This series of three newspaper columns by Olavo de Carvalho was collected in this order in the book “The Minimum You Need To Know So As Not To Be An Idiot”.
“Science against Reason” critically examines the modern understanding of “science” as the ultimate authority in all matters, arguing that science is not a self-sustaining entity but rather a specialized subset of human rational capacity. The article highlights the inability of science to define fundamental terms like “yes” and “no,” which are grounded in human moral responsibility and experience, not in scientific reasoning. It points out that many terms essential to scientific methodology, like “equality,” “difference,” “cause,” and “relation,” cannot be defined by science itself but rely on conventional meanings derived from human experience. Furthermore, the article asserts that science cannot transcend the limits of reason, as it is rooted in human experience and the contrast between the finite and the infinite. It criticizes the blind reliance on scientific authority in public debates, viewing it as an escape from the responsibilities of using reason. The piece concludes by illustrating the inconsistency of those who advocate for science, oscillating between relativism and absolutism, thus undermining the true essence of rational thought.
“Dreaming of the Ultimate Theory” discusses the concept of a perfect logical proof and its implications in the realm of scientific theories. It argues that while a perfect logical proof exists only in an ideal domain and not in real-world realities, the pursuit of a “final theory” in science — a unified explanation of nature and human existence — continues. The article critiques this pursuit by highlighting historical examples where scientific theories were interpreted as near-perfect logical proofs and applied beyond their scientific boundaries, leading to ideological and often destructive consequences. It points to the mechanistic interpretation of Newton’s principles, the societal applications of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, and the political implementation of Marxism as instances where scientific ideas were extended to justify actions like social reform, genocide, and totalitarian regimes. Olavo suggests that the enthusiastic quest for a final theory in science, with its potential ideological implications, might not bode well for humanity.
“Why I’m Not a Fan of Charles Darwin” presents a critical view of Charles Darwin and the celebration of his work. Olavo argues that Darwin did not invent the theory of evolution but rather adapted it from pre-existing ideas and his grandfather’s work. The piece criticizes Darwin’s concept of natural selection, contrasting it with the current understanding of random evolutionary changes (neo-Darwinism). It also suggests that Darwin himself was the progenitor of the “intelligent design” theory, a notion often rejected by his followers. The article goes further to accuse Darwinism of inherently supporting genocidal and racist ideologies, citing Darwin’s own writings as evidence. It concludes by questioning the idolization of Darwin, arguing that his scientific reputation is based on misinterpretations and contradictions of his actual beliefs and theories.
Science against Reason
Diário do Comércio, January 7, 2009
What is proudly called “science” today, intending to designate it as the ultimate and supreme instance in the judgment of all public and private questions, is neither a univocally recognizable entity, nor much less a knowledge that has its own foundation.
The possibility of the existence of something like “science” rests on a variety of assumptions that can neither be subjected to “scientific” testing themselves, nor provide any rational basis to give the so-called “science” the authority of the last word not only in general questions of human existence but even in the specialized domain of each particular scientific area.
Just to give an elementary example, without the words “yes” and “no,” no logical reasoning is possible. No science can tell us what they mean. All formal logic is based on these two words, and formal logic itself cannot define them. Any logical-formal definition offered for them will always be purely tautological, saying nothing in itself and ultimately basing all its understanding on an appeal to the personal experience of the listener or reader. If we say, for example, that the meaning of “yes” is consent, agreement, acceptance, etc., we affirm nothing except that to say yes is to say yes. Likewise, “no” cannot be defined as rejection, contestation, etc., for the simple reason that the meaning of these words consists precisely in saying no. The only possible meaning of the word “yes” is the full moral responsibility that a person assumes in declaring something. This responsibility, in turn, is subdivided into degrees ranging from the absolute disposition to die for what is said to the mere provisional acceptance of a hypothesis for argumentation purposes, therefore also for refutation. The same happens with “no.”
There is no way to define these words except through an appeal to personal responsibility as it appears in subjective self-knowledge. This simply means that every purely logical-formal use of these terms, amputated from their root in human moral experience, is only a conventional and hypothetical use that does not allow distinguishing whether, in the end, “yes” means “yes” or “no,” and “no” means “no” or “yes.”
