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.

Strauss and Darwin as Zetetics in the Reason/Revelation Debate

In deciding how to find their bearings in the universe and how best to live their lives, Leo Strauss said, human beings face a fundamental choice: should they live in pious obedience to God whom they fear and love, or should they live under the guidance of their own minds as based on their human understanding of the world--"a life of obedient love versus a life of free insight" (1953, 74)?

In answering this question, they must choose between the two roots of Western civilization--reason and revelation, Athens and Jerusalem, Greek philosophy and the Bible.  Strauss thought that the vitality of Western civilization arose from the tension between these two peaks of human existence.  Over the past few centuries, this debate has been between science and religion, and particularly Darwinian evolution and the Biblical creation story (Strauss 2006, 144, 155, 160-61, 171, 173, 177).  Strauss's account of this debate is best stated in his "Reason and Revelation," a lecture delivered in 1948 at Hartford Theological Seminary (Strauss 2006), in "Progress or Return?," a series of lectures at Hillel House at the University of Chicago in 1952 (Strauss 1997), and in some parts of Natural Right and History (74-77).

In the history of the West, there had been attempts to resolve this tension either by synthesizing philosophy and theology in a unified vision or by showing that one side could refute the other.  But Strauss thought no such resolution of the tension was possible, because any supposed synthesis would require one side to be subordinated to the other, and because neither could truly refute the other without begging the question at issue.

The failure of philosophy to refute revelation creates a special problem for philosophy, Strauss believed.  If the philosophic life is to be rationally defensible, the philosopher must refute the claim that divine revelation shows that a life of obedience to God's law is superior to a life of rational inquiry into all things.  If philosophy cannot refute revelation, then the choice of the philosophic life would seem to be an arbitrary choice unsupported by reason; and yet Strauss wanted to claim that the life of philosophy is in fact rationally defensible.  By contrast, the life devoted to revelation does not face this kind of problem.  Since submission to revelation is based on faith rather than reason, the failure of revelation to refute philosophy through rational argument does not render the life of faith incoherent.

This is what Strauss called "the theological-political problem," which he identified as "the theme of my studies" (Strauss 1997, 453).  Strauss learned about this problem primarily from his reading of the medieval Jewish and Muslim philosophers--particularly, Maimonides and Alfarabi--who saw the conflict between Greek philosophy and the Bible or the Koran.  Although Strauss tried to claim that the reason-revelation debate can be seen in Greek philosophy and the Bible, he admitted that, of course, the Greek philosophers did not know the Bible, and the Biblical authors did not know Greek philosophy.  It is not clear, therefore, that the conflict between ancient Greek philosophy and religious myth is the same as the conflict between Greek philosophy and Biblical revelation in the Middle Ages.  After all, the Bible agrees with Greek philosophy in criticizing polytheistic religious myth.

According to Michael and Catherine Zuckert, in Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy, the best way to see the theological-political problem is to state Strauss's position as a "paradoxical syllogism":

"PROPOSITION 1:  In order to be a rationally defensible pursuit, philosophy must be able to refute revelation in a non-question-begging way."

"PROPOSITION 2:  Philosophy cannot refute revelation."

"PROPOSITION 3:  Philosophy is a rationally defensible pursuit." (314)

To resolve the problem in holding these three propositions, the Straussians have said that Strauss actually denied one of these three propositions; but they disagree about which one of the propositions needs to be denied. The Zuckerts lay out four alternative interpretations, and they imply that the most persuasive interpretation is that of the "zetetics, who argue that Strauss persisted in his view that the possibility of revelation could not be refuted by philosophy but who also maintain that Strauss had worked out a way to rationally justify the choice of the philosophic life without that refutation" (315), thus rejecting Proposition 1.  (The term zetetic is derived from the Greek verb zeteo--to seek or inquire--so a zetetic philosopher is one who seeks the truth or inquires about things without ever attaining full knowledge or wisdom.)

As my response to this, I will make three claims.  First, the Zuckerts are correct in identifying Strauss as a zetetic--as someone devoted to Socratic inquiry into the nature of the whole without expecting to achieve full knowledge of the whole--who makes a rational choice for philosophy over revelation but without ever refuting revelation.  Second, Charles Darwin was a zetetic scientific philosopher in choosing evolutionary science over Biblical creationism.  Third, the Darwinian liberalism that emerged during Darwin's lifetime promoted the public debate over reason and revelation that was revived by Strauss, which shows how the liberal social order secures the freedom of thought that allows people to freely choose between the philosophic life and the religious life.

In this post, I will explain the first claim.  In the next two posts, I will explain the second and third claims.

The Zuckerts rightly see four alternative positions among the Straussians interpreting Strauss's account of the reason/revelation debate.  The rationalists believe that philosophy really can refute revelation, and thus they deny Proposition 2--that philosophy cannot refute revelation.  The decisionists believe that philosophy cannot be rationally defended, that Strauss only arbitrarily decided in favor of philosophy, and so they deny Proposition 3--that philosophy is a rationally defensible pursuit.  The faith-based Straussians believe that Strauss points to the superiority of revelation over reason, and so they also deny Proposition 3, while claiming that any denial of this proposition must favor the choice for a life of faith in revelation.  The zetetics believe that while philosophy cannot refute revelation--thus denying Proposition 1--it is rational for those with the natural desire and capacity for philosophy to choose the philosophic life, when this is rightly understood as a Socratic quest for knowledge that never attains the full knowledge of the whole that would refute revelation.

The most prominent of the Straussian rationalists are Heinrich Meier (1997) and Thomas Pangle (2003).  They show how philosophers can give rational explanations for how religious belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and providential God arose among human beings to support human morality and politics; and they believe that such a rationalist explanation of religion makes it unnecessary to believe in divine revelation, which is the refutation of revelation.  But they fail to answer Strauss's argument that every rationalist explanation of the genealogy of religious belief begs the question at issue, because it assumes the validity of rationalist explanations, and it fails to prove that miracles, including the miracle of a revelatory experience of God, are impossible.  To prove the impossibility of miracles, one would have to have complete rational knowledge of the whole--of everything in the universe--so that there is no place for a mysterious miracle-working God.  Since we do not have--and never will have--such absolute knowledge of the whole, we cannot prove that the experience of revelation is impossible.  We cannot prove that it is impossible that the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin of human life came as the miraculous work of the Creator.  To say that miracles are impossible because they are contrary to the rational laws of nature assumes what needs to be proven--that it is impossible that the laws of nature are legislated by a divine lawgiver who can miraculously set aside those laws by his omnipotent will, and that this God can reveal Himself miraculously to those who have faith in Him.

