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.

The History of Migration With Interbreeding: The Evolutionary Strategy That Made Us Human

I have argued for an "open borders" policy that would respect the natural human propensities to migration and interbreeding as shaped by the evolutionary history that has made us human.  In support of that argument, I now offer a brief genetic and cultural history of migration as a "melting pot of ideas, technology, and DNA" (Garcia-Bertrand and Herrera, 2018, p. 113; Goldin, 2024; Reich, 2018).

330,000-50,000 years ago.  Our earliest human ancestors emerged for the first time in Africa.  The oldest fossils with features shared with anatomically modern humans have been found in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, dating to around 330,000-300,000 years ago.  Since other hominid fossils are scattered across most of Africa except for the Sahara Desert region, that suggests that the first human beings migrated long distances within Africa as they adapted to diverse ecological and climatic conditions.  As I have indicated previously, there is also evidence for extensive long-distance trade in Africa as early as 300,000 years ago.  So human evolution in Africa was shaped by both migration and trade.

Many Biblical believers--Jews, Christians, and Muslims--doubt this Darwinian account of the evolutionary origin of human beings because they believe it contradicts the Biblical teaching that God created Adam and Eve as the first human beings.  But the theistic evolutionists argue that there is no contradiction if one sees that God could have employed the natural evolutionary process to carry out His plan for the creation of human beings.

After all, even Darwin himself recognized that the religious appeal to God as the uncaused cause of nature cannot be refuted by reason.  All natural explanations of the world--including Darwinian science--must assume that ultimately the order of nature is the unexplained ground of all explanation. But there is no way by rational proof to deny the possibility that nature itself is the contingent product of nature's God.  Darwin recognized this in adopting the principle of dual causality, which originated in medieval Islamic and Christian theology.  He spoke of the laws of nature as manifested in evolution as "secondary causes," which left open the possibility of God's creative power acting through "primary causes" to create the original order of nature itself.  Darwin thus allowed for theistic evolution, which has been adopted by a long line of Christian thinkers, including C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Alvin Plantinga. 

After the Genesis Flood, Noah and his family were the only human survivors left to populate the Earth.  Noah had three sons--Shem, Ham, and Japheth--"and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth" (Genesis 9:19).  The Bible then gives an elaborate genealogical history of how the nations arose from the migration of the descendants of Noah's sons over the earth.  For two thousand years, Christian writers have tried to trace the origins of all nations back to Noah's sons.  The dominant tendency was to attribute the paternity of Europeans to the children of Japheth, that of Asians to Shem, and that of the Africans to Ham.  Since the descendants of Ham were mysteriously cursed to serve their cousins as slaves (Genesis 9:27), this was interpreted as God's justifying the enslavement of Africans and condemning interracial marriage (Goldenberg, 2003).  Thus, this divinely ordained story of origins explained both the genealogical unity of all human beings through ancestry traced back to Noah and their genealogical diversity through ancestry traced back to one of Noah's sons.

130,000-95,000 years ago.  During this period, some anatomically modern humans began to migrate out of Africa into the Near East, where they could have met Neanderthals who were migrating out of Europe.  Genetic analysis indicates that Neanderthals had separated from the human lineage 770,000-550,000 years ago.  Neanderthal skeletons and DNA show that the Neanderthal lineage was evolving in Europe around 430,000 years ago.

80,000-35,000 years ago.  There was another wave of human migration out of Africa, and humans reached Europe, Asia, and Australasia.  During this time, humans interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans.  The best evidence for this comes from studies of "ancient DNA."  In the 1980s and 1990s, scientists discovered that it was possible to recover DNA from mummified human specimens and ancient bones.  In 1997, Svante Paabo and his colleagues reported that they had sequenced Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA.  In 2010, Paabo and his colleagues published a draft of the entire Neanderthal genome; and they suggested that there was interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans.  They also published a genetic analysis of another archaic human population--the Denisovans.  Later, it was shown that humans had interbred with Denisovans.

Since it was humans who had migrated out of Africa who interbred with Neanderthals, scientists have long assumed that while all present day non-African individuals carry some Neanderthal ancestry in their DNA, there would be no Neanderthal ancestry in African populations.  But in 2020, a new genetic study showed that African individuals do indeed show some Neanderthal ancestry (Chen et al., 2020).  This can be explained by ancient Europeans with Neanderthal genes migrating back to Africa.  So we now know that remnants of Neanderthal genomes are found in every human population.

Proportions of Neanderthal DNA in human populations today range as high as 2 percent.  Proportions of Denisovan DNA range as high as 5 percent--mostly in Asian and Australasian populations (Reich, 2018, 58-59).  This evolution by hybridization has benefitted human beings.  For example, modern humans in parts of Europe and East Asia have Neanderthal keratin protein genes that help them grow skin and hair suitable for the colder regions originally occupied by Neanderthals.  And many Tibetans today have a Denisovan gene active in red blood cells that help them breath the thin air of the Tibetan high altitudes (Reich, 2018, 65).

Thus, the scientific study of ancient DNA allows us to trace the entire history of human migration and interbreeding across time and space.  This research supports two general conclusions.  First, the evolution of human nature is about the mixture of populations, so that there is no such thing as a pure population or race.  Second, the people who live in a particular place today almost never descend exclusively from the people who lived in the same place in the distant past.  These two conclusions refute racism (by denying the "purity" of racial differences) and ethnic nationalism (by denying that national identity can be based on ancestral descent from a single founding population).

65,000-50,000 years ago.  The ancestors of the Aboriginal Australians arrived from Southeast Asia.  They remained foragers (living by hunting, gathering, and fishing), with little or no farming, until the British arrived in 1788.

20,000-13,00 years ago.  There is genetic evidence for at least four prehistoric migrations of Eurasians migrating to the Americas (Reich, 2018, 155-60).  By about 14,000 years ago, these human migrants had reached the southern tip of South America.  When sea levels were low enough for a land bridge to emerge in what is now the Bering Strait region, these people could walk across to Alaska.  In 1590, the Jesuit naturalist Jose de Acosta was the first person to speculate that human hunter-gatherers first crossed from Asia to an America without humans.  John Locke learned this from his reading of Acosta, which supported his conclusion that the American Indian hunter-gatherers were "still a Pattern of the first Ages in Asia and Europe" (ST, 108).

13,000-9,000 years ago.  Agriculture developed for the first time in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East.  The first European farmers were genetic mixtures of local hunter-gatherers and Anatolian farmers. Farming was then spread by migrants throughout Eurasia over the next few thousand years.

6,000-4,000 years ago.  Early wheel technologies and writing systems emerged and were spread by migrants.

9,000-4,500 years ago.  During this period--the Early Bronze Age--the Yamnaya culture emerged in the center of the Great Steppe north of the Black and Caspian seas.  The Yamnaya population arose from a genetic mixture of Iranian farmers and local hunter-gatherers.  They were pastoralists whose economy was based on sheep and cattle herding.  They were innovative in their use of the newly domesticated horse and the hitching of animals to wagons and chariots with wheels.  They eventually spread over a vast expanse of the steppe--5,000 miles from Hungary in Europe to the Altai Mountains in central Asia and south into India where they conquered the Indus Valley Civilization.  They developed the first form of Indo-European Language, and their expansion created the family of Indo-European languages that stretches across Europe, India, and parts of East Asia.  By sometime after 4,500 years ago, the Yamnaya had migrated all the way to the British Isles.  90 percent of the people who built Stonehenge--people with no Yamnaya ancestry--were replaced by Yamnaya people (Reich, 2018, 99-121).

