Oct 15, 2020 10:27 PM
https://areomagazine.com/2020/10/14/does...-religion/
EXCERPTS: Natural selection is the core of the modern theory of evolution. [...] One standard assumption in modern science is that ... the present can only be caused by the past. For the present to be caused by some future circumstance would be a case of teleology. To take a schoolbook example, the giraffe’s neck is long because those ancestors who had longer necks preferentially passed on their genes, not because it desires to reach higher branches and so stretches its neck. But in the strictest reading of Darwinism, the giraffe can’t even desire to reach higher branches. It can’t have any designs on the future at all, because desires are the kinds of teleological things that cannot cause anything to happen. The giraffe’s behaviour -- just as much as the makeup of its genome -- can only be caused by past events. It certainly looks as if animals, including humans, have desires or goals, but, for some Darwinians, natural selection is an all-purpose explanation of how all purposes can be explained away. Darwinism, in this scheme, banishes all designs along with a designer.
Ever since the publication of The Origin of Species, people have debated how much natural selection supplants religious or traditional views of nature. At least, that’s the standard historical narrative: everybody believed in the story in Genesis until Darwin came along and the world bifurcated into credulous fools and champions of reason. In reality, there were many versions of what we would now call evolution floating around in Europe in the hundred years preceding Darwin.
[...] Darwin’s natural selection-based theory also proved divisive among Christians. ... if you read a book by Richard Dawkins ... or a book by Michael Behe ... you could be forgiven for thinking that everyone believed the argument for design until Darwin came along, and that everyone’s been arguing over that point ever since.
This is a big part of what historians of science call the conflict thesis or conflict narrative. It frames all the major signposts along science’s journey from the Enlightenment to now as a series of clashes with religious authorities. The classic examples are Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin. But it’s a lot more complex than that. In the case of Darwin, in particular, the conflict with religion was never a pitched battle: instead his books met with a range of receptions...
[...] Dawkins and other well known Darwinians, like Jerry Coyne, say there is a conflict between religion and science. Their interlocutors on the faith side (intelligent design advocates, young earth creationists) say there is a conflict. Even Dawkins’ secular critics (philosophers like Mary Midgley, John Gray and Thomas Nagel) say there is a conflict. And yet, when the general public are polled about their attitudes towards the compatibility of religion with science, and with evolution in particular, most don’t perceive a conflict. Some do -- mainly atheists -- but most believers, unsurprisingly, think their religion is compatible with the theory of evolution and a lot of people have simply never thought about it.
To some extent, a conflict is based on perception. If disputants think they’re in conflict, they are. [...] Religious authorities aren’t actively trying to crucify biologists or ban evolution. Admittedly, in certain school districts in America they are trying to ban the teaching of evolution, but that’s something of an anomaly. Overall, people’s views are insulated from the content of scientific theories -- as we can see with attitudes towards climate change.
This disconnect between the rhetoric of spokespeople for Darwinism or intelligent design and mainstream attitudes raises a bigger question. Rhetoric generally has less impact than we often suppose. The Darwinism versus intelligent design debates are just one example of the way in which commentators often mistake what is written by experts -- who are, by definition, more interested in and motivated by a topic than the general populace -- for a reflection of public opinion. Either that or they assume that any reader who encounters these books will be helplessly swayed by their framing of the argument. It’s the same impulse that makes people worry about the influence of video games, pornography, fake news, conspiracy theories, school syllabuses, advertising, politicians’ gaffes, etc. Those things may have some effect, but a growing body of research is sceptical of the basic model whereby people simply imbibe what they’re exposed to.
This boils down to an is versus ought question. Is there a conflict today between Darwinism and religion? The answer seems to be no. Ought there to be one? The answer is evidently yes for most of the people who spend a lot of time thinking and writing about it. This is fitting because the whole debate hinges on an is–ought dilemma of another kind. Science is said to provide answers to the is-questions, the ones that concern neutral facts about how the world is. Religion is said to be in the business of oughts: how should we live? what are our values? how do we want the world to be?
[...] Evolution is a particularly spiky issue. Not only is it a field in which you can find support for many different ideologies, but it arguably determines what ideology, morality, politics and the entire normative realm can be. Dawkins says it’s natural selection all the way up, until you hit human purposes. But other Darwinians say that the acid burns through everything. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett argues that the Darwinian algorithm (replication plus variation) accounts not only for the origin of species but for the origins of anything interesting: cultures, languages, technologies, reasons, norms, meanings. Alex Rosenberg takes an even starker view. He says Darwin’s algorithm explains all the seeming design in nature—including that which is expressed in our thoughts and actions—in a purely physical way, thereby precluding all the human stuff we care about. In a Darwinian world, even human purposes are illusory.
In other words, depending on your own worldview, you might think Darwinism itself is a worldview or that it actually negates other worldviews. This raises an awkward question for science communicators and educators. What should be taught in schools and communicated to the public? There is a pretty good consensus about how evolution works. [...] So what should be said about Darwinism’s implications? Here are some options.
[...] For more mundane reasons, I think the traditional science outreach position is misguided because it’s very difficult to get the public engaged in anything -- rhetoric generally doesn’t work. So why bother writing this article? Frankly, because I assume that my readers are self-selected, already interested in the topic and probably have an opinion on it. That makes science outreach something of an elite discourse, communicating only with a group who already have access to roughly the same information as the communicators... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: Natural selection is the core of the modern theory of evolution. [...] One standard assumption in modern science is that ... the present can only be caused by the past. For the present to be caused by some future circumstance would be a case of teleology. To take a schoolbook example, the giraffe’s neck is long because those ancestors who had longer necks preferentially passed on their genes, not because it desires to reach higher branches and so stretches its neck. But in the strictest reading of Darwinism, the giraffe can’t even desire to reach higher branches. It can’t have any designs on the future at all, because desires are the kinds of teleological things that cannot cause anything to happen. The giraffe’s behaviour -- just as much as the makeup of its genome -- can only be caused by past events. It certainly looks as if animals, including humans, have desires or goals, but, for some Darwinians, natural selection is an all-purpose explanation of how all purposes can be explained away. Darwinism, in this scheme, banishes all designs along with a designer.
