Debating Darwinian Liberalism (3): Dual Causality and Theistic Evolution

The second premise of Dilley's Syllogism is: "Darwinism denies Christianity."

I disagree.  Darwinian evolutionary science does not resolve the reason-revelation debate in favor of reason over revelation, because that science rightly understood (as I understand it!) recognizes that neither side in this debate can refute the other.  Darwinian evolutionary science also recognizes that there is a natural desire for religious understanding, and so atheism is contrary to our evolved human nature.

In taking this position, I am on the side of Charles Darwin as against Richard Dawkins.  Darwin never claimed, either in public or in private, that his evolutionary science proved atheism.  By contrast, Dawkins has proclaimed that the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 made it possible for the first time in history to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, because evolutionary science provided a rational refutation of revelation.  Remarkably, my nine critics who embrace Dilley's Syllogism agree with Dawkins that Darwinism is atheism, even though they think this Darwinian atheism can be refuted by revelation and intelligent design theory.

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 recognizes this in adopting the principle of dual causality, which originated in medieval Islamic and Christian theology.  He speaks of the laws of nature as manifested in evolution as "secondary causes," which leaves open the possibility of God's creative power acting through "primary causes" to create the original order of nature itself.  I have elaborated this point in a previous post.

Darwin thus allows for theistic evolution, which has been adopted by a long line of Christian thinkers, including C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Alvin Plantinga.  Darwin rejects the "theory of special creation," which sees God as having to intervene miraculously in nature to specially create each form of life.  But Darwin allows for God to be understood as the First Cause, the uncaused cause of matter and life.

Most of my critics in Dilley's book seem to recognize that Darwin adopted the principle of dual causality, with natural evolution working through "secondary causes" and the Creator working through "primary causes" (3, 25-26, 87, 275-77, 284, 290).  Bruce Gordon, however, seems to reject the principle of dual causality as a blasphemous denial of God's omnipotence (168), which could be interpreted as his endorsement of a radical divine voluntarism that would make natural science impossible by denying the lawful regularity of nature (87, 162).

Darwin's dual causality allows him to conclude The Origin of Species with this famous sentence:  "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, are being evolved."

Dilley suggests that Darwin was not really serious in thus writing about life as "originally breathed by the Creator" into the first organisms, because he believes that for Darwin this language was merely a dishonest rhetorical gesture to placate his Christian readers (25).  Dilley quotes from a letter that Darwin wrote to Joseph Hooker in 1863: "I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion & used Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant 'appeared' by some wholly unknown process.--It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of origin of life; one might as well think of origin of matter."  But notice what Darwin is saying here.  He regrets that using the "Pentateuchal term of creation" might be read as endorsing a literal reading of the Creation story in Genesis, which is what Biblical creationists have done.  And yet he wants to recognize the ineluctable mystery of how matter and life originated "by some wholly unknown process." 

Like C. S. Lewis, Darwin probably saw the Creation story in Genesis as a "myth" or "Hebrew folk tale."  (I have written about Lewis's position here and here.)  But he also saw this story as pointing to a mystery--the problem of ultimate explanation--that might be beyond the limits of natural reason.

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 exists or why it has the order that it does, the only reasonable answer is that we must accept this as a brute fact of our experience.  That's just the way it is! 

Now, of course, some religious believers will argue that we can reason to the existence of God as the simplest way of explaining the existence and the order of the natural world that is presupposed in all scientific explanations.  But those like David Hume can insist that there is nothing in our ordinary 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.  Moreover, the religious believers might admit that they cannot explain why God is the way He is.  Thus, in looking for ultimate explanation, we must stop somewhere with something that is unexplained--either an uncaused or self-caused Nature or an uncaused or self-caused God.  I have elaborated this thought in a previous post.

In response to such mystery, Darwin suggested in The Descent of Man, religious belief might have evolved through the natural tendency of the human mind to project intelligent agency and design onto the world by analogy with our experience of human intelligence.  Intelligent design theory is founded on such reasoning by anthropomorphic analogy.  In recent years, evolutionary theorists like Pascal Boyer, Justin Barrett, and Jesse Bering have elaborated Darwin's thought into a general theory of religious belief as an evolutionary expression of the human mind's propensity for detecting intelligent agency.  This leaves open the question of whether religious belief is an adaptive truth (as Barrett believes) or an adaptive illusion (as Bering believes).  But in either case, religious belief belongs to our evolved human nature.  Thus, as I reported in an earlier post on the MPS conference in the Galapagos, Leda Cosmides and Father Robert Sirico agreed that atheism is unnatural, because it is contrary to our evolved human nature.  Some previous posts on this can be found here, here, here, and here.

Evolution as Secondary Causality: Darwin and Aquinas

In rejecting the "theory of special creation" and defending the "theory of natural selection," Charles Darwin explained the natural evolution of species as due to "secondary causes." In assuming dual causation--distinguishing "secondary causes" from "primary causes"--Darwin adopted a metaphysical principle that was originally formulated by Thomas Aquinas and other Dominican theologians of the Middle Ages, who had drawn the idea from some medieval Muslim philosophers.

This principle of dual causation was crucial for reconciling reason and revelation--Athens and Jerusalem--so that Jews, Muslims, and Christians could embrace Aristotle's natural philosophy as compatible with their religious belief in God as Creator. This reconciliation of Biblical religion and Aristotelian naturalism provided the cultural conditions for the emergence of modern science in the Western world.

The tension between religion and science continues to stir emotional debate today, particularly among those Christians and Muslims who worry about whether evolutionary science is compatible with their religious beliefs. The principle of dual causality is crucial today for those religious believers who want to reconcile biblical creationism and Darwinian evolution.

