The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [139]
One can see there is little room for a god in this theory. The natural forces of the earth drive everything, and as the environment of the earth changed so did the organisms dependent on that environment. Knowledgeable people in 1900 realized this theory applied to people as well as animals. After 1900, a secularized scientific world-view dominated the West, and evolution fit nicely into this view. In education, the secularized naturalist worldview became dominate under the guidance of men like Dewey.
The science of geology came of age at the same time the theory of evolution came into vogue. Lyle, an attorney, is the father of modern geology. He studied the landscapes very closely, deciding the processes at work on the environment in 1859 were the same forces at work in 500,000 BC or earlier. He stated, “As things are now, they have always been.” This was the uniformitarnism theory that was directly at odds with the catastrophic theory of earth’s history which had been the accepted idea. The catastrophic theory held cataclysmic events formed the earth causing massive geologic changes over short periods of time.
For Darwin’s theory to be accurate the uniformitarnism theory had to win acceptance as the foundation for geologic theory. If the earth were formed by cataclysmic events the species would not have time to evolve between the obliterations. The numbers of species on earth is great, and to reach this kind of diversity took long spans of uninterrupted time. Thus, the two theories of evolution and uniformitarnism managed to complete one another, bound together as a package. This fact is seldom part of an analysis of the theory of evolution.
Darwin’s theory challenged religious beliefs about the nature of man. If man was not created by God (or gods), then he was just an animal. The problem here was the lack of purpose and a lack of foundation for evaluating human behavior. Without God, where would morality come from? Who could then say what was right and wrong? Philosophy battled this problem since the ancient Greeks and never reached an agreed conclusion. Thus, science added to the stripping away of rationality from the world; and the world became a place without meaning, purpose, rationality, or god(s).
Art and Literature
Including music, philosophy, economics, and more
In the era of 1900, the artistic world experienced the death of rationality. Realism turned up dead, cause and effect dead, humanity dead, purpose of life . . . dead. Most ordinary people overlooked this in 1900, but it became evident soon enough.
As usual, artists led the way in predicting this new “reality.” Painters moved beyond Impressionism to Modernism. In this new way of painting, reality was unimportant. Van Gogh painted his famous Sunflowers in 1888, and this was already a great departure from Realism. Monet’s Water Lilies exhibited in 1916, and it is a stretch to call this Impressionism. Other paintings were coming, paintings of a dark and sordid world where shadow and form merged and made the subject hard to discern. In some paintings, clocks melted and landscapes became unrecognizable, or surrealistic, as we say today. Paintings contained no recognizable theme and often no recognizable center of attention. Most of the rules were gone. Cubism allowed the viewer to see the subject from many different perspectives; other paintings seemed formless, and without the title could not be recognized (Nude Descending a Staircase, Marcel Duchamp, 1912), and in others (The Scream, Edward Munch, 1893), the subject itself melts into a controlling title. In The Scream, the subject is the scream even though a scream is a noise. The artist made the person screaming appear as noise as much as a human (barely recognizable as human).
Figure 44 Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912
How artists can know the future before it arrives is an interesting issue; but in the era