The Straussian decisionists include Stanley Rosen (2000) and Laurence Lampert (1996).  They say that Strauss did not truly believe that philosophy is a rationally defensible pursuit (Proposition 3), because while he did say this, this was only his exoteric or public teaching, and his esoteric or secret teaching for his careful readers was that the choice for philosophy is an arbitrary or ungrounded act of will.  For Lampert, this means that Strauss was a Nietzschean who saw the philosophic life as devoted not to the discovery of truth but to the creation of truth by willful invention of the will to power.  And yet, as the Zuckerts indicate, Lampert's Strauss is a "timid Nietzschean," because unlike Nietzsche, Strauss did not openly legislate values.  In public, Strauss claimed that philosophers discover truth rather than create it, and thus Strauss was afraid to "shed his Clark Kent everydayness to step forth as the Superman he could be" (322).

Rosen's interpretation of Strauss on philosophy is even more radical than Lampert's.  For Rosen, when Strauss says that the philosophic life is possible, and even the best possible life, his secret teaching is that this is a "noble lie":

"There is good reason to infer from Strauss's texts that the truly secret teaching is the impossibility of philosophy, an impossibility that must be concealed from the human race for its own salvation.  That is to say, philosophy, understood as the quest for universal knowledge, for the replacement of opinions by knowledge, for knowledge of the whole, is impossible.  We are left with knowledge of ignorance.  No wonder that philosophy, as Strauss conceives it, is incapable of refuting revelation.  One could almost be persuaded to entertain the hypothesis that the main difference between Strauss and Wittgenstein is exoteric.  That is, Strauss believes that philosophy is a noble lie, whereas Wittgenstein regards it as neither noble nor base but harmful" (2000, 564).

Rosen offers this as "speculation" and a "conjecture" that is not explicitly stated in Strauss's texts, although Rosen thinks there is good reason to infer it from Strauss's texts.  But as the Zuckerts rightly observe, Rosen's interpretation of Strauss here is dubious, because it asserts that the most prominent theme in all of Strauss's writing--the goodness of the philosophic life--is only an intentional lie.

The faith-based Straussians don't deny Strauss's affirmation of philosophy, but they do interpret his account of the reason/revelation debate as stressing the limits of philosophy in ways that favor revelation as equal or even superior to philosophy.  The Zuckerts divide them into two groups.  One group includes two "West Coast Straussians"--Harry Jaffa (2012) and Susan Orr (1995).  (In a previous post here, I have written about the Zuckerts' mapping of Straussian geography--East-Coast, West-Coast, and Midwest Straussians.)  The second group consists of two people who are friendly critics of Strauss--Ralph Hancock (2007) and Peter Lawler (2007).

I have a special interest in Jaffa's reading of Strauss on reason and revelation, because his best statement was originally written in response to a letter that I and Rick Sorenson wrote to him in 1987.  Jaffa responded to us by saying that the unique teaching of the Bible is "the idea of the One God who is separate from the universe, of which He is the Creator," and "as both separate and unique, God is unknowable" (2012, 150).  Because He cannot be known by unassisted human reason, God can be known only by faith in revelation, and revelation is marked by miracles--with Creation itself being the primary miracle--that cannot be understood by reason, although reason cannot deny the possibility of miracles.

While Strauss saw this as setting up a sharp dichotomy between reason and faith, Jaffa claimed, there could be a synthesis of the two based on at least five points of common ground.  First, Socratic political philosophy and the Bible can agree that human beings are fundamentally ignorant of the whole, so that even Socrates had only knowledge of his ignorance; and complete knowledge of the whole must be forever unattainable (152, 155).  Second, because of this ignorance, both belief in philosophy and belief in the God of the Bible depend on acts of faith (153).  Third, reason and revelation need not be seen as contradictory if one sees that both reason and revelation are given to human beings by their Creator (153-54).  Fourth, philosophy and the Bible can agree on the authority of the moral order as based on the rule of reason over the passions (158-59).  Fifth, the political establishment of Christianity in fifth-century Rome was inconsistent with both reason and revelation, because the vitality of Western civilization as driven by the tension between reason and revelation required human freedom of thought in the reason/revelation debate to avoid both "theological despotism" (as in the medieval theocratic orders) or "ideological despotism" (as in the modern rule of a Hitler or a Stalin) (159-60).

Here Jaffa seemed to defend a Thomistic synthesis of reason and revelation, which departed from the argument of Jaffa's first book--Thomism and Aristotelianism--which stressed the conflict between Aristotelian rationalism and Thomistic faith.  At other times, oddly enough, in some lectures that were never published, Jaffa suggested that Thomas Aquinas's esoteric teaching was the superiority of the philosophic life over the life of Christian faith.  Thomas West has elaborated the reasoning for this position, and I have written about West's argument here.

Susan Orr's Jerusalem and Athens can be seen as statement of Jaffa's synthesis interpretation of Strauss as suggesting that he is neutral between reason and revelation or perhaps even tilting the scales towards revelation.  By contrast, Hancock and Lawler are Christian believers who think Strauss went too far to the side of reason in claiming that the philosophic life could fulfill the human erotic striving for transcendence without faithful submission to revelation: a life of philosophic inquiry without Christian faith in revelation cannot satisfy the deepest human longings for eternal redemption from the incompleteness of earthy life.

If this is true, then Pascal must have been correct in asserting the misery of man without God, because human beings have a yearning for God that cannot be satisfied by philosophy or any other human pursuit without faith.  But I think the Zuckerts are right in pointing out that Strauss is clear in rejecting this assertion as refuted by the fact that "the philosopher, as exemplified by Socrates in particular, lives on the islands of the blessed" (Strauss 2006, 161).  Pascal might answer by saying that Socrates did not have the Christian experience of faith-based happiness.  But, Strauss says, Plato could answer by saying that Pascal did not have the Socratic experience of philosophic happiness.

This appeal to the facts of the human experience of happiness is the crucial point for those the Zuckerts identify as zetetic or Socratic Straussians, who deny Proposition 1 of the paradoxical syllogism--the claim that philosophy cannot be a rationally defensible pursuit if it cannot refute revelation.  The Zuckerts point out that when Strauss seems to affirm this proposition, he is usually speaking of this as a "present day argument," thus suggesting that this is a modern philosophic position of Spinoza and others, but not the position of the ancient Socratic philosophers (Strauss 1997, 123).