The Yamnaya were a stratified male-dominated society in which a few elite males ruled.  The ancient DNA data show that.  The Y chromosomes of the Yamnaya were mostly of only a few types, which shows that a few males succeeded in spreading their genes.  Moreover, these few Y-chromosome types of the Yamnaya are predominant today in Europe and India, which shows that the Yamnaya expansion allowed the most powerful Yamnaya male descendants to be more successful in mating than men from the local groups (Reich, 2018, 237-41).

This reminds us that because of the biological differences between the sexes, a single male can have far more children than a single female, and consequently powerful men can potentially have a far greater imprint on the human genome than powerful women.

As we will see, this ancient history of an Indo-European culture was transformed--beginning in the 19th century--into the myth of the "Aryan race" that has supported the ideologies of Nazism, Hindutva (Hinduism), and the Alt-Right Nietzscheanism of Trumpists like "Bronze Age Pervert."

117 AD.  The Roman Empire reaches its greatest extent under Trajan.

500.  Silk Roads link the Mediterranean region and China.

700s-1000s.  Viking ships cross the Atlantic.

1206-1368.  The Mongols formed the largest contiguous empire in history.  Genghis Khan (1162-1227) was the founder and the first khan of the Mongol Empire.  Genetic evidence indicates that 8 percent of the males living in East Eurasia today share a characteristic Y-chromosome sequence that was probably Genghis Khan's Y chromosome, which shows his millions of direct male-line descendants across the territory occupied by the Mongols (Zerjal et al., 2003).

1320-1350.  New Zealand was discovered and settled by Polynesians, who developed the distinctive Maori ethnic cultural group, which is today the second largest ethnic group in New Zealand, behind the European New Zealanders.

1492.  Columbus landed in the Bahamas, although he thought it was India.  He encountered the Taino people--the indigenous people of the Caribbean islands. Thus began the first global network of immigration, interbreeding, and trade encompassing most of the Earth.

1519.  Hernan Cortes conquered the Aztec capital--Tenochtitlan--present-day Mexico City.  Within four years of the 1519 campaign, Martin Cortes, "el Mestizo," was born: his father was Hernan Cortes, his mother was Cortes's Aztec mistress.  Thus began the Darwinian evolution of Indigenous Americans through genetic and cultural hybridization.  Today, in Mexico (with a population of 127 million), 70% of the people are mestizos, 14% Amerindians, and 15% whites.  As I have argued previously, this refutes the idea of "American genocide": there are more people in the Americas today with Indigenous American genes than there were when Columbus landed in 1492.

1526.  This was the year of the first transatlantic slave voyage from West Africa to Brazil.  Thus began one of the most massive, forced migrations in human history.  By the 1780s, over 75,000 African slaves were arriving every year in the Americas.

1693.  John Locke wrote an essay "For a General Naturalization" that was probably written in support of the General Naturalization Bill of 1693.  "Naturalization is the shortest and easiest way of increasing your people," Locke declared at the beginning of the essay. Increasing population is important, he explained, because "people are the strength of any country or government," and it's "the number of people that make the riches of any country."  What we see here is what evolutionary scientists call cultural group selection through migration and assimilation, in which countries with cultural traditions of freedom have higher fitness than countries that are less free.  John Locke understood this, which is why he argued that free societies benefited from having open borders, so that they could attract migrants from less free societies.  The freer societies with a growing population of productive and inventive people become the more prosperous societies.   We see that today because the people in the less free countries want to migrate to the freer countries (as measured by the Human Freedom Index).

1718.  Great Britain's Transportation Act formalized the forced migration of convicts.  From 1718 to 1775, as many as 50,000 convicts were sent to the British colonies in America.  After the British lost the Revolutionary War in 1783, they decided to look elsewhere for penal colonies.  In 1788, they established their penal colony at Botany Bay (Sydney) in Australia.

1776.  Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence contained two grievances against King George III concerning immigration.  On the one hand, the King was accused of obstructing the passage of laws that would encourage the free migration of foreigners to America and then facilitate their naturalization.  On the other hand, the King was denounced for promoting the forced migration of African slaves through the slave trade, which was said to be a "cruel war against human nature itself."  The passage condemning the slave trade was excised from the final draft, however, because some of the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia wanted to continue the foreign importation of slaves, and because some people in the northern colonies had engaged in the commercial shipping of slaves.

I have written about Jefferson's disturbing behavior in adopting his slave Sally Hemmings as his concubine, who bore at least six of his children.  That the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, who affirmed natural human equality and who denounced slavery as a violation of human nature, could not only own black slaves but also exploit them for his sexual gratification forces us to think about the human nature of slavery, its corrupting effect on slaveowners, and the evolution of racial mixing.  Moreover, interracial sexual mating undermines the claims of the racist that the races can and should remain "pure" in their separation. 

1850.  The U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 to make it easier for Southern slaveowners to recapture slaves who had run away to the Northern free states.  The law made it a federal crime for anyone to help fugitive slaves avoid capture.  This denied the freedom of internal migration within the nation--the freedom to vote with one's feet by running away from enslavement in the American South.  Many Americans resisted this law as an unjust law that violated natural human rights.  A black abolitionist like Frederick Douglass, who had himself run away from his slave master, were especially eloquent in defending the natural human right to run away--to migrate--to some place where one could be free.  

Some years later, Douglass defended a general "right of migration" for all human beings.  And he argued for the greatness of America as a "composite nation" open to all races, creeds, and religions and to all foreigners who would come to America searching for freedom.   He compared the "repugnance to the presence and influence of foreigners" to the "prejudice of race and color" that had supported chattel slavery:  both express the natural human propensity to tribalism or xenophobia that favors us against them.  Even if all other nations manifest this natural tribalism in limiting migratory rights and other human rights to themselves, America is unique in being the nation dedicated to human rights for all--"the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds."  And therefore, America must recognize the right of locomotion or migration as a right for all of humanity, so that America must have open borders.

TO BE CONTINUED . . .

REFERENCES

Garcia-Bertrand, Ralph, and Rene J. Herrera. 2018. Ancestral DNA, Human Origins, and Migrations. Elsevier.

Goldenberg, David M. 2003. The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Goldin, Ian. 2024. The Shortest History of Migration.  New York: The Experiment.

Reich, David. 2018. Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. New York: Pantheon Books.

Zerjal, T., et al. 2003. "The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols."  American Journal of Human Genetics 72: 717-21.

Divine Revelation in "The Last Duel"--The Book and the Movie

 

                                                         Movie Trailer for "The Last Duel" 

The new movie The Last Duel has had its first general theatre release this past weekend.  It is a historical drama based on a book with the same name by Eric Jager.  It's about the last legal trial by combat in France in 1386.    

The film stars Matt Damon as Jean de Carrouges, a knight who challenges Jacques Le Gris (played by Adam Driver) to a legal duel after Carrouges's wife, Marguerite (played by Jodie Comer), accuses Le Gris of raping her.  Ben Affleck stars as Count Pierre d'Alencon, the lord to whom Carrouges and Le Gris are pledged as vassals.  The Director is Ridley Scott.

