A Reaction to Chesterton's “Man in the Cave”

            Once again we have a paper by Chesterton.  In this paper he talks the cavemen in general and how they really were instead of how we, as a society, depict them.  This is an interesting and probably difficult way to write a paper, but it is the way that he chose.

            Chesterton starts this discussion by talking about earth and how we do not even think of how we got here and how it was even created.  He is merely saying that to think of ourselves in an insignificant way compared to earth is just stupid and that we should not do that do ourselves or to others around us.  Dehumanization is horrible and pointless according to Chesterton.  After this he talks about Evolution of the Idea of God and how his opinion of this author and book was considered blasphemy even though what this book was talking about was actually blasphemy.  He then goes into talking about the order of words and its importance when it comes to making sense when you try to explain something or when you are trying to have something published.   After a more analogies he then goes into his caveman discussion.  He explains that how think of caveman as barbaric individuals who kill women and line their cave walls with their bones is completely wrong.  In all actuality the only time men were in caves back then was when needing shelter from weather and to draw and tell stories along the wall.  He explained that cavemen were the naturalists of that time period.  The way they depict the world was seen in their detailed of how they drew each of their animals with such detail.

            After that then he starts going into how he feels that evolution is stupid and that no one should believe it because God was the one who created us and that there is no way that we had developed from such a lower species.  He especially didn’t think it possible since you do not see primates or other animals drawing on surfaces so the fact that we came from primates or any other lower species is just not possible to Chesterton.  He just felt that Darwin was stupid.

            So as you can see since Chesterton was a Christian he did not support the evolutionary concept at least from the perspective that we came from primates, but that we evolved or changed as a species of human beings and in the process of us changing we forgot our old ways of life and its simplicity.  Chesterton had even related the caveman concept to Peter Pan and how it is more of a thought that cavemen were actually probably just like Peter Pan in the sense that they looked at the world around them with innocent eyes and that they went as far down into the earth that they did only to create the world that they saw on the walls of the earth.  Of course as the population grew and more and more things were created our innocents started to disappear to become more like Captain Hook in the sense that we would rather destroy that which is innocent since the world is not really like that.  In reality the world would have remained that way had we not developed and in that direction and ruined the world the way that we have.