Darwin's novel contribution was in extending the principle of dual causation to allow for the origin of species and the emergence of human morality through the "secondary causes" of natural evolutionary laws.

In the concluding chapter of The Origin of Species, Darwin tried to persuade Christian creationists that it was a nobler conception of the Creator to see Him as working through the secondary causes of evolution rather than having to specially create each form of life by miraculous intervention.

To my mind 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. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.

In the sixth edition of the Origin, Darwin quoted from his friend the Reverend Charles Kingsley, who had written that he had "gradually learnt to see that 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 actions of His laws."

In his Autobiography, Darwin described "the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist."

But then he indicated that since writing the Origin, he had begun to doubt this. He wondered whether the human tendency to see a necessary connection between cause and effect might be merely a product of inherited experience embedded by evolution in the human brain. Or it might be that the cultural tradition of belief in God, inculcated in the minds of children, has made it hard for many human beings to throw off their religious beliefs. "I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems," he observed. "The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic."

Darwin was also concerned that if we believe that God has designed everything in the world down to the last detail, then we must hold Him responsible for all the evil in the world. He thought that evolution could explain the occurence of evil in a world in which God is not directly responsible for everything.

In arguing that it was "nobler" for the Creator as First Cause to confer on His creatures the dignity of acting as secondary causes, Darwin was continuing a tradition of thought stretching back to the Middle Ages. Some biblical believers assumed that the glory of God as the omnipotent Creator required that He should be the only cause, so that He would have no need for intermediary processes to carry out His will. But Aquinas and others argued that it denigrated God's goodness to say that He was not good enough or powerful enough to give creatures their own causal power. To allow creatures to exercise power as secondary causes conferred dignity on them and glory to the Creator. "To take away their proper actions from things is to disparage the divine goodness" (SCG, III, 69, 16).

Moreover, Aquinas insisted, this dual causality was the necessary condition for natural science: "if created things have no actions productive of effects, it follows that no nature of anything would ever be known through the effect. And thus, all the knowledge of natural science is taken away from us, for the demonstrations in it are chiefly derived from the effect" (SCG, III, 69, 18).

This Christian defense of natural science was controversial in the Middle Ages, because natural science was understood primarily as coming from the pagan natural philosophy of Aristotle. Up to the twelfth century, most of the writings of Plato and Aristotle were not available in the Christian West. Christians could read only Plato's Timaeus and Aristotle's logical works. The theological cosmology of the Timaeus was interpreted as resembling Biblical creationism. And, similarly, Aristotle's logical works posed no challenge to Christian beliefs. But then in the twelfth century, the Arabic translations of Plato and Aristotle were translated into Latin, and for the first time, Christians could read Aristotle's books of natural philosophy--including his biological works--for the first time. Since Aristotle's science did not recognize a Creator God or a supernatural realm, Aristotle's books of natural science were banned at the University of Paris and other Christian universities. Those promoting Aristotelian science were subject to punishment by the Inquisition. Even Aquinas himself was suspected of promoting heretical doctrines in teaching Aristotelian science. Despite this persecution, Aristotelian science prevailed and even became part of the regular curriculum at Christian universities, but only because Aquinas and others were able to persuade the Church authorities that Aristotle's account of nature and its causal laws could be understood as belonging to a realm of secondary causes, and thus compatible with belief in God as First Cause.

A similar debate had occurred earlier in the Islamic world. When the works of Plato and Aristotle were translated into Arabic by Muslim scholars in the eighth century, some Muslim theologians denounced this pagan knowledge as contrary to the revealed wisdom of the Koran. The Muslim proponents of Greek philosophy--particularly, Avicenna, Alfarabi, and Averroes--had to show how the natural philosophy or science of the Greeks was compatible with the Koran. Drawing on certain Platonic and Neo-Platonic texts, they developed the principle of dual causation, so that the study of the causal laws of nature could be seen as compatible with believing in God's omnipotence as First Cause.

Perhaps the earliest source of the idea of dual causation is in Plato's Timaeus (46d-e). This idea was further developed in some of the Neo-Platonic texts, and then concisely stated in The Book of Causes, an anonymous work written probably in the ninth or tenth century in Baghdad. When this book was translated into Latin in Toledo in the twelfth century, it became the primary source for this idea in the Christian West.

For at least 300 years, if not longer, science and philosophy flourished in the Islamic world. But then, beginning in the twelfth century, some Muslim theologians began to attack this intellectual movement as irreligious. The most influential of these was Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, particularly in his work The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Representing the Asharite school of Islamic theology, al-Ghazali argued that God is the only cause, and therefore what human beings habitually regard as sequences of natural causes and effects are only contingent events that are arbitrarily decreed by God. Thus, there is no inherent necessity in the order of nature. To look for lawful causal necessities in nature--as scientists and philosophers do--is a blasphemous denial of God's unconstrained power.

Against al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers, Averroes wrote his own book The Incoherence of the Incoherence to defend Greek science and philosophy as consistent with Muslim beliefs.

This debate continues today. Remarkably, the Muslim world today seems inhospitable to science, because so many Muslims assume that modern science is contrary to their religious beliefs. In many Muslim countries, the majority of believers reject evolutionary science as contradicting the creationism of the Koran. We tend to assume that the creation/evolution debate is mostly a product of fundamentalist Christian culture in the United States. But, in fact, this same debate is carried out in the Muslim world. A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education surveys this current debate over whether science--and particularly, evolutionary science--can be accepted by Muslim believers. It should be noted that some of the Muslim scientists defending evolution as compatible with the Koran use the same arguments that Averroes used against al-Ghazali, arguments that depend upon the principle of dual causation.

