The secular denial of Evolution
When it comes to secular origin stories, creationism is everywhere. I’m not talking about the origins of life. Evolution remains the favorite answer to that question. But when it comes to the creation of the modern world—our Western, liberal outlook—the denial of evolution is everywhere. Nowadays your average Westerner considers their values, goals, and moral intuitions to have emerged, almost miraculously, from the darkness of ancient religions and superstition. Such convictions have arrived in history, so it’s assumed, fully formed and without dependence on prior beliefs and practices. But a more careful historian—one who pays attention to cultural developments over the centuries—will deny such creationism. In particular, he or she will see the undeniably Christian origins of a secular-liberal worldview. Let me give two examples: modern science and the Enlightenment. Both movements are central to the Western imagination, and both display the unmistakable signs of evolution from a com