The same phenomenon occurs with numerous other terms used in scientific reasoning, such as “equality,” “difference,” “cause,” “relation,” etc. No science can define these terms, nor can scientific methodology do so if it takes the validity of scientific knowledge for granted instead of grounding it from its roots. We can, of course, set logical-formal meanings for these words, as well as for many others, but only as a conventional cut made on top of what they mean in responsible human experience.
It also wouldn’t make sense to imagine that this difficulty only affects the expression of scientific knowledge in words and not the very substance of that knowledge. Either the usual terms of scientific language express the very content and structure of scientific knowledge, or the latter is in itself an indescribable and mystical knowledge whose translation into words remains always external, approximate, and imperfect.
In short, scientific knowledge — and even more so what is popularly understood as such today — is a specialized subdivision of the general rational capacity and has in it its foundation, not being able to judge it by its own criteria. What is understood here as “reason” is also not limited to the usual capacities of coherent language and calculation, for both these capacities are also nothing more than specializations of a more basic capacity. Reason is, first and foremost, the capacity to imaginatively open oneself to the entire field of real and virtual experience as a totality and to contrast that totality with the dimension of infinity that immeasurably transcends it. The finite and the infinite are the first categories of reason, and I do not refer to the mathematical equivalents of these terms, which are only their translations into a specialized domain. From this first distinction arise numerous others, such as inclusion and exclusion, limited and unlimited, permanence and change, substance and accident, and so on. Without this immense network of distinctions and inclusions that constitutes the basic structure of reason, the scientific method would be nothing. It is even more foolish to imagine that, once historically formed, the scientific method became independent of reason and can dispense with it or judge it according to its own criteria. It is reason, not the scientific method, that gives meaning to the very discourse of science, which in turn cannot account for it in the slightest. “Science” can never be the ultimate authority on any subject except within the limits that reason prescribes to it, limits that in turn continue to be subject to rational criticism at any time and in any circumstance of the scientific process.
The object of reason is human experience taken in its indistinct totality, only limited by the sense of infinitude. The object of science is a conventionally operated cut within this totality, a cut whose validity can only be relative and provisional, always conditioned to criticism according to the general categories of reason that infinitely transcend not only the domain of each particular science but that of all combined.
After all, how is a science constituted? It is assumed that a certain group of phenomena obeys certain constants and then samples are cut within that same group to verify, through observations, experiments, and measurements, whether things happen as predicted in the initial hypothesis. Once the operation is repeated a certain number of times, one seeks to articulate its results in a logical-deductive discourse, structuring the reality of experience in the form of a logical demonstration, ideally evidencing the rationality of the real. All this is impossible without the categories of reason, obtained not from this or that scientific experience, nor from all combined, but from the very sense of human experience as an unlimited totality.
Human experience, taken as an unlimited totality, is the most basic of realities, while the object of each science is a hypothetical construction erected within a more or less conventional cut of that totality. This construction is worthless if amputated from the background from which it was constituted. The attachment to the authority of “science,” as seen today in most public debates, is nothing but the search for a fetishistic, socially approved protection against the responsibilities of using reason.
The most evident symptom of this is the ease, the hurried and hopping channel change with which the spokespersons of “science” move from relativistic and deconstructionist attenuations, for which all discourses are valid in some way, to absolutist proclamations of “scientific facts” immune to all discussion, so sacred that their contesters must be excluded from the academic environment and exposed to public execration. The cult of “science” begins in ignorance of what reason is and culminates in the explicit appeal to the authority of the irrational.[^1]
[^1] Editor’s Note: The video — subtitled in Portuguese, with less than three minutes duration — in which the American philosopher William Lane Craig gives a devastating response about the supposed omnipotence of science to the English chemist Peter W. Atkins in a 1998 debate, is not to be missed, available at the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_TLzIR2ptM. The complete debate can be watched without subtitles at the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1Y6ev152BA.
Dreaming of the Ultimate Theory
Diário do Comércio, December 2, 2012
The perfect logical proof is independent of human passions and whims. It does not depend on witnesses. It is even independent of the existence of human beings. It imposes itself with the impersonality of earthquakes and planetary cycles. However, earthquakes and planetary cycles are, on the scale of the universe, limited events. Far above them, the perfect logical proof imposes itself with the absolute authority of divine will.
Anyone who has a perfect logical proof can accept disagreement as a fact, not as a right. Ultimately, they will explain all divergence as a result of ignorance or perversion and, sooner or later, will wish to suppress it through indoctrination or force.
