisingly large number of cases the biological sex is so ambiguous that an arbitrary decision has to be made. From good old Wikipedia entry for Sex Assignment:
So it is also a scientific, biological fact that there are a significant number of infants whose sex is so ambiguous that doctors and parents are forced to make a choice. Was this by accident or design, I wonder?
Would Seversky care to say what the percentage/number of such infants is? One heard hardly anything of it until “transgender” became the new progressive cause. A market for big government?
Seversky asks:
Which is the old ‘God would not have done it that way so Darwinian evolution must be true’ argument. The primary problem with this type of argument is that it is a Theological argument that is trying to make a scientific conclusion. Apparently, in Darwinian theology, we do not live in a fallen world and God would never allow such things as detrimental mutations. But aside from such a simplistic theology as Darwinists have, the fact of the matter is that detrimental mutations are a VERY powerful SCIENTIFIC, not Theological, argument against Darwinian evolution being true.
The evidence for the detrimental nature of mutations in humans is overwhelming for scientists have already cited over 100,000 mutational disorders.
I went to the mutation database website cited by John Avise and found:
Contrary to what Dr. Avise, and other Darwinists, may believe, such an overwhelming rate of detrimental mutations is NOT a point of scientific evidence in favor of Darwinism! In fact, it is a very powerful scientific argument against Darwinian claims,,, That this scientific fact would even have to be pointed out to Darwinists is a sad testimony to how warped Darwinian theology truly is in regards to the science at hand.
And this deterioration of the human genome has been happening for a long time:
The fossil record backs up the ‘deteriorating’ genetic evidence:
Moreover, contrary to what Seversky and other Darwinists may prefer to believe theologically, there is nothing Theologically problematic with detrimental mutations since Christianity has always maintained that we live in a fallen world. In fact, the fact that we do live in a fallen world is pretty much a central claim of Christian theology.
to News: the article Seversky quoted gives percentages in the form 1 out of x. Did you see that?
Aleta at 4, yes, but it sounds like motivated nonsense, as usual. What would happen if no one did anything except in extreme cases is not, of course, the grievance industry’s issue.
Most statistics in these areas are ignorable unless one is compelled by law to assent to what one reasonably doubts.
What? Are you doubting the statistics? They may be wrong, or not (I don’t know), but I can’t actually tell what you meant.
News @2
Evidently, based on the Wikipedia article Seversky quoted, 0.005% of babies lack sufficient physiological definition to identify sex within seconds, minutes or a few days of birth. It seems to me that under normal conditions one could uncontroversially characterize this kind of condition as an extremely rare pathology. But who would be so foolish as to think these types of issues are allowed to be discussed as if they were subject to “normal conditions”?
Question. Since transgender ideology implies that “the body is an accident that has befallen the real me; the real me has a true sex” apart from my body. And yet there is no real me apart from the biological body within materialism, only an illusion of a ‘real me’, then why is the sexual illusion of the illusory ‘real me’ given priority over the biological/material reality of the body by materialists?
If materialists were consistent in their materialism, they should be first and foremost to give priority to the material reality of their body over the psychological preferences of the illusory mind.
Quote of note:
The purpose of claiming that we are only meat is to establish the authority for saying, “You are only meat.”
This transgender stuff comes from the same place as the gay stuff.
The good guys must make a great argument and based on morality.
First it must be based onb morals and that from God and man.
So it must be the peoples decision. not governments acting on their own.
Everyone must get a say and then , I guess, a head count ala democracy.
the bad guys never let the people decide just like gay marriage etc.
If they say experts have decided transgender is scientifically right then its a science issue once more.
We must say God, our ancestors, and ourselves have the moral duty to do the right thing and the moral to decide that based on each individuals opinion.
Then we can contend on the merits.
Obama and company FIRST deny the people the right to decide and then say we may discuss it. Then a vote as long as they are sure of the result.
I say the, whjats the name, our our side has failed since WWii to argue on moral foundations but instead argues on the merits only.
