Science and Religion by Thomas Dixon & Adam Shapiro

Author:Thomas Dixon & Adam Shapiro [Dixon, Thomas & Shapiro, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192566775
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2022-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

Evolution and theology

Wilberforce’s review of The Origin of Species identified the theological issues which would play out repeatedly among Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others as they considered the implications of evolution for their religious beliefs in the 19th century and afterwards. Some of these were not new. Discoveries in astronomy and geology had already given theologians plenty of opportunity to discuss the relative authority of science and scripture in determining natural knowledge. Darwin’s view of nature drew particular attention to suffering, violence, and death. But people hardly needed Darwin to tell them that these were features of the natural world in general and of human life in particular. Again, theologians were already aware of the problem of evil, and had various responses to it. One common response to human evil was to explain that God must allow his creatures free will, which could be turned to either good or evil ends. Bishop Wilberforce’s response to Darwin’s remarks on imperfections in nature, and on the apparent cruelty of such creatures as the ichneumon wasp, was to refer to the Christian idea of the Fall. On this view, when Adam and Eve, the crowns and rulers of creation, were expelled from the Garden of Eden for their disobedience, it was not just they and their human descendants who fell from grace into a disordered state; it was the whole of nature. As Wilberforce put it, the ‘strange forms of imperfection and suffering amongst the works of God’ were the ongoing expression of ‘the strong shudder which ran through all this world when its head and ruler fell’.

What was theologically new and troubling was the destruction of the boundary securely separating humanity from the ‘brute creation’ (and, to a lesser but significant extent, the destruction of the boundaries separating kinds of plants and animals from each other). The publication of Darwin’s theories about human evolution in The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) provided further material for discussions about the relationship between humanity and the other animals. In these works Darwin speculated, as he had not dared to in 1859, on how even the most elevated of human faculties—the emotions, the moral sense, and religious feelings—might have evolved by natural means.

By the end of the 19th century, there was no serious scientific opposition to the basic evolutionary tenets of descent with modification and the common ancestry of all forms of life. There was considerable dispute about the explanatory sufficiency of the mechanism identified by Darwin and Wallace as the main driving force of evolution, namely natural selection acting on random variations. Lamarckian mechanisms of the inheritance of acquired characteristics were still discussed, and the process of heredity was a matter of dispute. From 1900 onwards, there were debates about whether Gregor Mendel’s work on all-or-nothing units of inheritance that came to be known as ‘genes’ was compatible with a Darwinian model of gradual change over generations. That debate was not resolved until the 1930s and 1940s with the modern evolutionary synthesis of neo-Darwinism.

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