In "Progress or Return?," Strauss wrote:

". . . The philosopher, when confronted with revelation, seems to be compelled to contradict the very idea of philosophy by rejecting without sufficient grounds.  How can we understand that?  The philosophic reply can be stated as follows: the question of utmost urgency, the question which does not permit suspense, is the question of how one should live.  Now this question is settled for Socrates by the fact that he is a philosopher.;  As a philosopher, he knows that we are ignorant of the most important things.  The ignorance, the evident fact of his ignorance, evidently proves that quest for knowledge of the most important things is the most important thing for us.  Philosophy is, then, evidently the right way of life.  This, in addition, according to him, is confirmed by the fact that he finds his happiness in acquiring the highest possible degree of clarity which he can acquire.  He sees no necessity whatever to assent to something which is not evident to him.  And if he is told that his disobedience to revelation might be fatal, he raises the question: what does fatal mean?  In the extreme case, it would be eternal damnation.  Now, the philosophers of the past were absolutely certain that an all-wise God would not punish with eternal damnation, or with anything else, such human beings as are seeking the truth or clarity.  We must consider later on whether this reply is quite sufficient.  At any rate, philosophy is meant--and that is the decisive point--not as a set of propositions, a teaching, or even a system, but as a way of life, a life animated by a peculiar passion, the philosophic desire or eros. . . ." (1997, 122)

So in choosing reason over revelation, the philosopher seems to contradict the very idea of philosophy by rejecting revelation without a rational refutation of revelation.  But the Socratic philosopher's choice of philosophy as the best way of life for him is warranted by three facts--the fact that he is a philosopher, the fact that his ignorance makes it necessary for him to seek knowledge, and the fact that he finds his happiness in a life of philosophic inquiry.  This makes a man like Socrates happy because he is driven by a "peculiar passion, the philosophic desire or eros."  This leaves open the possibility that other human beings who do not have this philosophic desire, or who do not feel it as intensely as Socrates, might have such a deep desire for religious understanding that their happiness comes not from philosophy but from faith.  A Socratic philosopher cannot refute revelation, because he cannot prove the impossibility that some human beings have had an experience of God through revelation in which they find their happiness by satisfying their natural desire for religious understanding.  But even without a philosophic refutation of revelation, the Socratic philosopher's experience of happiness in a life of philosophizing is evident.

This zetetic understanding of philosophy and of the philosopher's choice for reason over revelation seems to be Strauss's understanding.  As I will indicate in the next post, Charles Darwin arrived at a similar understanding of his life devoted to scientific philosophizing, which was part of the intense debate over reason and revelation that arose publicly during his lifetime.


REFERENCES

Hancock, Ralph. 2007. "What Was Political Philosophy? Or: The Straussian Philosopher and His Other, Political Science Reviewer 36.

Jaffa, Harry. 1952. Thomism and Aristotelianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jaffa, Harry. 2012. "Leo Strauss, the Bible, and Political Philosophy," in Crisis of the Strauss Divided. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Lampert, Laurence. 1996. Leo Strauss and Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lawler, Peter. 2007. "Strauss, Straussians, and Faith-Based Students of Strauss," Political Science Reviewer 36.

Meier, Heinrich. 2006. Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Orr, Susan. 1995. Jerusalem and Athens: Reason and Revelation in the Works of Leo Strauss. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Pangle, Thomas. Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Rosen, Stanley. 2000. "Leo Strauss and the Possibility of Philosophy," The Review of Metaphysics 53: 541-564.

Strauss, Leo. 1953. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Strauss, Leo. 1997.  "Progress or Return?" In Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Strauss, Leo. 2006. "Reason and Revelation." In Meier 2006.

Zuckert, Michael, and Catherine Zuckert. 2014. Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Heaven and Hell in the Reason/Revelation Debate: In Defense of Zetetic Scientific Philosophizing

Over the years, I have written a lot about the reason/revelation debate, particularly as manifest in the thought of Leo Strauss and Charles Darwin.   I have made five claims. 

First, I have agreed with Catherine and Michael Zuckert in identifying Strauss as a zetetic philosopher--as someone devoted to Socratic inquiry into the nature of the whole without expecting to achieve full knowledge of the whole, who makes a rational choice for philosophy over revelation but without ever refuting revelation.  

Second, I have identified Charles Darwin as a zetetic scientific philosopher in choosing evolutionary science over Biblical creationism, while recognizing that he could not refute the revelation of God as the First Cause of natural evolutionary history, which would support theistic evolution.  

Third, I have argued that the Darwinian liberalism that emerged during Darwin's lifetime promoted the public debate over reason and revelation that was revived by Strauss, which shows how the liberal social order secures the freedom of thought that allows people to freely choose between the philosophic life, as satisfying the natural desire for intellectual understanding, and the religious life, as satisfying the natural desire for religious transcendence.

Fourth, I have said that the success of Darwinian liberalism over the past two hundred years has made esoteric writing undesirable and unnecessary, so that now the choice between reason and revelation can be an open and public debate, because in a liberal or open society, there is no natural conflict between the philosophic life of the few and the practical life of the many.

Fifth, although the zetetic scientific philosophers cannot refute revelation, they can show that revelation suffers from such obscurity that religious believers cannot agree on what is religious orthodoxy, and consequently, as Locke said, "everyone is orthodox to himself," which supports the need for religious toleration and liberty.

As one illustration of the last point, I have pointed out that neither biblical revelation nor natural revelation provides a clear teaching to resolve the debate among Christians over creation and evolution. 

Another illustration of the obscurity of revelation is in the disagreement among Christians about the afterlife in Heaven and Hell.  In some ways, this is the crucial teaching of Christianity because it's the question of the eternal destiny or final end of human beings in the cosmos:  Will we achieve eternal happiness in Heaven or eternal misery in Hell?

In my next three posts, I will take up the question of Hell.  And I will argue that neither biblical revelation, nor traditional revelation, nor natural revelation provide Christians with a clear teaching about Hell on which they can agree.

The zetetic scientific philosopher will infer from this that either God has not revealed the truth about Hell, or He has, but He has failed to reveal it clearly enough to be understood by all (or at least most) believers.

Then, in subsequent posts, I will take up the question of Heaven, and argue that the revelation of Heaven has been just as obscure as the revelation of Hell.

