Steve Fuller

My apologies for not posting more here recently. I now have a blog on my university’s website dedicated to the future of the university, where I have done a bit of posting.  But mostly I have been trying to finish a new book on science as an ‘art of living’ for new series by the UK philosophy publisher, Acumen.  ID followers should find it of interest. I have been also travelling and lecturing. On my audio lecture page, scroll to 28 at the bottom, and you’ll find a talk and the Q&A given at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, sponsored by Genesis Agendum on my recent book Dissent over Descent. You’ll hear from the Q&A that I was by no Read More ›

 On 31 March, I gave one of the keynote addresses at the annual meeting of the British Sociological Association’s Religion Study Group in Durham. This meant that I could not watch the first airing of ‘Did Darwin Kill God?’ on BBC2.  I recommend that you watch this show over the next couple of days, while it’s still available on-line at the BBC website. It may be the most sophisticated treatment of this general topic on television, though as you’ll see from my comments below I found it profoundly unsatisfying. The person who scripted and presents the programme is Conor Cunningham, an academic theologian, about whom more below. Even those who disagree with his take on things – as I do – should welcome what he has done here. The challenge is to do better. Read More ›

I am pleased to say that an audio version (MP3) of my play ‘Lincoln and Darwin — Live for One Night Only!’ is now on-line at ‘The Sci-Phi Show’, courtesy of Jason Rennie, the Sydneyside philosophical broadcaster. Here it is, just in time for Lincoln and Darwin’s 200th birthday (tomorrow). The play runs to 85 minutes and is premised on Lincoln and Darwin coming on one of today’s TV chat shows to talk about has happened since they died.  Each then is given the option of staying in 2009 or returning to the 19th century. One decides to stay and the other goes.  The play was originally staged in Liverpool in September 2008 as part of the annual meeting of the British Read More ›

Andrew Sibley has drawn attention to the recent Theos survey of the UK public’s beliefs in evolution, creationism and intelligent design. Wearing my sociologist’s hat, one overriding conclusion comes through in this survey: It was very poorly designed. Theos should get its money back from the social researchers they hired. Theos wants to give the impression that the public holds confused views about the various positions relating to the origins of life. In fact, Theos is the one confused. Have a look at how the various positions were described and what people thought of them. I’ve collapsed the statistics because I want to focus on the exact wording: Young Earth Creationism is the idea that God created the world sometime Read More ›

Some of you may find interesting a couple of articles in the latest issue of Spontaneous Generations, a peer-reviewed journal founded and run by graduate students at the Institute for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Toronto.   One article documents the activities of a philosopher of science in the American South who teaches the next generation of teachers who will have to deal with evolution/creation/ID in the classroom. It’s quite a thoughtful piece and well worth a read.   The other article is a piece I was asked to write in response but which turned out to be a stand-alone piece that attempts to justify my participation in these matters (since this is a question that arises Read More ›

This week marks the publication of the Darwin book that has so far received the most advance publicity in the UK, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore (Allen Lane). Desmond and Moore, both together and separately, have written some of the best histories of the Victorian life sciences, including a best-selling biography of Darwin. You can get a sense of the book from this excerpt currently featured in Prospect Magazine. 

Desmond and Moore always wade very deep in the archives but also with an eye to what might attract today’s reader about their subject. Not surprisingly, then, this is a book that documents the link between Darwin’s more general doctrine of common descent and his belief that all humans descend from a common ancestor and hence are members of the same species. A lot of stress is placed on Darwin’s revulsion at the brutality of slavery that he saw while voyaging on the Beagle, and the fact that it was common among the natural historians of his day to believe in several species of ‘man’. The reader can easily get the impression that this was some kind of triumph of evidence over prejudice. However, this impression would be very misleading. Read More ›

A Book Review of John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York, Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present (Monthly Review Press, 2008).

There are many interesting features of this book, authored by academic Marxists (or at least people who used to be Marxists) and published by a historically Marxist press. The argument is presented as a critical intellectual history, which, while clearly written from a committed ‘materialist’ standpoint, is quite nuanced. But from the standpoint of ID defenders, the book’s most interesting feature is that the authors gladly embrace ID’s demonised image of its opponents. So those who remain sceptical of ID rhetoric that connects Epicurus, Darwin, Marx and Freud as part of a vast ‘materialist’ conspiracy should be silenced by what transpires in these pages: Yes, such scary two-dimensional materialists do really seem to exist – and they write books like this.

Read More ›

I have posted on my website an audio recording of the talk I gave this past Tuesday at the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture, kicking off their Darwin Year series. My talk was entitled ‘Darwin’s Original Sin: The Rejection of Theology’s Claims to Knowledge‘. If you scroll down to the bottom of this page you should find it. It’s only about 45 minutes long, and it captures many of the points that I have been raising more discursively since I started blogging here. I should say that the first 4 minutes or so is introductory stuff, including a reference to Obama’s inauguration.