Fortunately, perfect logical proofs only exist in the purely ideal domain. They do not pertain to the realities of the world. Even the most exact science admits that its realm is not that of definitive truths, but that of probabilities and uncertainties. This does not prevent many scientists from continuing to dream of the “final theory”: a unified and complete explanation of nature and everything within it — which necessarily includes the human being with all his thoughts, desires, emotions, beliefs, and values.
The devotees of this ideal, when they speak of it, hasten to acknowledge that “we are still far” from achieving it. The apparent modesty of this confession hides the unshakeable faith that it will be achieved. It also includes forgetting that, in the past, there were those who firmly believed they had already achieved it, already possessing at least the founding principles of entire nature, and thus being able to apply them to all domains of knowledge and action, shaping by them society, laws, culture, education, and the human mind. In none of these cases did the foundation reach the level of a perfect logical proof. It always included some unproven assumptions, sometimes incongruous or incomprehensible. But, in any case, compared with the rest of the opinions in circulation, the “general theory” seemed to be what most closely approached a perfect logical proof, making it difficult for its spokespeople to resist the temptation to arrogate the unlimited authority of a divine commandment, stifling all opposition as irrational and anti-scientific.
This happened at least three times in history. The first was when Sir Isaac Newton, having succeeded in deducing some natural phenomena from mechanical principles, expressed hope that soon all other phenomena could be explained by the same principles. Subsequent developments in science showed that the dream was impossible. But, in the 18th century, as Sir Isaac’s prestige spread across Europe, this dream was taken as an accomplished reality and enshrined in mandatory doctrine under the name of “mechanism.” Soon mechanism transformed into a social reform project and began chopping off heads — including those of some mechanists dissatisfied with the political consequences of the doctrine. (Years ago, I wrote a few lines about the damage mechanism brought to the world, and I was accused, in a discussion list among logic professors, of wanting to “refute Newton” — which suggests that, at least in Brazil, it is possible to be a professor of logic without having learned to read.)
The second time was when Charles Darwin’s evolutionary doctrine, barely published, and although it was not even a theory of everything but just a comprehensive explanation of the variety of living beings, was applauded as the general key to human history and scientific foundation of both the race war and class struggle. Adopted with slight modifications by the two totalitarian regimes that vied for power in the world at the beginning of the 20th century, it served as the ideological foundation for the organized killing of some 200 million human beings.
The third, which intertwines with the second, was the proclamation of Marxism as the supreme scientific explanation of historical evolution and, in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, “the unsurpassable philosophy of our time.” It ended as it did.
In all three cases, the pious attempt to dig an insurmountable ditch between the “purely scientific” core of these theories and their malevolent historical-social effects is futile, attributing the latter exclusively to subsequent ideological distortion and the contamination of “pseudoscience.” Scientific theories do not come ready-made from the heaven of pure ideas. All carry some ideological element, however discreet and unwanted it may be, which sooner or later ends up surfacing in history, just as the rejected passions rise from the unconscious and eventually engulf the personality.
Newton did not conceive his gravitational theory solely to explain certain facts of nature — although it is still taught this way to the gymnasium population — but as part of a comprehensive project to destroy Trinitarian Christianity and replace it with a religion of “absolute unity,” of esoteric inspiration. One must be very naive not to notice the scope of the underlying totalitarian ambition.
Darwin and Marx were much more explicit about the foreseeable consequences of their theories: the former accepted genocide as a normal fact of nature,1 the latter as an indispensable instrument for the establishment of socialist paradise.2
The utopian delight with which so many scientists dream of the “final theory” and strive to refine the logical instruments to substantiate it does not seem, in this sense, to be a harbinger of better days for the human species.
Why I’m Not a Fan of Charles Darwin
Diário do Comércio, February 20, 2009
The billion-dollar festivities commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth momentarily render invisible some essential facts of the life and work of this man of science.
Firstly, Darwin did not invent the theory of evolution: he found it ready-made, in the form of esoteric doctrine, in the work of his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, and as a scientific hypothesis in countless mentions scattered in the books of Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Goethe, among others.