In the Middle Ages, in legal cases where it was difficult for the courts to reach a decision, one of the parties in the dispute could challenge the other to a duel, in which God would intervene to allow the innocent party to kill the guilty party, who would be condemned to eternal damnation.  In this case, Carrouges was fighting as the champion of his wife, so that if he were killed, this would show God's judgment that both he and his wife were guilty of lying under oath, and Marguerite would be immediately stripped naked and burned at the stake.  Both of their souls would be eternally punished in Hell, while Le Gris's soul would win eternal reward in Heaven.

The screenplay for the movie was written by Damon, Affleck, and Nicole Holofcener.  The screenplay follows closely Jager's book The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat (2004).  Jager is a professor of English at UCLA who specializes in medieval literature.  Once he became fascinated by the story, he spent ten years researching and writing the book.  His research is meticulous, which required archival research in France and elsewhere.  Almost every detail in his book is supported by citations of his sources in the notes to the book.  But unlike most such works of historical scholarship, the book has such a vivid narrative style that it reads like a novel.

The movie is very good.  But as we often say, the book is better than the movie.  Most importantly, the book is better in provoking us to think about the religious beliefs that drive the drama of this story.  In at least one scene, however, where the movie's script follows the exact words of the book, the movie does force the audience to wonder about the religious beliefs of these people.

Here's how the book relates Le Gris's last words, after a long brutal fight in the enclosed field for judicial combat, just before Carrouges kills him:

"As the two men struggled, and the huge crowd watched the spectacle in fascinated horror, Carrouges began shouting at Le Gris.  His voice was muffled by his visor, but the nearest spectators could make out his words:

"'Confess!  Confess your crime!'"

"Le Gris shook his head even more violently, as if refusing to admit his guilt even as he resisted the knight's efforts to unlock his visor."

Finally, Carrouges broke the lock, and the visor sprang open, exposing Le Gris's face.

"Le Gris blinked at the light and at his enemy's visored face, which hovered just a few inches away."

"Carrouges drew his dagger, again shouting: 'Confess!'"

"Le Gris, pinned down by the relentless knight, shouted back, trying to make himself heard by all at the field:

"'In the name of God, and on the peril and damnation of my soul, I am innocent of the crime!'"

"'Then be you damned!' cried the knight" (178-79). 

Carrouges then plunged his dagger into Le Gris's throat and mouth up to his brain.

It is almost unbelievable that a man like Le Gris would have had the will and the strength to shout his sacred oath of innocence in these circumstances, because, according to the religious beliefs of the time, if he were really guilty, refusing to confess his guilt before he died would condemn his soul to eternal damnation.

Did Le Gris, Carrouges, and Marguerite really believe what they were professing about God's revelation of his eternal judgment of guilt and innocence?  Did God in fact miraculously intervene to give Carrouges the strength and skill to defeat Le Gris and thus show the innocence of Carrouges and Marguerite and Le Gris's guilt?  If God did this, how would anyone know this to be true?  Would it depend on whether we thought the evidence supported the case of Carrouges and Marguerite?  It was said that Carrouges was sick with a fever when he entered the combat, and Le Gris was healthier and stronger.  If so, does that suggest that only divine intervention could have given Carrouges the ability to prevail?

"Does he truly believe his innocence at the end?" Affleck said of Le Gris in an interview for the Los Angeles Times.  "They took the idea of damnation seriously.  They were very religious.  That was at the root of everything.  And that's one of the things we didn't focus as much on: They truly believed God would make happen whatever was the fair thing to happen, so it would be God's will.  And for him to have to invoke that at the moment of his death and to protest his innocence is interesting." 

If religious belief was "at the root of everything" in this story, then Jager's book really is better than the movie because the book says a lot about the religious beliefs in medieval France, even though Jager clearly suggests that he does not himself share those beliefs, and even though his historical narrative gives us reasons to believe that there was no Revelation of God's will in such a way as to resolve any of the moral and political problems of medieval France.

THE FAILURE OF REVELATION?

Jager draws our attention to the fact that in medieval Europe, there was no Revelation of God's truth to resolve the many conflicts in the religious communities.  By the fourteenth century, Christendom had faced the Muslim threat for more than six hundred years.  Ten years after surviving his duel, Carrouges was killed in 1396 while fighting in the Last Crusade against the Ottoman Turks in the city of Nicopolis, in present-day Bulgaria.  Both Christians and Muslims believed that they were defending the true Revelation against the infidels.  Either there was no Revelation, or there was, but it was not clear enough to settle this dispute.  

Christianity was even at war with itself over conflicting interpretations of Revelation.  From 1378 to 1417, Christendom was divided into warring camps led first by two rival popes (in Rome and Avignon) and then by three popes (with a third pope in Pisa).  Previously, in 1054, there was a split between Western Christianity and Eastern Christianity, which is today the separation of the Catholic Church from the Eastern Orthodox Churches.  And, of course, in the 16th century, the Protestant churches would split off.  

These disagreements over Revelation threw Medieval Christian societies into violent conflict.  For example, in 1339 the English invaded France, initiating what came to be known as the Hundred Years War, in which Carrouges and Le Gris fought on the side of France.  By 1378, the Roman pope was blessing England's war of conquest in France, while the Avignon pope was blessing the French against the English.  This led to many atrocities, such as the English raid on Brittany in 1380, during which the English attacked a convent, raping and torturing the nuns.

Jesus prayed to God that all believers would be as one, that they would come to complete unity, "so that the world may believe that you have sent me" (John 17:21).  It seems then that Christians could give witness to the truth of Revelation by showing their agreement about that Revelation.

But in fact Christians have never achieved that goal of Christian unity in their interpretation of Revelation.  Previously, I have written about the failure of Revelation to bring Christian unity in the debate over creation and evolution.  As I indicated, there are three possible explanations for this.  Either there has been no Revelation of God's teaching.  Or there has been a Revelation, but it is so obscure that it conveys no clear teaching.  Or there has been a clear Revelation of that teaching, but human beings have been so blinded by biased thinking that they cannot see it.

CAN WE KNOW THE TRUTH BY REASON ALONE?

If we cannot rely on God's Revelation of the truth, perhaps through a divine judgment revealed in a trial by combat, then we must rely on our human reason to search for the truth.  To decide whether Marguerite was telling the truth about Le Gris raping her, we must use our reason in examining the evidence to decide whether it is probable or not that she was telling the truth.

But can we trust reason without Revelation to lead us to the truth?  Some Christian philosophers like Alvin Plantinga would say no, because we must accept at least one revealed truth--that God has created the human mind in His image--if we are to trust our minds.  If we embrace Naturalism--the view that nothing exists except Nature, and so there is no God or nothing like God--we are caught in self-contradiction: if human thought originated not from a divine Mind but from the irrational causes of Nature, then we cannot trust our minds as reliable, and thus we cannot trust our belief in Naturalism. Naturalism destroys itself by destroying the rationality of believing in Naturalism, or anything else.

As I have previously argued, however, the weak link in Plantinga's argument for metaphysical naturalism as self-defeating is his assumption that adaptive behavior is completely unrelated to true belief. The evidence of evolutionary history suggests that evolution produces cognitive faculties that are reliable but fallible. The mental abilities of animals, including human beings, are fallible because evolution produces adaptations that are good enough but not perfect, and this results in the mental fallibility that is familiar to us.  But despite this fallibility, the mental faculties cannot be absolutely unreliable. Even Plantinga concedes (in his debate with Daniel Dennett) that in the evolution of animals, "adaptive behavior requires accurate indicators."