We must THIS TIME use this transgender thing as a way to ROLL BACK all these attacks.
The people must demand the people decide the moral status of these things.
Until then its illegal invasion and occupation by those in power to assert thier will.
We must then demand there is no case for transgenders confusion.
We deny it. They don’t need to interfere with our historic segregation of the sexes based on the physical body.
Human body structure is a complicated one. We all do not know how it forms. However, we can study it through the biological field. And now many researches related to drug discovery have become more and more popular here:
How would your philosophical framework assign sexual identity for those who are afflicted by Disorders of Sexual Development? What constitutes a male vs a female designation when the chromosomes and/or the genitalia are ambiguous?
As examples, classifications of sex chromosome DSD include the following:
– 45,X ( Turner syndrome and variants)
– 47,XXY ( Klinefelter syndrome and variants)
– 45,X/46,XY (mixed gonadal dysgenesis, ovotesticular DSD)
– 46,XX/46,XY (chimeric, ovotesticular DSD)
Classifications of 46,XY DSD include the following:
– Disorders of testicular development (complete and partial gonadal dysgenesis)
– Disorders of androgen synthesis (complete and partial androgen insensitivity, disorders of antimüllerian hormone [AMH]/receptor, androgen biosynthesis defect)
– Other (severe hypospadias, cloacal exstrophy)
Classifications of 46,XX DSD include the following:
– Disorders of ovarian development (ovotesticular DSD, testicular DSD, gonadal dysgenesis)
– Androgen excess (fetal [eg, congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH)], fetoplacental, maternal)
– Other ( vaginal atresia, cloacal exstrophy)
http://emedicine.medscape.com/.....0-overview
rhampton
Before this line of argument goes further, let me point out that from the medical point of view biological intersex and transgender are chalk and cheese.
It’s the equivalent of using castration to explain why some people don’t like the idea of marriage.
I studied social psychology when the idea of “assigned gender” was the new kid on the block in sociology – and its roots are, to say the least, muddily associated with a particular ideology (as in most sociology of that era). But it arose from the suggestion that a biological male with ambiguous anatomy would do best “assigned” to the female sex. Not surprisingly, it led to tears.
To go from that to the current idea that gender is universally independent of biology, independent of social condition, and instead a mysterious “inner” conviction, cannot be reached through science, but only some kind of ideological mysticism.
Romans 1 playing out right before our eyes
What’s the key word here? “Assigned.” As though a person’s sex at birth were purely arbitrary instead of a scientific, biological fact.”
No, the key word is AND. “…to define gender as “a person’s gender identity AND gender related appearance and behavior…”
To hear the opposition to the transgender use of bathrooms, it would give sexual predators the legal right to enter women bathrooms to attack them. Obviously, assuming your words are correct, this is not the case.
How does the fact that we have two sexes show that we are oriented towards pair bonding and emotional attachment? It only shows that we are oriented towards reproduction. There are plenty of examples of species with two sexes in which there is no pair bonding or emotional attachment.
You know, I’m reminded of G.K. Chesterton saying, “If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits.”
In that we are not making a distinction of the sexes doesn’t elevate anyone or free anyone, rather, it binds everyone.
And then to C.S. Lewis who says, “Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have ‘taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho’ and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it?”
“Man’s conquest of nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.”
Transgender boys that I’ve known are pretty meek – your daughters are safe. The only Darwinian concept at play is extinction?
News, where do Pearcey’s words begin? In this available elsewhere? KF
“Parents furious over school’s plan to teach gender spectrum, fluidity
“The district will also introduce young teenagers to the “concept that sexuality is a broader spectrum.” By tenth grade, they will be taught that one’s sexuality “develops throughout a lifetime.””
Yes, I can see why parents would be furious at the plan to teach reality to children. They would be much better off not being taught that homosexuality exists, that transgender exists, that they have both existed for all of human recorded history. Maybe we shouldn’t teach them about hygiene and germ theory either.