Similarly, among Christians in the Western World today, the interpretation of evolution as secondary causality continues to be the fundamental idea for justifying theistic evolution, which has been embraced by Christian scientists like Francis Collins, Christian writers like C. S. Lewis, and Christian politicians like Mitt Romney.

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 to deny the possibility that nature itself is the contingent product of nature's God.

REFERENCES
Al-Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, trans. Michael E. Marmura (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University, 2000).

The Book of Causes, trans. Dennis J. Brand (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1984).

Maurer, Armand, "Darwin, Thomists, and Secondary Causality," The Review of Metaphysics 57 (March 2004): 491-514.

Rubenstein, Richard, Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003).

Aquinas's reconciliation of Arabic and Greek science with Christian theology is beautifully depicted in Francesco Traini's altarpiece "Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas", which is nicely reproduced as part of the cover for Rubenstein's book.

Some blog posts on related themes can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.

The Darwinian Science of the Creator in the Declaration of Independence

Here is the beginning of the second sentence in Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence:  "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal and independent; that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable."

Here is that same passage as it appears in the final version: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."

Although the first version conveys the idea of human beings as created equal and deriving rights from that equal creation, the addition of "by their Creator" in the final version makes it clearer that the agent of creation is the divine Creator.

Here is the last sentence in the first edition of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species published in 1859: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed 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."

In the second edition of this book, Darwin added the phrase "by the Creator" after the word "breathed."  Darwin's language here about creation through "breathing" echoes the language of the King James translation of Genesis 2:7--"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."  As in the revision of the Declaration, Darwin's addition of "the Creator" makes the implication clear that there's a divine agent at work in the origin of life.

In the Biblical story of Creation, there seems to be something special about God's creation of human beings, and that human specialness is emphasized by the Bible's declaration that "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Genesis 1:27).  There is also a suggestion of human specialness in the Declaration's claim that human beings are endowed by their Creator with rights.

In Darwin's text, however, the powers of life were originally breathed by the Creator "into a few forms or into one," implying that human beings were not specially created but rather evolved from lower forms of life.  And, in fact, Darwin explicitly rejects the "theory of special creation"--the theory that the Creator had to miraculously create each species of life separately--in affirming "the theory of natural selection"--Darwin's theory that all living species of life have naturally evolved over millions of years from one or a few primordial forms of life.

The exact dating of creation is not clear either in the Bible or in the Declaration.  "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1:1).  But Genesis does not give us a date for "the beginning." God's acts of creation are said to be spread out over six days, and yet it's not clear whether these are meant to be literal 24-hour days.  In the seventeenth century, Bishop James Ussher tried to calculate the chronology of Biblical history, and he estimated that the "beginning" of creation was 4,004 years before the birth of Christ; so that the whole world was no older than 6,000 years.  But the Bible does not clearly state this.  And the Declaration takes no position on this dating.

Although it was impossible for Darwin to date the history of life precisely, he saw that the natural evolution of all forms of life would require at least hundreds of millions of years.  One of the achievements of geology in the first half of the nineteenth century was reaching a general agreement that the Earth was surely much older than 6,000 years.  Nevertheless, by the beginning of the twentieth centuries, there were some "young-Earth creationists" who defended Ussher's dating, although the "old-Earth creationists" were willing to concede that the geological evidence was against Ussher, and that the "days" of creation in Genesis should be interpreted as "ages" much longer than 24 hours.  William Jennings Bryan, for example, was an old-Earth creationist.

So is the Darwinian science of human evolution compatible with what the Declaration says about the creation of human beings by the Creator?  Well, it depends on what one means by "creation" and "the Creator."  As I have already indicated, there are different kinds of creationism, and while some kinds clearly contradict Darwin's science, some do not--as suggested by Darwin himself in his reference to "the Creator."  A Creator whose creative activity is always against the laws of nature denies Darwin's science.  But a Creator whose creative activity works through the laws of nature--who acts as Nature's God--is compatible with Darwin's science.

There are five kinds of creationism--young-Earth creationism, old-Earth creationism, intelligent-design creationism, evolutionary creationism, and Spinozistic creationism.  Spinozistic creationism is completely compatible with Darwinian science, and evolutionary creationism is largely so.  (I have written about the different kinds of creationism here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

Most scientific creationists today concede that Darwin refuted the "theory of special creation"--the idea that the Creator had to miraculously create every plant and animal species separately.  The Bible speaks of God as creating the "kinds" of life, but these "kinds" are not necessarily all the "species" of life.  Some creation scientists claim that "created kinds" correspond not to "species" but to groups of plants or animals at a taxonomic level higher than species, perhaps at or near the taxonomic rank of family.  So, for example, Todd Wood concedes that Peter and Rosemary Grant have presented convincing evidence for the evolution of diverse species of "Darwin's finches" on the Galapagos Islands as adaptations to the environment of the Galapagos.  But still, Wood argues, all of these species of finches belong to a single "kind" created by God.

Wood also concedes that the human species might have evolved from ancestral primate species, so that human beings and apes might belong to some "kind" that was originally created by God with the genetic potential for evolving into all of the primate species.

Unlike the young-Earth creationists (like Wood), the old-Earth creationists (like Hugh Ross) concede that the universe is billions of years old, and so Ussher's dating of 6,000 years is false.  But over those billions of years of cosmic history, Ross argues, God had to miraculously intervene at critical points for supernatural creative activity that cannot be reduced to natural evolution.

