Darwin and Religion: Rumors of Warfare in a Post- Darwinian Age - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Darwin and Religion:

Rumors of Warfare in a Post- Darwinian Age

Darwin and Religion 


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• “Although atheism

might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

• Richard Dawkins, The

Blind Watchmaker (1986)

Darwin and Religion 


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• “Theistic evolution may

be described as an anesthetic which deadens the pain while the patient’s religion is being gradually removed, [or] a way- station on the highway that leads from Christian faith to No- God-Land.”

• William Jennings Bryan,

The Menace of Darwinism (1923)

Darwin and Religion

• “When [Henry Ward] Beecher

and other liberal preachers accepted evolution their evangelical brothers looked upon them with suspicion. Scientific method had not reached religious thought. It was only when educational processes had ceased to be controlled by the study of classical literature and grew more contemporary, that

• rthodox theology was felt to

be incompatible with intellectual integrity. “

• Shailer Mathews, New Faith for

Old: An Autobiography (1936)

Darwin and Religion 


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• “Let each man hope &

believe what he can.”

• Charles Darwin, letter

to Asa Gray (1860)

• What does Darwin

mean for religion?

• What has Darwin been

said to mean for religion?

The “Warfare” Thesis


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• NYU chemist John

William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874)

The “Warfare” Thesis


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• Cornell president and

historian Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896)

Darwin & Religion: Four Main Responses

• Conflict resulting in the rejection of evolution

as valid science

• Conflict resulting in the outright rejection of

most types of theism as contradictory to science

• Conflict resulting in the rejection of divine

transcendence and the wholesale reformulation

• f traditional theological beliefs
• Complementarity in which traditional

theological beliefs are upheld

Conflict – resulting in the rejection of evolution

• “fundamentalist” defined

in 1920

• “We suggest that those

who still cling to the great fundamentals and who mean to do battle royal for the fundamentals shall be called ‘Fundamentalists’.”

• Curtis Lee Laws,

Watchman-Examiner, July 1920

Bryan, Seven Questions in Dispute (1925), frontispiece by E. J. Pace

Sunday School Times, July 1924, cartoon by E. J. Pace

Conflict – resulting in the rejection of evolution


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• Adam Sedgwick, letter to

Charles Lyell (1845), responding to Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

• “If the book be true, the

labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice; morality is moonshine; our labours for the black people

• f Africa were works of

madmen; and man and woman are only better beasts.”

Conflict – resulting in the rejection of evolution


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• Hugh Miller, responding to

Vestiges

• If humans are continuous

with animals, “we must either hold the monstrous belief, that all the vitalities … are individually and inherently immortal and undying, or that human souls are not so.”

Conflict – resulting in the rejection of evolution


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• “The difference between

the dying and the undying—between the spirit of the brute that goeth downward, and the spirit of the man that goeth upward—is not a difference infinitesimally, or even atomically, small. It possesses all the breadth

• f eternity to come, and

is an infinitely great distance.”

Conflict – resulting in the rejection of theism

Conflict – resulting in the rejection of theism


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Conflict – resulting in the rejection of divine

transcendence & wholesale doctrinal reformulation


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• “White did not

formulate his thesis about warfare between religion and science primarily to advance the cause of science, but rather to save religion from its own internal enemies.”

• Steven Jay Gould,

Rocks of Ages (1999)

Conflict –the rejection of divine transcendence 


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Conflict –the rejection of divine transcendence


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• “How much can I still believe?”

is the question pathetically

• asked. ... Beginning with two

score or more doctrinal articles there ensues a process of elimination and attenuation till today, in liberal circles, the minimum creed seems to have been reduced to three tenets: belief in God, confidence in immortality, and conviction of spiritual uniqueness in Jesus of

• Nazareth. ... Thus the pathetic

game of give what must, hold what can, continues.”

• Edwin Arthur Burtt, Religion in

an Age of Science (1930)

Conflict –the rejection of divine transcendence

• Princeton biologist Edwin

Grant Conklin

• “My gradual loss of faith in

many orthodox beliefs, came inevitably with increasing knowledge of nature and growth of a critical sense.”

• White and Draper “showed

the impossibility of harmonizing many traditional doctrines of theology with the demonstrations of modern science.”

Conflict –the rejection of divine transcendence

• Conklin’s “religion of

science” (1920s)

Conflict –the rejection of divine transcendence

• Ian Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical

and Contemporary Issues (1997)

• the modernists “emphasized God’s

immanence, often to the virtual exclusion of transcendence, and in some cases God was viewed as a force within a cosmic process that was itself divine.”

• David Ray Griffin, Religion and Scientific

Naturalism (2000)

• “modern liberal theologies have achieved a

reconciliation of science with theology at the expense of its religious content...”

Complementarity, in which traditional theological beliefs are upheld


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• “The scientific avenue

into theological thinking will seek to give due weight to science, but it would be fatal to allow it to become a scientific take-over bid, affording no more than a religious gloss on a basically naturalistic account.”

• John Polkinghorne,

Belief in God in an Age

• f Science (1998)

Complementarity

• “The resurrection is the pivot on which Christian belief
• turns. Without it, it seems to me that the story of

Jesus’ life and its continuing aftermath is not fully intelligible.”

• John Polkinghorne, Exploring Reality (2005)
• David Hume’s “confidence that the laws of nature

were known with a certainty that extends even into realms of unprecedented and hitherto unexplored phenomena is one that was certainly falsified by the history of science subsequent to the eighteenth century, and it could never be pressed to dispose of an event like the resurrection of Jesus, which claims to be a particular act of God in a unique circumstance.”

• John Polkinghorne, The Faith of a Physicist (1994)

Complementarity

• Polkinghorne not only understands (as many others do)

that the “warfare” model that was uncritically accepted for most of the twentieth century is historically bankrupt; he also understands that this negates the pseudo-historical underpinning of many modern efforts to demythologize theology in the name of science

• He realizes that one of the most serious consequences of

the modern embrace of White’s attitude, the flight from transcendence, has left theology unable adequately to ground Christian hope and less able to converse productively with science as a partner of equal standing

• In identifying philosopher David Hume rather than

scientist Charles Darwin as the bogeyman, he advances a more helpful conversation between science and religion