Contrary top the belief of some, accurate information, even if disturbing, is always preferable to the withholding of accurate information or the dissemination of misinformation.
“Contrary to the belief of some, accurate information, even if disturbing, is always preferable to the withholding of accurate information or the dissemination of misinformation.”
Does this include teaching students the accurate information against Darwinian evolution instead of just the dissemination of misinformation currently taught for Darwinian evolution? Or does teaching all of the information suddenly become problematic for you when it comes to Darwinian evolution?
For more background, including a discussion of intersex and its implications, please read this article that appeared in CNSNews:
(excerpt) “Is this fragmented view of sexuality actually liberating? Many who have tried it say no. Jonah Mix, who writes for “Gender Detective,” spent years immersed in queer theory, wearing makeup and nail polish: “It was in those queer circles that I first heard the common admonition to never define a person by their body.”
Eventually, however, he realized the promise of liberation was a lie. To discover whether you “identify” as a man, you must define manhood. If you do not define yourself by your biological sex, then you must define yourself by your actions. Do you act stereotypically masculine? Then you are a man. Do you behave in ways that are stereotypically feminine? You must be a woman. Queer theory actually reinforces gender stereotypes.
By contrast, if you base your identity on your physical anatomy, you can engage in a range of diverse behaviors without threatening your identity as a man. Mix writes, “When we are defined by our bodies, the whole width of human experience remains open. … There is freedom in the body.”
On a trans website a commenter named Trish wrote, “As a little girl, I enjoyed both ballet lessons and playing in the mud. … I liked miniskirts and wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. It looks to me like the trans movement is fighting very hard to force everyone to choose whether to live in the blue box or the pink box, and no playing mix-and-match. To me this is the opposite of freedom.”
Contrary to what progressives say, there is greater diversity when we anchor our gender identity in the objective, scientifically knowable reality of our biology as male or female.
In culture war rhetoric, the existence of intersex people (hermaphrodites) is often used to disrupt the male/female binary. But intersex conditions are a matter of biology, not gender identity. A report filed to the European Commission in 2011 says, “Intersex people differ from trans people as their status is not gender related but instead relates to their biological makeup (genetic, hormonal and physical features).”
http://www.cnsnews.com/comment.....ger-matter
supplement to post 21
Jon Garvey,
I think you misunderstand the nature of my post. I agree that psychological issues are likely the reason for a majority who identify as transgendered. However, there is a foundational belief that the biological sexes are clearly and easily defined. Sadly, this is not true for far too many people.
So, how is a society to deal with this issue? Do we leave it to the individual to determine their sex? Do we establish a legal framework to determine the gender of the sexually ambiguous? It’s not an easy question, and goes straight to the philosophical grounding for what is gender identity, and who owns it.
News @ 2
One heard hardly anything about the oppression of slavery, or the denial of women’s rights, or the treatment of homosexuality as a crime until the “progressives” of the day began protesting about them and demanding the redress of longstanding grievances. Do you dismiss all of them as just “a market for big government”?
bornagain77 @ 3
If you want your copy/paste of cherry-picked quotes to be taken seriously in any way as a scientific approach then you should explain how evolutionary biology accounts for detrimental mutations and, while you’re at it, you could summarize objections to the concept of “The Fall” in Christian theology. Of course, if your purpose is the same as Cornelius Hunter’s, namely anti-evolution advocacy rather than science, that is not going to happen, is it?
Seversky, you, a atheistic troll who could care less for the truth, are trying to give me pointers on how to be taken seriously? Thanks for the laugh!
Perhaps you would like to establish Darwinian evolution as a real science before you try to give me pointers on being taken seriously?
