Theology
Darwinian Explanations
The influence of Darwin's theory of evolution has been felt everywhere. Philosophers and religious thinkers often invoke "evolution" to discuss religion or even thought itself. Whenever religion scholars have identified religions as "archaic" or "primitive" or talk about more evolved forms of religion they implicitly appeal to evolutionary thinking. The idea of "natural selection" has never transferred easily into the social, cultural or religious realm.
We can find appeals to Darwinian concepts in religious thought and of course opposition to them as well. Darwin was vilified for advancing ideas that challenged the Biblical account of a six-day creation: that challenge to Darwin is known as "creationism." Creationism denies the context of time that Darwin insisted must be available for evolutionary change to take place. Intelligent Design is not necessarily "creationism"-- although some Iders really are creationists near as I can tell--but ID advocates have sometimes suggested that flaws or unknowns in the evolutionary record allow science to jump to metaphysical conclusions about the existence of God. In other words, science can get you to infer logically an intelligent designer, a creator, and we are disingenuous if we do not substitute 'God' for that Intelligent Designer.
I would never challenge an individual's right to make metaphysical judgments. Philosophers do this all the time, and some, including Aristotle and Aquinas, have made a leap to God from natural evidences. This is what is meant by "natural theology," which its advocates have traditionally understood as theology and not science. The problem with allowing natural theology to be identified as science is that the collapse of the two privileges a particular way of knowing—the scientific way—and then says it is the only way to know things and to establish truth with certainty. And the ironic thing is that lots of religious people, especially Creationists, accept this view. Only someone committed to a scientific way of knowing as the only way to truth would dare suggest that, say, the Genesis account of creation must be true--scientifically true--as natural history.
Darwin maintained his agnostic stance, for in his agnosticism Darwin was saying that we cannot know the truth about God or transcendent things. Darwin did draw definite conclusions about the value of the Bible, for he had held the testimony and sties of scripture up to evaluation in light of common human experience and found them fanciful and thus untrue. He did not, however, ever proclaim himself an atheist—atheism is a certainty stance that asserts a conclusion on the question of God that I have to assume Darwin himself was not comfortable drawing. He just did not know, and he said so.
I would be willing to say to Darwin about his coming to grips with geological time and its incompatibility with the biblical account of creation in Genesis --that Genesis is misread if it is read as a natural history account of the origins of the world. That is exactly how Darwin read it; so to my mind Darwin made the exactly the same mistake at this point as his religiously orthodox detractors. He accepted the view that Genesis was laying out a scientific account of how the world came to be--so of course he rejected it as poor science. As science, the Genesis six day creation account is actually refutable. If you put forward Genesis as a natural history account, it is reasonable to reject it, and Darwin was a reasonable man.
Here is what I would say to Darwin: Look at Genesis as the authors of Genesis did. Those writers were trying to explain why the Sabbath—that seventh day of rest--was so important in the Hebrew faith tradition, so that in recounting something so marvelously wonderful as the creation of the world, the Sabbath day is presented as a part of the very origins of God's great work and, even more than that, it is Sabbath, not the creation of the human being, that is the climax of the whole business. Now Genesis is suddenly something other than a natural history account, and there is a different kind of interpretive truth to be gleaned from it. (Do not even "creationists" recognize that the creation of the Sabbath, for all it might mean in tradition, by authority, as poetry, or though faith, is not an event whose truth is confirmable by science?) So, yes, I would argue with Darwin for making the mistake of scientism—the mistake of thinking that the scientific way of knowing is the only way to truth. That is a perspective extraordinarily prevalent today, even among religious people. I say "Posh" to that; be reasonable--remember Shakespeare?
But what about his agnosticism and rejection of faith in God? I hold people who struggle with big matters like God in high esteem, even when they wind up in places different from mine. People wind up where they do because of their experiences, their depth of understanding, and their temperaments. I believe Charles Darwin went through a difficult spiritual evolution. He moved from one way of thinking about matters of faith to another, and clearly he moved by constant questioning. I admire him for the honesty of his struggle and for the depth of his reflections on his experiences. Some of those experiences were intellectual, observational and scientific; others were as intimate, personal, and as emotional as a father losing a child. Darwin did not choose to resolve his suffering and pain by applying an easy salve of religious platitude--he never said nor took comfort in the thought, "Well the Lord gives and the Lord takes away." He did not in his lifetime find easy answers to the pain of his loss--he lived in his grief and carried it with him to the end.
As a person who does stand in a Christian faith tradition, I think it important to say I do not fear Darwin and I certainly do not hate him. I think of Charles Darwin as a champion of freedom; and I believe he is deserving of whatever praise we can find in tribute to his memory--for he is what all of us should aspire to be as free men and women: a person who sought truth, advanced knowledge, and brought light to the world.
Lloyd Steffen
William James (1842-1910)
The Varieties of Religious Experience; a Study in Human Nature, Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., [c1902].
"I would argue that there are ways other than through science to know things, and in this I would find myself in the company of William James, who once expressed this very idea famously in his Varieties of Religious Experience. Knowing and understanding can come through experiences science cannot fathom; it can come through the imaginative portals of faith and poetry. I do not read Genesis as natural history but as poetry, and developing the ability to discern the truth in poetry that requires the development of an imaginative capacity as demanding in its own way as science is in its realm of truth. We go to Shakespeare for something other than historical accounting, even in Shakespeare's histories—so why do we think we have to go to Genesis for it? There are different ways of knowing and different kinds of truth, and our lives would be enormously impoverished if we were to allow science to be the sole determinant of truth. There are truths poetry does not care too much about; and there are truths to be discovered that science is not competent to access."
-Commentary by Lloyd Steffen
William Paley (1743-1805)
Natural Theology. New York: American Tract Society [n.d.].
"It is widely known that Darwin almost went into the ministry. He studied theology for three years at Christ College, Cambridge, and he had been greatly impressed by William Paley's Evidences of Christianity and his Natural Theology, which presented a famous "watch-maker" argument for God's existence from design. But Darwin would write that his theological interests "died a natural death" when, on leaving Cambridge, he signed on to the HMS Beagle for a five year sojourn as an unpaid naturalist. On board ship he read Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, which argued for an earth much older than the Biblical accounts would have it. Lyell's presentation of vast spans of time gave Darwin the context within which to see natural selection as a mechanism that would make evolution work. And when Lyell died in 1875, Darwin said, "I never forget that almost everything which I have done in science I owe to the study of his great works."
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
"As tendentious, arguable and culturally bound as such invocation of Darwinian ideas are outside of biological science, one invocation of a religious evolution idea I rather like comes from Teilhard de Chardin, the 20th century Catholic theologian—heretic?—who was well versed in geology, who in a singular way grasped the temporal context required for evolution. Teilhard once wrote something like this: human being is evolution become conscious of itself. There is much to ponder in that little gem."
-Commentary by Lloyd Steffen