12 as he makes no mention of any biblical origin of humans, their initial God-given nature or their fall into sin; rather, man can sanctify himself through reason and science. Condorcet writes, no bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties; that the perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite; that the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth above the control of every power that would impede it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has placed us.5 Humans have only been restrained from progress in the past because of ignorance, a lack of reason, and servility to corrupt traditional authorities (church and state). Obviously man is not fallen and, thus, there are no obstacles within human nature itself to unlimited progress. For instance, a contemporary of Condorcet, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, held that man in his original state of nature was inherently good (“noble savage”) and that it was only society that came later, which corrupted him. Many Enlightenment rationalists, in opposition to the teaching of Scripture, held to this very optimistic view of human nature. A Christian might think that philosophers could not deviate much farther from the biblical view. Unfortunately, the worst was yet to come — and is still with us — in theology and science. In the 19th century, the intellectual world rejected the very truth of the Bible, except as a record of primitive and superstitious religion, while simultaneously embracing evolution. Neither academic trend was totally unexpected, as they had been foreshadowed earlier. But the culminating effect was devastating. When Charles Darwin publishedOn the Origin of the Species in 1859, the theological world was at least partly ready to accept it. According to the theory of evolution, humans were at best a more highly evolved animal, having descended through long ages from much simpler animal forms. An inescapable implication of Darwin’s work (as well as his later works) was that since humans did not come by a direct, fiat creation of God, the Genesis narrative was false and the theology of sin had to be replaced by some other explanation for human nature. For both secular evolutionists and certain Christian intellectuals enamored by Darwin’s theory, humans are “getting better,” for no other reason than that natural selection and adaptation were “weeding” out the bad traits and passing on the good. 5 Marquis de Condorcet, Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind. J. Johnson, 1795, Introduction.
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