To test the real difference that theodicy makes to ID, Timaeus posed a thought experiment (see post 33) involving a team of scientists of various religious persuasions who conclude that the malarial cell is a designed entity. However, the scientists’ ability to infer why a deity would have created such a malignant cell is impeded by their religious differences, which have no natural resolution. Moreover, Timaeus wonders, even if after much discussion these differences were somehow resolved into a common theodicy, to what extent would that theodicy have been based on their scientific work or, for that matter, the theodicy would be capable of justifying that work. The implied conclusion of this thought experiment is that theodicy is not a necessary feature of ID’s conceptual framework but a controversial add-on.

Read More ›

In this instalment, I begin to address both Andrew Sibley’s and Timaeus’ (see post 33) questions concerning my interest in reviving a full-blooded (i.e. early modern) sense of theodicy, especially as part of the ID agenda. I will need another post to complete this task because more assumptions about theodicy in its original robust form need to be put on the table. My apologies if this does not seem blog-friendly but hopefully we’ll able to continue discussing in this medium issues that show the essential unity of concern among theologians, philosophers and scientists.

  Read More ›

This post originally began as a response to Andrew Sibley but the issues here may resonate with others wanting to reconcile science and religion, coming at it mainly from the religious side. My concern here, as an interested bystander, is that apologetics tends to be much too apologetic. Christianity, in particular, has a much stronger hand to play with regard to the support of science.

Read More ›

I have been reflecting on the critical responses to my posts, which I appreciate. They mostly centre on the very need for ID to include theodicy as part of its intellectual orientation.

The intuitive basis for theodicy is pretty harmless: The presence of design implies a designing intelligence. Moreover, in order to make sense of the exact nature of the design, you need to make hypotheses about the designing intelligence. These hypotheses need to be tested and may or may not be confirmed in the course of further inquiry. Historians and archaeologists reason this way all the time. However, the theodicist applies the argument to nature itself.

At that point, theodicy binds science and theology together inextricably — with potentially explosive consequences. After all, if you take theodicy seriously, you may find yourself saying, once you learn more about the character of nature’s design, that science disconfirms certain accounts of God – but not others. Scientific and religious beliefs rise and fall together because, in the end, they are all about the same reality.

Read More ›

 I will be opening the 2009 series of lectures on ‘Darwin Reconsidered’ at the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture on Tuesday, 20th January, at 5 pm. My topic is ‘Darwin’s Original Sin: The Rejection of Theology’s Claims to Knowledge’. You can find out more about the series here. The talk will deal with the issues of theodicy that I have been raising in this blog.  

In this instalment, I try to make the connection between theodicy and ID tighter, not only to provide some deeper intellectual grounding but also to make quite plain why even religious people have not been rushing to support ID.

Read More ›

Some of you may know that last year I staged a play at the annual British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, which brought back Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin – who were both born on 12th February 1809 — to reflect on what has taken place since their time. Denyse O’Leary kindly mentioned the play here. It takes the form of a talk show, with all the show biz that entails. At the end Lincoln and Darwin were asked whether they wished to stay in the present or return to the 19th century. One stays and the other goes – but which does which?   The play’s running time is 80 minutes and it covers a host of issues common Read More ›

In response to an earlier post of mine, DaveScot kindly pointed out this website’s definition of ID. The breadth of the definition invites scepticism: ID is defined as the science of design detection — how to recognize patterns arranged by an intelligent cause for a purpose. But is there really some single concept of ‘intelligence’ that informs designs that are generated by biological, human, and possibly even mechanical means? Why would anyone think such a thing in the first place? Yet, it is precisely this prospect that makes ID intellectually challenging – for both supporters and opponents.

It’s interesting that not everything is claimed to be intelligently designed. This keeps the phrase ‘intelligent design’ from simply collapsing into ‘design’ by implying a distinction between the intelligence and that on which it acts to produce design. So, then, what exactly is this ‘intelligence’ that stands apart from matter? Well, the most obvious answer historically is a deity who exists in at least a semi-transcendent state. But how can you get any scientific mileage from that?

Enter theodicy, which literally means (in Greek) ‘divine justice’. It is now a field much reduced from its late 17^th century heyday. Theodicy exists today as a boutique topic in philosophy and theology, where it’s limited to asking how God could allow so much evil and suffering in the world. But originally the question was expressed much more broadly to encompass issues that are nowadays more naturally taken up by economics, engineering and systems science – and the areas of biology influenced by them: How does the deity optimise, given what it’s trying to achieve (i.e. ideas) and what it’s got to work with (i.e. matter)? This broader version moves into ID territory, a point that has not escaped the notice of theologians who nowadays talk about theodicy.

Read More ›