Darwinian Liberalism Promoted Freedom of Thought in the Reason/Revelation Debate in Victorian England

There is a fundamental contradiction in the Straussian account of the reason/revelation debate and the need for philosophers to be esoteric in their speaking and writing about this debate.  Leo Strauss presented the irreconcilable conflict between reason and revelation as part of the irreconcilable conflict between philosophy and politics, because the philosopher's pursuit of truth about the whole clashes with society's need for unquestioned belief in the divine law that supports the social order; and consequently philosophers must speak and write esoterically to protect themselves from persecution and to protect society from being subverted by philosophic atheism.  At the same time, however, we see that Strauss spoke and wrote openly about the conflict between reason and revelation, apparently thinking he had no need to hide this disturbing teaching from public view by engaging in esoteric speaking and writing.  Moreover, Strauss argued that since every stable society must be a closed society that prohibits public questioning of the authoritative opinions supporting the social order, modern liberalism must fail in its attempt to establish an open society with freedom of thought and speech, so that even the most authoritative opinions can be questioned in public debate.  Oddly, Strauss said this while he himself enjoyed the freedom secured by the American liberal regime that allowed him to speak and write publicly about the conflict between reason and revelation and between philosophy and politics with no fear of persecution.

This is part of the most persistent and prominent theme in Strauss's teaching--his interpretation of Plato's metaphor of human beings living in a cave.  Most human beings are chained to the floor of the cave, and they can only see shadows cast on a cave wall, which symbolizes their mental confinement to common opinions about the world that they never question.  Only a very few human beings are capable of turning around to see the fire behind them and the objects carried before the fire that create the shadows on the wall.  These few can climb out of the cave to see the Sun outside.  This symbolizes the philosophic life of those few--like Socrates--who question everything in their pursuit of knowledge--in their quest to replace mere opinions with truth known by one's own reason.  The shadows on the wall of the cave include authoritative religious beliefs that the multitude of human beings accept without any rational proof.  Only the philosophic few can doubt those religious beliefs in demanding that all beliefs about the world be subject to rational examination, and so only these few can see the conflict between reason and revelation.  These philosophic few cannot speak about this openly in public without creating scandals that would harm themselves and others.  Strauss indicated that the failure of modern liberalism comes from the liberal attempt to establish open societies through popular enlightenment so that everyone can climb out of the cave to see the Sun, or at least question the shadowy opinions on the wall of the cave.

But then Strauss contradicted this teaching in his own words and deeds by publicly explaining the reason/revelation debate and then telling his audience (in "Progress or Return?"):

". . . No one can be both a philosopher and a theologian, or, for that matter, some possibility which transcends the conflict between philosophy and theology, or pretends to be a synthesis of both.  But every one of us can be and ought to be either one or the other, the philosopher open to the challenge of theology, or the theologian open to the challenge of philosophy." (116-117)

How can "every one of us" be free to make this choice between reason and revelation, philosophy and theology?  Doesn't that assume that "we"--those in Strauss's audiences at the University of Chicago and those who have read his published writings--live in modern liberal societies like the United States where it is possible for philosophers like Strauss to speak openly to a popular audience about the reason/revelation debate?  If so, doesn't that mean that modern liberalism has succeeded in creating largely open societies with freedom of thought and speech where "every one of us" can choose between reason and revelation, and where it is no longer necessary for philosophers like Strauss to speak and write esoterically, so that this choice is hidden from public view?  Wouldn't we therefore have to say that for Strauss to escape self-contradiction, he needed to be a "Midwest Straussian" who saw that modernity is good, and the modern liberal social order is the best regime, because it gives human beings the freedom to live the best human lives, including the religious life and the philosophic life?  (I have written about "Midwest Straussianism" here and here, and about esoteric writing here and here.)

The modern liberal promotion of the debate over reason and revelation could be seen as beginning in the 17th century (as in the controversy stirred by Spinoza's writings) or in the 18th century (as in the controversy stirred by Hume's writings).  But this became a fully free and public debate for the first time in the 19th century in Victorian England, where it arose in response to the new evolutionary science of nature and the intellectual culture created by Darwinian liberalism.  It was during this time that the public culture of Great Britain moved from "confessional values" to "liberal values" (see William C. Lubenow, Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain, 1815-1914: Making Words Flesh [Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2010].)

After the publication late in 1859 of Darwin's Origin of Species, Thomas Henry Huxley wrote one of the first reviews of the book in the Westminster Review, where he said that "every philosophical thinker" would hail Darwin's book "as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism."  The Whitworth rifle was considered the most accurate rifle of its time, and so Huxley saw Darwin's book as a powerful weapon in the warfare of liberalism against its opponents, in which the "philosophical thinkers" were on the side of liberalism and scientific naturalism, and the anti-philosophical thinkers were on the side of the theological dogmas of supernatural religion.  Some years later, in a letter to his wife, Huxley described this as part of a centuries-long battle between "free thought and traditional authority" (letter to Nettie Huxley, August 8, 1873).

In this battle, the liberal science of Darwin and Huxley had an alliance with liberal theology, which questioned traditional Christian doctrines and thus subordinated revelation to reason.  This was clear in the controversy over the publication in March of 1860 of a collection of seven essays--entitled Essays and Reviews--arguing that a rational study of nature and history proved that the Bible could not be literally true and could not be a miraculous revelation from God, and therefore it should be read like any other ancient book.  One author claimed that modern natural science showed that miracles were impossible because the causal uniformity of nature does not allow for supernatural interventions violating the order of nature.  The general argument of the book was that traditional Christian doctrines would have to be changed to conform to what was known by natural science.  The religious public was shocked by this, especially because most of the authors were ordained clergy of the Church of England.  Some of the bishops of the Church wanted the essayists to be charged with heresy.

John Lubbock, Huxley, and other scientists close to Darwin signed a public memorial lending scientific support to the essayists.  In persuading scientists to sign this, Lubbock insisted that in "the battle of freedom," "the great Liberal Party should stand by their guns and their friends," supporting the "liberal and thoughtful" clergy (letter to Joseph Hooker, March 2, 1861).

