Culture

He sees that as a framework for much of the change around us: Nineteenth-century Darwinism was much more than a revolutionary scientific theory. It was hardly a scientific theory in any meaningful sense. Natural selection, as atheist philosopher Jerry Fodor has pointed out, isn’t a meaningful level of scientific explanation. It’s barely more than a tautology. Natural selection is an “empty” theory — “survivors survive” has no genuine explanatory power. As ID pioneer Phillip Johnson observed, Darwinism was really a new philosophical theory. It was the view that there is no teleology — no purpose — inherent to nature. Purpose in biology, Darwin insisted, is an illusion. Differential survival alone can explain “purpose” in nature. Darwin proposed that all of Read More ›