In the case of judging criminal guilt or innocence, we must rely on our evolved adaptations for detecting and punishing cheaters.  As Morris Hoffman has said, "evolution built us to punish cheaters."

But even if that evolved capacity for judgment in criminal cases is reliable, it is not infallible; and in a case like Marguerite's accusation of rape, there can be disagreement over what counts as the truth.  Le Gris's lawyer--Jean Le Coq--kept a private journal where he wrote out his thoughts about the case.  At one point, he wrote: "No one really knew the truth of the matter."

The movie is divided into three chapters, suggesting three different points of view.  The first chapter is entitled "The Truth According to Jean de Carrouges."  The second chapter is "The Truth According to Jacques Le Gris."  The third is "The Truth According to Marguerite de Carrouges."  So there was a different truth for each of these three people.  And yet, immediately after the title for the third chapter has faded from the movie screen, "The Truth" is flashed on the screen.  So the script writers want the audience to see that there really is only one truth, and it's Margarite's.  

This third chapter of the movie was written by Nicole Holofcener, who invented many details for her story that are not found in Jager's book, which allowed her to turn this into a modern "Me Too" story of how women suffer from the patriarchal oppression of men.  Actually, Damon and Affleck allowed Holofcener to push the entire movie towards this theme.

When Jager has been asked about the historical accuracy of Holofcener's writing, he has said that it is at least 75% accurate.  Most importantly, he agrees with her conclusion that the evidence in the case favors Marguerite's story as most likely true.

In his book, Jager makes four arguments for why we should be persuaded by Marguerite's accusations.  First, some people have suggested that even if she was raped, she might have been mistaken in identifying Le Gris as the rapist.  Marguerite had met Le Gris only once, a little over a year before the night of the rape.  So she may have had only a vague memory of what he looked like.  And if she did not have a clear view of the rapist's face, she might have mistakenly thought the rapist looked like Le Gris.  But as Jager observes, this is implausible.  Marguerite swore in court that two men were responsible for her rape, and that she had a clear view of both men.  She said that Adam Louvel--a friend of Le Gris--helped Le Gris in holding her down on her bed, while Le Gris raped her.  She also said that Louvel was the first one to appear at her door, and that he specifically mentioned Le Gris by name before Le Gris entered her room.  This makes it highly unlikely that she was mistaken in identifying both men.

Jager's second argument concerns the story that sometime after Carrouges won his duel, a man later confessed to being Marguerite's rapist, which vindicated Le Gris's innocence.  Jager points out the implausibility of this considering that Marguerite had accused two men as responsible for her rape.

Jager's third argument responds to the claim that Marguerite knowingly lied in accusing Le Gris, either because she was trying to cover up her adultery, or because Carrouges forced her to fabricate this lie to get vengeance against a man he hated.  This was the claim made by Le Gris in his testimony.  Jager notes the obvious problem with this:  if she was lying, why did she include Adam Louvel in her charges?  Why would she add to her burden of proof by including Louvel in her charges?  If either Louvel or Le Gris had a good alibi, that would deny her story.

Jager's fourth argument is his strongest.  It is hard to come up with any good motivation for Marguerite to lie given that she had very little to gain from this and everything to lose.  She knew that if it was decided that she was lying, she would be executed; and according to her religious beliefs, her soul would be condemned to eternal punishment by God.  Surely the risk of such punishment would have deterred her from falsely charging Le Gris with rape.

There is another complicating factor in this case that I have not yet mentioned.  Marguerite and Carrouges had tried without success for five years to conceive a child.  But when Marguerite and Carrouges appealed their case to the Parlement of Paris, she was pregnant.  She had told Carrouges that she was pregnant at the same time that she told him about the rape, four days after it had occurred on January 18, 1386.  Jager judges that the child was born sometime between early September, nine months after Carrouges had returned from fighting in Scotland, and the middle of October, nine months after the rape.  The duel occurred on December 29, 1386.

Had she been impregnated by Carrouges or by Le Gris?  According to medieval law, if Le Gris was the father, that would prove that he did not rape her, because Galen had taught that sexual intercourse could not cause a pregnancy unless the woman's "seed" was produced by her orgasm; and if she had an orgasm that showed that she was not raped because she had enjoyed the coitus.

Now we know that if a rapist impregnates his victim, that does not show that she felt sexual pleasure, because a woman's orgasm is not required for ovulation.  This should be known by common-sense experience as much as by science, since many women have been fertile without experiencing orgasm.

It seems unlikely, however, that Marguerite was impregnated by Le Gris only four days before she told Carrouges that she was pregnant.

For all of these reasons, we can conclude that it is highly probable that Marguerite was telling the truth about her being raped by Le Gris.  We can reach this conclusion by using our reason to examine the evidence and then to logically draw inferences from that evidence.  Even if this is not a demonstrative proof, it is a probable truth beyond a reasonable doubt.

We can do this by reason alone without any need to appeal to some Revelation of the truth by God through trial by battle or some other means.  We can see this, beginning in the early modern period of European history, as European legal systems shifted to relying on judges and juries to decide legal disputes, which provided an alternative to oaths, ordeals, combat, and other appeals to divine intervention.  Thus did the state take over the role first played by God.

Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism: A Reply to Wiley, Price, and Sunshine

Conservatives need Charles Darwin.  

Explaining why that is so was the purpose of my article in the Fall 2010 issue of The Intercollegiate Review. My article was entitled "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism."  This was followed by John West's article criticizing my argument entitled "Darwin, Scientism, and the Misguided Quest for Darwinian Conservatism."  My article can be found online.  Some of the writing in this article came from blog posts here, here, and here.

Last week, the Theology Pugcast had a one-hour podcast discussion of my article.  The three discussants were C. R. Wiley (a pastor in Vancouver, Washington), Thomas Price (a professor at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary), and Glenn Sunshine (Professor Emeritus of History at Central Connecticut State University).  (I am grateful to Clifford Bates for drawing my attention to this podcast.)

The three discussants reach a common conclusion: Arnhart is wrong because he disagrees with us.  They offer many assertions about how they are right, and I am wrong.  But they offer very little evidence or argumentation to prove their assertions.  Watch the video, if I am wrong, please correct me.  Notice how Price laughs at the beginning, as if it is ridiculous that anyone would disagree with them.

I will comment on nine points of disagreement.

1.  ARE THERE ANY DARWINIAN CONSERVATIVES?

Wiley begins by saying that he was shocked to see my article in The Intercollegiate Review, because while he generally agrees with the articles in IR, he disagrees fundamentally with my article.  When he saw the title of the article, he assumed it would criticize Darwinian Conservatism and support Metaphysical Conservatism; and so he was deeply disturbed to see that it actually defended Darwinian Conservatism.

At first, he seems to deny that there are any Darwinian conservatives, because after all conservatism must be anti-Darwinian.  But then he says that maybe there are some Darwinian conservatives, although he implies that they can't be real conservatives.

He is silent about my history of the incipient ideas of evolutionary conservatism beginning with David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke, of how those ideas were picked up by Charles Darwin in his account of the evolution of morality, and of how those ideas were revived by conservatives like Friedrich Hayek and James Q. Wilson.