Against this, however, another group of scientists wanted to defend Christian orthodoxy as compatible with natural science, and they signed a "Declaration of the Students of the Natural Sciences," which affirmed that it was impossible for the Word of God as written in the book of nature to contradict the Word of God as written in the Bible.  Therefore, they argued, scientists should "rest in faith" that any apparent conflicts between natural science and the Bible would eventually be reconciled to confirm the truth of Scripture (Brock and MacLeod 1976).  Darwin and his friends saw that this attempt at a synthesis of reason and revelation would actually require the subordination of reason to revelation, just as Strauss would later argue.

Many of the leading defenders of Darwinian liberal science against traditional orthodox theology were informally organized as overlapping networks of friends.  On November 3, 1864, nine of these friends decided to form a dining club--the X Club--that would meet in London for dinner and discussion on the first Thursday of each month from October to June.  After their dinner, they would attend the regular meetings of the Royal Society of London.  Their meetings continued into the mid-1880s.  The nine members were George Busk (1807-1886), Joseph Hooker (1817-1911), Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), John Tyndall (1822-1893), Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), William Spottiswoode (1825-1883), Edward Frankland (1825-1899), Thomas Hirst (1830-1892), and John Lubbock (1834-1913).  Although Darwin was not a member, because he preferred a reclusive life at his house in Down, much of the work of the X Club was devoted to defending Darwin's science and advancing the cause of Darwinian scientific naturalism against traditional theology.  Members of the X Club were responsible for persuading the Royal Society to award Darwin the Copley Medal, the highest honor they bestowed.  They were also responsible for having Darwin buried in Westminster Cathedral.  Even more importantly, they took control of the leading scientific organizations, such as the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and many of the leading journals.  Perhaps the most important lesson from the history of the X Club is the importance of philosophic friendships in forming social groups in liberal societies for the advancement of the philosophic life.  (The best history of the X Club was published last year--Ruth Barton, The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science.)

At the first meeting of the X Club, Hirst took notes and reported: "Besides personal friendship, the bond that united us was devotion to science, pure and free, untrammeled by religious dogmas.  Amongst ourselves there is perfect outspokenness, and no doubt opportunities will arise where concerted action on our part may be of service.  The first meeting was very pleasant and 'jolly'" (Barton, 13).  So they were committed to "science, pure and free."  By "pure science," they meant a science of relentless inquiry into nature for its own sake--for the Socratic pleasure of living a philosophic life--without regard for any practical utility, money making, or technological advancement.  This counters Strauss's claim that modern scientific philosophy denigrated the contemplative life of philosophy in favor of Francis Bacon's project for an effective knowledge directed to the mastery of nature for the relief of the human estate.  Actually, Huxley criticized Bacon for attaching "an undue value to the practical advantages which he foresaw"--in pleading for science as the "gathering of fruit."  Huxley thought this ignored the fact that the great steps in the progress of knowledge "have been made, are made, and will be made, by men who seek knowledge simply because they crave for it" ("The Progress of Science," 47, 56).

In their commitment to a "free science" that is "untrammeled by religious dogma," the X Club members took the side of reason and natural philosophy against revelation and theological doctrine.  As Strauss indicated, philosophers have made this choice for thousands of years, but they have hidden their argument for reason over revelation from public view by conveying it to only a few philosophic readers through esoteric writing.  What was new about the position of the Darwinian liberal scientists is that they defended their choice of reason over revelation openly in public debate before large audiences that included the great multitude of people in their society.

For example, the X Club members were active in the Sunday lecture societies, which was an anti-Sabbatarian movement that sponsored lectures at "Sunday Evenings for the People," as an alternative to attending church on Sundays and hearing sermons, and thus a challenge to Sabbatarian legislation that restricted secular activities on Sundays.  These lectures were attended by people of all classes, including workingmen and many women.

The first Sunday lecture in this series early in 1866 was Huxley's "On the Desirableness of Improving Natural Knowledge."  Thousands of people filled the lecture hall to capacity, and thousands more were turned away.  Newspapers published reports about the lecture.  A week later, the lecture was published as an article in the Fortnightly Review, and later it was published as a chapter in Huxley's Essays.  This was the common way to reach a large audience--lecturing and then publishing the lecture as an article in a journal and finally in a book.  Here we see one of the crucial elements of the Liberal Enlightenment: rising literacy and printing technology allowed for the general spread of knowledge through reading.  In Great Britain in 1600, only about 20% of the people were literate; by 1860, over 80% were literate.  And with improvements in printing techniques, newspapers, journals, and books were cheap enough to be purchased even by common working people.  (See James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000].)

In his lecture, Huxley traced the modern movement for improving knowledge of nature to the founding of the "Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge," which began in 1660 with a royal charter from Charles II, and which became the oldest national scientific institution in the world.  And yet, Huxley observed, the true origin of the pursuit of natural knowledge is in the ancient history of humanity, at that point at which human reason first discovered nature:

"I cannot but think that the foundations of all natural knowledge were laid when the reason of man first came face to face with the facts of Nature; when the savage first learned that the fingers of one hand are fewer than those of both; that it is shorter to cross a stream than to head it; that a stone stops where it is unless it be moved, and that it drops from the hand which lets it go; that light and heat come and go with the sun; that sticks burn away in a fire; that plants and animals grow and die; that if he struck his fellow savage a blow he would make him angry, and perhaps get a blow in return, while if he offered him a fruit he would please him, and perhaps receive a fish in exchange.  When men had acquired this much knowledge, the outlines, rude though they were, of mathematics, of physics, of chemistry, of biology, of moral, economical, and political science, were sketched.  Nor did the germ of religion fail when science began to bud. . . . the little light of awakened human intelligence shines so mere a spark amidst the abyss of the unknown and unknowable seems so insufficient to do more than illuminate the imperfections that cannot be remedied, the aspirations that cannot be realized, of man's own nature.  But in this sadness, this consciousness of the limitation of man, this sense of an open secret which he cannot penetrate, lies the essence of all religion; and the attempt to embody it in the forms furnished by the intellect is the origin of the higher theologies" (32-33).

Strauss thought that nature was discovered about 2,600 years ago by some Greek philosopher.  But Huxley thought that the philosophic concept of nature had already been implicit inchoately in the mental experience of primitive human beings who saw regular patterns in the physical and living world around them.  The natural knowledge gained by philosophic science is the systematic and rigorous working out of human common sense experience of the natural world.