The evolutionary creationists (or theistic evolutionists) like Francis Collins and Deborah Haarsma believe that God could have acted as First Cause in originally creating the general laws of nature, but then He could have allowed natural evolutionary history to unfold just as evolutionary scientists have explained it, without any need for God to miraculously disrupt the natural order of things.

This is the idea of the metaphysics of dual causality that Darwin introduces in the Origin of Species: God's establishment of general laws constitutes the primary causes of the universe, while the natural scientist studies the secondary causes that govern the observable world. (I have written about this here, here, and here.)

The signers of the Declaration of Independence were familiar with a similar conception of dual causality in Isaac Newton's version of deistic religion.  The universe is a "machine" governed by the mathematical laws of nature.  But God is the "Maker" of the machine.

This Newtonian conception of the "clockmaker God" creates a dilemma, however, for anyone who wants to see God as a transcendent being beyond the immanent order of nature.  As Gottfried Leibniz pointed out in his debate with Samuel Clark, either God must intervene regularly to rewind or repair the clock, which shows that God is an incompetent clockmaker; or the clock works fine all by itself, and God the clockmaker is indistinguishable from God the clock.  If it's the latter, then Newton's God is Spinoza's God, who is the same as Nature.

In one of the most influential statements of Lockean political philosophy in the eighteenth century--Cato's Letters--John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon resolved this debate in favor of Spinoza.  In their essay on how to dispel "superstitious fears" by recognizing that what appear to be miraculous events are probably works of natural causes, they argue:

"The works of Almighty God are as infinite as is his power to do them.  And 'tis paying greater deference to him, and having higher conceptions of his omnipotence, to suppose that he  saw all things which have been, are, or ever shall be, at one view, and formed the whole system of nature with such exquisite contrivance and infinite wisdom, as by its own energy and intrinsick power, to promote all the effects and operations which we daily see, feel, and admire; than to believe him to be often interposing to alter and amend his own work, which was undoubtedly perfect at first" (no. 77, Liberty Fund edition, 2:565).

This same Spinozistic idea of identifying God and Nature was adopted by Darwin.  After reading one of the first copies of The Origin of Species, Charles Kingsley--a prominent clergyman of the Church of England and a friend of Darwin--wrote a letter to Darwin, which included this remark:

"I have gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that he created primal forms capable of self development into all forms needful pro tempore & pro loco, as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which he himself had made."

Darwin wrote to John Murray, his publisher, that Kingsley's "capital sentence" should be inserted into the second edition of Origin, "in answer to anyone who may, as many will, say that my Book is irreligious."  This sentence was introduced into the concluding section of Origin as showing that there is "no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one" (Origin of Species, Modern Library/Random House, 1936, pp. 367-68).

But can the creation of human beings "in the image of God" arise by purely natural evolution without any miraculous intervention by God?  Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis--and Catholics generally--have embraced theistic evolution in conceding that Darwin's theory of evolution has been verified.  But they have also declared that the creation of the human soul requires an "ontological leap" through a miraculous divine act that transcends natural evolution.  (I have written about that here.)

Darwin suggests, however, that even the creation of the soul might be explained by natural evolution. Here is the last sentence of The Descent of Man:

"I have given the evidence to the best of my ability; and we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system--with all these exalted powers--Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."

Darwin's reference to the "god-like intellect" of human beings suggests that there might be some truth in the biblical idea that human beings bear the image of God.  But still, Darwin argues, all of the "noble qualities" of humanity can be explained as products of a natural evolution from lower animals.

To support this conclusion, Darwin offered evidence of the anatomical, behavioral, and mental similarities between human beings and other animals.  But he also saw that human beings were unique in their capacities for language, self-conscious reflection, and the moral sense.  Now, recent research in evolutionary neuroscience allows us to explain the emergent evolution of the mind in the brain, which includes the human mind's capacity for moral judgment, which allows us to recognize our natural rights, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Jefferson foresaw this, because he studied some of the earliest neurological experiments showing how mental activity was correlated with the stimulation of the brain, which Jefferson took as evidence of how mind arises naturally from the material brain.  This came up in his correspondence with John Adams: "Why may not the mode of action called thought, have been given to a material organ of peculiar structure? as that of magnetism is to the Needle, or of elasticity to the spring by a particular manipulation of the steel?" (letter to Adams, March 14, 1820).  (I have written about this here.)

Darwin and the Bible

For the first edition of his Origin of Species in 1859, Darwin put two epigrams opposite the title page.  The first was from William Whewell's Bridgewater Treatise: "But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this--we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws."

The second was from Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning: "To conclude, therefore, let no man out of a weak conceit of sobriety, or an ill-applied moderation, think or maintain, that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God's word, or in the book of God's works; divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavor an endless progress or proficience in both."

Darwin thus intimated to his reader the relationship of his book to the Bible.  In defending his "theory of natural selection" as superior to the "theory of special creation," The Origin of Species has been seen by many biblical believers as an attack on the Bible's account of God's creation of everything in six days, including His creation of Adam and Eve in His image.  But these two epigrams suggest Darwin's way of presenting his theory as compatible with the Bible.

The quotation from Bacon conveys an idea that was often used by early modern scientists to justify their natural science as a worthy activity for a biblical believer--the metaphor of two books: one can read God's word in the Bible, or one can read God's works in nature.  These two books were often identified as revealed religion and natural religion.

The quotation from Whewell conveys the thought that God's works in nature are not so much miraculous interventions by God that break nature's order but the divine establishment of the general laws of nature.  This is the idea of the metaphysics of dual causality that Darwin introduces in the Origin--God's establishment of general laws constitutes the primary causes of the universe, while the natural scientist studies the secondary causes that govern the observable world.  (I have written about this in a previous post.)

