The Darwinian Lockean Liberalism of Natural Religion

In this season of the year, our greetings of "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Holidays" acknowledge our natural human propensity to religious beliefs and rituals, while also acknowledging that in the modern liberal social orders in which many of us live today, we respect religious liberty and toleration.  "Merry Christmas" doesn't favor any one Christian tradition over any other.  And "Happy Holy Days" recognizes that there are some non-Christian religious observances during this season--particularly, the Jewish festival of Hanukkah.

The Darwinian Lockean Liberalism that I have defended explains the naturalness of religion as rooted in our evolved human nature.  It also explains why we need religious liberty and toleration so that all individuals have the equal liberty to pursue their natural desire for religious experience in their own way.

My position has provoked lots of criticisms, of which two are most prominent.  The first is that Darwinian Lockean Liberalism is incoherent insofar as Darwinian atheism denies the Christian foundations of Lockean Liberalism.  The second is that Lockean religious liberty and toleration denies the truth of Christian Integralism (Catholic or Protestant) that there is one true church--the true Christian Church established by Jesus Christ--and that this Christian Church can rightly use the secular authority of government to enforce the Orthodoxy of that Church.

I have previously responded to these two criticisms (here and here).  But after thinking more about these issues, I have decided to lay out a slightly revised version of my previous responses.

Various authors have countered my position with a syllogistic rebuttal (Dilley, 2013; Holloway, 2006; West, 2006).  I will call this “Dilley’s Syllogism” because Stephen Dilley formulated it in his Introduction to his edited book Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism:

Classical (Lockean) liberalism is founded on Christianity.

Darwinism denies Christianity.

Therefore, Darwinism denies classical (Lockean) liberalism.

The conclusion of this syllogism is false, because the major premise is only partly true, and the minor premise is totally false.

The major premise has been asserted by those of my critics who are proponents of what they call “Christian classical liberalism” or “theistic classical liberalism” (Dilley, 2013, pp. 19, 23, 158-59).  I have inserted “Lockean” into the syllogism because these critics generally appeal to Locke as “the quintessential classical liberal” (Dilley, 2013, p. 198).  The only doctrinal teaching of Christianity that they mention as supporting Lockean classical liberalism is the idea of imago Dei: that all human beings have been created in the image of God (as declared in Genesis 1:26-27) seems to endow them with the equal moral dignity that supports the classical liberal teaching that all human beings are created equal in their moral dignity as equally endowed by God with natural rights (Dilley, 2013, p. 11). 

Locke seemed to adopt this idea in speaking about the law of nature as grounded in the nature of human beings as God’s “workmanship”:

Reason, which is that Law, teaches all Mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions.  For Men being all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the Servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his order and about his business, they are his Property, whose Workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s Pleasure (ST, 6).

Locke identified this idea of men being God’s property because they are his workmanship with man being created in God’s image, in the sense that all members of the human species were created as “intellectual creatures,” which gave them dominion over the “inferior creatures,” but without giving any human being dominion over any other human being, because all men were equal in having a human mind that was a likeness to the Mind of God (FT, 30, 39, 52-54, 85-86; ST, 56).

But Locke also claimed that natural rights were rooted in every man’s self-ownership (ST, 27).  Now, as Peter Laslett (1970, p. 100) observed, this principle of human self-ownership “almost contradicts his principle that men belong to God, not themselves.”  “Almost”?  Can men both belong to themselves and belong to God?  I have argued that evolutionary neuroscience can explain the human experience of self-ownership as rooted in the interoceptive capacity of the embodied brain.  But the human experience of being owned by God might be harder to explain scientifically.

The apparent contradiction between Locke’s principle of self-ownership and his principle of divine ownership can be resolved by seeing that Locke made what Michael Zuckert has called a “two-track argument,” in which “one track is theistic, the workmanship argument, an argument of natural theology; the other track is the appeal to self-ownership” (Zuckert, 2002, pp. 4-5; 2005, p. 431).  Locke believed that the workmanship argument would require a rational theology that could prove the existence of God.  From “the idea of ourselves as understanding, rational creatures,” we would have to infer “the idea of a supreme Being, infinite in power, goodness, and wisdom, whose workmanship we are” (ECHU, IV.3.18).  Through an anthropomorphic analogy, we could project from the idea of our own minds and other human minds the idea of a Divine Mind.  Thus, man would create God in man’s image (ECHU, IV.3.27; IV.10.1).  But then Locke admitted that having the idea of God in one’s mind does not prove God’s real existence (ECHU, IV.10.7; IV.10.19; IV.11.1).