Darwinian evolution, despite whatever lies you may prefer to believe, since it has no falsification criteria, does not even qualify as a real science in the first place but is more properly classified as a unfalsifiable pseudo-science:
The main reason why Darwinian evolution is more properly thought of as a pseudo-science instead of a proper science is because Darwinian evolution has no rigid mathematical basis, like other overarching physical theories of science do. A rigid mathematical basis to test against in order to potentially falsify it (in fact, in so far as math can be applied to Darwinian claims, mathematics constantly shows us that Darwinian evolution is astronomically unlikely),,
Darwinian Evolution is a Unfalsifiable Pseudo-Science – Mathematics – video
https://www.facebook.com/philip.cunningham.73/videos/vb.100000088262100/1132659110080354/?type=2&theater
“In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.”
Karl Popper – The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge (2014 edition), Routledge
BA77: “Seversky, you, a atheistic troll who could care less for the truth, are trying to give me pointers on how to be taken seriously? Thanks for the laugh!”
The thought that anyone takes you seriously certainly made me laugh.
A self-named clown seeks to defend a troll? 🙂 (Insert laugh track here)
All childish games of prestige aside, the fact of the matter is that Darwinian evolution can’t explain, nor demonstrate, the origin of a single protein by Darwinian processes. Much less can Darwinists even begin to coherently explain how trillions upon trillions of protein molecules and cells ‘accidentally’ came together to form a single unified whole that typifies a living organism.
BA77: “All childish games of prestige aside, the fact of the matter is that Darwinian evolution can’t explain, nor demonstrate, the origin of a single protein by Darwinian processes.”
Nylonase.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9foi342LXQE
Though Darwinists love to claim Nylonase as a ‘new’ protein. The simple fact is that is the same exact enzyme/protein, esterase, with only a minor variation on its previous enzymatic activity:
Moreover, much like it was recently found for Lenski’s citrate, Nylonase is a repeatable adaptation that is not arrived at by Darwinian processes but is arrived at by ‘directed’ mutations
So, a protein that is different than any previously known protein is not a new protein. You have some pretty strange definitions. And you should check the sources of your infirmation. Evolution News and Views and Cornelius Hunter do not exactly count as legitimate and respected sources of scientific information. Do you have anything else? Possibly an OP from News? Or an assertion from KF?
Quote. Mildew has 2 sexes. So do some plants. A lot of insects are sexually differentiated, but they don’t go in for a lot of emotional attachment.
clown fish, your postings certainly sound a lot like william spearshake. A troll whom has been banned several times under numerous different handles for exactly the same type of trollish behavior you are now exhibiting. i.e. ad hominem, refusal to deal forthrightly with the evidence, etc.. etc…
“Mildew has 2 sexes. So do some plants. A lot of insects are sexually differentiated, but they don’t go in for a lot of emotional attachment.”
So in the Darwinian worldview, the institution of marriage between a man and a woman degrades into insects having sex in order to reproduce?
you are missing a rather huge elephant in the living room. i.e. Love!
One pertinent note. In the Darwinian worldview, sexual reproduction does not make any sense and should not exist in the first place if Darwinism were true.
Simply put, if evolution by natural selection were actually the truth about how all life came to be on Earth then the only ‘life’ that should be around should be extremely small organisms with the highest replication rate, and with the most ‘mutational firepower’, since only they, since they greatly outclass multi-cellular organism in terms of ‘reproductive success’, would be fittest to survive in the dog eat dog world where blind pitiless evolution rules and only the fittest are allowed to survive. The logic of this is nicely summed up here:
In other words, Since successful reproduction is all that really matters on a neo-Darwinian view of things, how can anything but successful reproduction be realistically ‘selected’ for? Any other function besides reproduction, such as sight, hearing, thinking, etc.., would be highly superfluous to the primary criteria of successfully reproducing, and should, on a Darwinian view, be discarded as so much excess baggage since it would, sooner or later, slow down successful reproduction.
Moreover, contrary to one of Darwin’s central predictions, time after time we find micro-organisms helping each other, and us, in ways that have nothing to with ‘survival of the fittest’’. The following researchers were ‘more than a little shaken’ by what they found:
Moreover, instead of eating us, which would be expected if Darwinism were actually true, time after time different types of microbial life are found to be helping us in essential ways,,,