I set this empirical and evolutionary line of conservative thought against the transcendent and metaphysical conservatism of people like Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver.  Kirk said that the "first canon" of conservative thought was "belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty," and consequently "politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which is above nature," which assumes "a transcendent moral order."  He connected this to "Burke's description of the state as a divinely ordained moral essence" and Burke's view of history as "the unfolding of Design."  According to Kirk, the primary enemy of this metaphysical conservatism was Darwinian science.  Similarly, Weaver insisted that a healthy cultural order required a "metaphysical dream of the world," so that people could imagine their cultural life as a "metaphysical community" fulfilling a cosmic purpose.  And like Kirk, Weaver worried that Darwin's theory of evolution denied this "metaphysical dream" of cosmic order by explaining human beings as products of a natural evolutionary process governed by material causes that were not directed to any cosmic purposes.

Against this metaphysical conservatism, Hayek objected to the "obscurantism" of a conservative attitude that rejected Darwin's theory of evolution as morally corrupting.  He elaborated his view of Burkean "Old Whig" liberalism as belonging to a British empiricist evolutionary tradition contrasted with a French rationalistic design tradition.  In the evolutionary tradition of Hume, Smith, and Burke, Hayek explained, "it was shown that an evident order which was not the product of a designing human intelligence need not therefore be ascribed to the design of a higher, supernatural intelligence, but that there was a third possibility--the emergence of order as the result of adaptive evolution."  Hayek suggested that Darwin's theory of biological evolution was derived from the theories of social evolution developed by the Scottish philosophers.

Notice that both sides of this debate appeal to Burke.  As I show in my article, one can see in Burke's writings the split between the metaphysical and evolutionary versions of conservatism.  On the one hand, Burke says that human morality must be grounded in a religious metaphysics of cosmic design; and he cites Plato's political theology of design (in Book 10 of Plato's Laws): the authority of human laws must be founded on a religious belief in cosmic moral order as part of a divinely designed universe in which the good are rewarded and the bad punished.  

On the other hand, Burke rejected Richard Price's religious metaphysics of history and the Christian Platonism of his moral philosophy.  Price argued against the moral naturalism of Hume and the Scottish moral sense philosophers, and he scorned the idea that morality was rooted in natural moral sentiments. He contended instead that moral knowledge was a rational activity of the mind in grasping the eternal and immutable metaphysical truths of God.  Against Price's metaphysical morality, Burke evoked those "natural feelings" and "moral sentiments" that show "the natural sense of right and wrong" and "the moral constitution of the heart" as the empirical foundation in human nature of moral experience.  Here he showed his agreement with the ideas of Hume and Smith, which would later be taken up by Darwin.

Early in his life, Burke had expressed his skepticism about metaphysical causes in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.  He had explained that in looking for the "efficient cause" of sublimity and beauty, he did not pretend to explain the "ultimate cause," because he was pursuing a purely empirical inquiry into sense experience:

"That great chain of causes, which linking one to another even to the throne of God himself, can never be unraveled by any inquiry of ours.  When we go but one step beyond the immediately sensible qualities of things, we go out of our depths.  All we do after, is but a faint struggle, that shows we are in an element which does not belong to us."

I assume that Wiley, Price, and Sunshine would say that I am completely wrong about this history of conservative thought as split between empirical evolutionary ideas of natural morality and transcendent metaphysical ideas of cosmic moral order.  But I can't be sure because they are silent about all of this.

2. TWO DIFFERENT METAPHYSICS?  THE PROBLEM OF ULTIMATE EXPLANATION

They do say a lot, however, in criticizing the title of my article.  "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism" implies that Darwinian conservatism is not metaphysical.  On the contrary, they say, my Darwinian naturalism is actually a metaphysics; and so the dispute here is between two different metaphysics.  This must be so because any fundamental view of reality must depend on some metaphysical first principles about the ultimate ground of all things.  A naturalistic metaphysics assumes that Nature is the ultimate ground of Being.  A theistic metaphysics assumes that God is the ultimate ground of Being. 

If we define metaphysics as the branch of philosophy concerned with the first principles of all things, then Darwinian naturalism might seem to be metaphysical.  But as I indicated in my article (pp. 22-23), I was using the word metaphysical in the sense of supernatural or transcendent, which is recognized in the Oxford English Dictionary, and in that sense Darwinian naturalism is not metaphysical.

Actually, I have argued that while Darwinian science, like all natural science, requires a methodological naturalism that allows for the possibility of a metaphysical theism, it does not require a metaphysical naturalism that denies metaphysical theism.  A methodological naturalism means that we must adopt as a methodological principle that all of our scientific explanations must be grounded in the laws of nature without any appeal to supernatural revelation.  But this methodological naturalism leaves open the possibility that as a matter of faith we might move beyond nature to nature's God as the First Cause of nature.  This is the basis for those scientists who have embraced theistic evolution or evolutionary creation--the idea that God created the Big Bang and the laws of nature that have allowed the evolutionary unfolding of cosmic history. 

In fact, Darwin himself was open to a theistic metaphysics, because as I have indicated in a previous post, he accepted the Thomistic principle of "dual causality" in distinguishing "secondary causes" from "primary causes." While God might by understood by faith as the First Cause of all things, the evolution of species occurred through the "secondary causes" of natural evolutionary laws, and consequently there was no need for God to miraculously intervene in nature to specially create each species.  Thus Darwin allowed for the theistic evolution that has been embraced by people like C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, Deborah Haarsma, and Alvin Plantinga.  I have written about this in a previous post.

Darwin concluded--in both the Origin and Descent--that there was no necessary contradiction between his theory and religious belief. In the concluding chapter of the Origin, he declared: "I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one." He quoted a remark by the Reverend Charles Kingsley: "it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws."

His famous last sentence of the book evoked the image of the Creator as First Cause, borrowing language that echoes the Biblical book of Genesis: "There is 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, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."

This opens the possibility of a theistic evolution for those who seek a reconciliation of religious belief and evolutionary science.

At some times in his life, Darwin identified himself as a theist.  At other times, particularly in his later years, he identified himself as a skeptic or agnostic.  But he always insisted that he was not an atheist.  In any case, he never believed that the Genesis story of Creation in six days was to be taken literally.  I have written about some of this here and here.

Nevertheless, the critical point for my argument is that Darwin could explain the evolution of morality and social order as a purely natural process.  He recognized that while religious belief was often important in the cultural evolution of morality, this moral evolution could be understood as a matter of natural law without any necessary appeal to a supernatural revelation.

Wiley, Price, and Sunshine repeatedly say that this naturalistic explanation of moral evolution must fail because nature isn't self-explanatory without God.  Nature must have its transcendent source in God.  Ultimately, we must ask: Why is there anything at all?  The only possible answer, they say, is God.  But then, of course, we must ask: Why is there a God?  And why is He the way he is?

Here we face the problem of ultimate explanation: all explanation depends on some ultimate reality that is unexplained.  All explanation presupposes the observable order of the world as the final ground of explanation that cannot itself be explained.  To the question of why nature has the kind of order that it has, the only reasonable answer is that we must accept this as a brute fact of our experience.  That's just the way it is.

Why is there something rather than nothing?  Well, why not?  

There is nothing in our experience of the world that would make it likely, or even comprehensible, that something would have the power to create everything in the world out of nothing.  Indeed, we cannot even understand absolute nothingness, because we have no experience of absolute nothingness.  Therefore, if we are reasoning from our ordinary experience of the world, the existence of an omnipotent God who created everything out of nothing is highly improbable or even incomprehensible.

