As part of a new series, Neil Thomas, author of Taking Leave of Darwin (2021), offers a look at the culture wars inDarwin’s sday.It wasn’t all lace doilies and tea and crumpets:
In order to explain Charles Darwin’s curious rehabilitation, it is necessary to be clear about the fact that we are not dealing with a scientific adjudication here. The scientists had already pronounced on the Origin in resoundingly negative reviews — which inevitably leads to the conclusion that something else must have been going on here.
In this regard, a useful memoir has been left us by the acclaimed female author who by both birth and marriage was plugged into the 19th-century zeitgeist like few others, namely Mrs. Humphry Ward (born into intellectual aristocracy as Mary Augusta Arnold), the author of a particularly moving novel about loss of faith, Robert Elsmere (1888). In looking back at her experiences of Oxford in the 1860s and 70s, Ward noted that “the men of science entered but little into the struggle of ideas that was going on […] It was in literature, history and theology that evolutionary conceptions were most visibly and dramatically at work.”1 This judgment inevitably points us away from science proper in the direction of sundry Victorian debates and culture wars in our search of answers to the question of why Darwinism was able to triumph (and still is able to triumph) against the ascertainable scientific facts.
Neil Thomas, “Darwin and the Victorian Culture Wars” at Evolution News and Science Today (March 2, 2022)
Thomas goes on to talk about the main circumstances that made Darwinism a suitable origin story for a new era — none of which were particularly scientific:
As Alec Ryrie aptly pointed out in his recent “emotional” history of Doubt, “intellectuals and philosophers may think they make the weather, but they are more often driven by it,”3 and the more decisive forces in the eventual acceptance of Darwinism may have issued from works of imaginative literature with a more universal outreach.
Neil Thomas, “Darwin and the Victorian Culture Wars” at Evolution News and Science Today (March 2, 2022)
Anyone familiar with popular science writing on evolution will see what Thomas means here. Darwinism is introduced as a hypothesis/theory but then treated as a dogma/article of faith — and (this is emotionally very important) a way of segregating the Smart People from the Yobs and Yayhoos. Appeals to science-based analysis fall on deaf ears because the dogma has become what “science” now mean.
You may also wish to read: At Evolution News: Darwin and the ghost of Epicurus. 3 March 2022One way of looking at it: Darwinism enabled thinkers to retain the thought of Epicurus and Lucretius when, in general, the thinkers themselves were forgotten.
Beautiful observation about caste. (Smart vs Yobs.) That’s the original purpose of universities, and it hasn’t changed in 1000 years.
Agreed – excellent insight. It was a means of exclusion, like an expensive country club.
Neil Thomas was criticized because he is a literary guy. But here it is – Darwin was appealing to the Victorian literary set himself. Erasmus Darwin was a poet. That group didn’t care about the science, as long as they had a story that could prop-up atheism and be used as a weapon against the believers.
The question Neil Thomas is asking in this series is essential also – how could such a lame scientific theory take over all of biology and become the sacred myth of our culture? It’s not the compelling science – we know that.
As to:
Indeed, far from the empirical science preceding Darwin’s formulation of his theory, faulty liberal ‘theology’ preceded Darwin’s formulation of his theory.
In fact, Darwin learned the faulty liberal ‘theology’ (i.e. metaphysical underpinnings), of Darwinism from a ‘liberal’ Anglican seminary (Cambridge), which sought to reconcile Christianity with (the supposedly) ‘scientific’ Enlightenment deism of the time.
As Pastor Joe Boot observed, “The biggest tragedy of the story of Charles Darwin,, is that he learned it, (i.e. the metaphysics behind Darwinism), from the church. And he learned it in a sensibly Christian university (Cambridge) training for the ministry.”
In short, Darwin’s book “Origin of Species” is to be considered, mainly, a (faulty) liberal theological treatise rather than ever being considered, (in any way, shape, or form), a truly scientific book.
And the fact that Darwin’s theory is primarily built upon faulty ‘liberal’ Theological presuppositions, (instead of any compelling scientific evidence) has now been recently, and clearly, elucidated by both Stephen Dilley and Cornelius Hunter.
In fact, to this day Darwinists, (since they still have no compelling scientific evidence that the theory is true, or even feasible), are still vitally dependent of faulty ‘liberal’ theological presuppositions.
What is interesting in all of this is the fact that all of science, (every nook and cranny of it), is vitally dependent of essential Judeo-Christian presuppositions, (see Stephen Meyer, “Return of the God Hypothesis” chapter 1). And yet Darwinian Atheists turn out to be vitally dependent on faulty ‘liberal’ theological presuppositions in order to try to make their case for Darwinian atheism.
This is a blatantly self-refuting position for Darwinian Atheists to be in. As Paul Nelson pointed out, “Yet many of the same scientists who argue theologically for evolution are committed to the philosophical doctrine of methodological naturalism, which maintains that theology has no place in science.”
Thus ironically, Darwinian Atheists, with their vital dependence on faulty ‘liberal’ theological presuppositions, instead of on any compelling scientific evidence, (in order to try to make his case for Darwinian Atheism, and in order to try to undermine Christianity), are, as Cornelius Van Til put it, like a child who must climb up onto his father’s lap into order to slap his face. i.e. “Without this God, the place on which he, (the Darwinian atheist), stands does not exist. He cannot stand in a vacuum.”
In short and in conclusion, the ‘faulty’ liberal theological presuppositions that Darwinian Atheists are vitally dependent on are, in the end, self-refuting.
Verse:
A Blast From The Past:
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AsauberDecember 27, 2017 at 8:43 am
News @ 3
All true. I was just thinking of people I know who don’t consider science-related (or what is purported to be science) issues at all. Anything they associate with a discussion of scientific ideas is passed over for anything else.
I think science has been misrepresented in a way that intentionally excludes a lot of people for a long time. There’s a long-standing elitism that breeds disinterest, which goes along with what you are saying.
Andrew