Ever since the publication of The Origin of Species, people have debated how much natural selection supplants religious or traditional views of nature. At least, that’s the standard historical narrative: everybody believed in the story in Genesis until Darwin came along and the world bifurcated into credulous fools and champions of reason. In reality, there were many versions of what we would now call evolution floating around in Europe in the hundred years preceding Darwin.
[...] Darwin’s natural selection-based theory also proved divisive among Christians. ... if you read a book by Richard Dawkins ... or a book by Michael Behe ... you could be forgiven for thinking that everyone believed the argument for design until Darwin came along, and that everyone’s been arguing over that point ever since.
This is a big part of what historians of science call the conflict thesis or conflict narrative. It frames all the major signposts along science’s journey from the Enlightenment to now as a series of clashes with religious authorities. The classic examples are Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin. But it’s a lot more complex than that. In the case of Darwin, in particular, the conflict with religion was never a pitched battle: instead his books met with a range of receptions...
[...] Dawkins and other well known Darwinians, like Jerry Coyne, say there is a conflict between religion and science. Their interlocutors on the faith side (intelligent design advocates, young earth creationists) say there is a conflict. Even Dawkins’ secular critics (philosophers like Mary Midgley, John Gray and Thomas Nagel) say there is a conflict. And yet, when the general public are polled about their attitudes towards the compatibility of religion with science, and with evolution in particular, most don’t perceive a conflict. Some do -- mainly atheists -- but most believers, unsurprisingly, think their religion is compatible with the theory of evolution and a lot of people have simply never thought about it.
To some extent, a conflict is based on perception. If disputants think they’re in conflict, they are. [...] Religious authorities aren’t actively trying to crucify biologists or ban evolution. Admittedly, in certain school districts in America they are trying to ban the teaching of evolution, but that’s something of an anomaly. Overall, people’s views are insulated from the content of scientific theories -- as we can see with attitudes towards climate change.
This disconnect between the rhetoric of spokespeople for Darwinism or intelligent design and mainstream attitudes raises a bigger question. Rhetoric generally has less impact than we often suppose. The Darwinism versus intelligent design debates are just one example of the way in which commentators often mistake what is written by experts -- who are, by definition, more interested in and motivated by a topic than the general populace -- for a reflection of public opinion. Either that or they assume that any reader who encounters these books will be helplessly swayed by their framing of the argument. It’s the same impulse that makes people worry about the influence of video games, pornography, fake news, conspiracy theories, school syllabuses, advertising, politicians’ gaffes, etc. Those things may have some effect, but a growing body of research is sceptical of the basic model whereby people simply imbibe what they’re exposed to.
This boils down to an is versus ought question. Is there a conflict today between Darwinism and religion? The answer seems to be no. Ought there to be one? The answer is evidently yes for most of the people who spend a lot of time thinking and writing about it. This is fitting because the whole debate hinges on an is–ought dilemma of another kind. Science is said to provide answers to the is-questions, the ones that concern neutral facts about how the world is. Religion is said to be in the business of oughts: how should we live? what are our values? how do we want the world to be?
[...] Evolution is a particularly spiky issue. Not only is it a field in which you can find support for many different ideologies, but it arguably determines what ideology, morality, politics and the entire normative realm can be. Dawkins says it’s natural selection all the way up, until you hit human purposes. But other Darwinians say that the acid burns through everything. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett argues that the Darwinian algorithm (replication plus variation) accounts not only for the origin of species but for the origins of anything interesting: cultures, languages, technologies, reasons, norms, meanings. Alex Rosenberg takes an even starker view. He says Darwin’s algorithm explains all the seeming design in nature—including that which is expressed in our thoughts and actions—in a purely physical way, thereby precluding all the human stuff we care about. In a Darwinian world, even human purposes are illusory.
In other words, depending on your own worldview, you might think Darwinism itself is a worldview or that it actually negates other worldviews. This raises an awkward question for science communicators and educators. What should be taught in schools and communicated to the public? There is a pretty good consensus about how evolution works. [...] So what should be said about Darwinism’s implications? Here are some options.
- It can only describe the natural world, so keep it separate from human concerns, which you learn about in civics class or Sunday school. (Gould’s view.)
- It explains everything in nature and rules out God, but we can make our own purposes because we evolved to do so. Phew. (Dawkins’ view.)
- If Darwinism were true it certainly would destroy all human purpose and meaning, and we’d be left with nihilism. Luckily it isn’t true and the irreducible complexity of living things is evidence of a designer. Phew. (Intelligent design.)
- The neo-Darwinian orthodoxy is too harsh. We need to promote a non-supernatural but still more expansive version of Darwinism that allows for life’s creativity and agency. (Some advocates of a scientifically respectable version of vitalism and some people’s take on the extended evolutionary synthesis.)
- Darwinism appears to be nihilistic because it is. Its baleful implications for politics and morality are an important part of the theory and the sooner we take the bitter pill the better. (Rosenberg’s view.)
[...] For more mundane reasons, I think the traditional science outreach position is misguided because it’s very difficult to get the public engaged in anything -- rhetoric generally doesn’t work. So why bother writing this article? Frankly, because I assume that my readers are self-selected, already interested in the topic and probably have an opinion on it. That makes science outreach something of an elite discourse, communicating only with a group who already have access to roughly the same information as the communicators... (MORE - details)
.....maybe.
