Dan Hitchens on Something
What Darwin did to Christianity
Not much, actually, if you were orthodox enough.
The good Catholic John Henry Newman.
When people say that modern science has made old-fashioned religious belief impossible, I suppose what they mean is this: that if you could show St Paul or Thomas Aquinas or Ralph Cudworth a list of scientific discoveries since their age, they would, at some point, throw up their hands and admit that they had made a terrible mistake. That must be what is implied by a battle between science and religion. The idea strikes me as improbable; but it does at least have a straightforward kind of logic. Of course the immediate question is: at what stage would the religious believer of the past admit their error? Presumably it would not be the invention of the washing machine or the solving of Fermat’s Last Theorem. One popular nomination, of course, would be Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.
Now, Darwinism certainly does destroy the false religions of biblical literalism and crude creationism; but then, that is what happens to false religions. It happened to Communism and it will happen to Scientology. But it is not clear that Darwin harms any version of Christianity worth believing: such as orthodox Christianity. The great Christian thinkers of the last two thousand years did not base their arguments on Intelligent Design or on “irreducible complexity”. St Augustine told his readers not to take Genesis literally in the fifth century.
Moreover, we know how the most thoughtful Christians of Darwin’s time responded to The Origin of Species; and it is not the case that they shouted it down or ridiculed it. Intellectual Christianity at its best was quite happy with Darwin. According to Darwin’s biographer James Moore, there was “a much more subdued overall reaction to The Origin of Species than is generally supposed and a genuine amiability in the relations of those who are customarily believed to have been at battle.” Edward Pusey pointed out that Darwinism was entirely compatible with the Church’s teachings. Charles Kingsley wrote to Darwin to congratulate him on a theory which seemed to Kingsley to magnify the glory of God.
The picture that exists in many minds goes something like this: at first, the spokesmen of Christianity reacted with horror and tried to discredit Darwin’s theory. Then, as it gained acceptance, they hastily changed their position and pretended that Darwinism was entirely compatible with Christian theism. Anyone who looks into the matter will see how untrue that story is, and will have to give it up in spite of its pleasing simplicity. Intriguingly, James Moore also concludes: “it was only those who had maintained a distinctly orthodox theology who could embrace Darwinism; liberals were unable to accept it… The correlation between Darwinism and orthodoxy was not inverse but direct.” It was not Christianity that Darwin took down, but warped pseudo-Christianity.
The very orthodox Catholic convert John Henry Newman wrote mildly to a friend, “Mr Darwin’s theory need not then be atheistical, be it true or not.” Newman was well-qualified to say so, having written well before the Origin of Species on the misconception that science and religion contradict each other. What Newman called “Physical Theology” and what we would now call Intelligent Design “cannot, from the nature of the case, tell us one word about Christianity proper; it cannot be Christian, in any true sense, at all… Nay, more than this; I do not hesitate to say that, taking men as they are, this so-called science tends, if it occupies the mind, to dispose it against Christianity.”
Since Newman is an astonishing genius and the master of the nineteenth-century English essay, and I am not, and since he demolishes by himself the myth that Darwin liberated humanity from belief in God, I yield to him:
“The Physicist treats of efficient causes; the Theologian of final. The Physicist tells us of laws; the Theologian of the Author, Maintainer, and Controller of them; of their scope, of their suspension, if so be; of their beginning and their end. This is how the two schools stand related to each other, at that point where they approach the nearest; but for the most part they are absolutely divergent. What Physical Science is engaged in I have already said; as to Theology, it contemplates the world, not of matter, but of mind; the Supreme Intelligence; souls and their destiny; conscience and duty; the past, present, and future dealings of the Creator with the creature.”
Topics: Politics, Religion, Science
John Newman stole my face.
Excellent article. Biblical literalism is indeed a flawed, false, and immature belief system.
It is interesting to note that in the 1860s the publication of “Origin of the Species” did not have nearly the impact on Christianity that people generally think. It was VASTLY overshadowed by “Essays and Reviews”, which brought the work of the German Biblical textual critics to the attention of the English-speaking world. “Essays and Reviews”, which dared to offer proof that Moses did not author the Pentateuch, sold many many times more copies in its first year than “Origin” sold in its first decade. “Origin of the Species” didn’t become a lightning rod for Biblical Literalist Christians until Williams Jennings Bryan made evolution his personal crusade.
The problem with a nonliteral interpretation of the Bible, is that is undermines other areas of scripture. For example: I Timothy 2:12-15
12I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. 13For Adam was formed first, then Eve; 14and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. 15Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.
The basis for Paul’s argument is that the events in the Garden of Eden were true. If you don’t believe they were true, then this argument is baseless.
In addition, you have a church father arguing with a fallacious assumption. If he does it here, wherelse does he do it?