This natural knowledge includes the moral and political knowledge of human nature that Strauss called natural right.  Primitive human beings discovered that there was a natural punishment for attacking or threatening other human beings, because they had a natural propensity to punish those who injured them: "if he struck his fellow savage a blow he would make him angry, and perhaps get a blow in return."  This is what John Locke called "the executive power of the law of nature"--the natural inclination of every individual to punish those who harm him.  Primitive human beings also discovered the natural gains from cooperative trade: "if he offered him a fruit, he would please him, and perhaps receive a fish in exchange."  Here is the ground for Darwinian natural right in the natural punishment of injustice and the natural benefits of cooperative exchange.

As Strauss said, the philosopher seeks a natural knowledge of the whole, but that can never be fully attained because human knowledge will always be limited, and consequently the whole will always be mysterious, which leaves an opening for the possibility of revelation from a mysterious God.  Huxley agreed: the sense of "the abyss of the unknown and unknowable" is "the essence of all religion."  He also claimed that a scientific theology could be based on "the noblest and most human of man's emotions, . . . worship . . . at the altar of the Unknown" (38).  But notice that this "Unknown" has none of the features of the personal, providential, and miracle-working God of the Bible.

Despite the fact that natural knowledge is always incomplete--and thus a Socratic knowledge of ignorance--those human beings who are most moved by the natural desire for intellectual understanding will devote their lives to improving their natural knowledge.  To live such a philosophic life, Huxley observed in his lecture, philosophers must overcome two obstacles.

The first obstacle is the moral conviction common among human beings that authority must be obeyed--"that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to a readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism a sin; that when good authority has pronounced what is to be believed, and faith accepted it, reason has no further duty."  Against this, Huxley argued: "The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority as such.  For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. . . . The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification" (40-41).  Strauss expressed this same thought by saying that philosophy rejects the authority of the ancestral and recognizes that "nature is the authority" (NRH, 92).

The second obstacle to improving natural knowledge is the natural tendency of human beings to anthropomorphic projection of their own mental experience onto the universe, so that they imagine that the whole world is ruled by a divine Mind or an Intelligent Designer that demands love and obedience.  This is the idea developed by Darwin and some recent evolutionary psychologists for explaining religious belief through an evolved "hyperactive agency-detection device," which has been the subject for some posts here, here, and here.

In his lecture, Huxley explained:

"But, with respect to all the less familiar occurrences which present themselves, uncultured man, no doubt, has always taken himself as the standard of comparison, as the centre and measure of the world; nor could we well avoid doing so.  And finding that his apparently uncaused will has a powerful effect in giving rise to many occurrences, he naturally enough ascribed other and greater events to other and greater volitions, and came to look upon the world and all that therein is, as the product of the volitions of persons like himself, but stronger, and capable of being appeased or angered, as he himself might be soothed or irritated" (34).

This is an obstacle to improving natural knowledge because believing that the universe is governed by a divine Mind discourages us from rationally looking for the natural causes of cosmic order.  As natural philosophy increases our knowledge of those natural causes, Huxley suggested, we see that this is a better explanation of cosmic order than an anthropomorphic projection of mind onto the whole.

Strauss argued that the anthropomorphic analogy for explaining cosmic order as ruled by Mind is fallacious because it fails to distinguish that which is man-made and that which is not.  We have natural experience with how human beings make or design things with their minds, but we have no natural experience with how divine minds make or design things.  So there's a fallacy of equivocation in reasoning from human intelligent design to divine intelligent design.

But, still, Strauss argued, reason cannot demonstratively refute revelation, because reason cannot prove that it is impossible for any human being to have an experience of revelation from God.  Any supposed proof would have to beg the question at issue by assuming that nature is uniform, that there are no supernatural interventions in nature, and so miracles are impossible.

This irreconcilable debate over reason and revelation was carried on by the Darwinian liberals and their theological opponents in a remarkable series of discussions in The Metaphysical Society, which will be the topic for my next post.


REFERENCES

Barton, Ruth. 2018. The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Brock, W. H., and R. M. MacLeod.  1976. "The Scientists' Declaration: Reflections on Science and Belief in the Wake of Essays and Reviews, 1864-65." The British Journal for the History of Science 9: 39-66.

Huxley, Thomas Henry. 1896. Method and Results: Essays. New York: D. Appleton.

Strauss, Leo.  1997. "Progress or Return?" In Kenneth H. Green, ed., Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity. Albany: SUNY Press.

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.

Strauss, Darwin, and the Reason-Revelation Debate

Darwinian science completes the Greek philosophic substitution of "natural order" or "natural morality" for "divine law" by providing a natural explanation for how the order of the cosmos could arise by natural evolution, within which human morality could arise as an expression of evolved human nature. In this way, Darwinian science took the side of reason against revelation, but without being able to refute the possibility of revelation. Thus does Darwinian science fit into the reason-revelation debate as understood by Leo Strauss.

In his lecture in 1948 on "Reason and Revelation," Strauss indicated that the irreconcilable conflict between revelation and philosophy or science is manifest in the conflict between the Biblical story of Creation and Darwinian evolutionary science.

In "Progress or Return?" (1952)--reprinted in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism--Strauss puts this conflict in the context of "the basic question of how to find one's bearings in the cosmos." He explains:

"The Greek answer fundamentally is this: we have to discover the first things on the basis of inquiry. We can note two implications of what inquiry means here. In the first place, inquiry implies seeing with one's own eyes as distinguished from hearsay; it means observing for oneself. Secondly, 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 nonmanmade things is possible except if it is first established by demonstration that the visible universe has been made by thinking beings. This implication, I think, is decisive: it was on the basis of the principles of Greek philosophy that what later became known as demonstrations of the existence of God or gods came into being. This is absolutely necessary, and that is true not only in Aristotle, but in Plato as well, as you see, for example, from the tenth book of the Laws. An ascent from sense perception and reasoning on sense data, an ascent indeed guided, according to Plato and Aristotle, by certain notions, leads upwards; and everything depends on the solidity of the ascending process, on the demonstration. The quest for the beginning, for the first things, becomes now the philosophic or scientific analysis of the cosmos; the place of the divine law, in the traditional sense of the term, where it is a code traced to a personal God, is replaced by a natural order, which may even be called, as it was later to be called, a natural law--or at any rate, to use a wider term, a natural morality. So the divine law, in the real and strict sense of the term, is only the starting point, the absolutely essential starting point, for Greek philosophy, but it is abandoned in the process. And if it is accepted by Greek philosophy, it is accepted only politically, meaning for the education of the many, and not as something which stands independently" (255-56).  (Also in K. H. Green's edited anthology, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, pp. 113-14.)

