Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards?: Philosophical Essays on Darwin's Theory (Prometheus Prize) by Sober Elliott

Author:Sober, Elliott [Sober, Elliott]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2011-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

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. (Darwin 1887, vol. 2, 202–203)

It is unclear why Darwin did not delete “by the Creator” from the other passage.

How can the picture of Darwin as a methodological naturalist be consistent with these theological remarks? Maybe the answer is that theology was mere window dressing in the Origin, something that occurs only at the start by way of a perfunctory nod to philosophers and at the end in a paragraph that is self-consciously poetic. One reason to resist this suggestion is that theology enters the Origin as part of Darwin's argument, not merely as part of his rhetoric. Darwin is at pains to show that his own theory is superior to the theory of special creation, and some of his criticisms of this antinaturalistic theory involve theological assumptions, as I'll now explain.

The substance of Darwin's quotation from Whewell is something that Darwin returns to at the end of the Origin, where he says:

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