This makes it possible to interpret Darwin as what today would be called a theistic evolutionist or an evolutionary creationist--like Francis Collins and others associated with Collins' BioLogos organization.  In the beginning, the evolutionary creationist believes, God created the natural laws of the Universe and then allowed the natural evolution of everything to occur within those laws.  This allows the biblical believer to accept both the religious truth of biblical creationism and the scientific truth of evolutionary biology.

This is suggested by Darwin's echoing of the language of the biblical creation story in the eloquent last sentence of The Origin of Species: "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."  The phrase "by the Creator" was added to this sentence in the second edition of Origin. 

In 1863, Darwin read an article in which the author said that explaining the origin of life requires "a creative force, . . . which Darwin could only express in Pentateuchal terms as the primordial form 'into which life was first breathed.'"  In a letter of March 29, 1863, Darwin wrote about this: "I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion, and used the Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant 'appeared' by some wholly unknown process.  It is mere rubbish, thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter" (The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters, ed. Francis Darwin, p. 272).  Some of Darwin's religious critics have quoted this remark as evidence that he was not serious in his use of the biblical language of "creation" and "Creator," and that it only shows how he "truckled to public opinion."

In any case, we see Darwin here admitting that the origin of all things is an unresolvable mystery for him that creates an opening for religious belief in some First Cause.  In his Autobiography, Darwin said that when he was on board the Beagle, he was a very orthodox Christian, who quoted the Bible as the unanswerable authority on morality.  But then in the first few years after his return to England, 1836-1839, when he was first developing his theory of natural selection, he thought a lot about religion, and "disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete" (Autobiography, ed. Nora Barlow, pp. 85-87).  Some of this writing about his loss of religious belief was cut out of the first publication of the Autobiography in 1887 by Darwin's son Francis at the request of his mother, who said that she wanted to avoid any offense to the feelings of Darwin's friends who were believers.  (I have written about the struggles of Darwin and his wife Emma over religious questions here and here.)

When he was writing The Origin of Species, Darwin reports, he felt compelled "to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist."  But then this belief gradually became weaker, and he began to doubt whether the human mind could ever fathom the meaning of a First Cause to everything.  "I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems," he admitted.  "The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic" (Autobiography, pp. 92-94).

The biblical language in the last sentence of the Origin is one way that Darwin tried to convey this "mystery of the beginning of all things."  But his language is not exactly the same as what Genesis says. Darwin says that life was "originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one."  Here's the biblical verse, in the King James translation: "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul" (Genesis 2:7).  Moreover, it is said, "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them" (Genesis 1:27).  So, in the biblical story, God's breathing the breath of life into man to make him a living soul is a special creation of humanity as uniquely set apart as the image of God from all other life. 

Genesis also says that God called the first man Adam, and then Adam named the first woman Eve.  Thus, it seems that all of humanity is descended from these two individuals specially created by God.  But in Darwin's story, the Creator's breath of life animates one or a few forms of life; and apparently, as Darwin made clear in The Descent of Man, human beings were not specially created by God, but rather they evolved naturally from some ancestral species of animals.  Also, Darwin never speaks of Adam and Eve as the first two human beings.

This difference between the Bible and Darwin is more bluntly indicated in one of Darwin's notebooks from 1838 that was not written for publication: "Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity, more humble & I believe true to consider him created from animals" (Notebooks, 300).

The first chapter of Descent is entitled "The Evidence of the Descent of Man from Some Lower Form."  After surveying the similarities between man and the lower animals, Darwin concludes the chapter with remarks resembling his comments in his notebook: "It is only our natural prejudice, and that arrogance which made our forefathers declare that they were descended from demi-gods, which leads us to demur to this conclusion [that human beings are evolved from lower forms]. But the time will before long come when it will be thought wonderful, that naturalists, who were well acquainted with the comparative structure and development of man and other mammals, should have believed that each was the work of a separate act of creation" (I:32-33).  Although it's not completely clear, the reference here to the false belief in human beings being "descended from demi-gods" could be a reference to the creation of Adam and Eve.  If so, this could be a denial of the teaching that human beings were created in God's image.

Darwin returns to this point in the last sentence of Descent:

"I have given the evidence to the best of my ability; and we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system--with all these exalted powers--Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin" (II:405).

The reference to the "god-like intellect" of human beings suggests that there might be some truth in the biblical idea that human beings bear the image of God.  But, still, Darwin argues, all of the "noble qualities" of humanity can be explained as products of a natural evolution from lower animals.

To support this conclusion, Darwin offered evidence of the anatomical, behavioral, and mental similarities between human beings and other animals.  But since he did not understand genetics, Darwin could not recognize the genetic similarities that might support his argument for human evolution from ancestral animal species.

Now, with the growing knowledge of the human genome and of the genomes of other species, and of the techniques for comparing genomes, it is now possible to infer the pathways of human genetic evolution from other lower forms of life.  That provides new evidence for testing evolutionary theory.  But it also raises new questions about whether the science of human genetic evolution is compatible with the biblical creation story of Adam and Eve, or whether that science must deny that story.

Once again, we must wonder whether the two books--the Bible as read by faith and Nature as read by science--are compatible or contradictory.  In recent years, that question has created a great intellectual and spiritual crisis for many Christians--particularly, American evangelical Christians.  It has been called the search for the historical Adam.  That will be the question for my next few posts.

Darwin's Philosophic Understanding of Reason and Revelation

Charles Darwin was a scientific philosopher who took the side of reason against revelation, but with the understanding that he could not refute the possibility of revelation; and therefore he saw the irreconcilable tension between philosophy and the Bible that constitutes the vitality of Western civilization.  In this way, he took the position on the reason/revelation debate that has been adopted by the zetetic Socratic Straussians.  I have defended this interpretation of Darwin in some previous posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.  In this post, I will restate and elaborate some of my reasoning.