All he did was risk a new explanation for this theory — and the explanation was wrong. No one among the self-proclaimed disciples of Darwin believes in “natural selection” anymore. The fashionable theory, so-called “neo-Darwinism,” proclaims that, instead of a mysteriously directed selection towards the improvement of species, all that happened were random changes. As far as I know, mere chance is precisely the opposite of a regularity founded on natural law, rationally expressible. Darwinism is a slippery and protean idea, with which one cannot seriously discuss: as soon as squeezed against the wall by a new objection, it does not defend itself — it changes identity and leaves singing victory. Many theories idolized by moderns do this, but Darwinism is the only one that had the audacity to transform itself into its opposite and continue proclaiming that it is still the same.
All celebrants of the Darwinian ritual, neo-Darwinists included, reject as pseudoscientific the theory of “intelligent design.” But the inventor of this theory was Charles Darwin himself. This becomes very clear in the final paragraphs of The Origin of Species, which in my remote adolescence I read from cover to cover with huge enchantment and which made me a fanatic Darwinist, to the point of placing the author’s portrait on the wall of my room, surrounded by dinosaurs (only now do I understand that I was one of them). Now, thanks to the kindness of a reader, I became aware of the studies developed by John Angus Campbell on the “rhetoric of sciences.” He studies scientific books from the perspective of their persuasion strategy. In a fascinating video,3 he demonstrates that “intelligent design” is not just a final complement to the Darwinist theory, but its fundamental premise, discreetly spread throughout the entire argumentative edifice of The Origin of Species. “Intelligent design” is, therefore, the only part of the Darwinian theory that still has defenders: and these are the worst enemies of Darwinism.
It’s certainly a paradox that the inventor of a false explanation for a pre-existing theory is celebrated as the creator of that theory, yet an even greater paradox is that the foundational premise of Darwinian argumentation is repelled as the very denial of Darwinism.
Purely farcical, however, is the general effort to camouflage the genocidal ideology embedded in the very internal logic of the theory of evolution. When apologists for the British scientist reluctantly admit that evolution “was used” to legitimize racism and mass murder, they do so with monstrous hypocrisy. Darwinism is genocidal in itself, from its very root. It did not have to be distorted by unfaithful disciples to become something it was not. Read these paragraphs by Charles Darwin and honestly say whether racism and the apology for genocide had to be grafted onto an innocent theory:
In some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time, the anthropomorphic apes… will undoubtedly be exterminated. The gap between man and his lower companions will then be greater, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of, as now, between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.4
Imagine, during the American elections, John McCain’s campaign proclaiming that Barack Hussein Obama was closer to the gorilla than the Republican candidate!
There’s more:
Looking to the world at a not very distant date, what an incalculable number of lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races5
To complete, an explicit appeal to the liquidation of the undesirable:
Among savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination: we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment… Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the human race. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but except in the case of man himself, no one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.6
Note well: I am not against the evolutionary hypothesis. From what I have observed to date, I must conclude that I am the only human being, in my circle of close and distant relations, who has no idea whether evolution happened or not. Everyone else has some belief about it and seems willing to kill and die for it. I have none.
However, my abstention from opinions about a question that I consider insoluble does not forbid me from noting the absurdity of the opinions of those who have any. Long ago I realized that scientists are even less trustworthy than politicians, and the paradoxes of Charles Darwin’s fame only serve to confirm it.7 My evil instincts compel me to grab Darwinists by the throat and ask them:
Why so much fuss about Charles Darwin? He invented “intelligent design,” which you hate, and natural selection, which you say is false. He openly preached racism and genocide, which you say you abhor. To celebrate him, you have to create from nothing a fictional character that is the opposite of what he historically was. Don’t you see that all this is a farce?
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Editor’s Note: For Charles Darwin’s statements in this regard, see the following text, on page 398.↩
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Editor’s Note: For Karl Marx’s statements in this regard, see “Illuminating Quotations” in the chapter Socialism.↩
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Editor’s Note: Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1896.↩
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Editor’s Note: Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Part 1, 1897.↩
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Editor’s Note: Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1896.↩
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Editor’s Note: “But a Darwinist crying out against the violence of religions [the English scientist Richard Dawkins declared to Veja magazine on June 23, 2004, that the world would be more peaceful if all religions were abolished] is the most complete and perfect image of intellectual imposture. Evolutionism was the father of communism and Nazism. All the religious wars since the beginning of the world, added together, have killed only a minuscule fraction of the number of victims these regimes made in a few decades. Even taking into account the population difference between the eras, the disproportion is frightening” - Olavo de Carvalho, “Darwinist Imposture”, O Globo, June 26, 2004 — http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/040626globo.htm].↩
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