If we appeal to the existence of God as the ultimate cause of nature's order, we still cannot explain the ultimate cause of God.  Burke pointed to this problem in speaking of the futility of looking for the "ultimate cause."  It might seem very unlikely that a universe would exist uncaused, but it is just as unlikely that God would exist uncaused.  Since we have never directly observed God creating everything out of nothing, but every day we observe the causal regularities of nature, the existence of an uncaused nature is to the skeptical thinker far more probable than the existence of an uncaused God.

As Darwin said, "the mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us."  Metaphysical conservatives like Wiley, Price, and Sunshine say the mystery is solved by believing in God as the Creator ex nihilo.  But that commits the fallacy of explaining a great mystery with an even greater mystery.

Moreover, it should be noted that the Bible never says that God created everything ex nihilo.  That "out of nothing" doctrine was imposed by some Christian theologians.  But the first two chapters of Genesis suggest that the Creator was working on some preexisting formless matter, which is not nothing!

Consequently, in our search for ultimate explanations, we must appeal either to nature (if we're a skeptic) or to God (if we're a believer) as the unexplained ground of all explanation.  Thus does the natural desire to understand lead us to this most fundamental of choices--nature or God, reason or revelation.

Darwin was a Socratic scientific philosopher who chose reason over revelation, but with the understanding that reason cannot refute revelation.

I have written many posts elaborating these points.  Some can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

3. DOES METAPHYSICAL CONSERVATISM INCLINE TOWARDS THEOCRACY?

At this point, we might wonder whether this metaphysical debate makes any difference for our moral and political life.  If I am right, it does make a difference, because metaphysical conservatism inclines towards theocracy.  Wiley, Price, and Sunshine object to this by saying that a theocratic (or God-centered) metaphysics does not necessarily dictate a theocratic politics.  "We're all in a theocratic reality," Price asserts.  But this need not dictate theocratic politics, Sunshine says, if we see that God is interested in human liberty.

In my article, I pointed to some examples of metaphysical conservatives who support theocracy.  I noted that the Intercollegiate Review had published an article by Remi Brague with the title "Are Non-Theocratic Regimes Possible?"  His answer to the question was "No."  He argued that moral and political order is impossible without the theocratic appeal to the law of God as the metaphysical standard for all human action.  

I also noted Dinesh D'Sousa's book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, in which he tried to persuade American conservatives that "conservatives must move closer to the traditional Muslims."  Traditional Muslims believe that America's liberal morality will destroy their religion and their way of life.  American conservatives, D'Souza insisted, should admit that the Muslims are right.  America really is morally corrupt.  American conservatives should join with fundamentalist Muslims in fighting against secular morality and fighting for theocratic morality.

Wiley, Price, and Sunshine are silent about D'Sousa's book.  But Wiley asserts that I have distorted Brague, because what he calls theocracy does not mean theocratic politics.  After all, Wiley observes, some conservatives like Doug Wilson have argued for "theocratic libertarianism."

This is a confusing use of the word "theocracy" that departs from the root meaning of the word.  The English word "theocracy" is a translation of the Greek word theocratia that was coined by Josephus as a term for ancient Israel as ruled by the Mosaic laws.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines "theocracy" as 

"A form of government in which God (or a deity) is recognized as the king or immediate ruler, and his laws are taken as the statute-book of the kingdom, these laws being usually administered by a priestly order as his ministers and agents; hence (loosely) a system of government by a sacerdotal order, claiming a divine commission; also, a state so governed: esp. applied to the commonwealth of Israel from the exodus to the election of Saul as king."

This doesn't look like libertarianism to me.  On the contrary, it looks more like the theocratic regime sought by conservative Catholic integralists who argue that politics must order the lives of citizens to direct them to the eternal salvation of their souls, and for this the temporal power of government must be subordinated to the spiritual power of the Church.  Some integralists point to the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX in medieval France as their model.  This is a Christian version of Israel under the Mosaic law or of Plato's theocratic city in the Laws. 

This suggests to me that deciding whether a G0d-centered metaphysics requires a theocratic political regime will depend upon whether one is looking to the God of the Old Testament or the God of the New Testament.  As I have indicated in a previous post, Roger Williams was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for denouncing the Puritan rule there as a theocracy enforcing Mosaic law that was contrary to the New Testament, where the Christian churches were voluntary associations that did not persecute heretics or unbelievers.  In Rhode Island, he established a political order that tolerated all religions and even atheists.  This showed how God-centered Christians could reject the theocratic God of the Old Testament and embrace the Lockean liberal principles of toleration and religious liberty suggested in the New Testament.  One can see this, for example, in the Christian Lockean liberalism of C. S. Lewis.

4.  IMMANENT TELEOLOGY VERSUS COSMIC TELEOLOGY

In a Lockean liberal society with religious liberty, where people will not be persecuted for heresy, blasphemy, or atheism, some people will be guided by a religiously-informed cosmic teleology, while others will be guided by the immanent teleology that is part of our evolved human nature.  Wiley, Price, and Sunshine say that evolutionary science cannot support any teleology.  Price says that I illicitly import formal and final causes into my reasoning.  But they assert this without responding to my argument that while the evolutionary explanation of morality cannot appeal to the cosmic teleology of the metaphysical conservatives, the evolutionary explanation does recognize the immanent teleology of living beings.  

Cosmic teleology is the metaphysical conception of all of nature as an organic whole in which all beings serve a cosmic purpose set by an intelligent designer or Creator.  By contrast, the immanent teleology of organic life is manifest in the goal-directed generation, structure, and activity of individual organisms.  Even if evolution by natural selection is not purposeful, it produces organic beings that are purposeful.  Plants and animals grow to maturity, and once grown, they act for ends set by the functional nature of the species.  Human beings act to satisfy the natural desires of their evolved human nature.

Darwin recognized the teleological character of his evolutionary science.  In an article in Nature, Asa Gray wrote: "let us recognize Darwin's great service to Natural Science in bringing back to it Teleology; so that instead of Morphology versus Teleology, we shall have Morphology wedded to Teleology."  In response to this, Darwin wrote to Gray (June 5, 1874): "What you say about Teleology pleases me especially and I do not think anyone else has ever noted that."  When Darwin read some of Aristotle's biological works, he saw that he and Aristotle were in agreement about biological teleology.  I have written about this.

5. DID DARWIN NATURALIZE GENOCIDE?

If Darwin has a teleology, Sunshine suggests, it must be an immoral teleology of survival of the fittest leading to genocide.  This must be so because Darwinian evolution is driven by competition within the species.  He quotes this passage from Darwin's Descent of Man:  "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races" (1871, I:201; 2004 [Penguin ed.], 183).

When Sunshine says that evolution is all about competition within the species, he ignores Darwin's insistence that the evolution of human morality arises from human sociability and sympathy (Descent of Man, I:70-106; 2004, 120-151).  It is true, however, that Darwin recognized tribal conflict and group selection: "It is no argument against savage man being a social animal, that the tribes inhabiting adjacent districts are almost always at war with each other; for the social instincts never extend to all the individuals of the same species" (I.85; 2004, 132).  Darwin thought that one of the "chief causes of the low morality of savages" was "the confinement of sympathy to the same tribe" (I.97; 2004, 143).  

Nevertheless, Darwin looked forward to the cultural evolution of morality towards a universal humanitarian sympathy: "As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him.  This point being reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races" (I:100-101; 2004, 147).