I call Darwin a "scientific philosopher" to indicate that he did not see a separation of science from philosophy.  In "Reason and Revelation," Leo Strauss observed that the distinction between science and philosophy did not arise until late in the 18th century, a distinction that created an opposition between "unscientific philosophy" and "unphilosophic science."  As a consequence of this, "there exists no longer a direct access to philosophy in its original meaning as quest for the true and final account of the whole" (144).

During his lifetime, Darwin was generally identified as both a "man of science" and a philosopher.  On board the Beagle, the seamen referred to Darwin as "the philosopher."  In his early notebooks, where he began to work out his theory of evolution, he had notes on his reading of many philosophers--such as Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and Adam Smith--particularly for his studies of the natural "moral sense," which later was written out in his Descent of Man.  After his death in 1882, William Spottiswoode, the President of the Royal Society of London, remembered Darwin as showing the "ideal of the philosophic life."  In his obituary for Nature, Thomas Huxley observed: "One could not converse with Darwin without being reminded of Socrates.  There was the same desire to find some one wiser than himself, the same belief in the sovereignty of reason." Huxley concluded by quoting the last line of the Apology: "The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways--I to die and you to live.  Which is the better, God only knows."  Even the iconic photographs of Darwin's head evoked the resemblance to Socrates.

Darwin's study of nature conformed to what Strauss called the "original meaning of philosophy" as based on the discovery of nature:

". . . Nature was discovered when the quest for the beginnings became guided by these two fundamental distinctions:

"a) the distinction between hearsay and seeing with one's own eyes--the beginnings of all things must be made manifest, or demonstrated, on the basis of what men can see always in broad daylight or through ascent from the visible things.

"b) the distinction between man-made things and things that are not man-made--the beginning of artificial things is man, but man is clearly not the first thing, the beginning of all things.  hence those things that are not man-made, lead more directly to the first things than do the artificial things.  The production of artefacts is due to contrivance, to forethought.  Nature was discovered when the possibility was realized that the first things may produce all other things, not by means of forethought, but by blind necessity. I say: the possibility.  It was not excluded that the origin of all things is forethought, divine forethought.  But this assertion required from now on a demonstration.  The characteristic outcome of the discovery of nature is the demand for rigorous demonstration of the existence of divine beings, for a demonstration which starts from the analysis of phenomena manifest to everyone.  Since no demonstration can presuppose the demonstrandum, philosophy is radically atheistic."  ("Reason and Revelation," 145-46; compare "Progress or Return?", 113-14, and Natural Right and History, 81-89)

Darwin described his scientific research during the five years of the voyage of the Beagle around the world as based on what he could see with his own eyes:

"During some part of the day I wrote my Journal, and took much pains in describing carefully and vividly all that I had seen; and this was good practice. . . ."

". . . Everything about which I thought or read was made to bear directly on what I had seen and was likely to see; and this habit of mind was continued during the years of the voyage.  I fee sure that it was this training which has enabled me to do whatever I have done in science." (Autobiography, 78).

He then began The Origin of Species in 1859 by claiming that his careful collection of and reflections on "certain facts in the distribution of the organic beings" could "throw some light on the origin of species--that mystery of mysteries."

Early in his life, Darwin felt compelled to believe that the origin of nature was "by means of forethought"--the work of a Divine Mind or intelligent designer, and thus he was a theist.  But gradually he began to doubt the anthropomorphic analogy--the idea that the First Cause must be a Mind--and he saw that all of nature could have arisen by natural necessity.  By the end of his life, he was a skeptical zetetic, who thought that while the human mind was unable to explain the mystery of the whole, there was no good reason to believe in Biblical Revelation; and the life of scientific inquiry into nature by reason alone was the best life for him.  Darwin did not reveal his skeptical doubt about the divine in the writings published in his lifetime.  But he did reveal this clearly in some of his correspondence that was marked "private" and in his Autobiography that he wrote for publication after his death.

In the section on "Religious Belief" in his Autobiography, Darwin related the evolution of his religious thought through four phases: New Testament Christianity, theism, agnosticism, and skepticism or rationalism. Darwin said that when he was on board the Beagle, he was "quite orthodox" in accepting the moral authority of the New Testament, although he had rejected the Old Testament because of its "manifestly false history of the world" (85).  But then he decided that there was not enough evidence for the Christian miracles, and that "the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become" (86).  He thus agreed with Strauss, who said that miracles must be incredible to the philosopher, even if he cannot prove them impossible: "all scientific accounts presuppose the impossibility of miracles" ("Reason and Revelation," 155).

By the time that he wrote The Origin of Species, Darwin reported, he had moved to being a theistic evolutionist who believed that the First Cause of all things was a Divine Mind:

"Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight.  This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity.  When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist" (92-93).

Notice how Darwin's language here echoes that of Philo, speaking at the end of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: "That the cause or causes or order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence."  Philo suggests that this "remote analogy to human intelligence" must be very remote, because all intelligent designers of our experience--humans and other animals--are embodied intelligences, and we have no direct experience of disembodied intelligence designing the world. 

Darwin's theism led him to employ the Thomistic idea of "dual causality"--God acted as the intelligent designer through "primary causes" to create the laws of nature at the beginning, but then those laws of nature worked through "secondary causes" that were open to scientific study.  This was the famous "two books" analogy: the Bible as the Book of God's Word and Nature as the Book of God's Works.