As Strauss indicates here, the proofs for the existence of God by inferring invisible divine causes from visible natural effects were first developed by Plato and Aristotle--particularly, in Book 10 of the Laws, where Plato sketched the reasoning for intelligent design theory or natural theology, the same fundamental reasoning later developed in medieval natural theology and in the contemporary intelligent design theory of Bill Dembski and Michael Behe. Paul first introduced this into Christianity in his Letter to the Romans (1:20), when he declared (under the influence of Greek philosophy): "The invisible things of Him are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made."

Strauss also indicates, however, the essential fallacy in such reasoning--"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 nonmanmade things is possible except if it is first established by demonstration that the visible universe has been made by thinking beings." Indeed, this anthropomorphic assumption that our experience of human mental agency can be projected onto the cosmos runs through Plato's reasoning in the Laws and the longing of Plato's Socrates for a cosmos ruled by Nous. Dembski shows this same anthropomorphic assumption when he says: "The point of the intelligent design program is to extend design from the realm of human artifacts to the natural sciences." This rhetorical strategy hides the fact that while detecting the design of human artifacts is a matter of common observation and logic, detecting the design of divine artifacts is not, because while the working of human intelligent design is known by natural experience, the working of divine intelligent design is not.

The rational ascent to divine law is the starting point for Greek philosophy, but a starting point that is abandoned in the move from divine law to natural order or natural law. This requires the fulfillment of Greek natural philosophy, which sought to explain the cosmic whole as a product of nature and chance, within which human art could arise through custom and reason(Laws, 888e-89e).

But Greek natural philosophy faced three seemingly insurmountable problems. The first problem was that despite the weaknesses in the intelligent design argument, there did not seem to be any plausible alternative for explaining the apparent design in the natural world. If the irreducible complexity in the universe is not a product of divine design, then how else can we explain it?

The second problem was that a purely naturalistic explanation of the cosmos could not easily explain human moral order without falling into a radical relativism or nihilism. If the cosmos is not the product of a God who is also a moral lawgiver, does this mean that there is no cosmic support for human morality, which is a purely artificial and therefore arbitrary product of human will?

The third problem is that it's unclear whether even the most successful natural philosophy can refute the claims of revelation. If natural philosophy must assume that miracles are impossible--that there are no breaks in the causal regularities of nature--doesn't this beg the question at issue? How does natural philosophy prove the impossibility of miracles, including the impossibility of miraculous revelation in which some human beings can have a direct experience of God? (Actually, this third problem did not emerge clearly until Greek philosophy confronted the scriptural religions of the Bible and the Koran in the Middle Ages.)

Darwinian science supports the fulfillment of natural philosophy by solving--at least in principle--the first two problems. But it leaves the third problem unresolved.

Darwinian science solves the first problem by showing how natural order can arise through an evolutionary process of spontaneous order emerging from random variation and selective retention, by which irreducibly complex orders can arise without intentional design.

Darwinian science solves the second problem by showing how moral order can arise through the natural evolution of a human moral sense shaped by social instincts, social learning, language, and deliberate judgment. The human good is not a cosmic good, but it is a natural good in so far as it conforms to human nature.

Darwinian science does not solve the third problem--the reason-revelation debate--because it cannot refute the possibility of miracles--the possibility of miracles in natural history that are not detectable by natural science or the possibility that natural evolution itself is a miracle as arising from laws of nature originally created by nature's God or the possibility that some human beings can directly experience a revelation of God's presence.

Darwinian science can explain the evolutionary psychology of religious belief as prompted by the anthropomorphic fallacy, because it can explain this as an extension of our evolved social disposition for "mind reading" and detecting agency. As cognitive scientists like Jesse Bering and Justin Barrett have shown, we can explain the natural desire for religious understanding as the work of a "hyperactive agency detection device," which was first suggested by Darwin in his evolutionary theory of religion in The Descent of Man.

And yet even this does not resolve the reason-revelation debate, because even if we accept this evolutionary explanation of religious belief, we are free to see religion as either an adaptive illusion (as Bering does) or as an adaptive truth (as Barrett does).

In any case, Darwin made it clear--especially in his Autobiography--that in the choice between the life of reason and the life of revelation, he had deliberately chosen the life of reason: "As for myself, I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my life to science."

Related posts can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Conservatives (Still) Need Charles Darwin. Responding to the Kirk Center's Conference on Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton

Conservatives need Charles Darwin.

That was the first sentence of my article in the November 2000 issue of First Things.  I argued that conservatives need Darwin because a Darwinian science of human nature supports conservatives in their realist view of human imperfectability and their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in nature, custom, and prudence.  In his response to my article in the same issue of the journal, Michael Behe (a biologist known for his advocacy of "intelligent design theory" as an alternative to Darwinian science) complained: "I'm sorry to be blunt, but the notion that Darwinism supports conservatism is absurd."

I elaborated my argument in my book Darwinian Conservatism (2005), and in a second edition of that book with eight critical responses and my replies (2009).  In the fall 2010 issue of The Intercollegiate Review, I wrote about "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism."  I have defended that article against three critics in a post (here).

Over this weekend, I have been thinking about this debate as I pondered the presentations at a conference in Grand Rapids sponsored by the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal: "Prospects for Anglo-American Conservatism in the Tradition of Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton."  Although neither Kirk nor Scruton ever moved toward anything like Darwinian conservatism, I see nothing in their defense of traditionalist conservatism that would refute my argument for Darwinian conservatism.  Previously, I have written about some of my points of agreement and disagreement with Kirk and Scruton.  Here I will respond to some of the presentations at the conference.

THE METAPHYSICAL CONSERVATISM OF CHRISTIAN PLATONISM

James Matthew Wilson (University of St. Thomas, Houston) spoke about "The Conservative Defense of Christian Platonism" in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution and in the writings of Roger Scruton.  He saw both Burke and Scruton as trying to preserve the Christian-Platonic tradition of Christendom that had dominated Western Civilization until it was overturned by the French Revolution.  While praising both of them for what they tried to do, Wilson thought their undertakings were weakened by their drawing on modern thought that subverted Christian-Platonist thought.  Burke appealed to the sentimentalism of the Scottish Enlightenment when he invoked those "natural feelings" and "moral sentiments" that show "the natural sense of right and wrong" and "the moral constitution of the heart" as the foundation of moral experience.  Scruton appealed to Immanuel Kant's Idealism as teaching that while the Ideas of Reason, God, Freedom, and Immortality cannot be proven true by pure reason, we must act "as if" they were true as a necessity of practical reason: these are conscious fictions of the mind.

