Does Darwinism entail naturalism?

Last updated on: November 3, 2018 at 12:22 pm by Dan Peterson

Does Darwinism entail naturalism? 2018-11-03T12:22:14-06:00 Dan Peterson

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A tidal pool on the southern coast of New South Wales, Australia. Charles Darwin proposed that life on Earth may have begun in just such a place. (Wikimedia Commons)

From another of my manuscripts come these notes, in a fairly raw state:

Why does the public care so much about Darwinism and evolution? Nobody — nobody who isn’t a specialist, anyway — becomes very exercised over quantum mechanics, the role of chlorophyll in photosynthesis, the nature of the covalent bond, or general relativity. The difference, I suspect, arises because Darwinism isn’t merely a theory in biology but an entire world view, one that carries profound implications, potentially at least, for our understanding of our own human nature and for our sense of our relationship to the broader universe. Whether they can articulate this or not, most people grasp that point intuitively. And they are entirely right to do so.

The famous American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) picked this up in an essay entitled “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy,” in which he declared that Darwinism had given rise to a “new logic to apply to mind and morals and life.”[1]

Disputes about evolution have never confined themselves to scientific periodicals and conferences. From the start, they involved clergymen — who were, incidentally and as a matter of sociology, also being dislodged by the professionalization of science, during the same era, from the role that many of them had long served as university-educated amateur “natural philosophers” — and other public intellectuals. And, today, they continue as a factor in such phenomena as the so-called “textbook wars” (which can also involve seemingly distinct issues like perceived liberal bias, human sexuality, “obscene” literature, suspicions of racism, and the like).

As one participant in those contentious disputes over textbooks has explained regarding evolution , “A naturalistic definition of science has the effect of indoctrinating students into a naturalistic worldview.”[2] And the perceived indoctrination hasn’t been confined to school curricula. As the 1975 children’s book The Bears’ Nature Guide, featuring the Berenstain Bears, informs its young audience, “Nature . . . is all that IS, or WAS, or EVER WILL BE!”[3]

“The Darwinian revolution,” wrote the famous zoologist (and self-declared atheist) Ernst Mayr, “was not merely the replacement of one scientific theory by another, but rather the replacement of a worldview, in which the supernatural was accepted as a normal and relevant explanatory principle, by a new worldview in which there was no room for supernatural forces.”[4]

In the words of historian Edward Purcell, people working in subject areas far afield from biology soon came to understand that Darwinism implied “a wholly naturalistic and empirically oriented world view” in which theological doctrines were to be viewed as “at worst totally fraudulent and at best merely symbolic of deep human aspirations.”[5]

That such figures as the distinguished geneticist and evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–1975), a devout Eastern Orthodox Christian, and the prominent contemporary cell biologist and molecular biologist Kenneth Miller, a committed Roman Catholic, have both insisted that theism is entirely compatible with belief in evolution is often ignored by both advocates and opponents of Darwinism.

[1] John Dewey, “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy,” in John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1910), 9. [See original.]

[2] Remark cited from personal conversation with John Calvert by Nancy R. Pearcey, “Darwin Meets the Berenstain Bears,” in William A. Dembski, ed., Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2004), 53 (compare 312, note 1).

[3] Stan Berenstain and Jan Berenstain, The Bears’ Nature Guide (New York: Random House, 1975). [See original.]

[4] Ernst Mayr, book review of “Evolution and God,” Nature 248 (22 March 1974): 285. [See original.]

[5] Edward A Purcell, Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), 8 and/or 21. [See original.]

Please note that I’m taking no stance in the above about biological evolution as such. And that I’m not, by any means, a young-earth creationist.

[To a considerable degree, though not entirely, these paraphrastic notes are drawn from an essay by Nancy Pearcey titled “”Darwin meets the Berenstain Bears,” which appeared as chapter 4 of Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing, edited by William Dembski.]

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