But then Darwin saw that this anthropomorphic analogy--that there was a divine intelligent designer analogous to human intelligent designers--was fallacious, because while we have experiential knowledge of how human intelligent designers create artifacts, we have no experience with how a divine intelligent designer could create everything out of nothing.  Moreover, once we see how the law of natural selection can explain the natural evolution of species, we have no need to posit a divinely intelligent First Cause, which cannot be rationally demonstrated to exist.

"The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered.  We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man.  There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.  Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws" (87)

Darwin thus agreed with Strauss: "the notion of inquiry presupposes the realization of the fundamental difference between human production and the production of things which are not manmade, so that no conclusion from human production to the production of non-manmade things is possible except if it is first established by demonstration that the visible universe has been made by thinking beings" ("Progress or Return?", 113).  Here Darwin and Strauss have identified the fundamental flaw of "intelligent design theory" in the fallacy of reasoning through an anthropomorphic analogy, which is the subject of a previous post here.

Darwin had to admit, however, that his philosophical science of natural evolution could not provide complete knowledge of the whole, because it could not explain the origin of the universe or the origin of life.  "The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic" (Autobiography, 94).

Darwin thus agreed with Strauss that while scientific philosophy strives for knowledge of the whole, this is forever unattainable.  "Human wisdom is knowledge of ignorance: there is no knowledge of the whole but only knowledge of parts, hence only partial knowledge of parts, hence no unqualified transcending, even by the wisest man as such, of the sphere of opinion" (The City and Man, 20).

This Socratic knowledge of his ignorance put Darwin into a state of "skepticism or rationalism," in which he could neither accept nor refute revelation, and thus the conflict of reason and revelation was irreconcilable, with neither being able to rationally refute the other.  Darwin admitted that he could not demonstrate the impossibility of some people having some direct experience of God by revelation.  He observed: "My father used to quote an unanswerable argument, by which an old lady, a Mrs. Barlow, who suspected him of unorthodoxy, hoped to convert him: 'Doctor, I know that sugar is sweet in my mouth, and I know that my Redeemer liveth.'" (Autobiography, 96)

And yet this "unanswerable argument" did not convince Darwin to choose revelation over reason.  "As for myself I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my life to science.  I feel no remorse from having committed any great sin" (95).

This "unanswerable argument" seems to be what Strauss identified as "the fact of revelation as known through faith," which the unbeliever cannot know, because he has not had "the experience of faith" ("Reason and Revelation," 142).   The debate between reason and revelation remains unreconcilable, and the question is settled for the believer by "the fact of revelation," while it is settled for the Socratic philosopher by "the fact that he is a philosopher" ("Progress or Return?", 122).

For thousands of years, this conflict between reason and revelation could not be publicly debated, because the philosophic proponents of reason would have been persecuted; and so the philosophers could speak about the conflict only through esoteric writing.  In reading Alfarabi and Maimonides, Strauss learned about both the reason/revelation conflict and esoteric writing.  But then, remarkably, Strauss himself wrote openly about reason and revelation without facing persecution, because he lived in a modern liberal order with freedom of thought and speech.  This achievement of liberalism began during Darwin's lifetime, when for the first time, a Darwinian liberalism made it possible to openly confront the tension between reason and revelation.  That will be the theme for my next post.

In the Garden: A Darwinian Love Story

I have just seen a new play presented by the Lookingglass Theatre Company of Chicago--"In the Garden: A Darwinian Love Story."  It's a wonderfully thoughtful story of the marriage of Charles and Emma Darwin, written by Sara Gmitter and directed by Jessica Thebus.  All of the acting is superb, and especially the performances of Rebecca Stone (as Emma) and Andy White (as Charles)

There is a good study guide for the play.

The story presents the Darwins' marriage as a life-long conversation over the apparent tension between Charles' science and Emma's faith.  Ever since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859, the whole world has been engaged in this conversation.  Does Darwinian evolutionary science deny religious faith--particularly the Biblical beliefs in God as Creator and in the immortal destiny of the human soul in the afterlife?  Or can Darwinian science and Biblical faith be compatible?  If human beings are just highly evolved animals, does that render human life meaningless?  Do the human experiences of love, death, and the longing for eternal life point to a spiritual reality of the human soul that transcends natural science?  Or can natural science account for those human experiences in a manner that is not degrading?  We see Charles and Emma struggling with these great human questions as a personal drama within their loving marriage.

As the play indicates, one of the most troubling periods of their marriage came during the illness and death of their child Annie, who died at age 10 in 1851.  Why did Annie die?  Charles cannot give a scientific explanation.  But neither can Emma give a religious explanation.  Annie probably died of tuberculosis, but at the time there was no understanding of what causes this disease.

In 1877, a friend sent Darwin an article by Dr. Robert Koch, who would later discover the bacillus that causes tuberculosis. The article contained the first photographs of bacteria, along with Koch's argument that such microorganisms could cause diseases. Darwin replied: "I well remember saying to myself between twenty and thirty years ago [about the time of Annie's death], that if ever the origin of any infectious disease could be proved, it would be the greatest triumph to Science; and now I rejoice to have seen the triumph."

So now Darwin's science can explain why his daughter died. She died because she lost her struggle for life in the war of nature with tubercular bacteria.  Would this have satisfied Emma?

What I found most instructive about the play is how Emma emerges as a strong intellectual partner for Charles.  Although she recognizes the superiority of his mind, she engages him vigorously but lovingly as she challenges him to think about the implications of his science.  Moreover, by the end of the play, they seemed to have reached common ground.  In the second edition of the Origin, Darwin inserted the phrase "by the Creator" into the last sentence of the book: "There is grandeur in this view of life, which 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."  Charles tells Emma that he wants "by the Creator" to suggest "space" for scientists and believers to find agreement on the possibility of a supernatural uncaused cause of everything.