Since he doubted that reason could prove God’s existence in support of the workmanship argument, Locke developed the self-ownership argument that would provide a purely natural ground for his law of nature.  He wanted to appeal to a rational theology of divine workmanship, but if that failed, he could fall back onto his natural self-ownership argument.  These two tracks—God and nature--are suggested by Locke’s repeated appeals to “the Laws of God and Nature” (FT, 56, 124; ST, 60, 66, 90, 93, 142, 195).  The “fixed and permanent rule of morals” could be “firmly rooted in the soil of human nature,” and human nature could be understood as created by “nature or God” (1997, p. 125).  Notice that the creative source of human nature is nature or God.

Consequently, the major premise of Dilley’s Syllogism is only partly true.  Yes, Locke’s classical liberalism can be grounded in the Christian doctrine of creation in the image of God as supporting the workmanship argument.  But Locke suggested that reason can neither prove nor disprove creationist theology.  And that led him to appeal to the self-ownership principle as a purely naturalistic argument that did not require any theological assumptions.  Another way of saying this is that Locke left the Reason/Revelation debate open, believing that neither side can refute the other.  And so, he often invited his readers to consider both what “Reason” taught them by their natural experience and what “Revelation” taught them through their reading of the Bible (ST, 25).

The minor premise of Dilley’s Syllogism—Darwinism denies Christianity—assumes that the Darwinian scientist believes that scientific reason can refute Christian revelation and thus supports atheism.  But even if this is true for some Darwinian scientists, it is not true for all--not even for Darwin himself.  Moreover, Darwinian evolutionary science recognizes that there is a natural desire for religious understanding, and so atheism is contrary to our evolved human nature.  But even though religious belief is natural for most human beings, what they believe about the supernatural will be determined by faith rather than reason.  And since religious believers can never reach agreement about the content of their faith, they must accept the fact of religious pluralism and recognize how that religious pluralism dictates the religious toleration that secures religious liberty.

Of course, there are Darwinian atheists.  Richard Dawkins, for example, has said that “I could not imagine being an atheist at any time before 1859, when Darwin’s Origin of Species was published.”  He thinks the Argument from Design has always been the best of the arguments for the existence of God, because the complexity of the living world appears to be the work of an intelligent designer—just as William Paley’s watch implied the existence of a watchmaker—and so we might infer that God is the Intelligent Designer of the living world.  David Hume rightly criticized this reasoning as illogical because it rests on a false analogy between human intelligent design and divine intelligent design.  We have all seen human intelligent designers at work as part of our ordinary human experience.  But we have never seen a Divine Intelligent Designer creating everything out of nothing.  This is not part of our ordinary human experience.  It is fallacious, therefore, to use apparent design in nature as evidence for the existence of God.  But even if Hume was right about this, Dawkins has observed, Hume did not offer any alternative explanation for apparent design in nature.  It was only in 1859, when Darwin showed how evolution by natural selection could explain complex biological design, that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist” (Dawkins, 1986, pp. 5-6).

And yet Darwin himself denied that his theory of evolution promoted atheism.  Consider what he said about “the Creator” in the last two paragraphs of The Origin of Species.  He rejected the common “view that each species has been independently created,” and he proposed instead that “it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual.”  Then, in his famous last sentence, he spoke of the “grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one,” and that “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved” (1936, pp. 373-74).

Here we see that Darwin adopted the medieval Scholastic metaphysics of “dual causality” in distinguishing supernatural primary causes and natural secondary causes (Maurer, 2004).  The Creator did not miraculously create each species of life separately.  But He did originally exercise primary causality in impressing the laws of nature on matter and breathing life into a few forms or into one.  Then, from that simple beginning, the Creator allowed all the forms of life to emerge through the secondary causes of the natural evolutionary process.

At this point in his life, Darwin was what today we would call a “theistic evolutionist” or “evolutionary creationist”—someone who believes that the existence of God as the Creator is compatible with evolutionary science.  Indeed, Darwin said that it was “absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist.”  And even when, towards the end of his life, he became an agnostic, he insisted: “In my most extreme fluctuations, I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God” (1879; 1969, pp. 92-96). 