I believe that Wilson was drawing material from his book The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (2017).  But since I have not read that book, I might not have rightly understood his presentation.

As I have argued in some previous posts, Plato's moral cosmology--particularly in the Republic, the Timaeus, the Parmenides, and The Laws--is so implausible as to be ridiculous, and it's not even clear that Plato or Plato's Socrates meant us to take this seriously.  I have suggested that while Plato might have thought that a teleological cosmology of divinely intelligent design could be a salutary belief for many people, it could not be a rational account of the cosmos for natural philosophers.  Aristotle suggested this in observing that such cosmic myths were little more than traditional folk tales (On the Heavens, 270b1-25, 283b26-284b5, 291b24-292a20, 298b6-299a2; The Movement of Animals, 699b12-31; Metaphysics, 1050b20-25, 1074b1-14).  But perhaps Wilson in his book has answered my objections.

Although much of Burke's Reflections seems to defend a Christian Platonic metaphysics, Wilson observed, this is in tension with Burke's empiricist ethics of moral sentiments that shows the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment.  As I indicated in my Intercollegiate Review article, I agree with this reading of Burke's Reflections, because I see there a tension between the metaphysical conservatism of Burke's moral cosmology of eternal right and wrong and the evolutionary conservatism of his moral anthropology of the moral sentiments.

But unlike Wilson, I don't see Burke's sentimentalism as weakening his argument for Christian Platonism.  In fact, Burke wrote his Reflections as a refutation of Reverend Richard Price's Christian Platonism.  Price contended that moral knowledge was a purely rational activity of the mind in grasping the eternal and immutable metaphysical truths of God's mind, and that the French Revolution was the historical fulfillment of those eternal truths.  Against Price's metaphysical morality, Burke rightly appealed to the natural moral sentiments as the empirical foundation of moral experience.  Later, Darwin adopted this moral sentimentalism as part of his evolutionary account of morality, which was then elaborated by evolutionary psychologists like Edward Westermarck and Darwinian conservatives like James Q. Wilson.

By contrast, James Matthew Wilson scorned moral sentimentalism as mere emotionalism, in which morality is reduced to emotive expressions without any rational apprehension of the human good.  But this ignores the fact that the moral sentimentalism of the Scottish Enlightenment--particularly in the work of Hume and Smith--was a reflective sentimentalism.   As I have indicated, the Scottish sentimentalists did not argue for enslaving reason to emotion, because they actually argued for moral autonomy as the activity of the whole human mind (reason and emotion), in which the mind can reflect rationally on itself and thus refine its emotional responses to the world by judging those responses as reasonable or unreasonable.  We can reflect on whether our moral sentiments are contradictory or consistent, whether they rest on true or false judgments about the world, and whether they promote or impede our happiness. 

SCRUTON'S CONSERVATISM OF RELIGIOUS ATHEISM

Wilson also criticized Scruton for embracing Kant's Idealism because this modern Idealism contradicts the premodern Idealism of Christian Platonism.  While Kant's ideas are fictional creations of the human mind that do not correspond to any objective reality in the world, Plato's ideas are meant to be intellectual perceptions of what exists in objective reality independently of the human mind.  

As I said earlier, I am not persuaded that Plato believed his Eternal Ideas to be anything more than a noble lie.  After all, in Plato's Parmenides, Plato has Parmenides refute Socrates' theory of the Forms, and Socrates cannot defend his theory against the criticisms; and in fact, nowhere in the Platonic dialogues does anyone satisfactorily reply to the criticisms.

I do agree with Wilson, however, that Scruton does not really affirm the objective truth of Christian Platonist metaphysics, because for Scruton this religious metaphysics is only a fictional creation of the human mind to satisfy a human longing for the divine.  As I have said previously, Scruton makes this clear in his praise for the atheistic religiosity of Richard Wagner's operatic art in the Ring cycle.  Scruton thinks that Wagner saw the "bleak truth" that "we are here on earth without an explanation and that if there is meaning, we ourselves must supply it." "The core religious phenomenon, Wagner believed, is not the idea of God, but the sense of the sacred. . . . religion contains deep truths about the human psyche; but these truths become conscious only in art, which captures them in symbols.  Religion conceals its legacy of truth within a doctrine.  Art reveals that truth through symbols."  In other words, "Wagner sees his art as expressing and completing our religious emotions.  Art shows the believable moral realities behind the unbelievable metaphysics."  Religion is an "elaborate fiction," because the gods exist only in human imagination, but in Wagner's imaginative art, the gods symbolize truthfully the spiritual needs of our human psychology.  Our deepest spiritual need is redemption from a world that has no meaning.  And Scruton believes that Wagner's Ring cycle satisfies our human longing for redemption. 

The incoherent self-deception of such atheistic religiosity is ultimately self-defeating.  How can a fake religiosity satisfy our religious longings when we know it's fake?

Darwinian conservatism offers a better account of the religious longings of the human animal.  As I have argued previously, Darwin was a zetetic philosophic scientist who recognized that the natural desire for religious transcendence was part of evolved human nature; and while Darwin himself took the side of reason in the reason/revelation debate, he knew that reason could not refute revelation.  He knew that the "mystery of the origin of all things is insoluble by us."  In the search for ultimate explanation, the philosophic scientist must assume that nature is the uncaused cause of everything; and yet he cannot refute the claim of the religious believer that God is the uncaused cause of nature.  Darwin conceded this in accepting the principle of dual causality, which recognizes natural evolution as the "secondary cause" of everything, while admitting that behind or above nature there might be a Divine First Cause.  Thus, Darwin saw that he had to remain open to the possibility of theistic evolution:  God does not have to miraculously intervene in nature to specially create every species, because God can choose to act through natural evolution to carry out his creative plan.

This supports a conservative view of religion.  The Darwinian scientist respects religious belief in revelation as satisfying the evolved natural desire for religious transcendence.  But the Darwinian scientist must also insist that since neither side in the reason/revelation debate can refute the other, and since the disagreement among believers in their interpretations of revelation make it impossible to identify the one true religion, the best regime must secure the freedom of thought and speech that promotes the reason/revelation debate and respects religious pluralism.

To be continued . . .