As I have indicated in some previous posts, Darwin was careful in distinguishing the "secondary causes" in nature from the "primary causes," and thus he employed a conception of dual causality that had emerged in the Christian and Muslim Middle Ages to reconcile scientific naturalism and religious supernaturalism.

These are deep philosophical and religious issues, and it's rare to see them taken up effectively in a theatrical drama.  "In the Garden" succeeds in doing this.  And I can think of two other stage productions in Chicago in recent years that have done this--"A History of Everything" and "Freud's Last Session"--which have been the subject of some posts here and here.

In his review of the play for the Chicago Reader, Jack Helbig claims that the issues raised in the play are not really very interesting today:  "the great philosophical question at its center—whether or not one can reasonably believe in both God and evolution—is not particularly compelling, except perhaps among the fundamentalist fringe. It may have been otherwise in Darwin's time, but most believers now don't insist on the biblical account's literal truth (whatever that might consist in). Darwin himself changed that, along with Freud, and Kierkegaard, and a host of others."

Is this really true?  At one point in the play, Emma and Charles argue about whether he's right that human beings are "just animals," shaped by the same natural evolutionary processes that shape all animals.  Is it true that only "the fundamentalist fringe" are disturbed by this claim?  Can't we see in the continuing debate over sociobiology and evolutionary psychology that many people today are deeply troubled by the Darwinian understanding of human beings as animals?  Don't we see here a kind of secular creationism in the thought that human beings must have some special worth that comes from being separated from and above the rest of the animal world?

Helbig also complains that "In the Garden" is not a well-crafted drama.  Similarly, Chris Jones, the Chicago Tribune critic, describes Gmitter's play as "a smart, carefully structured but rhetorically overstuffed 2 1/2-hour play badly in need of a good edit--the dramaturgical application, you might say, of the survival of the fittest scenes."

I agree that Gmitter could make her play dramatically tighter by cutting a few scenes and rearranging them to follow their actual sequence in the life of Charles and Emma.  She could organize the play around three points--their courtship and marriage, the death of Annie, and the publication of the Origin.  Gmitter moves the death of Annie in 1851 to just after the publication of Origin in 1859, which adds nothing to the dramatic quality of the story.  She also has Charles and Emma attending the famous debate at Oxford University between T. H. Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce, although neither Charles nor Emma was actually there.  Moreover, this scene at Oxford is the weakest scene in the play, and it could be cut out, which would shorten the play by 20 minutes or so.

Making a few changes like this would make a good play even better.  In fact, this could become one of the greatest dramatic presentations of Darwinism and its human implications.

Some of my posts on these themes can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here,.

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 Theistic Evolutionism of Pope Francis and the Emergence of the Soul in the Brain

In his speech this week (October 27) to a Plenary Session of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope Francis affirmed theistic evolution as compatible with the Catholic Church's teachings.  He thus implicitly rejected scientific creationism and intelligent design theory in their claim that each species of life had to be specially created by God, and so they could not have emerged by natural evolution.

He observed:

"You are addressing the highly complex subject of the evolution of nature. . . . When we read the account of Creation in Genesis, we risk imagining that God was a magician, complete with an all powerful magic wand.  But that was not so.  He created beings, and He let them develop according to the internal laws with which He endowed each one, that they might develop, and reach their fullness.  He gave autonomy to the beings of the universe at the same time in which He assured them of his continual presence, giving life to every reality. . . . The Big Bang theory, which is proposed today as the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of a divine creator but depends on it.  Evolution in nature does not conflict with the notion of Creation, because evolution presupposes the creation of beings who evolve."

"As for man, however, there is a change and a novelty.  When, on the sixth day in the account of Genesis, comes the moment of the creation of man, God gives the human being another autonomy, an autonomy different from that of nature, which is freedom. . . ."

Contrary to what was said in some of the news reports about this speech, Pope Francis was not saying anything that had not been said by previous popes.  In 1996, in another speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul II took essentially the same position in affirming the truth of evolutionary science as consistent with a proper interpretation of Genesis.

The Church's theistic evolutionism is close to what Charles Darwin defended.  Darwin adopted 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.  Darwin rejected the "theory of special creation," which sees God as having to intervene miraculously in nature to specially create each form of life.  But Darwin allowed for God to be understood as the First Cause, the uncaused cause of matter and life.

The one possible point of disagreement between Darwin and the popes is the claim of the popes that the creation of the human species required what Pope John Paul II called an "ontological leap"--a miraculous intervention by God into nature to specially create the human soul with a freedom of thought and action that other animals do not have.  Since the popes accept the idea that God was able and willing to allow natural evolutionary processes to create the species of life, it's hard to understand why this could not also be true for the creation of the human mind through the emergent evolution of the primate brain.

Pope Francis rejects the belief that God was "a magician, complete with an all-powerful magic wand," but then in assuming that God had to miraculously create the human soul outside of any natural evolutionary process, he seems to fall back onto imagining God as a magician.

That the human mind arose from the emergent evolution of the primate brain is perhaps suggested by Michelangelo's famous Creation of Adam fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  In an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Frank Meshberger has pointed out that the image surrounding God and the angels has the shape of a brain, with God's right arm extending through the prefrontal cortex.  Since Michelangelo was known to have performed dissections of the human body, he could have learned enough about neuroanatomy to convey the message that God's gift of human ensoulment was actually the gift of a human brain that might have arisen by natural processes.

Some of my posts on these points can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.