Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the intellectual founding fathers of communism, tried to describe their materialist philosophy in terms of a new method known as dialectics—the hypothesis that all progress in the universe is obtained as the result of conflict. Based on this assumption, Marx and Engels sought to interpret the entire history of the world. Marx claimed that the history of humanity was one of conflict, that the existing 19th-century conflict was between workers and capitalists, and that the workers would soon rise up and carry out a communist revolution. (See
Communism.)
In order to influence large masses of people, however, Marx and Engels needed to give their ideology a scientific appearance. The basic claims made in Darwin’s The Origin of Species published in the 19th century represented just such a supposed scientific basis for Marx and Engels’ ideas. Darwin maintained that living things emerged as the result of a struggle for survival—in other words, through dialectical conflict. (See Struggle for Survival, the.) Furthermore, Darwin rejected religious beliefs by denying creation; and for Marx and Engels, this was an opportunity not to be missed.
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| Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the intellectual fathers of communism, were delighted to imagine that Darwin’s theory of evolution gave scientific backing for their own atheistic views. |
Marx and Engels rejoiced to imagine that Darwin’s concept of evolution represented a scientific backing for their own atheistic world view. However, the theory of evolution received widespread acceptance mainly thanks to the primitive level of science in the 19th century when it was first put forward. Actually, it is devoid of any scientific evidence and is full of errors. Scientific advances in the second half of the 20th century revealed the invalidity of the theory of evolution. This spelled the collapse of materialist and communist thinking, and did the same for Darwinism. Yet scientists with a materialist world view resorted to all kinds of methods to conceal the collapse of Darwinism, since they knew that it would also spell the end of their own ideologies.