This cultural evolution of morality allows us to recognize the immorality of tribal warfare, such as that endorsed by the Old Testament.  Moses said that Yahweh told him to wage holy war in which the captured enemy towns would be put under a "curse of destruction," so that "thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth" (Deuteronomy 20:10-18).  So in the holy war against the Midianites, the soldiers of Israel killed all of the adult men, but they saved the women and children as captives.  When Moses saw this, he was enraged.  He ordered them: "So kill all the male children and kill all the women who have ever slept with a man; but spare the lives of the young girls who have never slept with a man, and keep them for yourselves" (Numbers 31:7-20).  Our evolved moral sense allows us to see the evil in such tribal brutality.

But then what should we say about the passage quoted by Sunshine, where Darwin speaks of the "civilized races" exterminating the "savage races"?  We should notice, first of all, that unlike Moses Darwin did not sanctify this as commanded by God.  We should also notice that Darwin was reporting what he had observed during his trip around the world on the Beagle, and that he recognized the evil in such tribal cruelty.  As I have noted in a post on this, Darwin condemned the Europeans who were exterminating the indigenous people of South America, Australia, and New Zealand.  Even if the Europeans were "a little superior in civilization" and superior in military power, Darwin observed, they were "inferior in every moral virtue."

Thus did Darwin show how an evolved moral sense could support his moral condemnation of European tribal brutality.

6.  WAS NIETZSCHE RIGHT ABOUT THE CHRISTIAN BASIS OF ALL MORALITY?

And yet Wiley, Price, and Sunshine say that Darwin failed to see that his morality was derived not from natural human evolution but from his Christian culture.  Although Darwin was not a Christian, he still held onto a Christian morality.  Even if he thought he was an atheist, he was a Christian in his moral practice.  Because if he had really been an atheist, who believed that there was no God to institute moral law by divine command, then he would have believed that "If God is dead, everything is permitted," and he would have become a murderous psychopath like Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov.  Wiley, Price, and Sunshine talk a lot about this point when they say that atheists like Richard Dawkins and Jurgen Habermas are actually "Christian atheists" insofar as they show the cultural influence of Christian morality.  

Wiley, Price, and Sunshine have picked up this idea from some remarks by Friedrich Nietzsche and Jordan Peterson's interpretation of those remarks.  They are very enamored of Peterson, and they say they want to have him appear in a Theology Pugcast podcast.

I have criticized this Nietzsche/Peterson/Dostoevsky idea that morality is impossible without the Christian belief in morality as created by Divine Command.  Some of my posts on this can be found here, here, and here.  On a related point, I have argued that the modern idea of universal human rights can be grounded in Darwinian biology without any need for religious beliefs (look here, here, and here).

In these posts, I have argued that Peterson's reasoning is silly.  The only reason we don't commit murder is because we believe that God commands us not to murder.  So if we believed that God was dead, we would commit murder.  Therefore, if we don't commit murder, our actions show that we are not atheists.  But then, eventually, as modern atheism becomes such a deeply felt belief that it becomes expressed in our actions--once we have consumed God's corpse, and there's nothing more to eat--we should expect that we will all become murderers.

If this were true, we would expect to see empirical historical evidence that religious belief is correlated with a low homicide rate, and declining religious belief is correlated with a high homicide rate.  But there is a lot of evidence for declining violence over the past centuries, with some of the steepest declines in the less religious countries. 

In fact, even Peterson cites Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature as supporting this conclusion: "The probability that a modern person, in a functional democratic country, will now kill or be killed is infinitesimally low compared to what it was in previous societies (and still is, in the unorganized and anarchic parts of the world)" (58).  Oddly, Peterson does not notice how this contradicts his prediction that the modern death of God must necessarily turn us all into murderous Raskolnikovs.

It's surprising to me that in all the commentary on Peterson that I have read, no one has pointed out this fundamental contradiction in his arguments.

Moreover, Peterson ignores all the problems with his Divine Command Theory of morality.  For example, what should a father do if God commands him to murder his son (Genesis 22)?  Is murder the right thing to do when God commands it?  Amazingly, even Thomas Aquinas says that murder is right if God commands it (ST, II-II, q. 64, a. 6, ad 1).  Would Wiley, Price, and Sunshine agree with this?

7.  DOES DARWIN REDUCE ALL HUMAN DESIRES TO SURVIVAL AND REPRODUCTION?

But having argued that a naturally evolved moral sense is a more reliable guide to morality than Divine Command, I know that Wiley, Price, and Sunshine would object by saying, as Wiley does, that Darwinian morality is crudely reductionist because the only moral ends are survival and reproduction.

Surely, however, survival and reproduction are important moral ends.  Whenever Moses has to give a reason for the people of Israel to obey his laws, he says that obeying the law will allow them to live and propagate themselves (Deuteronomy 4:1, 4:40, 5:29, 6:1-3, 24, 8:1, 11:8-9, 20, 22:7, 23:9-14, 25:15, 30:15-20).  The natural desires for life and parental care are human universals.  Do Wiley, Price, and Sunshine deny this?

Of course, survival and reproduction are only the minimal conditions of morality.  I argue that the natural desires for life and parental care are only two of 20 natural desires that constitute the natural standards for moral order.  Wiley, Price, and Sunshine are silent about this.

8.  PLANTINGA'S EVOLUTIONARY ARGUMENT AGAINST NATURALISM

In all of my responses here to Wiley, Price, and Sunshine, I have assumed the validity of Darwinian evolutionary science in explaining human nature and human morality.  But they say that Alvin Plantinga has proven that a purely naturalistic science cannot claim any rational validity unless it accepts a metaphysical theism. 

Plantinga argues that the theistic doctrine of the human mind as created by God in His image provides the necessary support for the validity of human thought, including the validity of modern science. If we embrace Naturalism--the view that nothing exists except Nature, and so there is no God or nothing like God--we are caught in self-contradiction: if human thought originated not from a divine Mind but from the irrational causes of Nature, then we cannot trust our minds as reliable, and thus we cannot trust our belief in Naturalism. Naturalism destroys itself by destroying the rationality of believing in Naturalism, or anything else. Insofar as science--including evolutionary science--depends on the validity of human thought, and insofar as theism is the indispensable support for trusting in the validity of human thought, science is not only compatible with theism, science depends upon theism.

Remarkably, however, Wiley, Price, and Sunshine invoke Plantinga's argument without even mentioning, much less answering, the powerful criticisms of that argument.  It's as though they think they need not concern themselves with the criticisms, because Plantinga agrees with them, and therefore he must be right.

The weak link in Plantinga's argument for metaphysical naturalism as self-defeating is his assumption that adaptive behavior is completely unrelated to true belief. The evidence of evolutionary history suggests that evolution produces cognitive faculties that are reliable but fallible. The mental abilities of animals, including human beings, are fallible because evolution produces adaptations that are good enough but not perfect, and this results in the mental fallibility that is familiar to us.

But despite this fallibility, the mental faculties cannot be absolutely unreliable. Even Plantinga concedes (in his debate with Daniel Dennett) that in the evolution of animals, "adaptive behavior requires accurate indicators."  So, for example, a frog must have sensory equipment that allows him to accurately detect flies so that he can catch them with his tongue. Similarly, the immune system of the human body must accurately indicate the presence of foreign bodies and then accurately devise responses to destroy the invaders. But then Plantinga argues that these accurate indicators don't require true beliefs. It's not clear that the frog has any beliefs. And the human being is probably not even aware of what the immune system is doing exactly.

