Darwin Does Not Love You

Although it's not as popular as the bumper sticker that reads "Jesus Loves You," one occasionally sees the contrasting bumper sticker--"Darwin Loves You."

A few yeas ago, George Levine took this as the title of a book--Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World. As the title suggests, Levine argued that contrary to the claim that Darwinian science contributes to the "disenchantment of the world" identified by Max Weber, Darwinism might actually promote the "re-enchantment of the world." After all, Levine indicated, Darwin shows a love of nature and a wonder evoked by nature's beautiful complexity and grand evolutionary history. So why shouldn't that love and wonder show us the way to a secular enchantment that has no need for a theistic religious view of this world as given a spiritual meaning by its transcendent Creator?

Now, Levine has edited a new book--The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now--which has been the basis for a good essay-review in The New Yorker by James Wood.

Levine argues for a Romantic Darwinism that would combine secular science with a sense of the sacredness of nature without any need for religious transcendence.

I need to think more about this. But my first reaction is that this kind of reasoning gives both too little and too much credit to revealed religion.

It gives too little credit to revealed religion, because it assumes that scientific reasoning has refuted the claims of revelation. I doubt this. Although there are many reasons to be skeptical about religious faith, I have never seen a rational demonstration that revelation must be false.

Moreover, I don't see in Darwin's writings any attempt to refute religious belief. I do see skepticism, especially towards the end of his life. But I also see that he never publicly proclaimed atheism, despite his skepticism. I also see in his writings a persistent effort to leave open the possibility of theistic evolution, the possibility that God as Creator might have employed natural evolution as the means for carrying out Creation.

What I see here is what I call the problem of ultimate explanation. All explanation must start with an unexplained, and unexplainable, ground of all explanation. For the Darwinian naturalist, nature itself--the laws of nature--are the unexplained ground of explanation. For the theist, God the Creator is the unexplained ground. I see no way around this ultimate choice, with no way for either side to refute the other. In a free society, both sides are available as people organize their lives around answers to this fundamental question of life.

But if Levine gives too little credit to religious belief, he also gives it too much credit. After all, the very quest for an enchanted world or sacred secularity is itself a religious quest, or a search for a surrogate religion. Nietzsche saw this when he warned that in the wake of the death of God, many people would be unable to shake off their longing for redemption, and they would seek religious emotions without the need for religious doctrines. He saw Romanticism as one manifestation of this, and he saw David Strauss's religious Darwinism as showing this tendency to want to turn scientific naturalism in a religious direction. Nietzsche himself embraced a Darwinian naturalism free from religious longings only in his middle works--Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science. In his later writings, however, he relapsed into an atheistic religiosity because he could not free himself of his religious longings.

Levine and others seeking an enchanted secularism are like the later Nietzsche in trying to be good atheists while failing to give up their religious longings.

In accepting Weber's "disenchantment" story, Levine assumes that for human life to have "meaning," human purposes must have some resonance with cosmic purposes, and thus he praises Darwin for his "anthropomorphic" view of the universe, his projection of human purposes onto the cosmic order. He sees this as the alternative to the "anthropocentric" or "theocentric" view of theistic religion. But even Levine's romantic anthropomorphism--his imaginative response to nature as mindful rather than mindless--expresses a religious longing.

The alternative to this atheistic religiosity is to see that a purely human purposefulness that has no cosmic support can satisfy the Socratic or Darwinian skeptic. But because of the natural desire for religious understanding, very few human beings can live this kind of life. And nothing said by the scientific skeptic can refute the claims of the religious life.

Darwin loved his wife, his children, and his friends. But he doesn't love you. Darwin is no substitute for Jesus. Darwin and Darwinism are not going to redeem us from the limitations of this world and give us entrance into an ecstatic enchantment.

But Darwinian science can teach us that life has meaning in so far as life has purposes--human purposes. Human purposes arise from those twenty natural desires that constitute our evolved human nature.

That evolved human nature leaves us vulnerable to suffering and death, and it provides no transcendent promise of escaping from that vulnerability, except for those moved by the desire for religious understanding. But it does provide us with the possibility of human goods--human love, human striving, human wonder. For many of us, that's enough.

My earlier blog post on Darwin's understanding of love and death can be found here.

Earlier blog posts on Nietzsche's struggles with Darwinism and religion can be found here, here, here, and here.

One of my posts on the evolution of the desire for religious understanding can be found here.