Thus the whole authority of the Bible begins to unravel.
Well, since 1 Timothy wasn’t written by Paul, it’s pretty hard to take 1 Timothy literally in any context. Paul clearly states in his ACTUAL writing that women held key positions in his ministry. So the reduction in the status of women expressed in 1 Timothy was almost certainly a later pseudoepigraphical addition by some enterprising author.
I think it is wiser to look at the evidence in nature, none of which was formed by the hand of man, than to hold up as an infallible idol a book written entirely by the hand of man (many many men, many of them unknown).
The Bible is metaphor and allegory, not a divinely written history book. If you treat it as metaphor and allegory, then you can be at peace with what is actually found in nature. And it is nature, not the Bible, that was indisputably written by the hand of God (assuming you believe in God).
Have you heard about St. George Jackson Mivart (1827-1900), a Roman catholic, a former Thomas Huxley’s student who wrote On the Genesis of Species (1871), and engaged in a scientific controversy with Darwin about the role of natural selection in the origin of species?
The problem with this, is that what scientists have learned about evolution in the years since Darwin died, has posed even greater challenges to Christianity–even a modernist Christianity.
When I was a child, we kids were still taught that the evolution of Man was more or less inevitable: mammals were bound to displace dinosaurs, because they were more intelligent and agile than those stupid slow-moving dinosaurs. And popular books still had depictions of “The Ascent of Man,” showing how he had “ascended” from primitive ape-men.
We now know that’s all wrong. If that meteorite hadn’t hit the Earth 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs might still be dominating the planet, and we humans would not be here. Things like this make the emergence of Man into a kind of cosmic accident, one of many possibilities in the evolution of life.
Scientists are no longer even sure if the evolution of high intelligence (tool-using, abstract thought) is inevitable on any planet on which life emerges.
And that does contradict the Christian conception of Man as a deliberate creation of God.
I suspect the clever Christians who managed to reconcile their faith with natural selection theory, have their cleverness as their intellectual pride instead of their faith. How natural selection theory destroys religion is by destroying any knowledge about freedom. Creation, intelligent design, free will of people, free behaviour of animals, plants and bacteria, all knowledge that posits any freedom is real is systematically destroyed by application of the logic of natural selection.
Those who pose the debate science vs. religion are out to deceive. Darwinism has no science behind its success. It is establisshed by concensus alone and more in science today are atheistic in worldview and interested more in justifying their worldview and lifestyle. Darwin gave tests by which to falsify his “theory” and it failed them.
Intelligent design asks questions like if DNA information generated each of us from a single cell, who wrote the instructions? All language use implies a conscious mind (needed to pick and place correctly the characters of the code.) Darwinists in effect are saying inert matter, rocks and the like, now and then write code for squishy machines like ourselves, already created by accidental interplay of natural forces, and waiting to interpret the blueprints sent them by the rocks.
NASA seeks to make this more plausible by saying only wet rocks can live (WRCL theory) so just add water and wait. It takes eons for the rock writings to find the correct squishy things to animate.
Adult fairy tales! Darwin should have begun, “once upon a time, in a land far, far away, …” the rocks got tired doing rock things and longed to be gerbils and ferns and migratory butterfies too.
DBM
Columbus
What did Global Warming do to Christianity?
What about phrenology?
For those who need encouragement to combat the caustic “Scripture is Metaphor” premise, listen to great message on the topic from Vodie Baucham: “Why I Choose to Believe the Bible” http://ow.ly/1gbLp
Quite right Dan – great article – conflict between religion and sciecne is much harder to establish than most people imagine.
I would go further than you in at least one respect: namely, Darwinism is not even incompatible with Intelligent Design.
As I understand it, Intelligent Design is a premise in the (so-called) Teleological Argument, which is one of three major arguments for God’s existence. It roughly says: the natural world appears to have been designed; the appearance of design is evidence for a designer; so we have evidence for a designer.
One way of fleshing out premise 1 – by taking ‘natural world’ to refer to biological organisms – is indeed challegend by Darwinism. Yet there are numerous other ways of fleshing out the premise – by saying that the cosmos, the structure of the atom etc all seem to have been designed – that Darwin cannot touch.
So Darwin does not refute the Teleological Argument. On top of that, refuting an argument for God’s existence does not disprove God’s existence (we can have a bad argument for a conclusion that happens to be true); and there are anyway the two other major arguments for God’s existence (the Ontolgical and Cosmological Arguments) both of which are a priori, so even more immune to scientific refutation.
That’s not to say that the Telelogical Argument is successful (Hume raised a slew of devestating problems with it in his Dialogues on Natural Religion), just that we cannot show it to be unsuccussful with the resources of Darwinism.