What this shows, of course, is that much of an animal's adaptive behavior through mental activity does not require conscious reasoning at all. But for those animals who do develop some capacity for conscious reasoning--and most preeminently human beings--the accuracy of this conscious reasoning will be important for adaptation. The highest mental capacities of human beings are so biologically expensive in terms of the investment of energy they consume that it is implausible that evolution would have produced them unless they improved the ability of human beings to track the truth about themselves and their environment. Again, this is going to be fallible, but it's implausible that human beings could be naturally evolved for being in a state of complete and perpetual delusion.

And yet that's exactly what Plantinga asks us to imagine--that we could have been naturally evolved for a state of complete and perpetual delusion. Having taken this step of absurd Cartesian skepticism, he then tells us that the only escape from such skepticism is to assume that God would never allow this to happen. But as always is the case for the Cartesian skeptic, this all depends on imagining scenarios that are utterly implausible and unsupported by even a shred of evidence.

Only those who find Cartesian skepticism plausible will find Plantinga's argument plausible.  Indeed, Plantinga's argument originated with Descartes.

For example, consider this possibility for human evolution suggested by Plantinga:

So suppose Paul is a prehistoric hominid; a hungry tiger approaches. Fleeing is perhaps the most appropriate behavior: . . . this behavior could be produced by a large number of different belief-desire pairs. . . .

Perhaps Paul very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely that the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief. . . . Or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it, but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it. . . . or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a regularly recurring illusion, and, hoping to keep his weight down, has formed the resolution to run a mile at top speed whenever presented with such an illusion; or perhaps he thinks he is about to take part in a sixteen-hundred-meter race, wants to win, and believes the appearance of the tiger is the starting signal; or perhaps . . . . Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally fit a given bit of behavior.

Sunshine quotes from this passage about Paul the prehistoric hominid as an example of Plantinga's profound insight.

Well, yes, these weird stories are all logically possible, as modern philosophers like to say. But they are also utterly implausible, because there is no evidence that anything like this could have happened in human evolution. Plantinga's claim that there is no clear connection between adaptive behavior and true beliefs in evolutionary history depends on fantasies of his imagination unsupported by evidence. He has to do that, because if he actually looked at the evidence of human evolutionary history bearing upon the emergence of human mental faculties, he would be faced with evidence for the evolution of human cognitive capacities for exploring the world that are generally reliable, even if fallible.

He would also see evidence that human beings can use their fallible mental capacities to correct their mistakes. After all, the very capacity to recognize our fallibility presupposes our skill for reliable reasoning about ourselves and our world. There are good reasons to believe that this can be explained as an outcome of a natural evolutionary process in which divine intervention was not necessary.

I have written about Plantinga's argument here, here, here, and here.

9.  SLAVERY, THE BIBLE, AND THE EVOLVED MORAL SENSE

One example of our evolved ability to use our fallible mental capacities to correct our moral mistakes is our ability to see that while slavery has been practiced for thousands of years, it has always been "a great crime," as Darwin called it (2004, 141-42).  And here using our evolved moral sense to correct our mistakes includes correcting the Bible's endorsement of slavery.  

I developed this argument in the last section of my Intercollegiate Review article.  Remarkably, however, Wiley began the Theology Pugcast podcast by saying that they would ignore this section of the article.  He offered no explanation for this except to say that I had "an ax to grind" in this section.

In this section of the article, I claimed that the contrast between metaphysical conservatism and evolutionary conservatism was illustrated in how they differ in their understanding of the moral debate over slavery.  Darwinian conservatism can recognize the immorality of slavery as contrary to our evolved moral sense.  Against this, my critics have argued that any moral condemnation of slavery must ultimately rest upon a religious metaphysics that sees slavery as contrary to God's law.

Hume, Smith, and Darwin saw slavery as a violation of the moral sentiments--particularly, those sentiments that enforce justice as reciprocity.  Slavery is a form of social parasitism, as can be seen in slavery among ants.  And since human slaves are not naturally adapted to their enslavement, they will resist their exploitation; and slaveholders will have to impose their rule over their slaves by force and fraud.  In the effort to justify slavery, slaveholders will espouse a fraudulent ideology of paternalism that claims that the slaves are naturally benefited by their enslavement.  Proslavery ideology in the American South asserted that black slaves were physically, morally, and intellectually inferior to whites in their biological nature, and so these black slaves were happier when they were enslaved to white masters.  One of the primary motivations for Darwin's writing of The Descent of Man was to refute this ideology of scientific racism by showing that all of the human races were members of the same human species with the same moral sense that condemned slavery as parasitic exploitation.

The critics of Darwinian conservatism have insisted, however, that a Darwinian account of morality cannot sustain a moral case against slavery, which requires a universal morality based upon the cosmic moral law of a religious metaphysics as taught by the Bible.  The problem with this reasoning is that the Bible supports slavery.

Metaphysical conservatives like Richard Weaver have admired the "older religiousness" in the American South before the Civil War, and they have recognized that part of the Southern religion was faith in the Bible as supporting slavery.  According to Weaver, slavery "is well recognized in the Old Testament, and it is not without endorsement in the New; indeed, a strict constructionism interpretation almost requires its defense."  Similarly, historian Mark Malvasi (writing in the conservative journal Modern Age) has seen the American South as the last bastion of the "Old Republic," which was founded on "a genuinely Christian slavery."

Malvasi identified the Reverend Frederick Ross's Slavery Ordained of God, published in 1857, as one of the best statements of the biblical justification for slavery.  Ross adhered to a divine command theory of morality.  Ross insisted that to look to natural standards of right and wrong independently of God's will was atheism.  (He condemned the "self-evident truths" of the Declaration of Independence as an expression of Thomas Jefferson's atheism.)  We know what is right and wrong only because, and to the extent that, we know whether God has declared it right or wrong.  And for this, we must turn to the Bible as God's revelation of His will.  Therefore, we cannot know whether slavery is right or wrong except by seeing what the Bible teaches about God's will as to slavery.

Ross noted that the Old Testament clearly endorsed slavery.  The ancient Israelites practiced it, and God commanded it.  Similarly, in the New Testament, the Christians accepted slavery as practiced by the ancient Romans.  Paul taught slaves to obey their masters, just as he taught children to obey their parents and wives to obey their husbands.

The dispute over the Bible's handling of the slavery issue divided the Christian churches in America before and during the Civil War.  Americans had looked to the Bible as the revelation of the sacred order of the universe that would resolve all moral disputes by the cosmic authority of God's law.  But in this greatest moral crisis in American history, the Bible failed to provide any clear answer in the dispute over slavery between North and South.  As Abraham Lincoln observed in his Second Inaugural Address, "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other."

In such a situation, human beings must appeal to some natural moral sense like that espoused by Hume, Smith, and Darwin.  Darwinian conservatives can explain this moral sense as rooted in evolved human nature and as shaped by moral sentiments, moral traditions, and practical judgments.  Unlike the metaphysical conservatives, who claim that all social order must conform to some supernatural order of intelligent design or divine creation, evolutionary conservatives see social order as the product of ordinary human experience as guided by nature, custom, and prudence.

That's why conservatives need Charles Darwin.

I have written about the debate over slavery and the Bible here and here.

I have invited Wiley, Price, and Sunshine to write a response to this post.  If they do so, I will be happy to post it here.