In the creation/evolution debate among Christians today, many Christian thinkers—such as Francis Collins, Deborah Haarsma, Darrel Falk, Alvin Plantinga, and Justin Barrett—have defended evolutionary creationism in arguing that, just as Darwin said, one can be both a theist and an evolutionist (Collins, 2006; Stump, 2007).  Remarkably, even the “young-Earth creationists,” who believe in the literal six-days-creation story in Genesis and a 6,000-year-old Earth, concede that Darwin’s Origin of Species refuted the traditional belief that God specially created all species of life, because they agree that all species emerged through evolution by natural selection.  But they also insist that God had to specially create all the “kinds” of animals and plants, so that the evolution of species could unfold within the limits of those “kinds” (with “kinds” corresponding to the taxonomic level of “families”) (Wood, 2008, 2011; Wood and Murray, 2003; Ham, 2017, pp. 14-26).   This resembles what Darwin said about the Creator breathing life into “a few forms or into one,” from which all species could then evolve by natural selection.

Darwin and the evolutionary creationists agree with Locke that religious belief is natural for human beings because they are naturally inclined to infer from their knowledge of their own minds and the minds of others that there must be a divine mind that exercises a supernatural intelligent agency analogous to the natural intelligent agency of human minds.  Darwin observed that when “conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity,” he “felt compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man,” which made him a theist (1969, pp. 92-93).  

Similarly, some evolutionary psychologists—such as Justin Barrett and Jesse Bering--have argued that the natural evolution of religious belief is rooted in the propensity of the human mind to detect rational agency in humans and other animals and then to infer a supernatural intelligent agency analogous to that of human minds (Barret, 2004; Bering, 2011).  But as we have seen, this anthropomorphic analogy between human and divine minds is dubious, and even if this explained the natural evolution of the idea of God in the human mind, that would not prove the existence of God.

This led Locke to conclude that believing in the existence of God is ultimately not a matter of reason but of faith.  And since “faith is not knowledge,” we cannot know what the true religion is (Locke, 1870, pp. 94-96; 1997, pp. 248-50; ECHU, IV.17-18).  Consequently, political rulers cannot coercively enforce belief in the religious orthodoxy of the true church, because religious believers cannot agree on what that orthodoxy is.  “Every man is orthodox to himself,” Locke observed in the Letter Concerning Toleration.  And “every church is orthodox to itself” (2010, pp. 7, 21, 38).  The simple fact of religious pluralism—that religious believers cannot agree on religious orthodoxy—supports Locke’s liberal argument for religious liberty and toleration of all religious sects that inflict no injury on others.  Religious liberty and religious pluralism create a free marketplace of religion in which religious movements must compete for adherents.  Those religious groups that succeed in satisfying the natural desire for religious understanding gain a larger share of the religious market (Seabright, 2024).

The mistake of the Christian Integralists (both Catholic and Protestant) in rejecting Lockean religious liberty and toleration and affirming Christian Theocracy (or Christian Nationalism) is their failure to see how any theocratic attempt to suppress religious pluralism must be oppressively unjust and also contrary to the religious voluntarism practiced by the early Christian Churches.

We can see then how a Darwinian Lockean Liberalism can explain natural religion and can secure the religious liberty and toleration that respect religious pluralism and allow every individual to satisfy his natural desire for religious understanding in his own way, while allowing all others the same religious liberty.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

REFERENCES

Barrett, J. 2004. Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Bering, J. 2011. The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life. New York: W. W. Norton.

Collins, F. S. 2006. The Language of God. New York: Free Press.

Darwin, C. 1879. Letter to John Fordyce, May 7. Cambridge, UK: Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter No.: DCP-LETT-12041.

Darwin, C. 1936. The Origin of Species & The Descent of Man. New York: Random House, The Modern Library.

Darwin, C. 1969. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. Ed. N. Barlow. New York: W. W. Norton.

Dilley, S., ed. 2013. Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism: Theories in Tension. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Ham, K. 2017. "Young-Earth Creationism." In J. B. Stump, ed., Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

Holloway, C. 2006. The Right Darwin? Evolution, Religion, and the Future of Democracy. Dallas: Spence Publishing.

Laslett, P. 1970. Introduction. In: John Locke, Two Treatises of Government: A Critical Edition with an Introduction and Apparatus Criticus, by Peter Laslett. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3-152.

Locke, J. 1870. Four Letters on Toleration. London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler.

Locke, J. 2010. A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, M. Goldie, ed. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Maurer, A. 2004. "Darwin, Thomists, and Secondary Causality." The Review of Metaphysics 57: 491-514.

Seabright, P. 2024. The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stump, J. B., ed. 2017. Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

West, J. G. 2006. Darwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest. Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute Press.

Wood, T. C. 2008. "Species Variability and Creationism." Origins Number 62: 6-24.

Wood, T. C., and M. J. Murray. 2003. Understanding the Pattern of Life: Origins and the Organization of the Species. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman.

Zuckert, M. 2002. Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Zuckert, M. 2005. "Locke-Religion-Equality." The Review of Politics 67: 419-431.